Blackhead never squeezed

I couldn’t resist the pun, but four-star General ‘Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf was one of those figures whose death I feel more than someone I know only in passing at their passing, like Lord Rees-Mogg.  Gerry Anderson, creator of Thunderbirds and much else besides, falls into the former category of myself being shocked and saddened, though he was 83 and was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, so his end was probably a blessing to him. 

While there will be plenty of people who will not mourn when George H.W. Bush kicks the bucket (though as his son’s presidency unfurled, his record in office looked ever better) but he had a moving eulogy for his former commander on the ground - delivered from his bedside by his aides - showing class from the president in charge during Gulf War One, even as he battles his own illnesses.  Barack Obama probably had the most encapsulating soundbite for ‘Stormin’ Norman’ of a “true American original.”

Aged just 78 (the average age for the American male but still), Schwarzkopf restored the USA’s faith in their military after the trauma of Vietnam, that operations in Grenada and Panama did not.  It was a classic military campaign at a time, with the end of the Cold War, when such inter-state wars were becoming infrequent.  Defeating the million-strong Iraqi army and liberating Kuwait in 100 hours of ground warfare (although preceded by lengthy aerial bombardment) guaranteed its inclusion in the study manuals at West Point, despite dubious relevance in how to tackle more ‘bitty’ conflicts, as Somalia a few years later showed. 

Schwarzkopf’s lasting legacy was in rehabilitating the army.  In Vietnam, it was vilified and returning veterans disowned.  After Gulf War One, whenever military failures occurred it was the fault of the politicians as in Somalia or the Iraqi insurgency of Gulf War Two or a few bad apples at the bottom of the chain (no matter the truth of how far up people knew) as in Abu Ghraib.  The army itself is sanctified, untouchable, hence the general grief at General David Petraeus’ fall from grace, not from any military debacle but from personal misdemeanour.  I’m not saying this is agreeable but it does elevate Shwarzkopf beyond the average commander.  I even have his autobiography that I bought second-hand and even used in an undergraduate essay, In The Eye Of The Storm (as is the wont of autobiographies for the cheesy line, a double pun with Desert Storm, though a little more respectful than my heading).  Stormin Norman, a certifiable good guy (despite your temper), I salute you.

Mournful Christmas

What is it with Christmas show writers – Doctor Who, Downton Abbey and, on Christmas Eve, Merlin – all killing off characters, the latter two hitherto important ones.  It is as if the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge, alive and unchanged from miserliness, was abroad in the minds of these writers.  Some of the reaction to the death in Downton Abbey was ridiculous (although also illustrating the poverty of Julian Fellowes’ imagination that he couldn’t engineer another exit for Dan Stevens’ character or was it some grudge against the actor?) but I can't be too harsh as Merlin left me very sad as well.

Part of me was mournful because there would be no more episodes of Merlin – the naff modern scene (because it was supposed to be a “land of myth and a time of magic” therefore has no counterpoint to the 21^st century, especially with the epic scenery in Merlin), reminiscent of the (literal) cop-out at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, emphasising that.  King Arthur dies, Sir Gawaines dies, Morgana dies, Mordred dies; technically Merlin could continue – after all, the series is named after him – but without Arthur it would be rather hollow.  Part of the tragic conclusion is that Arthur was only in his early 20s, while his father Uther lived until his 50s and while Arthur had built a strong kingdom of sorts, he had precious little time to administer beyond Camelot’s borders.  There was also no chance for Arthur to allow good magic to flourish at his court, which we had been built up to expect since the very first episode, not to mention the interesting new dynamic between Merlin and Arthur that would exist.  Morgana constantly surviving to intrigue again was becoming very tiresome, but Mordred could have survived to become a new arch-foe of Arthur.

