I can’t figure out which is more nauseating: the pathetic British obsession with the supposed “special relationship”; or the way the UN General Assembly provides despots with a platform for grandstanding. Witness Gadafi’s demented rant yesterday and Iran’s I’m-a-dinner-jacket today. Regarding the latter, there was a good piece by Simon Schama in the FT. Sample:

Not the least repellent aspect of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s reiteration, on the eve of the Rosh Hashanah Jewish holiday, that the Holocaust was a lie, was the muffled response to it by western media and governments. Statements were duly forthcoming in Berlin deploring the Iranian president’s speech, while in Washington it was left to Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, to do the official tut-tutting.

But it was as though the moral atrocity of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s speech was barely worthy of comment being, in the first place, nothing new, and in the second place, incidental to the practical dilemma of how to “engage” with him during his visit to the United Nations this week. Well, one way would be to send Mr Ahmadi-Nejad copies of the 2005 General Assembly resolution repudiating Holocaust deniers and instituting a day of remembrance on January 26 encouraging all member nations to educate their people in the genocide so that future acts of comparable barbarity might not recur.

But then the mere facts of the matter are unlikely to make much impression on a man and a regime lost in paranoid derangement. The pressing issue is how to contain the consequences of anti-Semitic fantasy and recover the moral credentials of a General Assembly that will have listened to someone in such flagrant contradiction of its own resolution…

… in 1952, Tricky Dick bet the ranch on this ludicrous TV broadcast. And got away with it.

No, not the country, which seems fine, but the Attorney General of the same name. As the saga of her employment of a housekeeper whose visa had expired unfolded, I fell to muttering about there being one law for politicians and one for the rest of us. As indeed did most of the country. But Michael White, the Guardian‘s Political Editor, has an interesting take on it in this morning’s paper.

As I noted here the other day, of the two couples in this tale, three of the four people – Scotland, her barrister husband and Tapui’s British solicitor husband – are all lawyers who ought to have been more careful to secure her residential status, a relatively easy thing to do for someone with a British spouse.

So only the non-lawyer in the case has lost her job. But should Scotland, who helped pass the relevant legislation as a Home Office minister and is the cabinet’s legal adviser, lose hers, too?

Phone-ins and chatrooms have been crowded since this morning’s announcement of the administrative (not criminal) penalty, with people complaining that it’s one law for the rich, another for the poor. Is that true in this case? I doubt it.

The laws against employing illegal immigrants are designed to deter people who do it systemically – either in business or their own homes – to gain cheap, malleable workers who can’t complain much.

I don’t think that motive will have applied to either party here, do you?

So what it’s really about is whipping up negative feeling about immigrants, legal or not, and the jobs they do in our economy, often because we won’t do them ourselves (or at least not for the money on offer).

“If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity or subservience to dictatorship.”

From the Preface to Richard Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich.

I’ve been reading Robert Skidelsky’s new book on Keynes, which is absorbing and well-written. I never accepted (as most of the neo-con economists did) that Keynes had been overtaken by history, as it were and Skidelsky backs that up by picking out three Big Ideas from Keynes which, he thinks, have an enduring resonance. They are:

1. The future is unknowable, so economic storms, especially those originating in the financial system, are not just external shocks which impinge on smoothly operating markets, but part of the normal working of the market system. (This is something an engineer would know intuitively, so it’s always been a source of amazement to me that economists and investors seem unaware of it. Market capitalism is an intrinsically unstable system.)

2. Economies wounded by these ‘shocks’ can, if left to themselves, stay in a depressed condition for a long time. (As the Japanese know to their cost.)

3. A moral critique of societies which worship the pursuit of money and efficiency above all other objects of human striving. I thought of this while passing the Cambridge Arts Theatre, which Keynes was instrumental in founding. In a way, it’s the most profound of his ideas, and the one most flagrantly ignored in the last two or three decades.

Skidelsky has a lovely Coda in his Preface in which he writes:

“Once I started writing this book, on 1 January 2009, I stopped reading the newspapers on a daily basis to avoid filling up my mind with ‘noise’. Any coherence my argument may have stems from this act of self-denial.”

No wonder I am sometimes incoherent. I read too many papers.

It’s been one of those perfect September days — sunny and warm and incredibly peaceful. Late in the afternoon my daughter and I went out into the local hedgerows to pick blackberries for supper. It’s one of the loveliest pleasures of this time of year — getting one’s hands sticky with berry juice; deciding which ones to eat and which to bring home; wondering about the injustice of the law which determines that the best, juiciest blackberries are always out of reach.

The crop this year has been simply wonderful. In the end, we had to tear ourselves away — otherwise there would be no crumble for supper. But in the 20 minutes or so we were out we picked two punnets’-worth. Effortlessly.

The (apple & blackberry) crumble’s in the oven as I write. Mmmm…..

LATER: Lovely email from a reader:

Reminds me that today, September 21st is St Matthew’s day. My mother used to tell me that on the next day, Sept 22nd, the Devil casts his hoof over the blackberries, and from that date onwards the blackberries became more and more insipid.

In another container there was a work of art consisting of a video, repeated over and over, showing a man — not in peak physical condition, I might add — rollerblading around a vast empty space, stark naked. I’m proud to say I betrayed no emotion while viewing this work, although my daughter, who is 3, said, quite loudly: “You can see his tushy! Yuck!”

She is young, and has no art training.

Anyway, in the corner of one container there was a ratty old collapsed armchair — worn, dirty, leaking stuffing, possibly housing active vermin colonies. I asked the gallery person if the chair was art, and she said yes, it was a work titled “Chair.” I asked her what role the artist had played in creating “Chair.” She said: “He found it.”

“Chair” is for sale. The price is $2,800. Really. I looked up “Chair” on a Serious Art Internet site, artcritical.com, which said: “The chair offers not a weedy patina of desuetude but an apotheosis of its former occupant.”

See, I missed that altogether, about the desuetude and the apotheosis. I thought it was just a crappy old junk chair some guy took off a trash pile and was now trying to sell for 2,800 clams.

From one of his Miami Herald columns entitled `The Idiot’s Guide to Art’.

“So, let me get this straight. Bush inherited a $7 Trillion surplus, turned it into a deficit by funding an illegal war, fought by murderous private contractors, but Obama is the bad guy because he wants healthcare the entire rest of the developed world has had since the early 1950s?”

From a posting on Reddit.com

Yep. That’s called Republican logic.