Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Mackenzie Brothers

Who has charisma? I’ll tell you who: Angela Merkel

By

In “Schubertiana” one of his greatest poems – and he has written more of them than anyone else alive – the matchless Tomas Tranströmer – incredibly he is  a Nobel prize winner who actually deserved it – presents the  composer  Franz Schubert like this: “And the man who catches  the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary chords from five strings who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle is a stout young gentlemen from Vienna, called “the mushroom” by his friends, who slept with his glasses on and stood  at his writing lectern punctually in the morning.  And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in  motion.”  (Trans. Robin Fulton).  What Tranströmer is driving at here, among other things, is that the superficial outer shell of  beauty that  plagues so many contemporary politicians;  think in terms of Obama’s wife and kiddies, Romney’s religious zeal, Sarkozy’s phoney aristocratic bearing, Berlusconi’s bizarre displays of burlesque pleasure, the no-name British prime minister’s ridiculous portrayal of a person of power, etc.  In all of Europe there is now only one politician who has real power and she has  gained it by not playing a role that  is based on poor theatre, but on hard work and policies that have brought results.  This is Angela Merkel, the 57 year old former East German physicist, who displays none of the silliness of her colleagues in supposed power, who dresses without flair (we have to mention the one extraordinary exception to this that proved the rule when she wore a dress to the opening of the new Oslo Opera House that was so low-cut that the puritanical Norwegians missed watching the opera), and whose husband, an eminent physicist, is never seen at political events.

Against all odds she has now been in power as  the first female chancellor of  Germany  for 7 years,  and today she was reconfirmed as leader of her party, the conservative CDU, by the largest majority she has ever received:  80% of the party delegates voted for her.  Even the most conservative wing of the conservative party for whom she is too liberal, admitted that they would be “blöd” (nuts) to not give her their full support in the upcoming election, which they will certainly win, (but by how much is unclear).  In a stunning display of solidarity, the leader of the even more conservative Bavarian sister party (CSU), which has usually been  at odds with anyone governing in Berlin (no wonder when you experience  the splendid condition of the Bavarian capital München compared to rundown bankrupt Berlin) admitted that his party will be a “purring cat” during  the pre-election months, content to snuggle up to the warmth provided by Mama Angela.  Now that is charisma.

Richard Ford writes the great American novel – and calls it “Canada”.

By

John Updike has passed on, Philip Roth has passed his peak, and like  Updike, will  not win the Nobel Prize, Toni Morrison, who did win it quite a long time ago, and Joyce Carol Oates have been productive but have long since levelled out on  a somewhat predictable plateau. So who will take on the mantel of the leading US novelist?   I’ll tell you who. It is Richard Ford, whose latest novel shows all the marks of a writer who learned his trade very well at the feet of masters and continued to improve and now in his mid sixties has really hit his stride with a novel that should remind readers of great works  like The Sound and the Fury by that splendid  fellow southerner William Faulkner – whom Ford met as a young man in Mississippi - or So Long, See You Tomorrow by the vastly underrated William Maxwell.  Richard Ford, born in 1945 in Jackson, Mississippi, has gradually pushed his imagination north, setting a couple of  his excellent earlier novels in places like Great Falls, Montana or central New York, and now, he has written what is  arguably the best American novel of the last decades, and titled it, against the wishes of his US publishers, “Canada”.  The publishers told him that this title was “a death knell for a book”, but Ford wouldn’t be pushed around, stood his ground on the title, and has seen his stubbornness more than vindicated with regard to both sales and reviews.

