Having said that I am not a swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist I do suggest to you the following hypotheses. On 3rd July 1988 the American warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian airbus flight IR655 carrying 290 people. Because this atrocity was committed by the Americans, and different rules apply to Americans than for the other humans on the planet, no action was taken, no court martial held, no reparation made. Indeed on its return to San Diego the ship was given a rapturous welcome.
There was a crime and so, some people, as yet unidentified, decided that there should be a punishment, and, being of the eye-for-an-eye persuasion the punishment needed to take the form of a downed passenger airliner.
The world’s intelligence services knew this, and they are just the sort of people who run scenarios using game theory and what follows is a perfect piece of game theory.
Your job is to stop people blowing up aeroplanes. You know there are people out there who are determined to blow up an aeroplane. You know the logic of the situation and you know they do too, because it was neatly summed up by the Provisional IRA after their attempt on the life of Margaret Thatcher in Brighton in 1984. “We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky all the time.”
If someone tries to do something determinedly there is a high probability that the will eventually succeed. A plane will blow up. However, there is also a high probability that having achieved their objective they will stop. That will make your life much easier. Better for both parties therefore if a plane goes down.
If you receive intelligence that a bomb is on a plane, therefore, do you take the bomb off the plane or do you take key people off the plane, knowing that you might not have that opportunity another time, but that there might not be another time if you leave the bomb alone.
I strongly suspect that Pan AM flight 103 was meant to go down. It was just meant to go down over the North Atlantic where there would be nothing to pick up and hand over to forensic scientists. It wasn’t meant to go down over the quiet border town of Lockerbie.
Saturday 21 August 2010
Lockerbie I
Yesterday was the anniversary of the release of the so-called Lockerbie Bomber Abdelbasset Ali Al- Megrahi and a lot of people – American Sentaors in particular - are getting very worked up about it. Mr Megrahi, it will be remembered, was convicted, on the basis of no firm evidence, of blowing up Pan AM flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie in 1988, and was released from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds because medical evidence indicated that he had no more than three months to live. The fact that he is alive and well 12 months later is not, apparently, in the strange, professedly Christian world that is the USA, grounds for rejoicing, but cause for ire, wrath and much wailing by people who think that his failure to die is the ultimate bad manners.
I care as little for Mr Megrahi as I do for American Senators, but I do have a passing interest in the Lockerbie bombing. I was, in a previous existence, an explosives engineer, and for a few short and fraught years edited the UK explosives industry’s trade journal. This role put me in contact with all sorts of interesting people whose jobs you have never heard of, but who, if you ever stop to think about it, must exist. Most interesting of all perhaps were the forensic scientists who went through the Lockerbie debris in an effort to piece together the evidence necessary to work out who did it.
Now, I am no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, and while I have frequently been abducted by aliens, it has always been after eight pints, so I have tended to regard it entirely my own fault. However, I have always regarded the idea of the Libyans being responsible for Lockerbie as making no sense. I am not alone. This evidence for this view was laid out meticulously by the late Paul Foot of Private Eye, whom I briefly had the privilege to meet.
Paul Foot had not started digging when I was munching on vol au vents at the explosives industry seminar also attended by members of the Lockerbie explosives forensics team. Imagine my joy, therefore, when I discovered that they didn’t think the Libyans did it either.
The reasons for their doubt are technical and complex, but in short boil down to considerations about the size of the bomb. It was, in fact, the smallest amount of explosive capable of bringing a plane that size down. In order to work it had to be located very close to the skin of the aircraft and not go bang in the middle of a container full of clothes, in which case it is possible that no one would have known it had gone off until the baggage carousel. The thinking was that the Libyans simply lacked the intelligence resources necessary to calculate the bomb size and engineer its correct placement.
So next time the newspapers are banging on about Megrahi not doing the decent thing and turning his toes up you may prefer to wonder why they are not doing their job and trying to find who did kill 270 people over Lockerbie, or why the Libyans were put in the frame when a large part of the British security establishment doesn’t believe it was them at all.
