Category: Blog

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died last week. So did Robin Gibb.

The former was one of the most seminal and influential singers of the twentieth century. His recordings of most of the Lieder repertoire, Schubert’s Winterreise and Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion will delight music lovers for as long as there are music lovers. ‘A born god who has it all’ was how Elisabeth Schwatzkopf described Fischer – a slight exaggeration surely, but it came from the heart of another great artist.

Robin Gibb was, with his brothers, a member of a popular pop group the Bee Gees that gave the world such disco hits as Stayin’ Alive and Jive Talkin’, selling 200 million albums as a result. In other words, if Fischer revealed to the world his interpretation of the very essence of the Western spirit, Gibb was a successful purveyor of primitive quasi-musical matter. As an experiment, read the lyrics of any of his songs as you would a poem. They relate to real poetry exactly as their musical accompaniment relates to real music.

Both will be missed – but in a different way and by different people. The word ‘different’ is these days a convenient cop-out, obviating any need for judgment and discernment. One hesitates to say that something is better than something else – just use the word ‘different’ and you’ll imply uncontroversial parity. Bach wasn’t better than John Lennon; they were just different. Rembrandt was different from, not better than, Tracy Emin. You have your taste, I have mine, and who’s to say that one is better than the other? To suggest that some tastes are infinitely more elevated and informed than others is to commit the ultimate heresy of our cultish age.

That’s why it’s only with an infidel’s trepidation that I dare say that Fischer-Dieskau was a musician, and Robin Gibb wasn’t. Fischer was among those who elevate the public taste to the level of mankind’s apex. Gibb was among those who drag the public down to the level of mankind’s nadir.

It has to be said that Gibb’s output, though having nothing to do with music, was generally inoffensive and not without its practical uses. Even the most accomplished of dancers would find it hard to dance to the sound of St Matthew’s Passion; even John Travolta twisted and turned creditably to the sound of Stayin’ Alive. On the other hand, I can’t imagine any post-pubescent individual sitting back, closing his eyes and spending hours listening to How Deep is Your Love and other variations on the same theme – which is the only way to treat Fischer’s work. In short, the difference here is between the functional and the sublime – between mindless entertainment and great art.

How is this difference reflected in the coverage of the two deaths in our ‘quality’ dailies, specifically The Times? One respectful obituary for Fischer-Dieskau; pages upon pages on Gibb, from the editorial to the cover story in Times 2. There’s no doubt which event The Times regards as more momentous.

‘The death of Robin Gibb reminds us how much pop music shapes our lives,’ says the editorial. It’s not something of which one likes to be reminded. Pop ‘music’ should remind us of something else: how a once great culture has been destroyed, how deeply we’ve sunk into the morass of deadened senses, crepuscular minds, undeveloped infantile tastes. It’s true that this junk has shaped our lives, but the same can be said about drugs, street crime and the pandemic of AIDS.

But The Times obviously believes that any shape is as good as any other, and each should be greeted with open arms. ‘A century ago, classical music made up 85 percent of sales of recorded music,’ announces the editorial proudly. ‘Today it accounts for well below a tenth.’ To me this ‘trajectory’ represents a cultural catastrophe. To The Times, it’s a welcome development.

The editorial then quotes Alban Berg, who allayed George Gershwin’s fears that his Rhapsody in Blue wouldn’t be taken seriously by saying, ‘Mr Gershwin, music is music.’ For The Times to use that quote in this context is dealing from the bottom of the pack. The Rhapsody is at the outer edge of what Berg would have recognised as music. To think for a second that he, or for that matter Gershwin, would feel the same way about pop is either dishonest or moronic, you decide which.

‘Pop’s ascendancy is everywhere,’ says The Times. I wonder if they’d say the same thing, with the same inflection, about the spread of drugs, which enjoys a symbiotic relationship with pop. They probably would – it’s the shape of things today and things to come.

By the standards of his chosen field, Robin Gibb was a nice man, and I’m sorry he died so early and with so much suffering. But that shouldn’t prevent us from keeping a sense of proportion when talking about his life and death and those of Fischer-Dieskau.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Robin Gibb, RIP. 

In Russian business a killing doesn’t just mean making a lot of money. It’s a way of settling disagreements, enforcing contracts, collecting debts or just gaining a competitive advantage.

I don’t know which of those motives inspired the murder of the Moscow furniture tycoon Mikhail Kravchenko, and frankly I don’t care. Life has always been cheap in Russia, and it’s now even cheaper than it was, say, 50 years ago. People these days can be murdered for most trivial reasons, making it hard to second-guess the real one.

I only wish that members of our royal family didn’t get embroiled, however tangentially, in the murky world of Russian gangland. That’s precisely what the Russian business world is – and what it can only be in a country that has little tradition of legality. Without a just, independent and enforceable legal system, free enterprise is gangsterism. To this rule there are no exceptions.

That doesn’t mean that every rich man in Russia is a crime lord. Some are, some aren’t. But even those who aren’t have to play the game whose rules are set by the Mafia, operating under the aegis of that ultimate protection racket, the country’s government.

That’s how it always is everywhere: the dominant system imposes its ethos on all others. Our own NHS and the National School Curriculum exert their gravitational pull even on private medicine and education; otherwise honest Western bankers have to bribe Third-World politicians; the Russian Mafia will bend to its will even those entrepreneurs who ostensibly have nothing to do with it.

