Storm clouds gathering

With Hurricane Sandy giving Barack Obama a boost in the polls - partly due to nations rallying to the leader in times of crisis, partly due to the president’s deft touch - rabid Republicans are getting their excuses in early about why Obama will win but ‘deserves’ to lose. After I was quietly optimistic about a John Kerry victory in 2004 (and that turned on one county in one state – of course in Ohio), I’m not making any predictions, tucking away any optimism until that part of election night when California declares (a state with a large Republican hinterland). I’m not saying that the incumbent is the best post-World War Two president and he has made slips, but we’re all human and I would to see the Obama-haters go keening into the night should he triumph (I, on the other hand, will be disappointed but not overly perturbed if Romney wins). In reality, the rabid right-wing would have been frothing at the mouth had it been Hillary Clinton at the head of the ticket, the bile and scorn they have for Obama in the same measure as they reserved for Hillary’s husband. Unable to explain Bill’s 1996 victory, their confusion turned to rage. So incapable of writing even a slightly slanted bias against Clinton, they had to employ a British writer to be sarcastic when the Wall Street Journal produced a history of US presidents.


Robert Dallek was one of only two contributors to that book who played down right-wing ideology to give a largely balanced assessment of their selected chief executive (ironically both accounts were of Democrat presidents – Truman and Johnson). His view of Obama is that in Congress, he has faced the most vitriolic opposition of any president in living memory. His enemies refuse to play ball in Congress and then accuse him of not being bipartisan! Obamacare’s passage was so fraught because he had to rely solely on his own party, plenty of whom were far from happy with it. Since the elections of 2010 and the loss of the House, the Tea Party has a large enough slice of the representatives to capture the Republicans – a movement which believes all government is bad and so their mission in government is to obstruct it; if this means an Amerian default on its debts, so be it. You can’t negotiate with such fanatics.

Obama has done what Rudy Giuliani did on 9/11, show himself authoritative and available. It would have perfectly reasonable to crisis manage the situation from The White House, like a spider at the entre of a web, as Emperor Antoninus Pius did in his day for a whole reign. But it gladdens the hearts of those suffering if the guy at top at least gives off an air that he cares. Giuliani’s performance was quite dangerous as the scale of the terrorist threat had not been assessed at that point, partly because the anti-terrorist building was at Ground Zero. How was he to know if a suicide bomber would throw themselves at the mayor? Yet his display sealed his image as a no-nonsense politician, who for the first time became loved by New Yorkers. Obama has that chance now.

What would George, Thomas, Teddy and Abe say?

Just to show how South Dakota is going south, an ad for a Republican Congressional candidate, Kristi Noem, slams her opponent, Matt Varilek, for holding radical ideas, yet also being a Washington insider.  Well, make up your mind – either he’s radical or he’s not.  Comically, it criticises him for attending Cambridge University, a higher education establishment regularly assessed as the best – and never out of the top five – over the last eleven years (he was there in 2001), while she majored in being a hick down on the farm.  Heck, she’s probably in hock to her hick of a husband, deferring to him on all matters.  While he is internationally respected around the globe, her knowledge of the world doesn’t seem to extend beyond the borders of The Mount Rushmore State.  This is called South Dakota Common Sense.  More like nonsense.  It’s equivalent to Virginia, prior to 2008, being proud of never voting for a Democratic candidate for president since 1964, which is the same as saying they are proud of never voting for a party since that party passed the Civil Rights Act (well, I suppose Virginia did home the capital of the Confederacy).

You're only not paranoid some of the time, if some of the time they're out to get you

The last month certainly has been big in exposing conspiracies – the massive cover-up at Hillsborough, the Jimmy Savile rolling scandal and Lance Armstrong proving more Stretch Armstrong when it comes to the truth and drugs.  One of my colleagues said he half-expects David Icke to be vindicated with a whole load of compromising lizard photos, though given the reptilian natures of some of our elites (especially financial), would it matter if we saw that they had human outward forms but lizard interiors?  Maybe Gary McKinnon can find out for us now that he won’t be extradited to the USA for hacking into sensitive American administrative computers.