Interestingly, like Henry VIII, Uther Pendragon’s dynastic play was all in vain – though not fully understanding that he was sacrificing his wife so Arthur could be born, Uther sought to be pragmatic but failed.  Guinevere might be pregnant but the implication is this is the end.  Merlin – as evinced from the first series – has the power to take one life to save another (the magic involved in Arthur’s birth) and there are still enemies of Camelot after the climatic battle.  Further, he could have summoned the dragon sooner to transport them to the mystical lake.  But the scriptwriters wanted this to be the definitive end, setting the historical scene to re-emerge with the Heptarchy and then, in consecutive order, the pre-eminence of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.  Bow out on a high, yes and the tale of King Arthur is tragic, but this was a still an especially sad note to go out on.

Squaring the circle

So difficult for The Guardian – one poll shows 3/5 of British people approve of gay marriage and another that 54% of people would vote to leave the EU if they had the chance.  How to reconcile such ‘progressive’ and ‘umprogressive’ views?  Well, The Guardian is taking part in the culture wars and puts the gay marriage article as its lead on the website and the EU withdrawal poll somewhat further down the page, as if trying to brush it under the carpet.

A child shall be born

Although reluctant to divulge this news for a few months now, given data protection and all, I feel that given the season we're in, it is apposite to log the birth of a daughter to me and Altaa - Kimberley Narangoo (which is pronounced Narangor) Plumb.  I go on to transpose the tale as told to my friends and work colleagues closer to the time after she was born.

After a largely sleepless night for both parents in the Delivery suite of Medway Hospital, following a pessary inducement for Altaa on 5th September, she went into labour at 4.10 am the following morning.  Placed in a separate room where an epidural was administered, at 5.45 the midwife (Kelly) left us, promising to return at 8 am.  At just after 7 am, Altaa asked me to readjust the angle of the backrest of the bed, unsure of which buttons to press, I accidentally pressed the midwife alert button; Kelly appeared and within a minute realised something was wrong, the baby's heartbeat slowing dramatically (a fact which both weary parents had not observed as it has occurred slowly over the hour and a half).  

After detecting blood at the cervix, she called in several doctors (anaesthetist, surgeon and someone else) and Altaa was rushed to theatre, where she underwent a C-section.  That accidental button press proved fortuitous for who knows the consequences had Altaa not been checked for another hour.

At 7.49 am, our baby daughter was delivered.  I thought I would be phlegmatic about it but hearing the sound of our child for the first time brought tears to my eyes, tears of joy.  While mummy was being sewn up, baby had a chance to bond with daddy first of all, singing her a nursery rhyme to sooth her anguish.  Within an hour of coming out, she was being breastfed, displaying an innate idea of what to do, with not even the slightest prompting necessary.  Weighing 9lbs, 6½ozs, she is certainly a hungry baby half the time.

Suffice to say, delight does not begin to describe our feelings for our new addition to the family.  

Why?

The chain of events that preceded and then followed the death of Jacintha Saldanha has been endlessly scrutinised as to make further commentary irrelevant, but I will strive to offer something which I feel is unsaid. What the two Australian DJs did was reprehensible in both conning innocent people but also in seeking to obtain the medical details of a sick young woman, no matter her position in society and the world. The Crown Prosecution Service is right to announce today that they are investigating whether charges are to be laid against the two. But the suicide this was engendered could not have been predicted and the two DJs do not deserve the death threats being made against them, even if the radio station they work for has previous form in being ticked off by the local regulators.


But what I also find unacceptable is that Saldanha took her own life, thereby depriving her two little children of a mother and leaving her husband wracked with guilt as he had rowed with her on the morning of the day she hung herself. She obviously had a breakdown, with the normal pressures of being a nurse being added to with all the unwarranted extra, but even if she saw herself as a burden to others, she should still have thought of her kids and, for me, that is unthinking at best and selfish at worst. You carry on, even if it just for the children. What is more is that she was a Christian yet chose this course of action. Further, it taints the news surrounding Kate’s baby, with Saldanha’s suicide always being associated with the sprog. This unborn child had no say about being saddled with this for the rest of history. Saldanha’s passing is tragic, heart-breaking, but my sympathy is for her family primarily and in limited supply for her. Maybe most will disagree with that but it is how I feel.