I don’t know much about the late Mr Kravchenko. If newspaper accounts are to be believed, he built his chain of furniture stores on the Ikea model. No direct Mafia links have been mentioned, but every Russian millionaire is tainted, if only by association. A pub landlord who pays protection money to the local hoodlum is unwittingly tarred by the same brush.

That’s why those British figures who stand for something other than just themselves should steer clear of any personal association with so-called Russian businessmen. One realises that this would be too much to expect from the likes of Lord Mandelson, whose financial shenanigans even within Britain have twice got him sacked from the government, and who is now friends with the Russian aluminium king Deripaska. But one is entitled to expect probity from members of the reigning dynasty that’s supposed to embody the historical sagacity and virtue of its realm.

Yet Prince and Princess Michael insist on hobnobbing with various Russians whose power and wealth by definition have a dubious provenance. Speculation has been rife that the Princess’s relationship with Kravchenko went beyond the ‘close friendship’ to which she owns up. I really don’t care one way or the other – though most men would be upset if their wives were photographed holding hands with a younger man in Venice. Venice isn’t Milan; one doesn’t go there on business. But let the gossip columns ponder this. For me a ‘close friendship’ is bad enough.

It may be entirely coincidental that Princess Michael’s ‘close friend’ got riddled with bullets during the same week in which it was revealed that Prince Michael had accepted a gift of £320,000 from Boris Berezovsky. Then again, it may not be.

Berezovsky, Putin’s friend and patron in the past, is now his worst enemy. This means that Boris can’t show his face anywhere near Russia and has to live in England with a platoon of bodyguards in close attendance. Occasionally peeking out from his assorted fortresses, he’s still meddling in Russian politics, usually by financing Putin’s opponents.

Berezovsky has claimed that his gift to Prince Michael was just a friendly gesture, offering help to a man in need. The extent of the grace-and-favour royal’s deprivation is neither immediately obvious nor particularly important. What is significant is that, even if the Russian exile had been driven by uncharacteristically noble impulses, the Prince acted imprudently by accepting money whose origin is in some eyes questionable. And Putin isn’t above sending a not-so-subtle message to the princely family: stay away or else.

Nor is it out of the question that this KGB colonel may see the Prince as a potential rival. The monarchist sentiment is strong in Russia, and it’s getting stronger. And Prince Michael has often been rumoured as a possible tsar, what with the immediate Romanov dynasty having been wiped out in 1918.

In all fairness, it has to be said that the Prince does little to dispel such rumours. He doesn’t mind, for example, emphasising his already remarkable resemblance to his second cousin twice removed, Tsar Nicholas II. To that end His Royal Highness has grown a beard styled à la Nicholas and has taken the trouble of learning Russian to a reasonable standard. His consultancy has had business dealings with Russia for many years, and the Prince has been awarded Russia’s Order of Friendship, a decoration for particularly friendly foreigners.

Being friendly to Russia is one thing; being friendly to her ruling regime is quite another. Apart from its transparent criminality, this regime is fickle in its affections. That it awards a medal to the husband today doesn’t at all preclude the possibility that it might ‘wack’ (to use Putin’s favourite word) the wife’s ‘close friend’ tomorrow.

I’m not speculating whether it did or didn’t. All I’m saying is that it’s best not to come in close contact with dirt, for some of it may rub off on one. It’s best to exercise prudence – unless of course the Prince and Princess wish to strike yet another blow for republicanism in Britain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The stories of Dave ‘chillaxing’ during the G8 Summit were heart-warming. That is, they began to perform this thermal function after I figured out what the word meant. My first impression was that it was a transitive verb denoting some particularly gruesome way of committing murder.

But then I looked at the pictures accompanying the stories, and they were indeed worth a thousand words. Dave wasn’t hacking anyone to death. He was doing a faithful impersonation of a football lout, throwing his arms up in the air in front of a telly to celebrate Chelsea’s triumph over Bayern Munich. Considering that Dave was going through that thespian routine in front of the crestfallen Angela Merkel, one can legitimately question his tact, manners and diplomatic skills. But then he gave Angie a hug and let her cry on his shoulder, so it was all right.

Just as legitimately one may wonder about the sincerity of that unbridled joy. Here the choice is straightforward: either Dave, who has always declared his affection for Aston Villa, was truly jubilant at the sight of another English team beating the Germans on penalties, or he was putting it on.

If he was indeed ecstatic, then one can easily believe the information helpfully provided by the same stories on his other ‘chillaxing’ habits, such as spending most of his spare time playing computer games designed for 10-year-olds playing truant from school. But the sceptics among us just might suspect that Dave’s tasteless enthusiasm came not from his heart but from his PR consultants.

Rather than getting a jolt of excitement out of an English team fielding only four English players, coached by an Italian and owned by a Russian, beating Angela’s Bavarians, Dave was trying to counter his image of being posh. No Enoch Powell, he. Dave’s not going to quote Virgil in public or profess his affection for Wagner. He’s a regular bloke, and he doesn’t give a monkey’s who knows it, djahmean?

If that’s the case, then he shouldn’t stop there. And nor should George, who was actually at the match, in a private, globally televised capacity. In case our two leaders are wondering what else they might do to prove to the electorate that they are as common as muck, here are a few helpful suggestions.

Those bespoke suits have to go. Instead, when attending the next EU summit on how to avoid a global economic meltdown, Dave and George should both wear patriotic T-shirts, purchasable from one of the stalls around Stamford Bridge. Dave’s could say ‘If it wasn’t for England, you’d all be Krauts.’ George would look most fetching in one proclaiming ‘Two World Wars, one World Cup, so @£&% off.’