I care as little for Mr Megrahi as I do for American Senators, but I do have a passing interest in the Lockerbie bombing. I was, in a previous existence, an explosives engineer, and for a few short and fraught years edited the UK explosives industry’s trade journal. This role put me in contact with all sorts of interesting people whose jobs you have never heard of, but who, if you ever stop to think about it, must exist. Most interesting of all perhaps were the forensic scientists who went through the Lockerbie debris in an effort to piece together the evidence necessary to work out who did it.
Now, I am no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, and while I have frequently been abducted by aliens, it has always been after eight pints, so I have tended to regard it entirely my own fault. However, I have always regarded the idea of the Libyans being responsible for Lockerbie as making no sense. I am not alone. This evidence for this view was laid out meticulously by the late Paul Foot of Private Eye, whom I briefly had the privilege to meet.
Paul Foot had not started digging when I was munching on vol au vents at the explosives industry seminar also attended by members of the Lockerbie explosives forensics team. Imagine my joy, therefore, when I discovered that they didn’t think the Libyans did it either.
The reasons for their doubt are technical and complex, but in short boil down to considerations about the size of the bomb. It was, in fact, the smallest amount of explosive capable of bringing a plane that size down. In order to work it had to be located very close to the skin of the aircraft and not go bang in the middle of a container full of clothes, in which case it is possible that no one would have known it had gone off until the baggage carousel. The thinking was that the Libyans simply lacked the intelligence resources necessary to calculate the bomb size and engineer its correct placement.
So next time the newspapers are banging on about Megrahi not doing the decent thing and turning his toes up you may prefer to wonder why they are not doing their job and trying to find who did kill 270 people over Lockerbie, or why the Libyans were put in the frame when a large part of the British security establishment doesn’t believe it was them at all.
Wednesday 18 August 2010
It's Dumb To Be Rude
A few years ago I was lucky enough to be invited to the opening of the new Slavery galleries at the National Maritime Museum. It was not long after I had returned from a holiday in Florence, which had of course, taken in the Uffizi. The Uffizzi is packed full of goodies but they are rather spoilt by the appalling level of curation that runs throughout the museum that renders most of the works anonymous and therefore frustrating. Many pictures even appear to have had their labels removed. Perhaps the curators imagine themselves living in a kind of Dan Brown world where every visitor is a kind of forensic art historian. Perhaps, more likely, they know that even if they took all the paintings off the wall and secretly flogged them off to dodgy Russians, crowds of the badly dressed would still come in to gawp at the place where space where the Leonardo used to hang. Consequently they realise that they don’t have to try very hard. So they don’t.
I mention this as at the Slavery gallery opening I was introduced to a professor from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Spotting in him someone who could confirm or confound my suspicions of Florentine curatorial standards, I attempted to engage him in discussion. “Don’t talk to me about Italian curation” was his riposte. I took as an indication that he rather shared my own views. This made his reluctance to sally forth on what was clearly a bête noire of his, tantalisingly disappointing.
I was reminded of this incident when I had the misfortune to visit the Rude Britannia exhibition at the Tate Britain yesterday. Museum curators are a little like orchestral conductors. It is very easy to misunderstand what they do. After all any decent orchestra can play the piece through without an egotistical metronome windmilling in front of them. Similarly in an art gallery you go to see the painting not the wall, surely?
Rude Britannia will make you appreciate that a great paintings don’t of themselves make a good exhibition, just as a conductor will decide whether good music gets a great performance. Rude Britannia does this by being appallingly curated.
It is haphazard, random, unstructured, and uninformative. It is not, in the main, rude, nor is rudeness a theme. Indeed there appears to be no theme. True its stated theme is British comic art from 1600 to the present, yet the first four exhibits – on the ones next to the bit on the wall saying ‘British’ - are Dutch. An entire room is given over to Gillray’s Worship of Bacchus, which is a piece of deeply serious moralising and in no way comic. Why is it there? Presumably it was available, and Gillray was a comic artist, wasn’t he? The rest of the exhibition is just as intellectually vacuous. Another room is ‘guest curated’ by Harry Hill. Why?
