Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (36 page)

Call this art as tyranny. First the gallery dictates your wardrobe, then the artist commandeers your mind. So is this an American paradox or another instance of American schizophrenia? Free the individual and then tell him what to do with his freedom; entangle him in red tape and then raise the roof if anyone mentions socialism.

The shock jocks of American television are defining socialism as the government invading your home with a shotgun and stealing your furniture. The Mad Hatter's Tea Party, whose patrons include Sarah ‘Read My Hands' Palin – otherwise described by the comedian Bill Maher as ‘the Nudnik from Alaska' – is making inroads into popular opinion with a mix of perfectly explicable loathing of the banks and perfectly inexplicable anxiety regarding health-care reforms which they are convinced will lead to the elderly and the sick being left to bleed to death in the corridors and waiting rooms of filthy hospitals, as they are in England, rather than on the roads as they are, if they happen to be uninsured, in the USA. (Don't bother to correct me on either score. I am infected by the new adversariality of American politics. Someone attacks you with unreason, you strike back with more unreason still.)

You would think that what has happened in Washington this last week would have finally disclosed to Americans the overwhelming truth about free enterprise: namely, that it doesn't work. It's the snow I'm talking about. Not who was responsible for making it fall, but who is responsible for clearing it away. Questioned by snowed-in citizens on the matter of uncleared sidewalks, the Mayor of Washington, Adrian Fenty – a man with an unnervingly over-polished bald pate – explained that responsibility for clearing a path outside a house or shop falls to the individual whose house or shop it is, and not the city. Interrogated further as to why he hadn't used his powers to compel people to fulfil these responsibilities, Mayor Fenty raised a hand and did to his glistening head what he will not do the city sidewalks. ‘I prefer the carrot to the stick approach,' he said.

Meaning, we don't hold with telling people what to do in these parts, unless they're wearing too many clothes to look at art in.

So the situation is this: some stretches of sidewalk appear passable, because owners of property have been out with their shovels, but these you can access only by leaping the hummocks of filthy snow, or fording the roaring rivulets of freezing sludge, left by owners of property who don't give a shit. The consequence of which is that the cleared sidewalks are of use to you only if someone helicopters you in.

Now wouldn't you think that if you were clearing your own two feet of pavement you would clear the two feet on either side of you while the spade was in your hand, no matter that the persons charged with that responsibility can't or won't? If not as an act of common courtesy, then in order to make your own coming and going that little bit easier? In socialist England where the government steals our furniture and leaves us to die where we fall, we shovel away snow and ask who the snow belongs to later. But in free-enterprise Washington this apparently is not possible. What's mine is mine, what's yours is yours. So go break your neck. But it's said politely.

I could have the sidewalks cleared in minutes. I'd invite government intervention. That's what governments are for. To make us do in a body what we are cussedly incapable of doing as individuals. Individualism is a fine ideal; it's only a shame individuals suck.

Bill Maher, to whom I've already referred, made the same point in an interview with Larry King the other day. ‘The people stink,' he said, alluding to the illogicality of the popular disillusionment with Obama for not doing what would, were he to do it, disillusion them still more.

There, in a nutshell, is the case against empowering the people. They stink. But how can you not love a country where someone will say that on television? We Brits might shovel one another's snow but we haven't the courage to insult the Demos. Love is what our politicians and comedians crave. They want the people to adore them. Cry a little over them. Feel their pain. Not even Paxman will tell the British public they stink.

So, thanks to Bill Maher, I approach the great democratic experiment which is America from an upside-down position. It doesn't work because the people stink. But in a country where you can say the people stink, the people can't stink. So it does work.

It's convoluted, but you can get there. Which is more than you can say about the sidewalks.

Elitism for Everybody

 

Here's a little test for you. Who said of Samuel Beckett, ‘His appeal lies in his directness – the sparse, unembellished prose that can make his meticulous stage directions unexpected'?

No, not Terry Eagleton. Guess again.

I'll put you out of your misery. Nick Clegg.

Let's not get carried away. I wouldn't have given that an A+ had it turned up in an essay at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. He who would avoid cliché must not put ‘sparse' and ‘unembellished' together. And ‘directness' is not a noun that quite winkles out what's distinctive or, as Clegg has it, ‘disturbing' – another cliché – in Samuel Beckett. Mrs Thatcher had ‘directness', as did John Prescott, if you remember him. The quality makes neither of them Beckett. But never mind. The wonder of it is, that asked to choose his hero, Clegg chose Beckett.

Whether Cameron will come round to any of Clegg's tastes in the long nights of slinky rapprochement ahead remains to be seen. His own stated preferences have always been strategically populist. As, of course, were Blair's and, latterly, Brown's. In Blair's case I believed them. Blair was superficial to his skin. In Brown's I didn't. We will never know now whether Brown would have fared better had he been allowed to speak in his own native sparse, unembellished prose, but it would have been worth a try. The lesson should not be lost on Cameron. The British might despise elitism but they quickly see through cultural sycophancy.

Though I don't doubt the sincerity of his passion for Beckett, Clegg is not what you would call an intellectual. No more than is – or maybe just a little bit more than is – Cameron. We wouldn't want it otherwise. In this country the intellectual life and the political life are inimical. We don't do philosopher or poet leaders. That keeps us tepid but it also keeps us safe. Clegg admits himself ‘unsettled' by Beckett's idea that ‘life is just a series of motions devoid of meaning'. A little flirtation with emptiness in the front row of the orchestra stalls is one thing, but we would rather our politicians didn't embrace nihilism.

