Peter Nolan

Jean Buadrillard Did Not Die

I've often tended to share Ambrose Bierce's view of philosophy,  which he defined as "A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. "

I'm reminded of it because today, comes the sad news that the post-modernist French philosopher of the "hyperreal" - Jean Baudrillard, has died. 

I wrote this commentary - Welcome to the Desert of the Theoretical - on one of his more recent books - "The Spirit of Terrorism" - just over two years ago. 

I subsequently read his magnum opus "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" as well.   First written as a series of essays in the French communist party daily Humanite, it was overpoweringly silly.  He repeatedly mentioned Timosoara, the town where protests by minority Hungarians precipitated the downfall of the Romanian dictatorship in 1989, as an example of the misuse of hyperreality: his outraged tone hinted that he and the majority of Romanians might not share the same conception of reality.  In practise, this has always been the art of politics, to do what observers and opponents cannot understand.  In the words of Machiavelli, in chapter eighteen of the Prince:

Men in general judge more by their eyes than by their hands, because seeing is given to everyone, touching to few. Everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are; and these few dare not oppose the opinion of many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them.

 

Georgeous George Meets Eloquent Eamon

On Friday 29 September, on The Late Late Show, the main evening chat show on Irish TV, editor, novelist and former Irish diplomat Eamon Delaney took on George Galloway MP, the former Labour MP who now presides over the well-oiled electoral machinery of the red-black alliance known as the Respect party. 

The first question that occured to me when I appeared on this was why would a politician, particularly one as controversial as Galloway, appear on a light-entertainment show?  The answer seems to lie in the interrogation skills of the presenter, RTE's Pat Kenny, or rather the lack of them.  I've seen shower-curtain mold that's more aggressive and lively.  Throughout, his manner was gentle and unconfrontational, as if coaxing a small child whose cat has just been run over by a lorry. 

Throughout, Galloway shows why he's the man who put the common in the House of Commons.    Dressed in a black shirt and sports jacket, open to his chest hair, he's crude, uncontrollably aggressive and snarling throughout.  He described Brown and Blair as "two cheeks of the same arse”, repeating the same metaphor, telling of meeting Tony Blair in the Commons toilet, of John Prescott “fiddling with his secretary’s drawers”, as if he's the Bernard Manning of the British left. 

Galloway got enthusiastic applause from much of the audience at certain points, when describing Bush and Blair as war criminals. 

While Galloway sat in the leftmost of three or more empty armchairs next to Kenny, Delaney was set up as an invited heckler - parked several rows back in the audience, without a microphone, left hardly visible and easy for Galloway to drown out.  He's invited into the discussion at 7:30 on the timer.  Galloway doesn't deign to answer – “I’ll speak through the chair. I wasn’t expecting this harangue”. – “you’re welcome to have a stand-up brawl”

“You were expecting an easy ride, were you? ...This isn’t Bagdhad!” Delaney responds at one point. 

Galloway asks “Where did you get that eejit?” and that it''s “shocking that an editor is so ignorant and ill-informed about these issues?”, even though he repeated a number of obvious, documented and well-covered lies.  “The Iraqis will fight you with their teeth if necessary…” - so why all the foreign suicide -bombers or only Sunni insurgents? 

“...when we were arming Saddam Hussein..." - Hence all those Russian tanks, and missiles, MiGs, French missiles, Mirage jets and nuclear reactors and  Chilean  cluster bombs, South African artillery, along with tens of billions of dollars of funding from the Saudis, Kuwaitis and the UAE.  Oh, and rice  from the US.  SIPRI figures show the US and UK contributions were in the order of 1% of Iraq's total arms imports, which leaves out their substantial domestic arms industry. 

The US and UK have killed more Iraqis  than Saddam managed.  Again, even tagging the coalition with the deaths of the suicide bombers,  death squads and head-choppers,  the Lancet's total doesn't match the  300,000 odd Shia mown down in the 1991 uprising, the same number of Kurds killed in the Anfal genocide and  probably the same number again  just of Iraqi casualties during the Iran-Iraq war, and perhaps three quarters of a million Iranians, still dying today from the after-effects of gas attacks.

“Bin Laden was equally armed and supported by  America" - although it's unclear why the Saudi construction billionaire channeling the funds of the oil sheiks would need CIA money, which he always denies taking and the Americans, according to the 9/11 Commission report,  have no evidence of paying.