The leading US and European reviews have  been superlative, and the PBS interview is much to be recommended, but their focus has been  almost entirely on the extraordinary quality of the often meditative writing in the framework of a tale full of sound and fury. This novel  explores the relationship between memory and long-ago events yet  throughout catches the reader’s attention with an action story involving extraordinary and  dangerous life choices that is presented  through the recollections of  a terrific 60-year old writer looking back at his teenage years.  And what splendid writing it is; is there anyone else out there now who can write like this? And yet, overlooked by  -and perhaps incomprehensible to – the US reviewers is the title, which Ford comments on at length in the PBS interview.  Ford has spent a lot of time in Canada, and has said how much he likes being there  and his description, in the second half of this novel, of the journey across an almost unmarked border – of course that is no longer the case – separating Montana from the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan – is simply convincing.  Dell, the teenager in desperate trouble not of his own making, enters a world so different from the one he leaves that it sometimes almost seems like he is in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale (perhaops that of the Snow Queen).  The author is neither judgmental nor prejudicial in his description of both sides of the border.  It all  just simply seems to be true, in things as different as language, landscape description, and customs.  If it is a fairy tale, there is a dark edge to both worlds portrayed, but, as Ford says in the PBS interview, he is very fond of Canada and believes that in his story  Dell is given the gift of the possibility of redemption and  consolation when he is kidnapped and taken off  to the nearby but unknown land of Saskatchewan.  This is a great novel on its own, but it is also the defining work that, almost in passing, catches the different ways in which life is now lived in the second and third largest countries in the world that used to share the world’s longest unguarded border, but no longer do.  Ford now lives in Maine.  He’s moving in.

Quo vadis Europe

By

The financial disaster called Europe sails on with no port in sight and with deadly reefs looming on a regular basis. Captain Merkel uses her delegated powers as the boss whos pays the bills to forge ahead on her chosen path with such a powerful and refined lack of charisma, in a political world otherwise run by charismatic lightweights and clowns, that no one can really challenge her spartan version of the financial globe. She demands sacrifices from European lands that have not been willing or able to live within their means, that ultimately mean a tremendous lowering of quality of life for the average Joe. Greece is the very small poster-boy for this campaign but bigger and much heftier combatants are falling over each other to try to keep out of the Merkelschiff’s course. Spain, no small piece in the European puzzle, now has higher unemploment (25% of the total population, 50% for those under 25) than does Greece. That is a recipe for disaster somewhat reminiscent of previous social catastrophes like the potato blight in 19th century Ireland (for a staggering fictional account see Peter Behrend’s The Law of Dreams) or the food failures of late 19th century Scandinavia (see Vilhelm Moberg’s epic The Emigrants). When 50% of the young people and large numbers of professionals cannot find work or feed their families, there is revolution or emigration brewing. And big players in  the economic puzzle like Italy and even France are running scared and Portugal is already staggering.

So far the solution of choice is emigration. This is a guaranteed right of all EU members and unemployed young Spaniards and Italians as well as middle-aged unemployed skilled labourers and professionals from all of southernEurope are moving north looking for jobs in Germany and Scandinavia. Portuguese engineers, with no work at home, are moving to booming oil-rich Angola or Brazil, as it suddenly pays to speak Portuguese in parts of Africa and South America. Who knows where it will end. Will the demographic map of Europe brcome seriously altered, probably to the benefit of already prosperous north european countries? Will the brain drain of southern europe to the richer EU countries or even to the former colonies, be long-lasting as was the emigration of the Scandinavians, Jews and Italians to North America a little more than100 years ago?  Or will, as Captain Merkel hopes, it all settle down relatively quickly and the EU will then reach an economic stability which is nowhere to be seen today?

London Olympics 1948 and 2012

By

London 1948.  The last World War had only been over for three years.  To a significant  extent London still lay in ruins as a result of that war and it was a daring idea to ask a country that had been bankrupted and almost destroyed by an aggressive enemy  to host an Olympic Games.  And yet the United Kingdom welcomed  the choice by an Olympic committee that had not yet become  a group of old boys, most of whom had dubious  expertise in the area of amateur sports.   After all, this was not an overly expensive event and  the UK deserved the chance to show that it had survived the war with its basic values intact.    Thus London hosted the Olympics and  put them on in venues which, for the most part, had survived the bombings well enough to be used for sporting events.   All the participants were really amateurs, were asked to bring their own  personal items for the dormitory rooms that they slept in, were fed fn large part by donated food, and of course received no money for any medals they might win.  Security was provided by the Boy Scouts.  Film of the opening ceremonies capture the excitement when  a single runner ran up a staircase with a torch and lit the  flame which seemed to carry the hope that the future would be better than the immediate past.

