Journalists turn to Yeats to describe crisis

If you complain that this is no country for old men, you’re quoting the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. If anything slouches toward anything else (especially Bethlehem), that's a Yeats quote too. You’re quoting Yeats if things fall apart, and if the centre cannot hold. When you describe a rough beast, especially if its hour is come at last, it’s Yeats. If you find yourself fastened to a dying animal, that’s Yeats as well. If, like the Irish Times recently, you ask “Was it for this?” you’re quoting Yeats. Any terrible beauty you might come across, particularly if it’s born, is Yeats’ offspring. If the best lack all conviction (and the worst are full of passionate intensity), you’re quoting Yeats. If you fear mere anarchy loosed upon the world, you’re quoting Yeats. If you urge anyone to tread softly for fear of stepping on dreams, then you’re quoting Yeats.

I thought I'd compile this list as a response to the often-posted 'You're quoting Shakespeare'. The bard has a 320 year headstart on W. B., but he's catching up.

The poems that journalists seem to be particularly fond of quoting are Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats' seemingly successful attempt to transform himself into art to become immortal; He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, a love poem; September 1913, Yeats' criticism of a commercialised, soulless Ireland not worthy of those who had martyred themselves for it; Easter 1916, where the poet apologises for denigrating the Irish nationalists, who had just proven themselves capable of heroism in the Easter Rising; and finally The Second Coming, an apocalyptic poem written in the aftermath of the First World War, offering a foreboding vision of the troubling decades ahead.

Birmingham

Walking through Birmingham at 2am, the only sound is the occasional lorry bringing stock from around to world to sell in its enormous shopping centre, The Bullring. Apart from that the city is icily quiet, as if even the drunks couldn't bother to be here.

Cities are like people. To age gracefully, what's wanted is a nip here, a tuck there. The French do it well. Streets, like the wrinkles on the face, grow according to the demands of use: only a foolish surgeon would aims to override their contours entirely. And to keep a city beautiful, the planner must, like a face, protect at all costs the features that make it unique.

Industrial towns have their own kind of gruff beauty, deserving of respect. But over the years Birmingham's town planners, like surgery addicts, have allowed developers to perform ever more gruesome intervention.

It started 210 years ago. Back then the centre of Birmingham was an informal market and a network of narrow streets. Prompted by 'disorderly behaviour' and political protests, town planners began to buy up buildings in the area and demolish them. By 1810, Corn Cheaping Street, The Shambles and Cock Street were flattened.

The next great clearance came in WW2. The Free Grammar School was demolished; the glass-roofed Victorian New Street Station was damaged by bombs and never repaired. Then the decision was made to replace Birmingham's centre with a shopping mall. Laing Construction were charged with its execution. The Market Hall was demolished, so was the Fish Market. Spiceal Street and Jamaica Row were flattened. The first Birmingham Bull Ring centre opened in 1964.

Wikipedia says: "The 1960s Bull Ring Centre had problems from the beginning and was very much a product of its era. At the time of its opening it was considered the height of modernity, but higher rentals within the shopping centre meant that traders turned away from it. The public were also less inclined to use the subways and escalators, which stopped working regularly. Also, it did not age well and soon became generally regarded as an unfortunate example of 1960s Brutalist architecture, with its boxy grey concrete design and its isolation within ringroads connected only by dangerous subways. It was, in later days, much disliked by the public and contributed to the popular conception that Birmingham was a concrete jungle of shopping centres and motorways."

20 years after its opening, developers put forward an application to demolish it. It took another 20 years to persuade the public. The job was done by Laing O'Rourke (by now the UK's biggest private developers company - O'Rourke had bought up Laing Construction).

It occupies the entire city centre, bawling out its brand names from the walls. Rather than being designed according to the existing city map, the streets have been reconstructed in obedience to the shopping centre. Its gigantic size seems to have been non-negotiable: the citizen must walk into the complex or go through a forbidding concrete underpass beneath it. This is an environment that actively hates the pedestrian: whole roads are car-only; unfriendly concrete benches are scattered beside the road, as though ironically. Curving tunnels, like tentacles, are flung between the buildings above your head.