That would communicate to those dastardly continentals that Dave and George will stick up for Britain in the only way they know how: by making empty, and if need be offensive, PR gestures. Dave should also, in my opinion, get a tattoo. After all Samantha already has one, and what can bring a posh politician closer to his flock? He should, however, avoid having ACAB inscribed on his knuckles, as that might communicate an insufficient devotion to law enforcement. Perhaps a heart pierced by an arrow would do the job, but this matter does require serious consideration.

Above all, it’s their speech that needs work, especially those vowels that sound as if they came straight out of Everyman’s English Pronouncing Dictionary by Daniel Jones. That simply won’t do. Dave should prove he’s a true heir to Blair, and didn’t Tony ‘Anthony’ glottal-stop his way to 10 Downing Street? Didn’t he drop his aitches whenever addressing an audience that looked as if it would settle for nothing less? Well then, Dave has his role model, and he should learn from him.

Thus, when his new friend François (who doesn’t yet realise he’s Dave’s friend) suggests that Britain abandon “zat rebate unfair and ‘elp run ze boutique European in ze manner proper”, Dave’s proper response should be, “You wha’, mate?” Then of course he should agree, having satisfied the domestic audience that his blokish credentials are impeccable.

And when George is asked by his German counterpart and new friend Wolfgang Schäuble (the one who got him that ticket for the Chelsea triumph, and what gesture could be friendlier?) to contribute another £50 billion to the Save-the-Euro charity, he must learn to reply, “ ’Ow much?!?!” – and only then pay.

The good thing about 10 Downing Street is that it’s a semi, though it would be much better if it were a couple of miles south of its present location. But have you ever heard this vote-winning fact mentioned anywhere? Dave should slip it into his next interview, by saying, for example, “The other night I was at me semi, in the kitchen, cooking tea for me trouble…”

The next election will be secure. Britain won’t be, but who cares? It’s really important stuff that matters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can see furniture emporia advertising similar deals on sofas upholstered in genuine vinyl: buy now, pay later, 0% interest, while stocks last. That’s how the EU project was sold to those industrious, ordnung-loving, pfennig-pinching Germans.

They saw, with a bit of prompting from the ruling bureaucrats, the economic advantages of a protectionist block touting a single currency pegged to their beloved deutschmark and a single market dominated by German exports. Deutschmark, deutschmark, über alles – even if it’s called something else now. What’s in a name, as that English precursor of Goethe once put it.

However, the ruling bureaucrats didn’t tell them a few other things, which the Germans are finding out the hard way. The economic advantages, as it turns out, weren’t the furniture emporium. They were its advertising campaign.

Advertising never lies; it deceives by omission. This particular campaign omitted the truly critical datum: the purpose behind the EU is political, not economic. And, if modernity has taught us anything, it’s that politics costs. Sometimes it costs a lot of blood, sometimes it doesn’t. One way or the other, it always costs a lot of money.

The economics of the situation are simple, though perhaps too simple for government economists to understand. A monetary union can’t work even in theory, never mind practice, in the absence of a fiscal union. And no fiscal union is possible without a strong central government allocating resources as it sees fit.

That’s how the South of England pays for the North, the North of Italy pays for the South, and California pays for Mississippi. The mayor of Milan doesn’t tell the mayor of Naples to sack half the police force and tell people who’ve never worked to find a job. Milan pays the central government, and the central government then keeps all those unemployed southerners in spaghetti alle vongole.

Extrapolating this proven arrangement to the EU means, in essence, that the Germans have to pay for everybody else, with the possible exception of the Benelux countries and one or two others. Suddenly it dawns on the Germans that to keep the EU going they’ll have to accept a lower standard of living and a higher rate of inflation. Perhaps not so high that they’ll have to take the old wheelbarrow off the mothballs to collect their weekly pay, but something approaching double digits.

They are understandably unhappy about that, and they’ve already communicated their feelings to the government through local elections. On that basis, most commentators have put a simple syllogism into effect. Thesis: Germany will have to pay for everybody. Antithesis: the Germans won’t wear it. Synthesis: the EU will fall apart.

That’s roughly the Aristotelian structure put together by a famous journalist speaking the other day to a mostly UKIP audience. The chap, endowed with much jolly-hockey-sticks charm but next to no intellectual rigour, more or less preached the Dave line. In the process, he gave the impression of someone who’d happily vote for a bull terrier, provided it sported a blue rosette.

The party line, as enunciated by the pundit, is that the EU is on its last legs, and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about what to do next. There’s no point even talking about leaving this megalomaniac abomination. Loose talk may cost Dave a few votes and what for? All we have to do is sit back and watch the EU implode before our very eyes, all by itself.

That’s wishful thinking that betokens a most unfortunate misreading of the problem. The EU would indeed implode if its powers-that-be were solely driven by economic concerns: one can’t think of another recent example of elementary economic theory receiving such a resounding empirical vindication. The EU may still implode, and good riddance to bad rubbish.

But I’m prepared to bet what’s left of my pension fund, that the Germans and their hangers-on will go to any extreme to prevent this. Had they not been prepared to stake all on an emerging federal state, a sort of EUSSR, or Fourth Reich if you’d rather, they wouldn’t have started the project in the first place.

Angela Merkel will pout for a while and whine about good housekeeping, but then she’ll do what politics demands, and damn the economy. She and her friends won’t let the EU bite the dust until they’ve exhausted every means of its preservation. And their feelings about the crisis just may be different from yours or mine.