The Tate curates amazing exhibitions when it chooses; Whistler and Monet, Turner and the Masters and Millais to name but a few recent highlights. Yet seems even the Tate falls victim to the modern misconception that to be popular one must be undemanding. Pursuing this fallacy only ever initiates a self-fulfilling downward spiral. This is why it is worth getting worked up about. Not because it has put on a bad show, but because it legitimises the same attitude elsewhere, and when that attitude becomes orthodox everywhere then our culture and society are impoverished by low expectations feeding into lower provision of information, and in certain areas this is worrying. If you don’t believe me look at the, mediocre and formulaic mish-mash of ill-informed speculation and selected-from-stock platitudes that are nightly served up on the BBC and ITV at 10.00 by people who have the brazen cheek to describe this unwatchable garbage as NEWS!
I mention this as at the Slavery gallery opening I was introduced to a professor from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Spotting in him someone who could confirm or confound my suspicions of Florentine curatorial standards, I attempted to engage him in discussion. “Don’t talk to me about Italian curation” was his riposte. I took as an indication that he rather shared my own views. This made his reluctance to sally forth on what was clearly a bête noire of his, tantalisingly disappointing.
I was reminded of this incident when I had the misfortune to visit the Rude Britannia exhibition at the Tate Britain yesterday. Museum curators are a little like orchestral conductors. It is very easy to misunderstand what they do. After all any decent orchestra can play the piece through without an egotistical metronome windmilling in front of them. Similarly in an art gallery you go to see the painting not the wall, surely?
Rude Britannia will make you appreciate that a great paintings don’t of themselves make a good exhibition, just as a conductor will decide whether good music gets a great performance. Rude Britannia does this by being appallingly curated.
It is haphazard, random, unstructured, and uninformative. It is not, in the main, rude, nor is rudeness a theme. Indeed there appears to be no theme. True its stated theme is British comic art from 1600 to the present, yet the first four exhibits – on the ones next to the bit on the wall saying ‘British’ - are Dutch. An entire room is given over to Gillray’s Worship of Bacchus, which is a piece of deeply serious moralising and in no way comic. Why is it there? Presumably it was available, and Gillray was a comic artist, wasn’t he? The rest of the exhibition is just as intellectually vacuous. Another room is ‘guest curated’ by Harry Hill. Why?
The Tate curates amazing exhibitions when it chooses; Whistler and Monet, Turner and the Masters and Millais to name but a few recent highlights. Yet seems even the Tate falls victim to the modern misconception that to be popular one must be undemanding. Pursuing this fallacy only ever initiates a self-fulfilling downward spiral. This is why it is worth getting worked up about. Not because it has put on a bad show, but because it legitimises the same attitude elsewhere, and when that attitude becomes orthodox everywhere then our culture and society are impoverished by low expectations feeding into lower provision of information, and in certain areas this is worrying. If you don’t believe me look at the, mediocre and formulaic mish-mash of ill-informed speculation and selected-from-stock platitudes that are nightly served up on the BBC and ITV at 10.00 by people who have the brazen cheek to describe this unwatchable garbage as NEWS!
Tuesday 17 August 2010
The Apprentice? Not Hired
My father is an expert at outings. Not for us the day out at Legoland or Thorpe Park. When my father organised a day out it would be to somewhere much more exciting, like the Royal Mail’s underground railway, Whitefriars glass blowers, or the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Today’s panegyric is inspired by a trip he and I once took to the Englefield pewter works in the East End.
Englefield is now defunct and I forget exactly which year we made the trip. However, it can only have been a few years before the demise of the Bethnal Green institution that had been a major presence on Cheshire Street since 1700. It had by then fallen into the ownership of the Malaysian firm Royal Selangor and the concern was clearly doomed, but it was a fascinating visit nonetheless. The men there were craftsmen who had taken the best part of their lifetimes to acquire their skills and the chief of them was the ‘father of the shop;’ a true master craftsman.
He was way past retirement age, though he looked like he had no plans to give up his life’s work, but, in the absence of a pulsating aura, jar of ambrosia, winged helmet, or other outwardly visible signs of immortality, I asked him what would happen when he did retire. “This place will close.” He replied. Naturally I asked him why. “Because there is no one else to take over.” Could not, I remonstrated, one of the other craftsmen take over? “Yes, but who would take over from them. Each task has a man that does it, and there are no apprentices.” Why, I crashed on, were there no apprentices. “Because the young men of the East End do not want to work here. They would prefer to sell mobile phones.”