It physically dwarfs all other buildings around it. It's enormous size seems unsustainable. How does the mall make enough money from its environs to support itself? Surely it's a mistake to put faith in Selfridges everlasting? What will be done with this building once they're gone?

Away from the shadow of the mall the depressed former high street is pocked with abandoned lots. Here and there on the remaining old brick walls are fading painted signs of what the city used to produce: Malox healthy dog food, Birmingham leathers, Birmingham silks.

Fall of the rebels

On Sunday I went to see the Cork 'The Rebels' vs Mayo in the national Gaelic football quarter finals in Croke Park with my dad. Everyone expected Cork to win. They grow them big in Cork, just look:

But Mayo crept up on them in the first half, and in the second half Cork scored only one point. The final score was Mayo 1-13 Cork 2-06 (each goal is worth 2 points, so in total, Mayo scored 1 x 3 + 13 = 16, Cork scored 2 x 3 + 6 = 12). Despite his enthusiasm, this fellow went home disappointed.

After the match, my dad and I did a tour of all the pubs of the area, where he grew up. We went from pub to pub, looking inside and sizing up the crowd, leaving without getting a drink. Quinns was packed with a young crowd of mostly Mayo supporters. It was cavernous inside and pitch black, and it was like stepping forward in time to 4 o'clock in the morning. Fagans' was miserable. It used to be former taoiseach Bertie Ahern's local. A friend of mine wandered in unknowingly and at the urinal, noticed he was peeing beside the head of government. But apparently Bertie doesn't go in there anymore because he's been attacked.

Then we took the road to Fairview and ended up outside a crazy-looking establishment, bristling with flags (Dublin, Ireland, Palestine...). We could hear a band playing so we poked our heads inside. It was an enormous place, packed with hundreds - hundreds - of men in Celtic jerseys. A man was dancing around topless with his 5-year old son. The band's grey-bearded lead singer sang something like "...diddle idle in the Old IRA" and the whole crowd yelled as one "Up the 'RA!"

We turned around and left very quickly.

My dad said this was the infamous Players' Lounge. He'd heard the place discussed on Joe Duffy (a radio chat show the nation calls to complain about all things terrible, awful and shocking). The owner is John Stokes, who's the father of the Celtic player Anthony Stokes. Ahead of Queen Elizabeth II's visit to Ireland, he hung a 60ft banner on the pub saying "She and her family are all officially barred from this pub as long as the British occupy one inch of this island they will never be welcome in Ireland."

This morning the pub was front page news. At 2am this morning armed men broke in, tied the manager up, stole €50,000 and set the place on fire.

This is what it looks like now. I called by to take some photos, people were super cagey. The Gardaí grumbled in my general direction and a few people who were being questioned yelled at me, thinking I was taking photos of their faces.

Everyone is assuming it was done by some Republican faction or other as intimidation. Two customers and the doorman were shot by the Real IRA this time last year.

Brandless bliss

I like pubs with crap decor and a limited range of beers, with bacon fries for sale behind the counter. Pubs with old men that come in and shakily put the coins in the machine for a packet of 25 Major. Pubs with three regulars drooping over the beer-circled counter, who eye you as you come in.

I love them for their idiosyncracies. They're a respite from the creepy impersonality of chain bars. Any chain which offers you an endless choice of products personalised to your taste, imposing no strictures, exists in a cultural vacuum. To experience culture is to experience an interesting restriction of choice: "this is what we eat here."

Today I discovered a treasure. It's called 'The Cafe'. A cup of tea costs 60p, and meals start from £1.80. The most expensive thing on the menu is the daily roast, at £5.

It was like stepping into the past. Sausages, eggs, fried liver and mushrooms, tea. Men coming in and out, greeting the chef George and barking for a plate of chips. The toilet is in the owners' house, upstairs.

Orwellian

A device on British buses that shows a live recording image of yourself, so you know you're being watched.

Was the AHRC 'forced' to adopt the Big Society as a research priority?