History teaches that economic (or military) cataclysms are the steroids on which state Leviathans build their muscle mass. That’s why all Western states acquired unprecedented powers after both great wars, or, more appropriately, the Great Depression. Hence, if there’s an opportunity in every crisis, then the eurocrats must feel that they have in Europe today their greatest opportunity ever.

They’ll try to use the abyss into which they’ve pushed Europe as vindication of federalism – not as irrefutable proof that the whole idea was criminally inept. And if it takes trillions of freshly minted euros to fill the abyss, they’ll eventually do so, after much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth.

Meanwhile, the only sane thing for us to do would be to leave this madhouse immediately. Instead of paying the lunatics even more than we’ve already paid them, we should use the vast sums earmarked for this to protect our banks against the asylum collapsing on our heads. And because it’s the only sane thing to do, you know HMG won’t do it.

Instead, they’ll sing from the hymn sheet provided by The Sunday Times editorial today. The lyrics extol ‘the trade advantages’ of staying in the asylum – as if a country has to dissolve itself into others in order to trade with them. Britain did reasonably well in that department throughout her history without becoming part of a German-dominated federation. But that was in the old days, when sound economics wasn’t trumped by deranged politics.

The Germans will pay dearly for their ultimately doomed attempt to unite Europe without resorting to panzers. So, one fears, will we.

 

 

Standing a round is a fine British tradition. It’s also a prohibitively expensive one when a dozen colleagues go out for a swift half after work. (Translation for outlanders: ‘a swift half’ is a flexible measurement covering the range between two and 12 pints of beer.)

People still do it though, but, if the government acts on its threat to raise the minimum price of an alcohol unit, the British may start carrying calculators to pubs. ‘I only had three rum-and-Cokes. Was it five or six pints you had, Kevin? And you, Fiona? Right then, that’ll be…’ We’ll swap Anglican generosity for Calvinist frugality, but without also acquiring Calvinist industry.

Yet the proposed measure will affect social drinkers only the way the shockwaves of an explosion affect bystanders a hundred yards away. The proposed, and supposed, target are asocial drinkers, those who throw up on a parked car before zigzagging into the path of a moving one.

To dismiss that sort of thing as innocent fun, as Guardian writers do, would be ignoring a serious problem. The first time I realised its gravity was some 20 years ago, when a friend of ours was playing a concert in Chester. Incidentally, for the benefit of those who equate loutish drunkenness with poverty, Chester is one of Britain’s wealthiest cities.

We went out for a late supper after the concert, alighting back in the street at about midnight. It was Friday, and there wasn’t a single sober person of either sex to be seen anywhere in the centre. The girls were screaming, ‘Darren [Wayne, Lee, Jason etc.] get a f****** taxi’, but no taxi would stop for those staggering Darrens [Waynes, Lees, Jasons etc.] – a fare of a few quid wouldn’t have covered the likely clean-up job. A young man was slowly sliding down the wall next to the restaurant door, a trickle of vomit coming out of the corner of his mouth. His girlfriend, high on passion, low on squeamishness, was kissing him on that very mouth with drunken abandon.

Such scenes have become commonplace all over the country, and their spread seems not to be sensitive to demographics or geography. Hence it’s foolhardy to expect that those who have to fill with booze the empty space inside themselves will be deterred by having to pay a little more for it. Artificial restrictions on the supply of a desired commodity are unlikely to reduce the demand. They are, however, almost guaranteed to encourage much illegal activity.

Thirteen years between 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution put Prohibition into effect, and 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth, ought to have been enough time to hammer the point home: state interference doesn’t solve social problems. It either makes them worse or creates new ones. In this instance too, the price America paid for a marginal fall in cirrhosis cases was too high. The first organised black market was created to fill the void, and American English was enriched by new words like ‘speak-easy’ and ‘bootlegging’.

The example of another country I know intimately, Russia, shows that people who want to get drunk will do so, regardless of the cost. Back in the old days, a half-litre bottle of vodka cost the daily wage of a young doctor. But intrepid Russians managed to get legless with metronomic regularity by either distilling their own moonshine or resorting to liquids not manifestly designed for human consumption, such as floor varnish, methanol, antifreeze, cologne, deodorants and some such.

Benny Yerofeev, the late poet of Russian dipsomania, remarked that while few people in Russia know what the great poet Pushkin died of, everybody knows how to prepare floor varnish for drinking. I hope you won’t find it patronising if I divulge the secret to the uninitiated: you take a three-gallon bucket of floor varnish and empty a four-pound bag of salt into it. The salt will form a blob that will start sinking to the bottom through the dense liquid. As it sinks, the blob will get heavier with the oils, ethers and other impurities it has absorbed. In about four hours you’ll be left with a brownish liquid, which would be unlikely to cause any sleepless nights to the makers of Lagavulin, but which can be drunk with relative impunity, at least in the short term.

I’m not suggesting that the proposed measure will drive the British to similar extremes – only that people tend to find a way around state activism. The problem, if the government really wanted to solve it, ought to be tackled at its roots, which are all cultural and social. Palliatives won’t even achieve their real aim of winning more votes for the coalition by portraying it as resolute and hardnosed. Older people whose pensions have been wiped out largely by the government’s incompetence won’t look kindly at having to pay more for their glass of wine with supper. They’ll be likely to punish the government at the polls.