Skip ahead 64 years to the spectacle witnessed on  tv by several billion people on the weekend.  It cost something like 30 million dollars, had 10,000 extras milling about in what apparently was meant to be the history of the British isles , featured an  Irish actor, dressed like one of the sleazy doctors or lawyers  from an Ibsen play and surrounded by rising polluting smokestacks while quoting from The Tempest of all things and waxing on about the edenic isle of Blake.  This eden was then highlighted by a 20 minute segment set in a gigantic hospital ward full of dancing nurses and hopping sick children.    British culture was represented by Sir Simon Rattle and the London Philharmonic attempting to play the theme song from Chariots of Fire with Rattle playing straight man to Mr. Bean.  Unfortunately the designers of this apparent nod to the British bureaucracy and humour failed to include a nod to the Ministry of Silly Walks.  Where are the Pythons when you need them?  Even the queen who was a princess soon to become a queen in 1948 agreed to make her acting debut in  a comic role with James Bond that involved her jumping out of a helicopter.   And later was that really Daniel Barenboim carrying in one section of the Olympic flag?   My how the mighty  lowered themselves for this spectacle.

In the Parade of Nations that interminably followed, athletes making many millions of dollars walked in alongside amateurs making nothing who had no chance of competing even half-serioiously with the millionaires.  Cannon-fodder.  How that will work out can be witnessed tomorrow when the so-called US dream team plays basketball against Tunisia.  No odds were being given by the ubiquitous gambling spots that the Tunisians would beat the US multi-millionaires.  Even at a million to one there was no chance.  Whatever happened to the Olympics of 1948?  As if to answer this question, the Olympic flame was lit this time by an enormously expensive and technically  impressive machine that  ignited a cauldron of fire that cannot be seen from outside the stadium into which almost no mortals succeeded in buying  a ticket.  That’s what has happened. The Olympics have been turned into a celebration of money and kitsch, and cannot be saved if its organizers don’t turn it back over to the amateur sportspeople and the general public who would like to see them compete beneath a flame that has a completely different meaning than it has today.

 

 

 

 

 

Obama – How has he done?

By

As an election in the USA approaches, the judgments on Obama’s four years in office, even among his supporters, seem to be settling in an area that might be summarized as pretty disappointing but not when compared to what the competition is offering.  For those of us looking on from outside, it seemed from the beginning that Obama’s victory was both  a very pleasant surprise that might however lead to a big let-down .  On  the one hand it showed such resilience that a non-Caucasian could win the big prize in a country that only 50 years ago was still struggling to ensure basic civil rights for all citizens.  On the other hand it just seemed impossible that such an inexperienced politician could fulfill the hopes placed on him in such  an unstable political and economic world.

On top of that, as it turned out he was be faced with a congress that was unwilling to co-operate  across party lines and soon ground to a standstill.  And there didn’t seem to be any doubt that beneath  the surface there would always be a significant number of voters who  would vote him out of his office because of his colour, no matter what he did.  In such grotesque episodes as the birthers, doggedly attempting to prove he wasn’t born in the USA, this came right up on to the surface.  The leading German news magazine Der Spiegel just came out with a sympathetic photo of Obama on its title page, and one word underneath it:  Schade (” Too bad”), and  in the most recent New York Review of Books, David Cole summed up Obama’s record on such a basic matter as civil liberties and the law as much better than his predecessor as he stayed clear of the politics of fear, but at the same time very disappointing in his unwillingness to defend the ideals on which  the USA once placed its flag out in the world.   In short, the judgment seems to be that Obama was dealt a poor hand but hasn’t shown much creativity in playing  a better round with it.   Under normal circumstances he would be in  deep trouble for the next election, but a recent tour of beautiful New England, where he will win in his rival’s home state, convinced my brother Doug that the Republicans have made such a mess of their campaign that Obama is at the moment still the slight favourite to be re-elected, but it will be over a very divided country if he does win.  And his second term might then  be even  more problematic than his first.  May the force be with him.