It doesn't, however, have to be a choice between being an intellectual or being a dickhead – the choice Old Labour made when it came up with John Prescott, as did New Labour when it came up with Ed ‘Give 'Em a Laptop' Balls. Seeing both of them popping up in news programmes as power changed hands last week was like watching a person age before one's eyes. The world was new and they weren't. The thing they vowed to go on fighting for nobody any longer wanted – not in those terms anyway. The new language being spoken belonged to men – neither dickheads nor intellectuals – whose time we thought had passed but who suddenly were here again: public-school boys unabashed by the privileges education had conferred on them, unapologetic, burnished by advantages of birth and money. That such an old reality could present itself as a new one has been the most fascinating aspect of this election. What are they still doing here, such men? They were supposed to have been superseded long ago. We thought we had cleared the way for people of another sort entirely.

Noting its predominantly private-school make-up, Lee Elliot Major of the Sutton Trust – a charity whose aim is to promote social mobility through education – expresses concern that the Liberal Conservative Cabinet ‘is highly unrepresentative'. So whose fault is that? Ought the Tories to be less representative of themselves? Are the Lib Dems now shown to be as self-serving as their new partners? Or are we to blame – still servile in our souls, still doffing our caps to gentlefolk?

Or – and this is the explanation I favour – isn't their reappearance the final proof of a self-defeating contradiction at the heart of socialism itself? After thirteen years of Labour, and many more years of grievously misguided tampering, not only with grammar schools but with the very principles of a humane education, relativising knowledge for fear of privileging truth, denying children an education in the name of not imposing one on them, have we not simply left the field open for Clegg and Cameron's return? They are not in power because they are monsters of deviance – the attacks on Clegg for acting politically this last week have been as absurd as anything in Beckett – nor are they in power because they are throwbacks for whom we entertain a sentimental hierarchical regard; they are in power because we have not come up with a sufficient number of people educationally equipped to seize it from them.

Social mobility through education is a wonderful ideal; but first we have to provide the education.

The irony is that the Tories, with or without the Liberal Democrats, are far more likely to facilitate this mobility through education than Labour in any of its guises. Michael Gove is the new Education Secretary. I confess to a liking for Michael Gove. He is a cultivated man and looks the way a cultivated man should look – always just a touch unkempt, cross-toothed and with a bit of a headache (I'm talking of impression, not fact), ironical, intellectually impatient, not quite inhabiting the space, as the two Cs occupy space, carved out for him by privilege. He is also, against all the prevailing orthodoxies, Arnoldian.

Education, he said recently, is about ‘introducing young people to the best that has been thought and written'. And you can't get much more Arnoldian than that.

Think of it – ‘the best'. And no ‘Who are you to be telling me what's best, sunshine?' To which the answer should always have been: ‘Your teacher, you little bastard, so sit down and listen.' The fear of teaching ‘the best' because it is an expression of canonical authoritarianism that will ultimately stultify pupils is rooted neither in reason nor experience; the history of educated man shows that it does the very opposite, equipping the well taught to disagree, to resist, even to overthrow, from a position of independence and strength. Myself, I hold the root-and-branch changes in educational thinking promised by Michael Gove to be every bit as as important, in the long run, as bringing down the deficit. Make of Clegg and Cameron what you will, but they persist against the odds because they are in possession of a culture which is no more theirs than ours, but which, thanks to a wicked ideology of principled self-disinheritance, we have ceded to them. Whoever would empower the disadvantaged must give them back ‘the best'. Only then will we see men and women who don't look quite so archaically deserving in power.

Glue Sticks and Human Rights

 

Let's be clear: I didn't vote tactically the other day to keep Labour in by voting Liberal Democrat to keep the Tories out which was itself a ploy to get Labour out by voting Liberal Democrat to put the Tories in, on the off chance that we'd get a Liberal Conservative coalition which would collapse so quickly that the Tories would have to form a second coalition with Labour which would strengthen the Liberal Democrats, thereby ultimately keeping both the Tories
and
Labour out – reader, I didn't tie myself in these electoral knots just to wake up two weeks later to hear that al-Qaeda operatives are alive and well and being looked after in the country they can't wait to blow apart, or to hear Nick Clegg assert that ‘The law is very clear, that it is wrong to deport people for whom there is serious concern that they could be seriously mistreated, or tortured or indeed killed'.

Groundhog Day. The same what's right and what's wrong and what the law is clear about, as though the law was ever clear about anything, the same giving largesse with one hand while taking with the other, the same claptrap of hand-me-down compassion we've been hearing for the past thirteen years of unexamined holier-than-thou human rights assumptiousness.

What I want to wake up and hear from a new government is that the law is an ass and we intend to change it.

Whatever Cameron's thinking, Clegg is thinking same old same old. ‘We, like any civilised nation, abide by the very highest standards of human rights,' he continues, but we will stop him there. We cannot argue with someone who asserts what he's offering to prove. You don't defend human rights legislation by invoking it. For it is not evident beyond disputation that we have a duty to worry what happens to those we send back to their own countries, when they only left their own countries to destroy ours. Nor is it evident beyond disputation that to show such concern for those who show none for us is the mark of a civilised nation. Loving our neighbours certainly belongs to civilisation, but loving our neighbours more than we love ourselves belongs to pathology. As for loving our neighbours more than we love ourselves when those neighbours' idea of neighbourliness is a kiss with a stick of explosives, I'm not sure that the psychology of human self-destructiveness can supply a word that does justice to its derangement.

Nor do I know many people who see the matter differently. You may think this merely shows I hang around with right-wing thugs, but I ask you to try this test with your nearest and dearest: sit them down somewhere convivial, look them in the eyes, and ask them whether, in the great spirit of human consciousness, man and woman speaking to man and woman, honestly now, in that non-ideological part of themselves where justice and humanity reside, they give a shit what happens to a deported terrorist.