Nor will the treasury get much fatter, which is the other underlying purpose of the measure. People who normally drink cheap wine or spirits will switch to strong lager or fortified wine (which is the most cost-effective route to befouling one’s clothes before passing out). And criminals will start flogging stolen or fake alcohol the way they now flog cheaper cigarettes off the back of a lorry.

In short, the proposed measure is ill-advised. And I only use this adjective to be charitable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forget all those non-words like diversity, multiculturalism, equal opportunity, the right to [fill in the blank], sexism… and so forth ad nauseam. They denote nothing, but they all connote the same thing: mediocrity is god who will smite any infidel.

You can see the high priests of this god everywhere, and you’re welcome to choose your own field by way of proof. My today’s choice is music, if only to let Dave off the hook this once.

In the last few days I couldn’t help hearing two typical performances on Radio 3, accompanied by equally typical commentary. In one, Murray Perahia, the patron saint of giftless pianists, played the last movement of the Emperor Concerto as if dead set on proving that it’s possible to convey Beethoven’s genius by just playing all the notes in the right sequence. In the other, Mitsuka Uchida communicated to the world her startling discovery that Mozart wrote his Sonata in A not when he was 27, but some time after his death.

I don’t know if you follow music, but these two are regarded these days as ineffable talents, the ultimate exponents of their art. Sure enough, Radio 3 announcers, whose giggly voices have the same effect on me as the word ‘culture’ had on Dr Goebbels, intoned a few sweet nothings to that effect.

At the same time, one of them described Glenn Gould, arguably the greatest instrumentalist of all time, as a pianist ‘who divides opinion’. That much is true: the opinion is divided between those who understand musical performance and those who don’t. In general, on the rare occasions those same announcers introduce a truly great musician of the past, they have to make inanely condescending remarks implying that the art of performance has moved on since that time, but here’s a little something of curiosity value.

Musical performance has indeed moved on – down to the level at which aesthetically challenged philistines feel comfortable. Just compare, in their performance of the same pieces, Schnabel to Uchida or Yudina to Perahia or Sofronitsky to Lang Lang or Gould to Hewitt and you’ll hear the difference between sublime artistry and nondescript mediocrity, hiding behind digital competence. (Note that I deliberately use as modern examples those universally lauded as the great masters of today. I could make the contrast even starker by naming, at random, any of the dozens of fly-by-night ‘celebrities’ who haven’t yet attained the iconic status, all those Yuja Wangs of this world.)

Why can’t those Radio 3 announcers hear it? Several reasons. First, they all can play a bit, and they naturally respond to those musicians who play the way the announcers themselves would if they had the fingers. True artistry, even if those BBC folk were capable of recognising it, would remind them too painfully of the real reason they are announcers and not musicians. Mediocrity tropistically reaches for mediocrity – it abhors the unsettling discomfort that a great performance inevitably causes.

And then of course they work for an outfit institutionally, if not statutorily, committed to promoting mediocrity – and then only if we are lucky. When we’re unlucky, they pay millions to utterly offensive types like Jonathan Ross, who aren’t amusing even on their own pathetic terms. When that is the case, they clearly contravene the BBC Charter that calls for ‘promoting education and learning; stimulating creativity and cultural excellence’. It’s almost embarrassing to have to say that Jonathan Ross asking our PM to what use he as a boy put a photo of Lady Thatcher doesn’t quite achieve such noble aims.

However, it should be equally evident that neither does Radio 3, with its consistent commitment to mediocrity. This comes across not only in their choice of performers, but also in the selection of music. ‘Cultural excellence’ they are obligated to ‘stimulate’ doesn’t cover minor Baroque composers performed by a minor Baroque band whose members play their original instruments with the opposite of originality. Nor does it comprise an umpteenth performance of a late Romantic composer, prefaced by the remark that he is undeservedly forgotten. Let me tell you: if a composer is still forgotten after 130 years, it’s not undeserved. Those Radio 3 chaps would be entirely within their Charter’s remit to let sleeping composers lie.

With the profusion of newly digitised CDs of great musicians of the past (there aren’t many at present), Radio 3 could play nothing but sublime works sublimely performed. Occasionally, by way of ‘promoting education and learning’, they could throw in something distinctly average as an illustration of our downward cultural slide – and explain why the stuff is distinctly average. That way Radio 3 would have a sporting chance of reversing the depressing trend rather than pushing it to risible extremes.

But they can’t and won’t do that. The god of mediocrity is athirst, and the BBC is there to provide his sustenance.

 

 

 

It took an Herculean effort for me to use the socially acceptable ‘neck’ in my entry into the coinage sweepstakes.

Still, if I say so myself who shouldn’t, even my neutered term hits a double whammy by being both a neologism and a pun. The newly fashionable ‘Grexit’ is also a double whammy as it’s a portmanteau word, a sum of two borrowed parts. But it isn’t a pun, unless it’s a subtle play on grex venalium. If that’s what it’s meant to be, then it edges ahead of my contribution, for being not only neologistic and punning but also posh.

For those of you who had the good sense to play truant during your Latin classes, ‘grex venalium’ means a venal throng, a heard of hirelings. One can’t think of a more fitting term to describe our European leaders, as they’re leading the continent into an abyss.

Take Romano Prodi for example, who no longer heads the EU Commission, but still has EU interests close to heart. Said interests, he has suggested, will be irrevocably damaged should Greece leave the euro: ‘Exit would bring down the whole house of cards, with one state falling after another: it would reach Portugal, Spain, then Italy and France,’ he said.