More trouble in the Levant

The massive car bomb in Beirut that killed Lebanon’s top intelligence officer among others has been blamed on the deteriorating situation in neighbouring Syria. General Wissam al-Hassan was a critic of the al-Assad regime and many see the hand of Damascus at work, if not directly, then through their political allies, Hezbollah.  It wouldn’t be surprising since Assad has chosen to escalate the crisis at every opportunity in the last year and a half, confident in the protection of Russia.

One feels that the Lebanese tourist ministry won’t be pursuing the defamation case against the TV series Homeland anymore, with the implication from the drama that Beirut was riddled with terrorists.  Even if this bomb proves to be an isolated incident, instead of a precursor of things to come,  no court would rule in favour of the Lebanese government.

The bat flies away

With the release on DVD of The Dark Knight Rises, I thought I’d record my thoughts on the cloud of my recollections at the time but regarding what I never got around to transposing from paper to ether.  With the comic incarnation of Batman finally dead and director Christopher Nolan informing us that this is the last instalment of the trilogy, he toys with the audience as to whether he too would ensure the demise of the hero.  For it would be a brave producer who greenlights a film solely around Robin, whose character arc and backstory are credibly modified to obscure his very appearance at the end.

Each part of the trilogy has an intellectual edge; if Batman represents rationality and innate goodness (such as, tellingly, an aversion to using guns to kill), his principal foes are not venal hoodlums but possess some overarching strategy and (im)moral aim themselves, from Rhas al Gul through The Joker to Bane – the three share a desire for chaos that is all-consuming and so, in their warped vision, purifying.  Batman is a symbol but so are they.

The first two films are referenced repeatedly here, stating that the fingerprints of our past inform our present, as Nolan did in his breakthrough picture Memento.  In this vein, he indulges the mysticism present in the comics whilst allowing the possibility of Christian Bale’s Batman hallucinating, with a cameo from Liam Neeson. 

This is typical of an all-star cast that isn’t wasted.  Whether she is ally or enemy, Anne Hathaway’s character is a sensuous Catwoman (though cat burglar is as close as Nolan will let fantasy intrude on reality).  She even has her own sidekick.  That Tom Hardy speaks with an eerily calm precision throughout lends his Bane a distinctly unnerving flavour of the menacingly psychotic.  The scale of his ambition and his malign genius are, of course, far-fetched but rendered plausible by a restriction of CGI unless absolutely essential.  He presents Batman with his toughest enemy so far – even lifting the Caped Crusader off his feet as he himself did in Batman Begins and, as in the comics, the Bat is broken.  Subtitles will probably be regularly applied upon DVD viewing so people can understand fully what Bane intones through his mask.

There is the familiar countdown to catastrophe so beloved of superhero flicks (beginning, I think, with James Bond), but as Nolan has avoided the ticking timebomb until now, it is an indulgence can be let to pass, plus it is given a fresh spin as it last five months.  This is in contrast to Avengers Assemble where they saved the world – how can they ramp it up from there to make the sequel more urgent?

TDKR is very topical, with echoes of the French Revolution, especially The Terror.  We may loathe the financial and political elites and desire a comeuppance but do we realise how that might impact on our lives should the wish be granted.  New York City is expressly identified as Gotham City (rather than in the abstract) with even the half-completed Freedom Tower given a fly-past.  This could be so as to have a go at Mayor Michael Bloomberg who removed term limits so he could continue in his role (the fate of Gotham’s mayor is a clear affront to Bloomberg).  Curiously, the US president is Caucasian which is a little jarring, though maybe the makers didn’t want to impugn Obama.

Very rare is the film where no faults can be identified.  After The Dark Knight, where The Joker blew up buildings and set booby traps with consummate and unrealistic ease (impossible to achieve under the radar), the plot is more finely crafted.  Still, I always find it doubtful when heroes and villains, even when genetically enhanced (as in The Amazing Spiderman) with super-strength, can smash through masonry and stone. 

I also spotted early on the ‘surprise’ villain, though they did disguise it very well.  There is a meta-narrative at work since the first film – how far can Rhas al Gul get inside Bruce Wayne/Batman without taking him over, tipping him into the dark side?