Failing the Old Grey (Ent)wistle Test

What an utter bag of tripe George Entwistle is in his whole approach to management and as a man in general.  Not content with a disastrous handling of the Royal Jubilee where much of the presentation was clueless and/or crass (though maybe republican proclivities at the Guardian-reading BBC saw this as just reason for giving him the keys to the castle), Entwistle seemed overwhelmed by ‘events’ even before he became Director-General.

As the Pollard Review found (and, as a former head of Sky News, Nick Pollard could be replied upon to be aggressively independent), though being warned by email a couple of years ago of Jimmy Saville’s ‘darker side’ while the posthumously disgraced presenter was still alive, Entwistle had no recollection of this – astounding because even to move to the email ‘bin’ unread requires an act of conscious agency.  It is inconceivable that he did not read the email.  Maybe, like many senior personnel in organisations revealed to have paedophiles in their midst, he just hoped it would all go away (which, if true, showed a cavalier disrespect for any victims as surmised at the time) and so filed it away in his mind to the extent that he forgot about the warning.  When Helen Boaden (head of BBC News), albeit informally, reiterated fears of Saville’s character in a Newsnight investigation (which was subsequently shelved through incompetence and then intransigence), this did not seem to jog Entwistle’s memory or maybe it did, given his allegedly cautious response.

When it was revealed, following an ITV investigation, that Newsnight had buried its own exposé, it reeked of internal cover-up and Peter Rippon, then Newsnight’s editor, came out with a blustering defence in a blog.  This posting was riddled with unintentional untruths and inaccuracies, yet it was not taken down for several days because Entwistle insisted on going through layers of BBC bureaucracy, rather than taking a firm hand due to the urgency of the matter.  We know he does have a spine from his extortionate pay-off and that he wanted more (the feint of an opening bargaining position), though had he stayed, Entwistle may have been an excellent negotiator on the BBC licence fee renewal.

So that he was skewered repeatedly by John Humphrys on the Today programme (one of those unexpected and therefore seminal moments that it is a privilege to hear or see live, such as Jeremy Paxman humiliating Michael Howard or Paxman engulfed in his own uncontrollable coughing at the start of a show), displaying complete complacency by being unaware of a front-page headline when the McAlpine affair broke, was the tip of his failings.  Thankfully, Entwistle’s reign of error was brought to an end after 54 days.  The BBC may not have been able to take much more.  Entwistle will have to emigrate to find an employer prepared to offer him a job that pays half as well.

It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine

Exactly 24 hours left before the end of the world, noting this event with today being 20/12/2012.  With it kicking off at 11.21 am GMT, make every hour count!

Another perspective

In all the debate about guns and whether they should be further controlled and some banned outright, postmodernists would argue that this polarisation between those who want to keep the status quo and those who want it modified to some extent is the standard binary distinction of moral identity, of Self and Other, where each side arrogates to itself an ethical superiority over the arguments of those with whom they disagree.


Foucault may have gone further. His concept of biopolitics could be applied here. Whenever this horrific slaughter in the school is mentioned I feel like crying but Foucault might argue that I had not even a scintilla of connection with any of the victims, nor did 99.999% of anyone who offers an opinion on the subject. Rather, the modern state measures people in terms of their useful productivity. This is why many European states have banned the death penalty including, surprisingly in an authoritarian state, Russia. When it is said of the children in particular, ‘they had their whole lives ahead of them’ this is partly in terms of what they could contribute.

Such a viewpoint would be described as callous at best, monstrous at worst, but postmodernism isn’t about value judgements, it is about uncovering the reasons for our reasoning and, thus informed, from there to make value judgements, all the while admitting one’s own lack of objectivity. I still think that this is a heinous act and that children should never ever be targeted, that my heart is filled with sorrow, but maybe I’m afraid to dig too deep as to the cause of this. Just as our minds are conditioned by our civilisation, I refuse to forget the dozens of nursery children stabbed to death recently in China. I acknowledge my bias against the possession of guns, believing them to enable greater carnage and this is why I say had the Chinese madman used a rapid-reloading weapon, his nihilism may have killed more.

