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Here he is giving very impressive voice (though maybe a few too many big words) to my feelings about how the modern Right shares many flaws of the '60s-'80s Left.
As I was asking the sadly evasive and uninformative Dom the other day, when did the Right start caring more about pie in the sky ideas than about facts and empiricism? When did the world turn upside down?
From Alan Hansen's most recent column. I'm less interested in his thoughts on Arsenal, welcome as they may be, than in this brilliant example of the way Brits handle verb tense when discussing sports teams:
In a tight game like Sunday's a couple of decisions going against you can result in defeat but the secret for any great team - and Arsenal are one - is to recover quickly from a setback.
It's an urban legend! The World Series isn't really named after the New York World. According to Snopes - and Cooperstown - there's no evidence whatsoever that the NY World ever did anything more than cover the games. Drat!
Oh, and by the way, someone won the World Series last night. Boston, was it?
So thousands were willing to pay 47c to write to the residents of Clark County to urge a vote for Kerry. My wife (Letters, October 18) forgot to register for an overseas vote and at £256 return she flies to the US next week to vote for Kerry, though we are natural Nader supporters. If readers want to throw in 47c each, it would be appreciated. Seriously, this election is important, please keep urging our American friends to vote Kerry.
Jon Fanning
London
The US correspondents who regard your Clark County letter-writing campaign as unwarranted interference have a point. But this is small beer. The most substantial previous campaign of this kind was prior to the Italian general election of 1948, with the Communist-Socialist bloc poised for victory. In the US, Italian-Americans were urged to write to their kin-folk calling on them to vote against the left and 10m letters were sent to Italy.
The message was that a victory for the left would mean no Marshall Aid for Italy and, for the supporters of the left ticket, the possibility of excommunication by the Catholic church. To accompany this, the CIA covertly channelled up to $3m into the coffers of the Christian Democrats - who duly won and held office for the next 40 years. Now that's a real campaign.
Anthony Carew
Stockport, Cheshire
The DaVinci Code is a nightmare of authorial ineptitude, but it certainly is chocabloc with funfacts, ain't it?
In preparation for the annual 'You Americans think you're so big' statements attached to the start of the World Series, I'll mention that crossword lovers should cut us some slack. The same paper that first published a crossword, The New York World, is also the paper that sponsored the early major league baseball championships, which were named after the paper.
Incidentally, crosswords started running in the World in 1913, I think, but didn't become a national craze until 1925. The more prestigious papers, eg the Times of London and the NYT, looked down at crosswords as a plebian activity, and didn't start running them until years later - the NYT not until 1942.
Via Atrios:
"We're Not Going to Have Any Casualties"
Pat Robertson claims that's what Bush said to him:
"And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.' "
Robertson said the president then told him, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."
Of course, Bush also said:
I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war.
Post-RIBA Awards, won by the Goykin, Jonathan Jones writes that architecture is the new sculpture.
Below, the first letter in particular offers a piquant criticism of the pickle in the sky, and may make a good point.
On second thought, I'm not sure that it is. While the writer is correct that the Gherkin needs a square to itself and thus can't "join with other buildings to make a coherent urban fabric and civilised streets", I think it's specious to argue that every building has to. When buildings' street front facades are alienating or don't engage passers-by, there's a problem, but that certainly couldn't be said about the Gherkin - just witness all the people crowding round the building's base to gawp up at its form. The empty space around the Gherkin isn't empty in the sense of "unused by the public". It's an area where, as I just said, people can admire the Gherkin. They may or may not continue to do this over the next however many years, but right now they certainly do, and I don't think you can eliminate a building from consideration as a good urban space solely because it doesn't have a rectangular base.
Architecture does not ape sculpture
Wednesday October 20, 2004
The Guardian
It was predictable that 30 St Mary Axe would win the Stirling Prize, as the competition has a track record of rewarding strikingly sculptural buildings. They photograph well, they excite the senses, they make good headlines, and they impress lay people. But Jonathan Jones's claim (G2, October 18) that architecture is the new sculpture diminishes both art forms. Urban architecture has to do a lot more than be sculptural. Foster's building is a striking and seductive object. But as a contribution to the making of cities it is a dead end. Unlike the Chrysler building, it cannot join with other buildings to make a coherent urban fabric and civilised streets. It just stands dumbly isolated in the centre of its rectangular site, amid leftover space - a magnificent but anomalous exception to the city's pattern.
Joe Holyoak
Birmingham
Architectural meaning and symbolism are quite different from those of art. Monumental architecture symbolises primarily power and wealth. Critics like to pretend such buildings are purely about aesthetics, but this is just lipstick on the face of the gorilla.
Louis Hellman
London
The "gherkin" does have a precedent, but it is from the expressionist not classical school. Bruno Taut's 1914 glass pavilion in Cologne pushed that shape and those materials as far as the early 20th century allowed; Foster's tower gleefully finishes the job.
Lalitte Stolper
University College Worcester
Carol Gould wrote a hysterical and, methinks, highly exaggerated article for David Horowitz's Front Page magazine, on what she sees as the nearly non-stop torrent of anti-American abuse suffered by expats/immigrants living over here; a few days later, the Guardian picked it up and ran it. Below are today's letters on it.