 

 

Hommage a Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

By

The obiuaries tended to speak of the end of an era when the greatest German singer died last week and it is easy to see why.  In many ways he encapsulated the experience of being  German in the  twentieth century like few others.  He was born just before he qualified for what Helmut Kohl called “Die Gnade der späten Geburt”, the mercy of having been born too late to have been forced to make some kind of  decision on what to do about the German catastrophe of World War Two.  As  a late teenager he was conscripted into an  army and a war that his family hated – the Nazis had killed his brother as part of their eugenics campaign – and ended up serving briefly and harmlessly on the Eastern Front before being captured just before the end of the war and sent off to allied POW camps.

From then on his life became a triumphal march through the world of European, and especially German, music, something the Germans could be proud of after their miserable performance in history.   He rarely left Europe and never sang at the Met,  as he dominated the repertoire of German song as no one else will ever do, while makin relatively rare forays onto the opera stage as well, mainly in Munich and Berlin.  While the obituaries focussed on the monumental scale of his Lieder recordings, those who saw his on-stage dramatic performances of characters as different as the wily comic Gianni Schicchi and the towering tormented Lear may well consider these life-encompssing portrayals to be his most enduring performances.  There will probably always be a new singer who can come close to the dramatic sensitivity  of his Lieder singing, if not at all to the scope of his repertoire (as the wonderfully professional and splendidly-voiced Christian Gerhaher recently displayed  in his Vancouver recital) – there is nobody out there who can come close to the staggering King Lear he created after personally commissioning the work from Aribert Reimann.  Though there are excerpts on DVD of this  shattering performance in Das Bayrische  Nationaltheater, you really had to be there to experience it.  And it may well be that  for that reason there will probably never be another performer like him, as he had experienced the deep depths and the splendid triumphs of  modern life  first-hand  and had found a way to bring it across unforgettably to a vast audience for more than half a century.

The decline and fall of the beautiful game

By

Exactly forty years ago a 22-year old kid from Parry Sound, Ontario, launched himself vertically 5 feet above the ice after scoring the winning goal for the Boston Bruins in the 1972 Stanley Cup championship game.   The splendid photo that caught Bobby Orr in mid-flight on that spring evening, also caught the thrill of the fastest of all sports which back then  rewarded the most-skilled skaters and shooters with names that are remain legends in the world of hockey, which at the time extended across Canada and in some major cities in the US northeast.  Bobby Orr was by most calculations the greatest of them all, but  he wasn’t the last.  Guy Lafleur, Bobby Hull, Phil Esposito, Wendell Clark, Bobby Clarke, take your pick and add the Europeans that followed Bure, Mogilny,  Näslund, the Sedin twins.  Now try to add the name of anyone playing in this year’s playoffs.  40 year old Jaromir Jagr is the only name that might show up on the list (goaltenders excluded), and he too is now gone  after returninng from several years in Russia.

In his place we have the no-name behemoths who are willing to throw themselves in the face of dangerous pucks and hit and try to stop anyone who enters their half of the ice.  And the formula works if the only things that counts is winning.  If any puck manages get through the crowd of big men standing in front  of oversized goalies with grotesquelly-oversized equipment, it may well prove to be the winning goal in an otherwise goalless tie.    However for the paying audience it is a real trial to actually sit through 60 minutes of skaters plodding around in glue, rarely even getting a shot on a bored goalie.   As the semifinals now begin all the leading teams have been eliminated – Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Jose)  and the semifianls  will be played by no one you ever heard of in the hockey hotbeds of Nashville (Tennesee), Phoenix (Arizona), Newark, (New Jersey),  Los Angeles and Washington or New York.  It is now perfectly possible that for the first time in the history of major-league sports, the finals will be between two bankrupt teams (Phoenix and New Jersey), and nobody will be watching.  It is the consequences of letting the league be run by people who do not come from the places where hockey counts and insist on setting up teams in places where few want to see them.  In these places it is not a question of watching skilled fast players flying down the ice and outguessing a superbly-trained goalie.  The point is to  not let someone who can do that get anywhere near the goal. Take another look at Bobby Orr flying like a bird 22 years ago, because you won’t see it again, at least not until players like Orr, Lafleur or the Sedins (or for that matter the still-active Ovechkin) can fly down the ice and score rather than being   dragged into the muck or even concussed and driven out of the sport, by large players who are unlikely to ever score a goal.  Hockey runs the risk of becoming unwatchable if someone doesn’t do something about it – and fast.