TDKR is a brilliant film with a poignant end, that even elicited a tear from me, as Michael Caine’s Alfred blubbered.  This will not be distorted into a quadrillogy, the equilibrium and purity of a trilogy untarnished.  I’m a little sad not to see Nolan’s take on The Penguin, The Riddler and Poison Ivy to list some of the the prime supervillains and I’m sure he could do a fine job with Mr Freeze, as the animated series achieved.  But maybe that is the point.  Nolan wanted to give his Batman a sharply realistic thrust and it is all the better for it.

EU must be kidding

Went to see a panel yesterday debating whether the UK should leave the EU. At the one level, this would seem completely academic (appropriately being held on a campus) with no possibility of affecting the outside world, in much the same way that a degree in English literature is just a glorified book club. Opens our minds to new streams of thought, blah, blah. Yet on another level, it was entertainment, for playing the Jeremiah (although he saw himself as David versus Goliath, typically) was the United Kingdom Independence Party councillor for Tonbridge and I attended primarily to hear his crackpot reasoning.


A should have had a ready supply of eggs to hand. But it’s not what you think. After all, one needs eggs to make a fruitcake. Of course, he was wearing a pinstripe suit, though mixing it up with a psychedelic purple lava lamp of a tie was interesting. He told of how the scales fell from his eyes about the EU as he went about his role as a law-cost ‘lawyer’, derided the ‘lies and deceit’ (repeated again later as if dogma) of Heath’s decision to enter the country for the common market without elucidating what these actually were – and contradicting himself when, further in his presentation, he said his party had no issue with a common market – and describing the previous presenter, a lithe long-legged lecturer in a rather summery outfit who gave a strident defence of the EU, as absolutely wrong akin to her being benighted and still living in Plato’s Cave (he didn’t use the Plato allegory but this was the general tenor). He drew hoots of derision when he referred to the EU as the Euro-Soviet – to be fair, he seemed prepared for the response – citing one unsupported anti-communist dissident’s description of the EU as a massive gulag. He mocked the level of justice in other EU countries, in a manner of ‘they do funny things in those funny places’ when slighting the European Arrest Warrant. Castigating all immigration as the fault of the EU, he curiously only talked of those coming in rather than net migration. Finally, he said, ‘don’t take my word for it’ or somesuch, promoting the literature he had brought with him written by “esteemed people” such as the odious prophet of selfishness Tim Congdon. Hyperbole was the order of the day.

Taking questions from the floor laying in to the decline of influence Britain would suffer when not pooling its resources or how non-EU countries like Norway have to implement a majority of EU legislation without a say in its formulation, it was clear that views on both sides were already set. What he never explained was how Britain could be “independent and sovereign’ in an interdependent, interconnected global economy. I didn’t care to ask it for what would it change? I was there for the fun.

Goodbye Lenin

Today, in Ulaanbaatar, the last Lenin statue in Mongolia has been removed from its pride of place just off the central square, in front of the ‘five-star’ Ulaanbaatar Hotel. For seventy years, as the first client state of the USSR, Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov was called ‘Teacher Lenin’. In 2012, a mass of people turn up to throw their shoes at the representation as they express their contempt.


The centre-right government is obviously doing this for political reasons and Lenin was responsible for the deaths of millions and ushered in a system that led to millions more dying, but still it is a little sad that Mongolia is shedding a bit more of its distinctiveness and becomes more homogenous. I wonder if they’ll do anything about the statue of Choibalsan, their own Stalin who eliminated 3% of the national population and destroyed much of its cultural heritage, yet stands proud outside the city’s first university. Moreover, the Mongolians have installed in front of their parliament building three statues of Chinggis (Genghis) Khaan, Ogedei Khaan and Khubilai Khaan, who unleashed devastation upon much of Asia and Russia as a Pax Mongolica was put in place in the 13th century. Nationalism has had a resurgence since communism – which suppressed it – was ditched in 1990. Maybe Lenin got the boot (literally) because he was not Mongolian.

