The Watchtowers Reverse Polarity

Striking how in the past few months the discourse-dominating elite has started to decree that it is OK to express the fact of having reservations about immigration, that not being happy to see a stable settled land being transformed for the good of incoming peoples is something which can at least be acknowledged as part of life's tapestry. Reminds me of the scene in Pinter's 'Mountain Language' where a guard suddenly turns from staring out of the cell-window to tell the terrorised, battered political prisoner within the room "The rules have been changed - you can speak now". Of course, oiks like me don't recall that it was not permissible to talk of X before last week.

The levels of incoming population are only part of the story of course (albeit a big part): descendants of those who have immigrated since 1948 or so are not dwindling in number, and the thing that binds one part of this latter segment together is growing in self-confidence in the face of the elite's vacillation (evidence of the fact that the elite doesn't see itself as connected to the people it governs and whose fate it can affect) whilst another segment's chaotic debauchery grows. What do you expect, relocating Africa in NW Europe?

The title? JG Ballard's short-story 'The Watchtowers' describes an enervated listless town whose pop'n's conformist apathy and fearfulness hinges upon the presence of obervation towers protruding from the ever-cloudy skies over the rooftops, towers whose presence the very acknowledgement of which is squirmingly deemed "improper". When a central character forces the issue, openly acknowledging their presence and influence the rest of the population withdraw from him before returning to coalesce around a collective position in which the very idea of watchtowers elicits baffled looks.

What They're Doing In Beirut This Summer



Help!! I am a 20-something Lebanese yuppie!! The Israeli attacks are ruining my Summer! I cannot get down to where my uncle's speedboat is berthed and the bombs keep making my shades slide down from their oh-so-cool perch on my head!! Usually the shopping malls, clubs and beaches are full at this time of year but now my father tells me he will have to reduce my allowance - I will not be able to avail myself of the already-reduced opening hours of the ravaged boutiques!!

Thank God your British journalists are reading the blogs of people like me and so understand something of our plight. It must be very reassuring to know that were such a crisis to affect your own country they would be just as interested. Probably.

Our cybercafes cannot hold out much longer!!! Please send help (preferably dressed in this year's fashions)!!!


Please!! We are desperate!!

Send some of your wonderful film directors such as the man who made 'Welcome to the Sarajevo Hotel' or 'A Fish Called Rwanda'!!

Send some of your TV reporters to file copy about two lovers from different sides of the conflict, their sportscars trapped on opposite sides of a barricade!!

Some of my groovy Beirut friends are organising a show this weekend to draw world attention to the city's plight: 'Compassion Through Fashion' will feature combat fatigues, savagely-ripped jackets and good-looking amputees sashaying down the catwalk even as the bombs rain down around James Naughtie.

If only Susan Sontag was still alive - she could show solidarity with us by staging Margaret Beckett's classic play 'Waiting For Dickie Davis' Hair'....

Spend It Wisely

The destruction of capital in one place can enhance the value of capital elsewhere. So the voluntary abdication of heritage by peoples through intermarriage might well be just what those in the elite, who advocate mixing of peoples whilst keeping themselves aloof from the fray, would seek, the better to elevate themselves above the (voluntarily-degenerated) proles of the various peoples of the world.

These advocates of a biological analogue of communism, with all differences dissolved into some homogenised anthropic alloy, seem to suggest that all the inter-ethnic/racial strife so characteristic of different peoples brought together cheek by jowl by money & power will then be gone.

It won't: instead of a small relatively clear-cut group of ethnic blocs instead there will be a more finely-graded mass, a multi-axial racialised space (to use the parlance of some PoMo twat or other). Pigmentogracy.

It's That Grand Old Man (of theatre) Again

This year marks 100 000 years of Samuel Beckett. Yes it is over 60 years since he was born. Or died. I forget which. I am sitting in a room talking aloud about how I forget which things are which. The audience is quiet. Silent, even. The auditorium might be uninhabited. Only the praise-filled reviews in the press and the never-generous-enough advances from commissioners-of-works tell me that there is anyone out there at all to hear my muffled muttered utterances.


Dear Dear Sam...he was such a darling. I once spent an entire weekend at his flat in Paris, you know, going over some details (well TRYING) for a production I was about to direct. All's he wanted to talk about was the prison exercise-yard we could see from his window. Despite his being a miserable twat he really was full of japes
e.g. me "It's a lovely day, eh, Sam?" - him "well I wouldn't really know about that".

But that was Sam for you - he never took things at face value. He always looked deeper into things than the rest of us. That's why he was such a cunt. His use of language was always so sparse, so economical.

And he fought against the Nazis in WW2. Surprising really, given his pessimism about everything. You'd wonder why he thought anything worth fighting for! But that was Sam...it's hard to believe it's over 800 years since he last shagged Billie Whitelaw.

The time has come, for a tribute -

2 Beckett-like figures in artist's garrett, surrounded by fine wines and theatre awards.

1. "Beckett, bleak".

2. "Beckett... bleak?"

1. "No...no.....bleaker yet"

2. "Bleaker yet....bleaker, still?"

1. "No,..no...not bleaker yet....not yet"

2. "No...Beckett...bleaker still"

1. "And yet...and yet..."

2. "Bleaker yet"

(agonisingly-long pause then rapturous applause of Melvyn Bragg & Harold Pinter and posthumous literary awards)

Fast-Track To America Via Singapore, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv and...

Thatcher worshipped the pugnacious devil-take-the-hindmost individualism of America. Her mob enacted measures to 'individualise' the society principally via the economy. NuLab has continued the process but could be said to conduct it principally via culture & politics (eg the whole Human Rights schtick) but you can feel the ground tremble under your feet so much with factory closures, downsizing, risk-offloading, arguments for perpetual mobility and endless change that you wonder why the apparently-intelligent media elite never seem to construct a coherent narrative out of the almighty juddering that's getting bewilderingly frighteningly evident and all the creepier for its existence's and significance's lack of acknowledgement.