Work and education in Britain are scarred by our culture’s wider obsession with class. Just as we are fixated with the idea that more and more people should go to university, regardless of whether university is good for them, or they are good for university, we are equally blind to the other side of the coin. People who would be better off not going to university should do the things that better suit them, which would be good for them and good for everyone else too.
I once asked my father what was meant by the professions. A professional, he opined, was someone who would give you advice that was not necessarily in their own best interests; the surgeon who tells you not to go under the knife, the solicitor who warns you that you will lose your suit. I have always treasured this definition for the joyous reason that it means that journalists, bankers and estate agents are not members of the ‘professions’, whatever they may like to think.
Anyway, the point being that professional employment in England enjoys higher status than vocational, or artisanal activity, despite the fact that many people in vocational occupations earn considerably more than many people regarded as being in professional occupations. Put another way, activities regarded as being more like the ‘professions’ stand higher than those that resemble them less. Engineering is perhaps a fine example. In Germany an engineer is regarded as a high status individual. In the UK he or she is not, with the result that the term is often applied to a man with a spanner or a screwdriver, who in no way is in possession of anything approaching an engineering qualification than a spanner or a screwdriver. The man who comes to install your telephone is, by no stretch of the imagination an engineer.
Brewing provides another example. In Germany brewing is recognised as a skilful activity and is awarded high status as a result. In a German town the brewer shares the status of the doctor, or the mayor. In England it is seen as a technical activity and therefore of lower status. It is rare, therefore, in the UK for a qualified brewer to be on the board of directors of a brewing firm. Incredibly, then, the vast majority of beer drunk in Britain today is made by companies run by people who know almost nothing about the products they make. A fact one’s sense of taste daily confirms. This theme I shall return to on other days.
Another pet theme of mine is that manufacturing creates wealth, but that services merely move it around. Making items out of pewter creates wealth. Making mobile phones creates wealth. Selling mobile phones does not. Mobile phones are more twenty-first century than pewter tankards and we should not continue to make pewter tankards merely because we have been making them since 1700. However, if we are going to abandon manufacture in pewter and at the same time decide that we are not going to manufacture mobile phones, then we had better have a very good idea of how we are going to earn our place in the world, because the old mantra of the Thatcherites that ‘services’ would take over from manufacturing has been exposed, if anyone missed the 2008 banking crash, as the big lie of the ‘greed is good’ generation.
Englefields didn’t close because its products were no longer suited to the times. Sales in 1987, for example, were 120% up on 1986. It closed because even in a depressed area of London where jobs were scarce, potential apprentices saw unskilled sales roles that involved wearing a suit as higher status than learning an ancient craft. Our nation’s peculiar class system predates London ‘s pewter industry, but perversely we have consigned the one – which was profitable – to the dustbin of history, whilst the other – which makes our country less profitable – continues to pervert and distort our employment markets and education system to the detriment of us all.
Englefield is now defunct and I forget exactly which year we made the trip. However, it can only have been a few years before the demise of the Bethnal Green institution that had been a major presence on Cheshire Street since 1700. It had by then fallen into the ownership of the Malaysian firm Royal Selangor and the concern was clearly doomed, but it was a fascinating visit nonetheless. The men there were craftsmen who had taken the best part of their lifetimes to acquire their skills and the chief of them was the ‘father of the shop;’ a true master craftsman.
He was way past retirement age, though he looked like he had no plans to give up his life’s work, but, in the absence of a pulsating aura, jar of ambrosia, winged helmet, or other outwardly visible signs of immortality, I asked him what would happen when he did retire. “This place will close.” He replied. Naturally I asked him why. “Because there is no one else to take over.” Could not, I remonstrated, one of the other craftsmen take over? “Yes, but who would take over from them. Each task has a man that does it, and there are no apprentices.” Why, I crashed on, were there no apprentices. “Because the young men of the East End do not want to work here. They would prefer to sell mobile phones.”
Work and education in Britain are scarred by our culture’s wider obsession with class. Just as we are fixated with the idea that more and more people should go to university, regardless of whether university is good for them, or they are good for university, we are equally blind to the other side of the coin. People who would be better off not going to university should do the things that better suit them, which would be good for them and good for everyone else too.