A stronger and better-briefed chair would have challenged Galloway on these, but Kenny was unwilling and unable.  Delaney got some applause for continuing to challenge him and asking him if he expected an obedient audinece like the ones in Bagdhad. 

Galloway went on to describe Castro, whose biography he recently published, as the greatest third-world leader of the twentieth century: I would have thought that Gandhi might have topped anybody else's list. 

Galloway was probably never more puffed up with pride than when talking about his Talksport radio program in the UK, which he claims has 3 million regular listeners. 

I've rarely seen Galloway in action before, but I can imagine that I'd not find it too hard to take him on in debate.  On the evidence of this showing, his supposed eloquence consists of him being nothing more than being crude, rude and evasive. 
 

The plank in your eye

Somebody hasn't been thinking consistently:

A father killed his wife and four daughters in their sleep because he could not bear them adopting a more westernised lifestyle, an inquest heard yesterday.

Mohammed Riaz, 49, found it abhorrent that his eldest daughter wanted to be a fashion designer, and that she and her sisters were likely to reject the Muslim tradition of arranged marriages

On Hallowe'en last year he sprayed petrol throughout their terraced home  in Accrington, Lancs, and set it alight.

Caneze Riaz, 39, woke and tried to protect her three-year-old child, Hannah, who was sleeping with her, but was overcome by fumes. Her other daughters, Sayrah, 16, Sophia, 13, and Alisha, 10, died elsewhere in the house.

Riaz, who had spent the evening drinking, set himself on fire and died two days later.

From today's Telegraph - a sad story of madness, alienation and alcohol, and probably nothing so grand as a desire to repress one's womenfolk. 

Monocle

Following the press coverage of Monocle in the papers this week, the new magazine appeared in newsagents yesterday.   I got a copy in  Liverpool Street station, appropriately enough, on my way to the Frontline Club to drop in my membership application form.  My first reactions, having read about a quarter of it, is that visually, it's much less impressive than I expected: The photos in the stories, like the one on the Japanese navy, are fairly humdrum - no action or no exotic and striking tableaux to catch the eye.  The most eye-catching things are the ads for luxury goods with which the magazine is packed. 

None of the news stories I've gone through so far seem very surprising - the cover-story on Japan shouldn't surprise anybody who reads the Economist, the NY Times or WSJ regularly in its account of Japan's quiet resurgance as a military power and the growing naval competition in Asia.  It seems to lack both the Steve Irwin factor ("Jesus, how the fuck did he not get killed?") and the writer's point of view that gives a spine to writing on current affairs. 

On the other hand, I was at a university reunion later in the evening and many of the ladies at least seem to have heard of the impending launch of the magazine - which surprised me.  The marketing buzz seems to have been handled well. 

Overall, I think that Charlie Baker's Diplo magazine looks and reads much better, in spite of being put together by students and impecunious freelancers in a hole in the wall off Greys Inn Road. it's monocle for grown-ups. 

What Tyler did next...

If you're the kind of cool metrosexual who insists on going to Reykjavik for the weekend to buy new shoelaces, you probably already read the design bible Wallpaper*.  Now,the Canadian wunderkind Tyler Brûlé is shortly to launch a brand new monthly news magazine called Monocle.

According to profiles in the Observer and the Monday Media Guardian, he's keen to avoid being tied down by any requirement to regurgitate the news as the Economist and others do. Also a no-no for him is what he alleges is competitors' over-reliance on PR copy. Instead, he offers in-depth journalism and coffee table book-quality photojournalism, as in their first cover story on Japan's growing naval power: "It's a great piece of geo-political analysis and it's also an outtanding piece of reportage."

The Wallpaper* style comes through again in the photos - "I don't care if it's a man or a woman reader, sometimes people want to see a picture of a warship or a handsome looking helicopter" - and the design and volume of a coffee table book, crammed with luxury goods advertising, all for a steep five pounds an issue.

I'm keen to see someone try to take on and beat the Americans - Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and The New Yorker - at the magazine game. If nothing else, I myself would be delighted to have a magazine that will last me longer than a restaurant dinner, the curse, I regret to say, of being a very fast reader.

Football's coming home....

.... to Lisbon.  Heh, heh!