Clive James on books and civilisation

There's a very good defence of the importance of books and libraries to any civilized society at Lecture: Our First Book, which is also hilariously funny.

Clive James and me

Me and Clive James go back a long way- back to the mid 1970s, when his weekly TV reviews in The Observer were the cleverest and funniest critical writing to be found. I was surprised to discover his credentials as a literary critic, characterised by deep knowledge and common sense (not as common a pairing as one might think). And his Unreliable Memoirs were a definitive roman a clef of adolescence, if a little self-indulgent. Self indulgence, alas, was to become the theme of his later work, including an embarassing comic/satirical poem for the Royal Wedding in 1980, and then his TV series. Initially, his elaborate sardonic riffs applied to popular culture were refreshing, but solidified into a pose. And he admitted that he was star-struck by Hollywood. The point at which I switched off was when he interviewed Jane Fonda, smirking at his good fortune to be spending time talking to such a personality, having forgotten, presumably, that he once wrote that Jane Fonda as an activist was a superb consciousness-raiser, on the grounds that if he found himself sharing an opinion she held he immediately examined it.

But to judge from his website www. clivejames.com, he is now back in the land of the sane, and his literary reviews are amusing and perceptive. As he says on the home page "It might seem strange to say so, in the face of the evidence, but this project is not meant entirely as an ego trip, although I suppose the Pharaohs said the same when they were approving the designs for their individual pyramids." His poetry has improved, too.

Thoughtcrime

I have always been rather wary of those advancing arguments to restrict freedom of speech. This may have started out, a long time ago, as simple self-interest, since I was once more radical than I am now, and wished to retain the opportunity to express my views (whatever they were: I'm not sure now, and may not have been sure then). It seemed to me obvious, though, that this freedom is as near-as-possible absolute, since as soon as you start restricting it, you are effectively imposing censorship by the government, the police and the courts, and while one would not of course suggest that this was their intention, the principle, once established, that politicians have a right and mechanism to gag their electorate, seems a dangerous one. For of course it is easy to allow freedom to those who agree with you: the test for a liberal democracy has to be its willingness to allow its citizens to voice dissent. I can remember in the 1980s that the Anti-Nazi League sought to prevent right-wing politicians from addressing student meetings under the banner of their "no platform for racists" policy. I can remember at the time being dubious of this argument: freedom of speech should not be so lightly surrendered just because you don't like how it is used. For the same reason, attempts to beef up prohibitions on racist and religious bigotry have caused alarm. Comedians have rightly quetioned whether the government really wants to get involved in deciding which individuals or groups of people can be safely lampooned and which cannot. And now with the anti-terror legislation, we are facing a government intent on stopping people saying some things as "incitement to commit terrorism" and even "glorifying terrorism".

This is wrong, as the opposition parties have noted. Identifying and punishing new criminal acts is one things. But the government is effectively criminalising the holding of certain beliefs. In doing so, it is making up law to suit its own agenda. One of the threadbare rights of a UK citizen is to complain about the government, or even to argue that the system is wrong and should be changed, if necessary by completing the works of Guy Fawkes, "burnt in effigy to remind the Parliament that it would have been a Good Thing", as those notorious anarchist subversives Sellars and Yeatman put it in 1066 And All That. These thoughts can be expressed through speech, letters, pamphlets, letters to newspaper editors written in green ink, or in the manifestos of new political parties. I would rather the BNP were open in their racism than for them to adopt the appearance of being a reasonable right-ist anti-European party whose members just happen to be white skinheads.

Because what the government is trying to do by targetting the rhetoric of terror is to control people's beliefs. I would say that rhetoric of war and imperialism (ie officially approved rhetoric) does not provide the basis for confidence in the application of common sense. There is a world of difference between saying that cars are crimes against the environment and blowing up a motor factory. A sensible view would be that people are allowed to think what they like as long as their actions remain legal. To do otherwise is to actually reduce the culpability of the terrorists, since they can argue "it wasn't my idea- he told me to!" as if this was some excuse. If we want people to take responsibility for their actions, then we must focus on their choice about whether to follow a belief into practice, not on some inflammatory preacher they once heard speak. If only Tony Blair were a lawyer, or knew one.*


* A note for non-UK readers. Blair was a lawyer, is married to a lawyer, and his best friends are lawyers.

A computer interface for real life

Things you wish your computer had:

http://www.tobynopoly.com/wish/computer.html

That's entertainment

One thing they say about the film industry is that "Nobody knows anything". It is impossible to predict which of the under-written over-hyped star vehicles that Hollywood churns out will turn into a billion-dollar money spinner and which will be a Heaven's Gate or Waterworld. Everybody says it, everybody knows it, but nobody wonders why. The reason why is simple: nobody knows anything because nobody learns anything. It seems just a week ago (but is in fact two years) that the BBC decided to re-launch Top of the Pops on Friday night to halt the decline in audience and in particular to recapture the elusive hip young audience (aka the dim and ignorant); their secret weapon was Fearne Cotton, who is as intelligent as she is talented (see my Live 8 post for details). Unfortunately, the radical redesign only accelerated the decline, and so the programme was moved: new channel, new time, new day, new look, new--no, same presenters. And what happens? New TOTP loses half its audience. If there's a common factor, I just can't think of it.

This reminds me of the story of the man in the hospital talikng to his wife "You were with me when I lost my job; you were with me when my dog died; you were with me when the roof fell off the house; you were with me when I was in a car crash; and now you're with me when I'm sick. Face it, woman, you're a f***ing jinx!"