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is the body responsible for distributing funds to academic researchers in the arts and humanities in Britain. On March 27 2011 the organisation was accused of ordering research on the 'Big Society', a Conservative Party slogan, by The Observer. The newspaper quoted Professor Peter Mandler, of the Cambridge history faculty, to say that the AHRC had been forced to adopt the 'Big Society' as a priority research point, and were threatened with funding cuts if they refused.

The AHRC then released a statement denying the claims and defending their inclusion of the 'Big Society' as a proposed area of research. The statement said that the council had been working on a programme called 'Connected Communities' for two years prior to the slogan's adoption by the Conservative Party; and that the slogan's later appearance only proved the relevance of their earlier selection of 'Connected Communities' as a research theme.

I do not believe that the AHRC was forced to adopt the 'Big Society' as a research priority. I believe that they adopted it of their own volition in an attempt to win the favour of the government, and perhaps in the hope of avoiding funding cuts in the future.

This powerpoint presentation entitled 'Building the Big Society' was given by guest speaker Dr. Bert Provan at a conference on a 'Connected Communities', held by the AHRC in Birmingham on June 2010. It quotes David Cameron throughout. Provan is a Deputy Director at the Department of Communities and Local Government, a governmental organisation which states on its website that its mission is "helping to end big government and create a free, fair and responsible Big Society". It shouldn't be surprising that this government official touts the party line. But why did the AHRC choose to host him as a speaker?

Dr. Provan's presentation was preceded by an opening speech by Professor Shearer West, the Head of Research at the AHRC, and Head of Humanities at Oxford University since February 9 this year (her background is in Art History). Unlike Provan, West did not mention the 'Big Society', though she did quote four pages of coalition statements about communities "coming together" and becoming "self-reliant".

But when opening the following conference on December 8, West mentions the Big Society on page 15. And whoever put together the presentation copied and pasted three photos from Provan's June 'Big Society' presentation into Shearer's new one (compare page 5 and 7, Shearer, and pages 5, 7 and 11, Provan.)

Furthermore, it appears to me that speakers at the December conference were asked to discuss the Big Society in their presentations.

One presentation is called 'Beauty and the Big Society', and quotes David Cameron in its first pages. It was given by Tom Bolton, Senior Research Advisor at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). CABE's website explains that it "was the government's advisor on architecture, urban design and public space" until February 2011, when its government funding was cut and it effectively ceased to exist. Bolton was about to lose his job, and he probably knew it. This presentation looks like a plea for mercy ahead of the impending 'bonfire of the quangos' (mentioned by Shearer in her opening address).

But less understandably, someone named Professor John Hartley, of the University of Technology of Queensland, Australia, was flown approximately 16466.51 kilometres to give a speech on 'Connected Communities and Creative Economy: Clash, cluster, complexity, creativity'. His job in Queensland is presumably safe from coalition cuts, yet in a footnote on page 3 he makes the claim that Enoch Powell articulated an early vision of the 'Big Society' in 1962, and he mentions the buzzword again on page 4. To me, it appears that he has tacked the words 'Big Society' into the introduction of a preexisting speech. It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that someone at the AHRC suggested he include it, as one of the conference's key themes.

The two other presentations in the conference, 'Connecting excluded communities?' by Dr Paul Benneworth, and a speech by another professor from Queensland, do not mention the 'Big Society'.

To me it appears like this: the AHRC held their first conference on 'Connected communities' in June 2009. They were happy to tie in their work on 'connected communities' with the new coalition's 'Big Society' slogan, and to host guest speakers to give 'Big Society'-titled presentations, from June 2010. They further incorporated the 'Big Society' slogan into conferences in December.

It seems to me that the AHRC, perhaps anticipating future cuts, obsequiously included the slogan as a topic in an ongoing project that was somewhat related to it without needing to be asked, and encouraged speakers to mention it.

I think the Daniel Boffey, the Observer journalist, unintentionally flatters the coalition by portraying them as a competently devilish foe who has successfully enforced their carefully preconsidered, evil aims. In reality, I doubt if their influence on the AHRC constituted anything so deliberate.

The question is: did the AHRC violate principles of academic research, and if so, if this was at its own volition.