Postmodernism cuts to the heart of the gun control debate too. How can we be sad about future victims of gun massacres when they are nameless, faceless and still, so far, alive? Biopolitics would suggest we are trying to minimise damage to society’s productivity (and not just economic productivity either). Proponents of gun control, of which I count myself one might think that the Republican senator who suggested all teachers should be armed is a retard, given the dangers of accidents and innocents getting caught in a crossfire of a situation from which escalation is inevitable, yet from his way of seeing it, we are retards. Each of us has arrogated to ourselves a superior moral plane, hence the other side’s arguments are inherently inferior, but both sides are seeking to limit death, which is bad for productivity. I’m not saying I agree with this fully but it does offer one way of clearing the fog of rhetoric.

One of the biggest ironies was that the mother of the killer, who was the first victim, had been hoarding guns as she believed economic and societal collapse was just around the corner. Yet her ‘survivalist’ outlook led to her being killed by the very guns she thought would protect her. That so many more innocents died to expose this irony is not acceptable and I wish it had not happened but it has all the same.

Another aspect, is that the killer left a shotgun in the car when he arrived at school, taking with him semi-automatic pistols and an automatic assault rifle. This is presumably because the shotgun had a cumbersome reload which he had not fully thought through when first he pilfered it from his mother’s arsenal. Any ban or restriction on these high calibre weapons will take decades to filter through. Banning or heavily taxing ammunition would have an immediate effect though for the Second Amendment says nothing about bearing fully loaded arms and it is possible to pistol-whip someone to protect oneself.

Gun control – now!

A modern-day Slaughter of the Innocents in the run-up to Christmas in the USA surely cries out for a curbing of many Americans addiction to the gun. The events in Newtown, Connecticut are of a different order to the three mass shootings in as many months over the summer and 15 in total in 2012, but they were all avoidable tragedies, since in virtually all cases the guns were purchased legally.


No doubt the National Rifle Association will hold a swift rally in Newtown in defence of the pernicious Second Amendment – a change to the original constitution to counter the very real threat of British re-invasion and authorising only “well-regulated militias,” i.e. not the individual, to bear arms. There are plenty who see the ‘tyranny’ of King George III replicated in today’s US federal government – a charge as absurd then as it is now but the myth is powerful. There is a way around this and that would be restricting all legal arms to eighteenth-century flintlock pistols as envisaged by the Founding Fathers because that would be constitutional. Incidentally, the right to bear arms doesn’t distinguish which arms – theoretically that could include nuclear devices – why doesn’t the US government throw open the assets of Strategic Air Command to public auction? Surely the only way for ordinary Americans to protect their families and homes is with atom-splitting explosives and Mutually Assured Destruction though at the moment MAD is being played out already. The only shame is disaffected gun nuts never save their fury for NRA conventions, instead of shooting the largely defenceless but cowardice has a big streak in such people. Whither the NRA then?

There will be more who want to extend irresponsibility by arming all teachers but, aside from adult accidents (plus the biggest cause of fatality among American cops is from gunshot wounds inflicted by their own weapon when the suspect grabs it), there would be countless (and unreported due to the small number of killed) times when a teacher is absent-minded with their weapon and a child picks it up and plays with it. We are all fallible.

There was a mass stabbing at a Chinese children’s nursery this week, which is becoming a dangerous pattern in China, yet the carnage would have been even greater had a gun or guns been used. The refrain is ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ yet far fewer die when guns are not used or is life so cheap to some Americans that a few more dead doesn’t really matter?