Trudeau in stunning upset

By

In the biggest upset in boxing since Pee Wee Hermann scored a TKO on Cassius Clay in that famous fight in Lewiston, Maine, Pierre Trudeau Junior (aka as Justin), a  3-1 underdog, brawled his way to a TKO in the third round of a charity challenge fight over tough-guy aboriginal Tory senator Patrick Brazeau.  By accepting the challenge of the toughest guy in Ottawa, despite dire warning that he risked serious injury, the slight 40 year old son of the greatest Canadian Prime Minister of modern times, risked his career as a potential future Prime Minister which was long threatened by a reputation as an over-intellectual type who took after his rather sensitive mother rather than his black-belt father.

As it turned out it was Brazeau who was in danger, stunned by haymakers leading to three standing 10 counts, before the ref stopped the fight in the third round. In less than ten minutes of real action Trudeau demolished his reputation as a wimp who could not stand the rough stuff of Canadian politics and emerged as someone to fear in future national elections. An amazed Brazeau admitted defeat to the new tough guy on the block and asked for a rematch. The fight Canadians would really like to see is the one with the arrogant current Prime Minister Stephen Harper who would probably also go in as a 3-1 underdog. Stay tuned.

Tom Lehrer – Where are you when we need you?

By

“Let’s make peace the way we did in Stanleyville and Saigon”.  The lines are 50 years old, but the Harvard math  lecturer  who wrote them is still alive, as far as we know: the great (and final?) Amurcan political satirist Tom Lehrer.  Where are the comic writers of today who could sing their way to  Armageddon so sweetly?  What’s that you say?  There are no sitting duck targets like those disastrous interventions of yesteryear in French Indochina and the Belgian Congo.

Well, how about every mixup of western troops in the last two decades in the troubles of the Middle East?  Iraq is, as long predicted, quickly sinking back into the authoritarian nightmare of the Saddam era.  Civil war seems inevitable, as is already happening in Syria, where no one has intervened.  In the course of only a year, Libya has already reconstituted itself into the tribal areas of pre-Ghaddafi days.  Egypt’s future is completely unpredictable and unnerving.   Afghanistan is already pretty much  in the hands of the various factions that will take over the moment the last US troops leave. Like the Brits (several times ) and the Russians before them, the US will soon leave Afghanistann in undignified disarray.   We can  only hope it is not quite as desperate and chaotic as the last helicopter flights  from Saigon.   But it will be yet another defeat for a once-vaunted army, whose allies have already disembarked  from a doomed campaign.  So what else would Old Tom need for a finale.  Well, let’s not forget his A-bomb song “Who’s next”?   It ends with the lines “We’ll all try to stay serene and calm when Alabama gets the bomb”.  He should be able to come up with a rhyme ending in “an” or “ael”.

Save a tear for Germany

By

Pity poor Germany.  It made such a mess of the twentieth  century that it just can’t do anything right in the twenty-first.  The truth is it is about the only country doing anything right in Europe these days, but no matter what it does, the folks it tries to help dig out Granddad’s old war memorabilia, and suggest that  that help is just another sign of Germany’s desire to laud its over poor European neighbours.  The passengers going down with  the Titanic curse the  German life boats ,that actually function,  rail on about how the war that ended almost 70 years ago was  making a comeback and of course don’t mean a word of it.  Places like Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Spain and even Italy don’t really want to go under and drown  and of course they expect the Germans to come to their rescue, but first they’s like to remind you of how nasty their rescuers are.

It’s an odd time in good old Europe.  Athens burns in protest, Portugal and Spain provide no jobs for their youth in protest, Cyprus makes no progress towards becoming a united and perhaps then viable island state, Italy votes for a leadership that is beyond mockery, and Hungary one beyond tolerance and even France displays an unheard-of humility in the face of the only European economy that works.  And they all expect the German rescue boat to haul them back on board.  God help them if the Germans decide they are not worth the effort.