I once asked my father what was meant by the professions. A professional, he opined, was someone who would give you advice that was not necessarily in their own best interests; the surgeon who tells you not to go under the knife, the solicitor who warns you that you will lose your suit. I have always treasured this definition for the joyous reason that it means that journalists, bankers and estate agents are not members of the ‘professions’, whatever they may like to think.
Anyway, the point being that professional employment in England enjoys higher status than vocational, or artisanal activity, despite the fact that many people in vocational occupations earn considerably more than many people regarded as being in professional occupations. Put another way, activities regarded as being more like the ‘professions’ stand higher than those that resemble them less. Engineering is perhaps a fine example. In Germany an engineer is regarded as a high status individual. In the UK he or she is not, with the result that the term is often applied to a man with a spanner or a screwdriver, who in no way is in possession of anything approaching an engineering qualification than a spanner or a screwdriver. The man who comes to install your telephone is, by no stretch of the imagination an engineer.
Brewing provides another example. In Germany brewing is recognised as a skilful activity and is awarded high status as a result. In a German town the brewer shares the status of the doctor, or the mayor. In England it is seen as a technical activity and therefore of lower status. It is rare, therefore, in the UK for a qualified brewer to be on the board of directors of a brewing firm. Incredibly, then, the vast majority of beer drunk in Britain today is made by companies run by people who know almost nothing about the products they make. A fact one’s sense of taste daily confirms. This theme I shall return to on other days.
Another pet theme of mine is that manufacturing creates wealth, but that services merely move it around. Making items out of pewter creates wealth. Making mobile phones creates wealth. Selling mobile phones does not. Mobile phones are more twenty-first century than pewter tankards and we should not continue to make pewter tankards merely because we have been making them since 1700. However, if we are going to abandon manufacture in pewter and at the same time decide that we are not going to manufacture mobile phones, then we had better have a very good idea of how we are going to earn our place in the world, because the old mantra of the Thatcherites that ‘services’ would take over from manufacturing has been exposed, if anyone missed the 2008 banking crash, as the big lie of the ‘greed is good’ generation.
Englefields didn’t close because its products were no longer suited to the times. Sales in 1987, for example, were 120% up on 1986. It closed because even in a depressed area of London where jobs were scarce, potential apprentices saw unskilled sales roles that involved wearing a suit as higher status than learning an ancient craft. Our nation’s peculiar class system predates London ‘s pewter industry, but perversely we have consigned the one – which was profitable – to the dustbin of history, whilst the other – which makes our country less profitable – continues to pervert and distort our employment markets and education system to the detriment of us all.
Got An 'A' - Just Can't Spell It
As Private Eye demonstrates ad nauseum journalists have shorter memories than just about anyone. We are in exam result time, so it is traditional at this time of year for papers to write stories about how the exam results are better than ever, accompanied – in the Daily Telegraph at least – by pictures that suggest that only women take A levels. Politicians then proclaim that these results do not mean that exams are easier, but, au contraire, that pupils are working harder and teaching standards are higher.
In a little over two months these same newspapers will then write slightly smaller stories on the inside pages this time – and this is also now traditional- that university lecturers are having to give remedial spelling lessons to the latest undergraduate intake.
No one ever seems to question how it is possible that the same the people, who in June wrote the best exam papers the country has ever seen, are, by October, barely literate.
This paradox has intrigued me for several years now. Every academic I come across I ask to explain it to me. Many, like my friend the recently retired, eminent art historian, explain it in terms of ‘grade inflation’ which has been going on unaddressed for years such and that the absurdities that must arise from not attending to it are now manifest for all to see. Another friend of mine, a highly respected professor of astrophysics, has a different view. “The best,” he says, “are as good as they have ever been. The rest are hopeless.”
This is a much more fascinating take. On one level is it is a comment on the obvious outcome of the contemptible, but largely unchallenged Blairite belief that being seen to be educating people is the same as educating them. On other levels it raises a whole host of questions, not the least of which is why are educating people anyway. On the level of the individual it is a stupid question (but not an unconentious one as we shall explore another time) but, at population level it really isn’t. Let us consider Dr Malthus.