Yes! my friends must be screaming, as they punch their left palms with their right fists. But the prophesy isn’t quite accurate. Those states will suffer even worse than they are suffering now, but they won’t fall. What will fall is the EU, and not before time. The ensuing thud will be deafening, and we should all start wearing earmuffs. But in the shorter term a tumble awaits most politicians involved in pushing Europe over the edge, and I’d like to commiserate with the sheer scale of the human tragedies unfolding before our very eyes.

Just look at poor Angie. First she lost Nicky, the love of her life. Then she lost the right to choose her next mate by being pushed into bed with François, a man whom she secretly despises. Now she has lost North Rhine-Westphalia, a big chunk of her trousseau. By itself that wouldn’t be so tragic, except that this loss is a harbinger of the ultimate one to come: the poor dear is going to lose her job. And what has she done wrong? Hasn’t she been a perfect little wife, keeping her eye on the family finances and raising her children in her own image? Didn’t she teach them to look after the billions, and the trillions will look after themselves? And now they’re all turning against her, one by one. That’s gratitude for you.

Or look at Dave. By thunderously taking Nicky’s side in his predictably doomed struggle to save his marriage to Angie, Dave acted in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘…bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you…’. Nicky had indeed been cursing Dave, even telling him to shut up, something your Mum must have told you never to say. And yet Dave, like an abused wife who refuses to walk out on her loutish hubby-wubby, stood by his man. When François came to London for a stag do before taking a plunge with Angie, Dave wouldn’t even talk to the impostor. Loyalty or what? Now, as a reward for the one selfless act of his life, Dave won’t be invited to the wedding – or any subsequent bash thrown by the newlyweds. On the plus side, when he himself is thrown out on his ear, he won’t have any problems finding a title for his memoir. Bipolarisation of Europe suggests itself.

But at least Angie and François can find some ersatz solace in each other’s embrace. Think of all those marriages breaking up all over the continent, where the divorced spouses have no fall-back mates. The coalition in Holland has gone Dutch, and the country is about to see red: Holland is about to move left of Hollande (I told you it was time for puns, especially bad ones).

And Italy had done a full Monti, only to show the world that her economy is sagging and badly in need of a lift, and her southern regions need a Botox treatment. She may have to shun the wedding of Angie and François – that is, assuming the marriage is still on, and François doesn’t leave Angie at the altar.

I’d treat you to more rotten puns whose sole aim is to laugh in the face of tragedy. But I can’t: tears are suffocating me too much, I can’t get another word out. So I’ll have to tell you about the major Spain in the neck some other time.

 

 

 

    

 

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that one should never start by saying ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged’. Yet no other phrase could better introduce the First Law of Modernity:

Large-scale government programmes always produce results different from those intended. The likelihood of such results being opposite to those intended is directly proportional to the zeal put into the implementation of said programmes.

Few programmes have ever been implemented more zealously than the systematic effort to turn British education from the envy of the world into its laughingstock. The rot set in in 1965, when Tony Crossland, Labour Education Secretary, announced, ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f****** grammar school…’

Next to the determination to win the Battle of Britain, this was the only sentiment I can think of that has ever drawn cross-party consensus. The subsequent two generations of politicians have achieved the task set in such a forthright fashion, and the sainted Margaret Thatcher, when still Education Secretary, shut down more grammar schools than any of her Labour colleagues.

Grammar schools, and the Tripartite system in general, were based not on any ideology but on a simple empirical observation that holds true all over the world: only about 25 percent of all children are academically inclined or capable. Yet 100 percent of the children should leave school equipped to handle life’s challenges as best they can – be it as future barristers or mechanics.

Conversely, comprehensive schools that replaced the old grammar and secondary modern schools were based on an ideological, which is to say false, premise. Their architects proceeded from the assumption that equality was an end both desirable and achievable.

This was a pie in the sky, and the pie was rancid. True equality can only exist in heaven; in earth, people are created unequal in strength, intelligence, character – well, in everything. Earthly inequality is thus a natural order of things, and it can only be distorted by unnatural means. Even then it won’t disappear; it’ll be replaced by a worse type of inequality or else camouflaged by demagoguery.

An important thing to remember is that downwards isn’t just the only possible direction of levelling but, for its champions, the only desirable one. To Burke ‘compulsory equalisations,’ could only mean ‘equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary.’ To modern egalitarians they are the shining beacon.

Now Michael Gove laments the entirely predictable, nay inevitable, results of the egalitarian hurricane that has swept away any semblance of decent education in Britain’s state schools. He has noticed with his eagle eye that most walks of life, including, amazingly, pop ‘music’ and some sports, are dominated by alumni of public schools.

What do you expect? A domination by comprehensively educated school-leavers who can’t read, write or add up? If comprehensives taught such skills, some pupils would master them better than others, thus defeating the founding purpose of these ‘schools’. It’s much better to make sure everyone is equally illiterate. This underlying sentiment, supposedly based on the desire to increase social mobility, is guaranteed to eliminate it, enshrining for a lifetime the conditions to which a child is born.

‘We live in a profoundly unequal society,’ laments Mr Gove. Truer words have never been spoken. In fact, they are so true that I’d like him to produce an example of a single equal society in the 5,000 years of recorded history. I, on the other hand, can offer many recent or current examples of countries where an attempt to create such a society resulted in the worst butchery the world has ever seen.

‘When more Etonians make it to Oxbridge than boys and girls on benefit, then we know we are not making the most of all our nation’s talents,’ says Mr Gove. One gets the impression he shares Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair’s aspiration that half of all Britons should have a university education – something guaranteed to reduce universities to the intellectual level of inner-city comprehensives.