Barack Obama’s response to the deaths of 20 children and eight adults (one of whom being the gunman, a victim – we should not forget – of gun-mad social structures and serious mental issues) was exactly right, not making a political issue out of it – unlike Mitt Romney and the Benghazi attack – and showing even his No-Drama Obama image has ordinary emotions. His tears reminded me of Walter Cronkite – a tough man – weeping on reporting the assassination of JFK. The situation is so grave that it is entirely natural. Obama murmured during one of the presidential debates about introducing some form of gun control though that was as far as it went. Though there are staunch cherishers of guns from both sides of the political divide, right-wingers will oppose restrictions most, but even a Republican-dominated House of Representatives will find it hard to block a considered bill with such weight of moral authority behind it. There has to be a permanent ban on at least some weapons, unlike the intellectually redundant ten-year moratorium on assault rifles in 1994. Every victim of gun shooting is a victim of the obsolete Second Amendment, which itself needs to be amended. These children need not have died but let their death bring some good to discourse on gun ownership, that fewer tragedies like this in scope and number occur in the future.

Pray for the departed souls.

A date to remember?

12/12/12 - enjoy it while it lasts because we won't be able to align day, month and year this way again for 89 years in 2101.  Then again, in that regard, it is like Halley's Comet and most people aren't bothered if they missed or not.  One can turn any date into something memorable if enough ingenuity is brought to bear - in eight days time, for instance, Europeans can 'celebrate' 20/12/2012.

Bradford City beat Arsenal on penalties

Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Harry, Saffron Burrows, Robert Pattinson, Matt Damon, Roger Daltrey, Zac Efron, Spike Lee, Alan Davies, Osama bin Laden, Mick Jagger, your boys took one hell of a beating!

For one night, the football ground is no longer known as the Coral Windows Stadium but, once more, Valley Parade.  Well done Bradford City - not just for beating Arsenal four divisions above but making the League Cup semi-finals.

Jihad coming to America

That’s right, GCHQ, you heard me correctly. Jihad Makdissi, Syria’s former foreign affairs spokesman is reportedly fleeing to – indeed, may have arrived in – the USA.  It is ironic that with a first name of Jihad, he is actually a Christian.  As a spokesman, he is unlikely to have what the Syrian National Coalition call ‘blood on his hands’ and so may play a part in any future government.  Some members of the regime will, nay, must, be engaged in a post-Bashar al-Assad future once the Syrian president falls, as the example of Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion shows.  It is interesting that, according to Russia, Assad believes that not only is victory impossible but also escape. Does he fear being shot in the back, proverbially, if he tries to flee.  At the very least he should send his children out of the country – they need not grow up like him, as the children of Idi Amin have proved – yet, were this to become public, it would be another blow to morale in the forces defending his regime.

The charms of dogwalking

My immediate family and I have never owned a dog – cats, yes, but that was far as it went – though I personally have no objections to them and would quite like to have one during my time on Earth (Mars awaits!).  Indeed, I would like to have a puppy and a kitten and raise them together so, as I believe the relevant literature says, they become effectively siblings to each other.

A dog is also a good reason to get one out of the house for unless you’re stupid, rich or stupid rich and buy one of those dog treadmills, your canine companion will need regular, that is, daily exercise.  In this way, one can meet other dog-owners and strike up friendships on your usual beat that you would never have done so otherwise.  For sure and for the most part, your fellow dog-walkers will never extend beyond the level of acquaintance but a comradeship through commonality will be engendered.

As I was walking across the iron bridge that crosses the railway cutting that links a nearby park to the rear of a supermarket, I saw affixed to the wire mesh a notice not dissimilar to those when pets are lost.  And this was the case in a definitive and permanent way.  Under laminate, there was a printed picture of a Scotty dog (I’m not too up with breeds but it was small and looked that kind of pooch) and below text, informing us that she had suffered a fall and had to be put down.  There were flowers fastened next to the sheet.

I think that’s incredibly sweet, heart-warming and imaginative.  To account for their non-appearance now, they were informing their dog-walking friends what had become of them and it is with this kind of consideration for others that is a key foundation of civilisation.  I know nothing else about this bereaved dog-owner but I do know this.

Over the next two weeks, more small bouquets were tied to the mesh next to the sheet as friends and well-wishers signified their appreciation of this gesture and their commiseration for the loss of the dog.  The notice was eventually removed when rainwater penetrated the laminate and caused the ink to run, which stopped it being a fitting memorial, but it will always serve in my mind that even on the occasion of routine we can be more than the sum of our parts.