For example in an industrial world of gradually increasing productivity it takes fewer people to achieve the same amount of work. This is fine when the population is increasing at a rate that creates demand for more people to do these tasks for the increased population - food manufacture for example. It is not fine in a technological world of huge productivity increases whereby one electronic innovation can supply the several and various needs of everyone. One is faced with the possibility that there are just more people than there are tasks to do. Let’s not call this unemployment, which a term used to describe generally short term imbalances in the supply and demand for labour. This is materially different.
In the 1990’s I had a spectacularly unsuccessful dotcom business with a friend. One year we were offered a marketing undergraduate from the University of North London as summer placement. We gave her a project and the poor girl sat quietly behind her PC for three days before we realised that she had done nothing whatever. She had not understood the brief and was not capable of understanding the brief. She was totally out of her depth and terrified that we would realise. How she thought that a complete lack of output was not a bit of a clue I do not know.
The sad fact was that she was not undergraduate material, but, under a university funding system that rewarded numbers, it had suited someone to tell her she was. I have nothing but contempt for the low life admissions tutor employed by the third rate excuse for an educational establishment that is the University of North London. They were playing with the girl’s whole life for nothing more than their own short term funding convenience. It makes me angry still to think about it. In fact at the time it made me so angry that I wrote to the Guardian’s education correspondent to vent my fury. Melanie Phillips, for it was, she wrote back to sympathise. That was, of course, in the days before she became the swivel-eyed loony’s swivel-eyed loony.
In a little over two months these same newspapers will then write slightly smaller stories on the inside pages this time – and this is also now traditional- that university lecturers are having to give remedial spelling lessons to the latest undergraduate intake.
No one ever seems to question how it is possible that the same the people, who in June wrote the best exam papers the country has ever seen, are, by October, barely literate.
This paradox has intrigued me for several years now. Every academic I come across I ask to explain it to me. Many, like my friend the recently retired, eminent art historian, explain it in terms of ‘grade inflation’ which has been going on unaddressed for years such and that the absurdities that must arise from not attending to it are now manifest for all to see. Another friend of mine, a highly respected professor of astrophysics, has a different view. “The best,” he says, “are as good as they have ever been. The rest are hopeless.”
This is a much more fascinating take. On one level is it is a comment on the obvious outcome of the contemptible, but largely unchallenged Blairite belief that being seen to be educating people is the same as educating them. On other levels it raises a whole host of questions, not the least of which is why are educating people anyway. On the level of the individual it is a stupid question (but not an unconentious one as we shall explore another time) but, at population level it really isn’t. Let us consider Dr Malthus.
For example in an industrial world of gradually increasing productivity it takes fewer people to achieve the same amount of work. This is fine when the population is increasing at a rate that creates demand for more people to do these tasks for the increased population - food manufacture for example. It is not fine in a technological world of huge productivity increases whereby one electronic innovation can supply the several and various needs of everyone. One is faced with the possibility that there are just more people than there are tasks to do. Let’s not call this unemployment, which a term used to describe generally short term imbalances in the supply and demand for labour. This is materially different.
In the 1990’s I had a spectacularly unsuccessful dotcom business with a friend. One year we were offered a marketing undergraduate from the University of North London as summer placement. We gave her a project and the poor girl sat quietly behind her PC for three days before we realised that she had done nothing whatever. She had not understood the brief and was not capable of understanding the brief. She was totally out of her depth and terrified that we would realise. How she thought that a complete lack of output was not a bit of a clue I do not know.
The sad fact was that she was not undergraduate material, but, under a university funding system that rewarded numbers, it had suited someone to tell her she was. I have nothing but contempt for the low life admissions tutor employed by the third rate excuse for an educational establishment that is the University of North London. They were playing with the girl’s whole life for nothing more than their own short term funding convenience. It makes me angry still to think about it. In fact at the time it made me so angry that I wrote to the Guardian’s education correspondent to vent my fury. Melanie Phillips, for it was, she wrote back to sympathise. That was, of course, in the days before she became the swivel-eyed loony’s swivel-eyed loony.
Who Would Be Young?
A friend, not born in that year, as it happens, recently remarked that the best year ever to have been born was 1946. You missed the war, but you got rock and roll; you got the pill but you missed AIDS. You got more than sex and drugs and rock and roll, though. You got everything. You got the earth and everything on it, all its bounty ‘yea, unto the seventh generation.’
