Last day of the… what was it again?

Well, so much for what was supposed to be called summer. This has to be crappiest June, July and August I can remember. A few flashes of sunshine, one or two warm days is the equivalent of one swallow. In August, having to wear a jumper and turn the radiators on for a few hours because your fingers are still freezing is a joke. This was confirmed by the news reporting that the Met Office said it was the coolest summer for twenty years., with of course regional variations being more extreme. I feel as if something has been stolen from me. You look forward to summer, putting up with the harshness of winter and a particularly drab, if dry, spring and then it never happens. Really, since the Met office predicted two and a half years ago that 2009 was going to have a ‘barbecue summer’, this country has suffered terribly for what should be the best three months of the year. Roll on 2012.

As the conflict in Libya enters its final stages - with Tripoli all but captured by the rebels to Colonel Gaddafi, the Mad Dog himself in flight and his birth place now laid siege with huge irony by forces from Misurata, who were themselves under the cosh for long periods this year - the initial critics in the West of even limited UN-endorsed, Arab League-backed intervention now are trying to recalibrate their arguments, so arrogant are they that they are incapable of eating humble pie and face up to the call of “I told you so.” Simon Jenkins and Con Coughlin, vociferous in their denunciations that the war wasn’t over in a couple of hours and so intervention must be judged a failure, are some of the most egregious commentators, though they are far from alone. The Arab Spring is unpredictable and to paraphrase the famous quip about economic predictions, it might be said that war forecasting was invented to make weather forecasting look good. Indeed, with fighting still in the streets of Libya’s capital, but indeed winding down, the Guardian editorial grumbled that in narrow military terms intervention had succeeded and that a majority of people had wanted to see the downfall of the Colonel, before immediately being downbeat of Libya’s prospects post-Gaddafi, as if a failed Libya would give them vindication.
Coughlin ponders gloomily that Libya is the new Afghanistan – this despite the first rule of international relations being that everything is local. He thinks – hopes – tribes will tear Libya apart and therefore NATO should not have acted in conjunction with states like Qatar to bomb Gaddafi out of power. I think people like Jenkins and Coughlin should go and live in Syria, where they will find a very receptive official audience for their cranky, patronising spouting.

The manoeuvring has not just begun, but is in full swing. Opening salvos by Boris Johnson and a few others on the nutty fringe of the Tory party, having been followed up by some kite flying of George Osborne that the 50p top rate of tax for the highest earners may soon be lowered (even though it is popular among the electorate and is not guaranteed to raise revenue given that many of the biggest economies are flat-lining – just look at the USA with the lowest tax burden on its highest earners for fifty years).
The Liberal Democrats, particularly the influential voice of Danny Alexander as Chief Secretary to the Treasury – essentially Minister for Cuts – have swung behind their original proposal of a mansion tax, to try and head the Tories off at the pass. Hitting all those whose homes are worth over two million pounds doesn’t seem particularly controversial, given that the average price of a home in the UK is around the £150,000 mark.
Yet back comes Eric Pickles, Communities Secretary, portrayed as monstrous on previous occasions by Steve Bell, insisting that there will be no mansion tax. Maybe he’s still smarting from a vigorous attempt by the Lib Dems to unseat him in 2005 and wanted to spike their guns. But his claim won’t go down well with middle Britain. “These people put a lot in and don’t take a lot out.” Hmm, would these be the bankers who started this current economic malaise, politicians who asked for their moats to be cleaned on the expenses system or spoilt footballers. All very deserving claims to be clobbered.

The tragic death of a man on his honeymoon in the Seychelles comes swiftly after another honeymoon death. The latest case though in the Seychelles was rendered ridiculous by the spokesman for the police who said the shark that was responsible was both foreign and rogue. How on earth do they know that the shark does not swin through the warm waters of the Seychelles? Did they confiscate its passport? As for being rogue, I believe nature is known as 'wild in tooth and claw'. The spokesman can't claim lanaguage difficulties as the British ruled the Seychelles for 150 years and would have institued the lanaguage of English as de rigeur for all official positions.
Another one with no excuse is Gordon Ramsay, who, last night in Kitchen Nightmares USA, said in the context of location that he was English! No self-repsecting Scotsman would ever dare breath that in private, let alone on camera, even if it was pandering to geographically-challenged Americans who don't know that a place called Scotland exists.

It has been shown in the past that if classical music is played at loud volume, the unruly youth disperse as it offends their hip-hop inflected ears. Pump out some Beethoven or Vivaldi (those in police helicopters could do Wagner) and watch the rioters flee. No doubt some lawyer will argue that increasing their cultural horizons is a breach of their human rights but that would get laughed out of court. Mind you, not all of the looters and rioters were NEET nitwits – of those arrested, included were a soldier who was soon to go off to Afghanistan, two policemen and many college students.
While people focus on ‘feral’ young people, it is all of a piece with the sense of entitlement that far too many of the population feel as this society becomes increasingly individualised. Look at the other end of the scale. Rapacious bankers, MPs who looted the expenses system, journalists who plumb ever deeper wells of depravity and footballers who pout and scream when they don’t get 90 minutes on the pitch or at least £90,000 a week. These are the people we are to look up to?
On Radio 4’s The World Tonight yesterday (which I listened to while missing Michael Gove’s and Harriet Harman’s bust-up on Newsnight) with Robin Lustig, Bonnie Greer came dangerously close to endorsing two parent families, before rowing back to align herself more with her liberal friends. Mr Lustig tried to introduce some balance, mentioning absence of responsible male role models or fathers but his other studio guest was even more of a bleeding heart liberal, a drama therapist no less, who insisted on the “empowerment of the individual” a minute or two after her and Greer had trashed the entitlement culture as thoroughly as some looters had electronics stores. It seems whatever evidence is provided, atomisation of society is progress.