I don’t have the same access to data as Gove has, so I’m not going to challenge the counterintuitive proposition that children on benefit are the secure depositories of ‘our nation’s talents’. But if they are, then such talents would come to the fore more readily if ‘benefits’ weren’t available, and the children saw before them the example of their parents working hard to earn a living. And if we had state grammar schools able and willing to spot those talents and to create conditions in which they could thrive.

‘For those of us who believe in social justice, this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible,’ thunders Gove. He ought to know better than to use hackneyed non-words designed to conceal hackneyed non-thoughts.

In real language, social justice would mean giving everyone his due. If such justice operated in Britain, half of her population, betrayed and brutalised by egalitarians, would starve to death. For Gove and other with-it politicians, ‘social justice’ means further promotion of the same harebrained philosophy that has destroyed our education in the first place. If that’s justice, give me injustice any day.

What’s even more galling is that one senses that Gove knows all this. Given a free hand, he’d probably wish to do a Crossland on the comprehensives and replace them with the old system, the one that in the distant past made Britain one the best-educated nations in the world. But even to hint at such a desideratum would be as ‘politically inexpedient’ as any other sane policy.

That’s why he’ll continue to treat the cough rather than the lung cancer, he’ll continue to mitigate the symptoms of what he probably knows to be a systemic flaw. Systemic flaws, Mr Gove, are eliminated by changing the system. Not tweaking it cosmetically to the accompaniment of meaningless twaddle.

The debt crisis exploded in 2008, and its shock waves have lost none of their destructiveness. The fault largely lies with governments whose frenzied borrowing and overheating printing presses turn currencies into Monopoly money.

This madness started in the run-up to the First World War, when most countries went off the gold standard enabling their governments to become players in the economic game, rather than its referees. The results were spectacular. In the last 50 years of the nineteenth century the British pound underwent a total inflation of 10 percent. The corresponding figure for the last 50 years of the twentieth century was an economy-busting, soul-destroying 2,200 percent.

That much is well known and understood. However, neither governments nor their quasi-independent central banks are the only culprits. For they aren’t the only inflators of the money supply – private institutions do their fair share.

Various JP Morgan outfits take pride of place in this activity, which manifestly runs against the constitution of most Western states. Private companies aren’t supposed to assume the functions of elected governments, yet this is precisely what JP Morgan has been doing for the better part of a century. By their own standards, they’ve done a good job, worth billions in bonuses. But by our standards they, and their able colleagues, have brought the world to the brink of disaster.

By way of historical background, it was Morgan bankers who were the principal architects of the Federal Reserve system, masterminding its strategic offensive against the gold standard and thus enabling the state to get those presses in high gear. And it was the House of Morgan that floated war loans for Britain, effectively breaking US neutrality and financing a steady flow of supplies across the Atlantic. That left the Kaiser’s Germany no choice but to launch unrestricted submarine warfare, dragging America into the war.

This was Morgan’s entry into global politics, inseparable from global economics. Since then their bankers have designed many sophisticated weapons of mass economic destruction. It was mainly those weapons that triggered off the current explosion and set up the next one, of a much higher yield.

Prime among such weapons are various schemes of increasing the money supply through the derivatives markets. The spirit behind such technically legal tricks is roughly the same as that animating illegal Ponzi schemes, of the kind that landed Bernie Madoff in prison for a surreal term.

It was derivatives schemes that emboldened American banks to offer unsecured mortgages, eventually blowing up the global market. A bank wouldn’t just proffer an unsecured loan of, say, $450,000 hoping that the borrower would dutifully repay it, with interest, over 25 years. It would protect itself by issuing a derivative bond on the loan and selling it to another bank. To make it worthwhile, the value of the bond would be stated as $600,000, which the buyer would accept. After all, the price of property has nowhere to go but up, has it not? So what’s a $150,000 surcharge among friends? Just in case, however, the buyer would then issue his own bond, this time for $900,000, and sell it on. And so forth, until in some instances the combined value of the derivative bonds would reach 15 times the original value of the house.

The expectation that the market value of the property would reach this figure in any foreseeable future was no longer merely optimistic. It was insane. Any tenuous link with the real world that may have existed had been severed.

Without going into much tedious detail, as derivative markets in mortgages tottered, exactly the same disaster was brewing with other bank securities. Just as with mortgages, clever banks thought they had protected themselves against a calamity. But they were too clever by half.  

They over-relied on various safety valves, prime among which was Credit Default Swap (CDS) developed by JP Morgan Chase in 1997. Essentially, a CDS means that the seller of a security assumes a certain amount of risk in case of defaults. Like mortgage bonds, CDSs can act as secondary derivatives; they too can be sold on at a profit.

Before long the idea turned into a standard practice all over the world: you buy my CDS, I buy yours. A few spins of that particular wheel, and everybody was insured, including the insurers. Unfortunately, reality has its own logic, and this hasn’t yet been universally repealed. And simple logic suggests that, when everyone is insured, no one is. To mix the metaphors slightly, when the penny drops, the piper has to be paid.

In this instance the piper is demanding rather exorbitant amounts. The Bank for International Settlements currently estimates the total paper value of outstanding derivatives, including CDSs, at $592 trillion, which is roughly 10 times the annual GDP of the whole world, with its five continents and variously industrious populaces. The face value is only about one tenth of that amount, but even such a paltry sum is clearly repayable in the virtual world only.

