Daily Archives: March 31, 2013

Dinner With Schmucks

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Terrific Esquire blog post by Charles Pierce, triggered by the news that Obama is having dinner with some of the more lunatic Republicans. “The president is having some congressional Republicans over for dinner again”, is how Pierce puts it, “so that he can conduct another seance for the purposes of getting their political souls to rise from the dead”. One of the invitees is Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia. “Isakson”, writes Pierce, “apparently, has been giving the president the impression that he may be the new leader of the Not Entirely Insane wing of his party’s congressional caucus, a position that has been open since Richard Lugar failed his annual carbon-14 dating test and was retired to an Indiana tree farm”.

And this is how the post ends:

Too often, the economic problems of this country are sold to its citizens as being far too complex for them to understand and, therefore, by clear implication, too complex for political democracy to handle. And the hell of it all is that most people are completely aware that this is happening to them. They see it in their own lives. It’s not as though the foreclosures, and the looted pensions, and the food-or-medicine decisions are happening in some Phantom Zone to other people.

What’s worse is that this is not being done by stealth, or by sharp practice, though sharp practices there are. It is being done deliberately and people are being encouraged by their government and by the courtier political media — and by the utterly corrupt financial media, especially on television — that their stagnant wages and the yawning gap in income inequality are both symptoms that the economy is getting better. A viable democracy is not sustainable within the economic model, and subject to the economic forces, that are prevailing now in our politics. Sooner or later, something’s going to blow. People are being asked to ignore the circumstances that are grinding them down, day by day, and being told that their economic pain is really for their own good. Who are you going to believe, after all, Maria Bartiromo or your own lying eyes?

Pierce is right. Soon or later, something’s going to blow.

My advice to Tony Hall

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Tony Hall takes over as Director-General of the BBC this week. The Observer, like every other newspaper in the land, was keen to offer him advice and Vanessa Thorpe (the paper’s Arts and Media Correspondent) asked various people what they thought Hall should be focussing on. I was one of the people she consulted, and some of what I said is included in her piece. Here, for the record, is the full text of what I said.

In thinking about its future, the BBC ought first to look back to its roots. Lord Reith may have been a crusty old patriarchal bird but in a way his vision for the BBC was startlingly egalitarian. He believed that the corporation’s mission was to bring the best to everyone. And he wanted the things it created to be free from commercial and political manipulation. When considering what the BBC’s role should be in a digital world, Tony Hall and James Purnell could do a lot worse than return to those two aspirations.

Because we’ve all bought into the techno-utopianism of the early Internet, we tend to assume that it’s always going to be open to everyone. But as more and more of the world goes online, it’s clear that we’re heading in a very different direction — towards an online world dominated by huge, primarily foreign-owned, corporations which are creating walled gardens in which internet users will be corralled and treated like captive consumers, much as travellers are in UK airports now. The dream that the Internet would make everything available to everyone on equal terms is fading fast.

For various reasons, including accidents of history, the BBC is the only institution in the world with the resources and the capability to challenge the drift towards commercially-controlled walled gardens. It has a huge archive of cultural treasures — 6 million photographs, 4 million copies of sheet music, a complete record of everything that has ever been broadcast, one of the world’s largest record collections, and national and international news reports for every day for the past 70 years — plus recordings of most of what it has ever created and transmitted. And it sits at the heart of a society endowed not only with the world’s lingua franca, but also with 2,500 museums and galleries, six national libraries, a thousand academic libraries and some of the world’s best universities.

So here’s what the BBC should be doing next: orchestrating the creation of a new kind of unwalled online garden, one which gathers together all of the nation’s cultural heritage in digitised form, together with: the metadata which enables things to be discovered; open access for all; and and permissive licences that allow citizens of Britain — and the world — to access, enjoy, consume, learn from and remix the great things that this society and its people have given to the world.

Wodehouse at war — and all at sea

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There are basically two kinds of people in the world: those who think that PG Wodehouse is the greatest comic writer in the English language; and those who for the life of them can’t see what the fuss is about. I am firmly in the former camp, which is why I was fascinated by BBC4’s Wodehouse in Exile (screened last Monday and still available on iPlayer as I write on Sunday morning).

It deals with the one great blunder that Wodehouse made in his life – broadcasting (on German radio) some light-hearted reminiscences of his time as an internee in a German prison camp. Coming at the height of World War II and before the United States entered the war, this was a bone-headed idea which led to him being accused of treachery in Britain and to permanent (if luxurious) exile in the United States.

It was a terrific production, with Tim Piggott-Smith giving a wonderful performance as a bemused innocent at large in a dangerous world, and by Zoe Wanamaker as Ethel, Wodehouse’s fiery, exotic wife. Nigel Williams’s screenplay did a great job of explaining how ‘Plum’ got into the mess, and of what a tragedy it turned out to be.

Checking with the two Wodehouse biographies (Robert McCrum’s and Frances Dolandson’s) in my collection suggests that the screenplay was pretty accurate. But what was most striking to me was a realisation that the reason Wodehouse was so good at bringing two of his greatest creations – Bertie Wooster and Lord Emsworth – to life is that he was, in a way, just describing himself. In real life he was, like Bertie, a good-hearted, innocent chump.

The Chatwin syndrome

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This morning’s Observer column:

Bruce Chatwin has a lot to answer for. Specifically, he’s responsible for a forthcoming initial public offering (IPO) on the Italian stock market. It all goes back to something he wrote in his book The Songlines. He had arrived in Australia and was setting up a work space in a caravan. “With the obsessive neatness that goes with the beginning of a project,” he wrote, “I made three neat stacks of my ‘Paris’ notebooks. In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: ‘moleskine’, in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie.”

Chatwin goes on to relate how the notebooks were made by a small firm in Tours, the owner of which had died and whose heirs had sold the business. So he assumed that the source of his beloved notebooks had dried up. What he didn’t know was that the business had been bought by a Milanese stationer who eventually began producing the notebooks again. And what he could not have known was that the business would one day be floated on the stock market (3 April, to be precise). The IPO could value the company at up to €560m (£473m)…