Supposedly there is no limit to the number of people Britain could contain and by Christ lots of 'em want to come to Europe's off-shore super-densely-populated mini-America -

"You're from Britain? Ah, my brother would like to live there. He wants a big house and a BMW" (Egyptian waiter to my visiting Dad 2 years ago).

"The bombs of 7/7 will not stop people coming from all over the world to London to live their dreams" (Ken Livingstone public statement).

He ought to have a little Statue of Liberty built on an islet in the Thames estuary. The British Left, for all its bile against the America of Bush, Reagan, Nixon et al is utterly in thrall to the liberal metropolitan coastal America of PC campuses, individual rights and 24-hr-city-culture where gratuitous meaningless combinations of peoples are made and the spectacle of spectacle can be sociologised long enough to last an entire busy busy hyper-active ultra-frenetic day before grabbing a couple of hours' kip.

"I began to realise there wasn't an absolute distinction between Socialism & Capitalism" (David Aaronovitch retrospectively justifying his neo-con position to a R4 item on ex-Communists).

There are of course lots of synagogues in New York as well as lots of people and speed. Heartland America though, as well as having plenty of suitable hate-targets for the poisonous prig who can bring in a good income thanks to those very targets, has vastly more physical space and consequently a far lower pop-density than Britain. I certainly haven't heard of any need to micro-manage road-usage via eye-in-the-sky satellites emanating from the US as is being mooted over here.

Maybe the whole hyper-individualist multi-culti nightmare would have already gone Chernobyl in the country that is exporting it to the rest of the world, had it not so much space to act as a heatsink for the social pathologies it piles up and up and on top of the previous landfill? Could a far smaller land attempting a mad dash to such a de-ethnicised market state (as [neo]liberal America sees itself) be the first advanced capitalist "failed state" of the era?

"There is no alternative" (Cole Porter song much beloved of the Toad-like Mr Aaronovitch)

The Climate of Opinion

Hilarious and bizarre to see a Conservative Party TV spot commence with vox pop from what looked like a spotty eco-hippy. "Vote blue...Go green" was the slogan. If Bremner Bird & Fortune had done it as a piss-take on how the Tories might revive their fortunes a year or two back the delivery would have been too sharp for the punchline to hit home. Same day as Cameron flies pollutingly to Norway for an eco-photo-opp Gordon 'Tax Relief on Dead Babies' Brown is talking about the same stuff.

Has big-biz given the nod that discussion of climate-change is now worthwhile, even imperative, for the political class? Has the scientific debate generated enough concern in the international commercial elite that the latter's well-being/standing/power/assets are seen as having a slightly raised risk-profile, and so the masses must be acclimatised (ho ho) to being led into another change tunnel? Can't say I've caught much vox pop concern with the environment to provide the mood-music to which these two self-serving cunts are pretending to respond, important as I think it is meself. Now Immigration, Muslim territorialism...that's another matter.

It's Class War, Karl, But Not As We Knew It

Sixty years without serious material disruption to a way of life is a long time when that life has been accruing more and more means to buy 'space' with which to elaborate itself. When you've never known famine or other self-and-kin-threatening crisis, had plentiful time to develop your personality and preferences, and the last war to necessitate your land's entire attention is a significant part of your programme (ie ultimately a positive, a moral cornerstone) then it's easy to act and talk as if you don't have a body, don't need to use the lavvy, and that your personal code will conquer everything.

Despite Tony's assertion that the Class War is over it looks to me to be in full swing, indeed approaching some kind of major juncture, as the developed world starts to divide into (very broadly) two new classes for each domain - geographically we could call them the mobile and the immobile. The mobile have the means (skills, networks and/or capital) to move from country to country (or within them) at something like will, availing themselves of global opportunities and transcontinental special offers. The immobile don't.

Then there are the mere wannabes who take the Western tradition of individualism and implicit anti-ethnocentrism to its logical conclusion by decrying 'narrow national' outlooks whilst spending far more vitriol on members of their own ethnos who fail to measure up to the highly-pious standards necessary for jet-setting moral-entrepeneurs than on outrages committed by aliens. Anti-nationalist fervour is the moral equivalent of collecting air-miles.

Someone asked in reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the New World Order thus partly inaugurated -

"Did Communism collapse, or was the West quietly absorbed into it?"

Could anyone living through the then-seemingly-unending Thatcher era imagine that PC would have the hold it does on public discourse in Britain? The weird combination of sell-the-country's-assets free-marketeering, nihilistic permissiveness and witch-hunting piousness is not something I'd have envisioned even fifteen years ago.

The response of the political class to the ever-rising power of corporations, and the latters' arguable attainment of a quasi-state character, seems to be to remodel their countries' internal make-up so as to better enable them to attract ever-volatile investment that can up and leave in a moment. Early in his premiership Tony Blair addressed a conference of business people, stating that social cohesion was a vital part of the macroeconomic framework necessary to their enterprises' success. Offering a deal in other words -

"Look, you know...we know we need you...but also, you need us. Work with us and we will deliver the non-elite populace over to you".

Enforcing the kind of social cohesion necessary to make Britain an attractive proposition to cold-eyed investors is something that comes naturally to the pragmatically-power-seeking creatures whose outlooks were incubated during the long years outside central power, in the unions and in 'loony-left' town halls. Here was at last an opportunity to remake the social fabric, to police people's most banal actions (where judged significant) and their very utterances, an opportunity to wield the kind of power they'd always felt was their due, to ooze righteousness in the process, and to make an excellent living into the bargain.