My thoughts pretty much start and end with the phrase "She's barking". Her opening story sounds terrible, but the rest of her tale is so obviously exaggerated that I doubt her veracity. "I cannot conduct business or even take a taxi ride in Britain without a scathing tirade about the scurrilous Yanks"? Really, Carol? Then why can I, and so many other Americans? She writes as if anti-American abuse were a daily occurence: "I am aware that many Americans are leaving their homes abroad and returning home after decades in Europe because they can no longer endure the daily abuse."
I agree that the chattering classes are more likely to be anti-American, but in two years here, almost all of it spent with people who in the US would be considered godless communists, I've received abuse twice: once from a homeless man who had gone off his meds in '79, the other from a student who objected to me telling him to get behind me when he'd cut in front of me in line. Twice in over four years! If I'd spoken up about my social and political beliefs more back in the US, I'd have gotten far more abuse there from the anti-abortionists and anti-gays.
All in all, I think this is yet another example of how happy the right has been to embrace the cult of victimisation. Their "poor embattled oppressed us" routine grows shriller and shriller, I think. And ever more tiresome. For instance, here's what poor beleagured Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail says:
This article describes vividly what it’s like to be an American and a Jew facing the tsunami of anti-American and anti-Jewish hatred that has swept over Britain.
Tsunami? Can you say tempest, Melanie, and then teapot?
Letters below, and here a link to a Crooked Timber discussion, which, unfortunately for me, spirals into a discussion of Israel.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1328663,00.html
Expats on anti-Americanism
Monday October 18, 2004
The Guardian
As an American who has lived in Britain for over 30 years, I read Carol Gould's description (An American scapegoat in London, October 16) with increasing incredulity. As a regular user of public transport and with constant exposure to people of many different backgrounds, I have never met the visceral hatred of Americans she describes. Indeed, last week's Guardian poll (We like Americans, we don't like Bush, October 15) shows the British have no difficulty in distinguishing between antipathy to Americans and their foreign policy.
Naturally, I have heard much concern about the latter, from the debacle of Vietnam to the current Iraqi misadventure - US foreign policy affects the entire world. Gould's wildly exaggerated accusations of anti-Americanism and anti-semitism should not be used as a smokescreen to deny the right of legitimate criticism of the policies of the US and Israeli governments, a right increasingly exercised by many Americans and Jews.
Dr Edie Friedman
London
I think and hope Ms Gould's experience is not typical, but it is clear that much of today's hysterical anti-Americanism is merely a surrogate for anti-semitism. Many people cannot stomach the fact that there is a power that wants to protect Jews. They would much rather "sympathise" with those who want to murder them. This is usually hidden under the mask of anti-Zionism. As ever, there are Jewish fellow-travellers more than happy to go along with this fraud to prove their liberal credentials.
Dr Michael Schachter
London
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Ms Gould writes: "Europe has always been a seething hotbed of anti-semitism." She does not mention one diabolically clever way by which the Europeans attempt to conceal this. In the UK, a Jewish citizen (Mr Howard) has been allowed to serve as leader of the Conservative party and others (Messrs Mandelson and Miliband, for instance) are prominent in Labour's senior ranks. In France, the next presidential election will probably have M Sarkozy as the candidate of the right, and M Holland for the left. Each is Jewish. Ms Gould is to be congratulated for not allowing herself to be fooled.
Norman Birnbaum
Washington DC
I would certainly agree that when I open my mouth in public, I run the risk of what I call "that conversation", which, in my experience, includes the following: "You left California to come here? Why, what on earth do you see in this country?" I have an uphill task to persuade people I am not mad to have left the "greatest place on earth" to come and live here.
As for my Jewish heritage, living and working in Oldham, I am accustomed to anti-Islamic remarks and to the effects of racism on my colleagues and adult students. My work with asylum seekers, who daily face being reviled and abused, gives me perspective on my experiences. I could never describe the inconveniences of explaining my national or ethnic background as in the same league.
Magda Sachs
Oldham
As an American who has also spent most of my adult life here, I realised long before 9/11 that everyone here didn't love us. This "island race" does have antagonistic feelings verging on the xenophobic. Anyone who has heard the British praise France if it only wasn't for the French, or claim all Italians are sex-mad cowards, knows they distrust everyone equally and, so, shouldn't be surprised that we aren't exempt just because we are so sure we're God's gift.
Rick Bryant
Exeter, Devon
The more I considered the article, the more offended I became. I am a Texan and have had the great pleasure of holidaying in Britain for many years. London is one of my favourite cities in the world. No one has ever been anything but kind. The people smile when they hear my accent, start conversations with me and give me friendly advice. It is a great disservice to both our countries to write of "American bashing".
Patricia Redford Kidd
Valley Spring, Texas
Having lived for two years in Alpharetta, Georgia, I can assure Carol Gould that educated Americans do invite Brits to their dinner table to abuse their country, do scream abuse at them in the street and elsewhere, or, in my actual experience, threaten to punch them in a Florida bar "cos you Brits think you know everything".
More serious was the constant stream of anti-European hate in the media at the time of the war in Iraq. And as for anti-semitic Europe, there may be a few with such views, but it is much less of a problem than the racism in the States, where, having married an African-American lady, some colleagues never spoke to me again. We joke over who they hate more: her, a successful black woman, or me, a snobby European.
Jonathan Fanning
London
As American expats who have lived in London for just over four years, we have found our neighbours to be welcoming and gracious people. The truest measure of actual sentiments can be measured by the substantial majority of the British people who wish to see George Bush defeated. That is the ultimate expression of kindness towards the American people.
Rev Ronald Garner
London