The torturable and the untorturable

Interestingly, the Urabi Revolt (see my previous post) was preceded by a period which saw a great increase in literacy and a raising of public political consciousness in Egypt. Attention is often drawn to the political satire newspaper Abu Nazzara Zarqa (The Man in the Blue Spectacles, 1877, pictured right). It was published by Ya'qub Sanu', an Egyptian of Jewish background; and written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic rather than classical Arabic, so as to be understandable to all. It's lampooning of the establishment and of European control greatly annoyed the authorities. Sanu's printing operations were frequently interfered with.


Something similar has happened in our time, though on a gigantic scale. The internet has come to Egypt. Egypt now has 160,000 bloggers in Arabic and other languages, some of whom have been arrested and detained by Mubarak's government for their dissenting views, as Wikileaks revealed on Friday 28th January 2011. The American Embassy's leaked report emphasised the role of blogs in opening up public discussion on previously taboo subjects:

"One can view posts ranging from videos of alleged police brutality, to comments about the GOE’s foreign policy, to complaints about separate lines for men and women in government offices distributing drivers’ licenses... Blogs have spread throughout the population to become vehicles for a wide range of activists, students, journalists and ordinary citizens to express their views on almost any issue they choose. As such, the blogs have significantly broadened the range of topics that Egyptians are able to discuss publicly."

This morning on the way to work, I was reading Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. The British spy protagonist, Mr Wormold, is playing a game of checkers with the Havana Chief of Police, Captain Segura. Segura is in charge of torturing prisoners at the police station: if you will, a small-time equivalent of Egypt's newly appointed Vice President, Omar Suleiman, left (kudos to Jane Mayer for flagging up his role in the US's rendition to torture programme in the New Yorker). Segura proposes that there are two classes of people: the torturable, and the untorturable:

'Did you torture him?'
Captain Segura laughed. 'No. He doesn't belong to the torturable class.'

'I didn't know there were class-distictions in torture.'

'Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea... Dr Hasselbacher does not be long to the torturable class.'

'Who does?'
'The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable... One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don't recognise class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons... I see that you have enlarged your staff.'
'I need someone to superintend accounts. Lopez is reliable.'
'Be careful, Mr Wormold. He is one of the torturable.'
They laughed, drinking daiquiries. It was easy to laugh at the idea of torture on a sunny day.

I would suggest that what makes the poor torturable is their inability to communicate and publicise their grievances to a community that would come to their aid. This is perhaps the most crucial aspect to their lack of power. Unlike in earlier, more brutal periods of history, as a rule torture does not occur in public, but hidden away in dark underground chambers and the like. This tendency declares just as strongly as article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that torture is no longer commonly considered acceptable. The nations who claim to be good humanists can only accept its perpetuation by themselves or those over whom they have influence if they are credibly able to claim ignorance of it. And surely, on a human level, few would be comfortable with the routine rape and brutalisation of other human beings, if they were baldly confronted with it?

Internet access has changed this. Easy access to means of communication has meant that the torturable are able to publicise their plight. Fewer people are able to ignore it, but not only that: evidence of injustice can reach those who oppose it easily. The same free communication furthermore allows those interested groups to rally together to take action.

Anyone who cares to can now read about the "literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone" in this leaked American cable. The case of bus-driver Imad El-Kebir, who was beaten and raped by police, "became notorious" after cell-phone footage of his assault was posted on YouTube. This was, the cable reads "a turning point in influencing the government to permit the sentencing of police officers".

The picture on the right is of a young businessman named Khaled Said. He was (allegedly) beaten to death by police officers in Alexandria this summer (extremely gruesome photographs of what happened to him are easily discoverable online - be warned, these cannot be unseen). He has become a rallying figure in the Egyptian uprising: cartoons circulate on Twitter portraying the protests as his revenge: January 25th would have been his 29th birthday. As Newsweek has pointed out, Iran's internet martyr was a young woman named Neda; Tunisia's was Mohamed Bouazizi.

That is why the Mubarak regime unplugged the internet when the unrest started. They knew very well what was catalysing the unrest. But their plan actually backfired: with no Twitter feed to follow, people got out onto the streets to find out what was going on. It's not enough to simply blog about injustices. To force change, the people have to actually go out and agitate for it, like they're doing right now in Tahrir Square.