Yet you and I live in the real world, where people have to pay for their housing, food and clothes. The virtual world has placed a time bomb under the real one, and it’s ticking away. Should it go off, as most such bombs do sooner or later, it would take Kafka’s imagination at its most macabre to describe the ensuing human catastrophes. I’m not even going to try.

 

 

None of Freud’s paintings could possibly adorn a chocolate box, which proves he’s a true artist (Mr Renoir, ring your office).

Some of his canvases are calculated to shock, some do so simply because real art always unsettles. So, as I walked towards the National Portrait Gallery to see the Freud exhibition, I didn’t expect my senses to be mollycoddled. I expected a shock.

And one came – even before I went in. Hanging on the fence was an expensively produced poster advertising another exhibition, of Admiral Nelson’s portraits. It was called Nauseous Sailor.

Now in the language of William Shakespeare and Kenneth Clark ‘nauseous’ means ‘disgusting’, ‘vomit-inducing’. Surely that’s putting it too strongly, I thought. Nelson had his failings, a propensity to consort with courtesans for one, but he’s generally regarded as a decent sailor.

In fact, the square next to the Gallery is named after one of Nelson’s exploits. You know, the one in which he established that Britain was a naval power and France wasn’t, a state of affairs that lasted until Dave bought a time share on a French carrier. Could a nation really have thus honoured a ‘disgusting’ sailor?

It didn’t. By erecting Nelson’s Column, the nation honoured its great hero. Unfortunately, the same nation later did to its education what Nelson had done to Villeneuve’s navy. The broadsides were so overpowering that even today’s supposedly literate curators don’t know the difference between ‘nauseous’ and ‘nauseated’. The institution once graced by the directorship of the erudite, elegant writer Kenneth Clark is now led by ignoramuses.

Why not just call the exhibition Sea-Sick Sailor? Not only would the title be accurate, but, thanks to the alliteration, it would also be catchier. Sea sickness is the unambiguous description of Nelson’s affliction – after all, a sailor can be nauseated (or ‘nauseous’ in the ignoramuses’ lingo) for a variety of reasons, such as too much grog, or else constant exposure to pretentious pseuds.

If I expected my newly jaundiced mood to change inside the exhibition, it didn’t. It’s not that I changed my assessment of Freud as one of modernity’s few great craftsmen. In fact, from the first painting to the last, one knows one is in the hands of a master. Freud’s best portraits, like those by Rembrandt or Velázquez, don’t just depict the sitter’s face; they capture his psychology.

Thanks largely to the artist’s grandfather, psychology has in our time tried to fill the space formerly occupied by the spirit or, even earlier, the soul. A futile attempt, if I ever saw one. For, if the spirit reaches outwards and upwards, psychology is inward and solipsistic. Preoccupation with it is a sure sign of a man who uses himself as the starting point of the universe – his is the single-point perspective, making anyone smaller as he moves away from the egotistic centre. A modern man looks inside himself to find the truth. Alas, he only finds himself there.

That’s where Freud’s portraits differ from those by Rembrandt or Velázquez: like them, he offers psychological insights; unlike them, he offers no spiritual ones. Hence his models lose a crucial part of their humanity, becoming merely vessels containing the artist’s own view of the world.

And what an eerie view it is. Freud obviously didn’t celebrate the beauty of life, as all great artists do – regardless of how gloomy their subjects are. Nor did he celebrate the beauty of the human body: his nudes tend to be either worryingly skeletal or grossly obese; most are unattractive. This is understandable in an artist preaching that life is ugly. It’s lamentable in a master held back by his monovision.

Though a true artist may sometimes be gentle, he is never genteel. Freud is neither gentle nor genteel; however, he’s often genital. Many of his paintings feature highly detailed close-ups, which by some may be taken for a manifestation of stark, unflinching realism. I see it as a lapse of taste.

Hard as I try, I can’t imagine Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with her legs wide-open, or any of Rembrandt’s merchants letting it all hang out. Great artists, no matter how raunchy they are in their life or even art, always retain a certain chastity of expression, an aesthetic purity of vision. They don’t rely on gynaecological images to make a point; they have finer tools at their disposal.

It would be too pat to say that Freud inherited his grandfather’s preoccupation with those particular organs. The real reason probably lay deeper: the artist was challenging traditional notions of taste, morality and aesthetics. Such a challenge is too difficult even for such a superb painter to pull off without plunging into the lower depths at which poor taste resides.

And superb he is. The task Freud set himself was dubious, but he went about it with consummate skill. The technique he used since about 1960 relied on huge brushes and thick paint. This gave flesh a disconcerting quality, and, as Freud tended to clean his brush after each bold stroke, his palette never remained stable. Each touch was chromatically, though not dramatically, different from the next, and at first glance his variations of tone may look almost monochrome, their subtlety at odds with Freud’s audacity of stroke. And his backdrops retained the same flesh tones, seldom trying to provide a contrast.

Freud cleaned his brushes with hotel linen, which he then used as his squalid backdrops. This was essential to his eerie view of life, as were his breath-taking angles and compositions. Freud often looked down on his models, literally as well as figuratively, distorting their bodies and shocking the viewer’s optical preconceptions.

Still dazed, I walked out and went to a small pseudo-Italian café for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, which the pretty girl at the counter called ‘a panini’. My distaste for modernity heightened by the exhibition, I wanted to say ‘it’s a panino, dear,’ but didn’t. There was no fight left in me.