Compare the Baby Boomer generation with the post Generation X’ers; those born in the 90s. Their prospects of ever getting on the unfortunately named ‘housing ladder’ seem vanishingly remote, which is particularly tough in a society that has abandoned manufacturing and increasingly returned to an Ancien Regime form of ‘rentier’ economy.
Increasing numbers are finding, after being told that this is all that matters, that there are simply not enough university places for them to get into, and if they do they will be saddled with debt for years thereafter, which will make it harder for them to save the deposit on a house, and therefore acquire the only entry ticket to full membership of society that seems to matter these days. I haven’t even mentioned the prospects of the underclass.
On top of it all this is the generation, educated, in this country a least, in a society largely shaped by the assumption of the primacy of what are quaintly – though wrongly - called free market values (a theme this blog shall return to frequently). This generation, more than any other, has been brought up in a world of conscience free consumerism, where it isn’t necessary to know if milk comes from a cow, or that once upon a time when things went wrong it was often actually possible to repair them. This is going to make it especially tough for them once they are confronted with the big truth – the party’s over.
In Galapagos Kurt Vonnegut foretold of a future in which a final generation of the young turned their backs on the remainder of society as people who had failed them. Their Nihilism defined them. I see them all around.
Compare the Baby Boomer generation with the post Generation X’ers; those born in the 90s. Their prospects of ever getting on the unfortunately named ‘housing ladder’ seem vanishingly remote, which is particularly tough in a society that has abandoned manufacturing and increasingly returned to an Ancien Regime form of ‘rentier’ economy.
Increasing numbers are finding, after being told that this is all that matters, that there are simply not enough university places for them to get into, and if they do they will be saddled with debt for years thereafter, which will make it harder for them to save the deposit on a house, and therefore acquire the only entry ticket to full membership of society that seems to matter these days. I haven’t even mentioned the prospects of the underclass.
On top of it all this is the generation, educated, in this country a least, in a society largely shaped by the assumption of the primacy of what are quaintly – though wrongly - called free market values (a theme this blog shall return to frequently). This generation, more than any other, has been brought up in a world of conscience free consumerism, where it isn’t necessary to know if milk comes from a cow, or that once upon a time when things went wrong it was often actually possible to repair them. This is going to make it especially tough for them once they are confronted with the big truth – the party’s over.
In Galapagos Kurt Vonnegut foretold of a future in which a final generation of the young turned their backs on the remainder of society as people who had failed them. Their Nihilism defined them. I see them all around.
For Against
A friend recently called me a pedant my post on the ‘Protest the Pope’ Facebook page. I had pointed out that by adopting the American habit of dropping the preposition it was unclear whether they were planning to protest FOR the Pope or AGAINST him.
Naturally I thanked her for her compliment, after all a pedant is merely someone who wants you to be right. I then set out to further irritate her by reminding her that my pedantry is born, not from an anal desire to pick up on people’s shortcomings, but a dislike of distraction.
What counts as good English, or bad, is highly subjective, but the purpose of language is communication. If the language distracts from the message being conveyed it is being used poorly.
If the language jars, and snaps your attention away from the sense of what is being said to the words being uttered then that is akin to spotting a blemish on an otherwise admirable object. It is like reading a metered poem where the line than does not scan damages the whole stanza.
Some people are going to protest against the Pope’s visit to Britain. I won’t be going to join them, not because I don’t share their loathing of this Nazi misogynist, but because I will be standing across the street with my own protest banner. It says “Protect The Preposition”.
Naturally I thanked her for her compliment, after all a pedant is merely someone who wants you to be right. I then set out to further irritate her by reminding her that my pedantry is born, not from an anal desire to pick up on people’s shortcomings, but a dislike of distraction.
What counts as good English, or bad, is highly subjective, but the purpose of language is communication. If the language distracts from the message being conveyed it is being used poorly.
If the language jars, and snaps your attention away from the sense of what is being said to the words being uttered then that is akin to spotting a blemish on an otherwise admirable object. It is like reading a metered poem where the line than does not scan damages the whole stanza.
Some people are going to protest against the Pope’s visit to Britain. I won’t be going to join them, not because I don’t share their loathing of this Nazi misogynist, but because I will be standing across the street with my own protest banner. It says “Protect The Preposition”.
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