Being pragmatic, the government is not melting it down (another break with the Communists, who had no qualms about melting down the ancient craftsmanship of the ‘feudal’ past), rather it is auctioning it away to the highest bidder. The offer starts at 400,000 tugrugs – roughly £200. Any takers?

Howsa bout that then? Appalling, actually

With the trickle of allegations against the late Sir Jimmy Savile becoming a torrent, it brings to my mind the documentary When Louis Met Jimmy.  Then he was a local hero, not the figure of disgust that now shrouds his legacy.  At one point, Louis Theroux questioned him on his famous statement, that despite his work on Jim’ll Fix It, he hated children.  To this, Savile said that were he ever to deviate from this expression, the tabloid newspapers would hound him as a pervert.  Theroux, playing the ingénue, replied “So, you don’t hate children?”  Savile was too savvy though. “No, I hate them.”

With molestation (and even rape) charges so widespread and thus undeniable that even his family have acknowledged them by removing his cemetery headstone, this moment in the documentary takes on a new light.  Far from defending himself from a rapacious press, it was a deliberate line to insulate him from anyone coming forward about what they knew, for he knew he had done wrong.  He has ruined many a televisual moment with his paedophilia now known, because he could not keep his perversion in check.  He was the first ever presenter of Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It was such a staple of British life but will now get as much airtime on mainstream TV as Triumph of the Will.  His charitable foundation is even considering dropping his name.  

Moreover, that so many unconnected people have come forward suggests it was a few individual’s failure of nerve to come out before but systemic cover-up – that if they suffered they were to suck it up because the elites could do what they wanted.  The quadrillogy of Red Riding is seen as sensationalist in its tales of official conspiracy but with the Hillsborough scandal and now this, evil could run amok in the corrupt old days.  The Daily Telegraph's obituary concluded that "he was simply an odd chap", which today seems a colossal understatement.  In retrospect, Savile was right in what he said for he did hate children.

Another Kerry failure

Despite a wealth of foreign policy experience, Senator John Kerry will always be known as the failed presidential candidate John Kerry, who did not respond aggressively enough to the welter of lies pelted at him and lost the popular vote to someone like George W Bush (though if Kerry had won one district more in Ohio, the state would have gone his way and the electoral college would then have favoured the Democrat challenger). Less well known is that Barack Obama picked him as his debating partner in the run-up to his showdown with Mitt Romney.


Kerry may have thrilled to the President delivering somnambulistic, technical-heavy lectures, but, as with the Swift Veterans whose slander did so much to wreck his own bid for the White House, he still is unable to deal with false calumnies, thus failing to prepare Obama for when Romney started issuing flat-out lies. If Obama doesn’t perk up in the next two debates, then the relatively decent economic news could count for nothing and place the election in jeopardy. Politics is about knowing when to be ruthless. Time to ditch Kerry and enlist the services of Hillary Clinton. Or Bill for that matter.

Off the rails

With civil servants rightly being lambasted for making a right hash of issuing a rail franchise for the West Coast mainline, thereby handing taxpayers a bill of at least £40m (goodbye promotion, farewell knighthood), we can be grateful for small mercies that they wised up before embarking on a protracted legal battle with beardy, ex-balloonist Sir Richard Branson, saving the nation at least a little bit of money and allowing the mess to be sorted out more quickly. It would have been so easy for civil servants to say “well, it’s not my money being wasted on legal fees and court time, it’s government [i.e. taxpayers’] cash,” and then send it down the line and probably appealing when they lost. The civil servants responsible for the fiasco have been suspended but they should be sacked – this goes way beyond a ‘first warning’.


Branson hasn’t had it all his own way though this week, with Newcastle United deciding to exercise their option to terminate the deal at the end of the season, instead of letting it running through to May 2014. I can’t say I’m saddened by it. Northern Rock on the shirts had a powerful theme, even if the club were frequently as chaotic as the now-defunct bank during this period. VirginMoney may have made logical sense as the successor to Northern Rock, but it would have stretched the tolerance of many a replica-wearing fan to sport a shirt emblazoned with ‘virgin’ on it!