The riots that have afflicted much of London and Kent, as well breaking out in other large cities around the country have drawn interesting reasons for them from both left and right. The left-leaning commentariat portray it either as a symptom of the cuts or as The Guardian puts it “a rage against exclusion from consumerist fulfilment.” The right attacks the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ – insidious code for immigration – while of course finding some angle to attack the BBC, which in the midst of the crisis is truly pathetic). The former continues the New Labour policy of proclaiming that if everyone has material wealth they will be happy and have an investment in society, while ignoring their consistent denigration of the family, boosting individual rights over that of any communitarian ideal – very odd for socialists. The latter are repeatedly demanding that the drawbridges are hauled up, even though the youthful idiots who are causing this destruction are a speck in the sea of well-behaved immigrants (and there are plenty of white kids involved too), not a microcosm. British insularity has often targeted the ‘alien’, even when great benefits have accrued to the country from immigration – if it wasn’t for the Angles and Saxons taking over much of the island, there wouldn’t even be an English race.
If these thugs were brought up correctly then they wouldn’t be doing this. A nuclear family unit isn’t a panacea and some single parents could also do a good job, but a lot of these young fools don’t really have anything in the way of a supportive family and so the gangs become their ‘family’. Thus, some Labour politicians are saying the budgetary cuts that are closing youth centres are causing the problem but it is only because of the failure of New Labour in office to promote family and social cohesion.
Anyway, it is too late to do something immediately, what is needed is generational and Labourite short-termism (which was terrified of being portrayed as nannying) was never going to be effective. These hoodlums have now meant that Mogadishu (since the Islamist rebels retreated) is now safer than London and that is truly unacceptable. This goes far beyond the death of one gangster muppet who was both big-time charlie and small-time loser – most of the rioters will have never have heard of him. This would not be tolerated in Northern Ireland – it is time to import those measures over here. Give the police (who may be playing a political game by tacitly standing by while the riots go on in a silent protest against cuts) rubber bullets and water cannons. Make the rioters feel the full force of the law by making sure sentencing puts them away for 20-30 years and remove whole echelon of scum from our streets. If this is war, then it should be fought with vigour. The responsible people must reclaim the streets.

XXXplosive - to the max!!! (as hype would say)

Watching XXX on television last night (on Fiver, with a criminal break in the middle of an action scene for an ad break) was a pleasure for which I feel no guilt at all; I just luxuriated in having time to do this. Hegel said freedom lies in the recognition of necessity and there were probably plenty of necessary things to do in my life, but Hegel never faced the possibility of a Vin Diesel action movie late on a Sunday night.
It is curious that Diesel couldn’t or wouldn’t reprise his role for a sequel, allowing his place, if not his character (who was ‘killed off’ inbetween films), to be taken by Ice Cube. Did he have a Keanu Reeves-high-minded moment? If so, with relaunching the Fast and the Furious franchise, he seems to have learnt his lesson that trashy thrillers are his stock in trade.
It was released in 2002 but in the nine years that have passed, it figured on my radar but not to an extent where I was capable of watching it. It is basically an American James Bond, with the principles of the latter taken to their logical, ludicrous point (it even has a ‘Q’ of sorts). Asia Argento, as the femme fatale, wears high-heeled boots and leather tops even in the most inappropriate of situations. At one point, Diesel does with a motorbike what Steve McQueen should have done in the Great Escape, if the latter had possessed the bottle and physics-defying abilities. He also has a souped-up car that is almost identical to that featured in the Green Hornet, making the later, disappointing Seth Rogen vehicle (in both senses) even more lame. Samuel L Jackson gives his usual gruff authority figure (unwitting training for the role of Nick Fury) with disfigurement – I was waiting for someone to refer to him as Scarface and I was not disappointed. Much of the action takes place in the Czech Republic, probably because of low film production costs in the country, but which adds a difference to a standard American romp. Australians may not give a XXXX about a certain lager but I would for this film.
Another film I saw on TV (now some time ago) was the Last King of Scotland, a fictional retelling of the heart of darkness within the Idi Amin regime in Uganda through the experiences of a made-up British medic. Played by James McAvoy against the monstrous Amin, a formidable (and, indeed, Oscar-winning) performance by Forest Whittaker, the former’s downfall is his cocksure flair for adventure and his taste for the forbidden fruit of married women (including Gillian Anderson as a long-suffering missionary), the latter’s his petulant megalomania. The end of the film has gut-wrenching brutality (meat hooks inserted into male breasts for example) though we don’t actually witness Amin’s political end within the visual narrative, just a postscript. One unintentionally funny moment in the movie is Amin talking of meeting up with Colonel Gaddafi for an African Union conference – this picture was made at the time when the West were cosying up to Gaddafi and was making a political point but with subsequent events regarding the war in Libya now, it shows up that while leopards do not change their spots, neither do ravenous hyenas change their characters – (dis)honour among thieves and villains Amin never got his comeuppance (although dying in Saudi Arabia in emasculated obscurity must have been crushing for this tyrannical attention-seeker); whether Gaddafi will receive his is moot.