The liberation of Tripoli considered as a catwalk opportunity

All wars of whatever kind have always had a strong fashion element. Hence such things as: grunts decorating their helmets in Vietnam; the adoption of the keffiyah by both middle eastern terrorist/liberation movements and as a western university uniform; the occasional pop star falling into a pit of embarrassment and vacuity when challenged about their claim that the Nazis were 'cool'.

The Libyan uprising, though, seems to have taken war-fashion to a new level. I can't help myself noticing the dress code of the rebels.

With the advent of effective long-distance rifles in the mid 19th century, warriors abandoned their previous battlefield finery. Out went feather plumes, red jackets, striped trousers and - a personal favourite - the pelisse, a fur-trimmed jacket that cavalry men (there were few, if any cavalry women, I'm assured) wore slung over one shoulder but never actually put on. In came olive drab, sensible boots and jackets with lots and lots of useful pockets. The only time modern troops get to dress up properly is when guarding the Queen or the Pope or something.

The rebels have upended this completely. They go into battle dressed up as if for a night out on the passegiata. No worries that their blue and white hooped polo shirt might make a target for enemy snipers. No, they seem set on cutting a bella figura. They really do offer a full range of well-chosen sports wear for the would-be liberator. They've mostly gone for the white trainers option, too.

I particularly like watching out for the football shirts being worn. I've seen a lot of Barcelona ones but my favourite was a Manchester United away shirt — complete with number 10 and 'Owen' on the back. If football is war by other means, here war is football by other means.

I was left with a question, though: what about the regime forces? Where are their fashionistas?

Then last night I found myself watching Newsnight or somesuch and seeing old footage of Gadafi. I'd long cracked the gag that the way he dressed these days, it was hard to tell him apart from Carlos Santana — moustache plus loose, brown outfit and unusual head-covering (for male pattern baldness reasons, I suspect).

But I'd forgotten just what a fashionist he'd been over the years. He had his Michael Jackson phase — peaked cap and military tunic, lots of excessive gold frogging, dark glasses. And as I watched Newsnight, I saw him in his 1980s phase — pale blue trakkie. He looked like a Scouse scally on his way to a pre-Heysel Liverpool away match in Europe. (Or were Michael Jackson and the scallies copying Gadafi?)

So maybe the rebels realised that as, in the end, all military victories can only be successfully secured by concomitant social victories, therefore when going into battle the choice of shirt is at least as significant as NATO air support, maybe more.

Plato: When the texture of shirting fabric changes, so the walls of the city shake.

PS When my friend Paul published a big magazine article on the fashion aspect of terrorist groupings, he got into terrible trouble. Here's hoping.

The dietary requirements of the average north London rioter . . .


The smashing etc time reached to within a few hundred metres of my house, to Chalk Farm station. I was expecting more damage, I guess, but all I could see was broken fronts — all now guarded by calm policemen — on Evans cycles, Sainsbury's mini store and this, the local Domino's pizza.

Notice that the sushi place next door was left untouched. As was Marine Ices over the road. And even the Marathon kebab bar — though the some of the clientele there really wouldn't take kindly to their consumption patterns being disrupted.

So . . . just Domino's Pizza, please — the chosen dinner of rioters. Perhaps even now, in Ann Arbor, the owners are thinking of that as a slogan. You are, it was often said, what you eat.

PS1 I was there because there was an online call for people to help clear up this morning. It was needed, I'm pleased to say. It had already all been cleared up, by the council, I should imagine.

PS2 Perhaps I should have guessed that: I was woken up this morning by the council street-sweeper doing the kerb outside my house.

Hackety hack

Last autumn, an American friend, a US TV news man in London, told me I should read the New York Times article on what was going on at News International. You won’t believe it, he said. It’s really serious, much worse than I realised. You really should read it.

I didn’t. I kept meaning to. But I didn’t.

Then the other day, I did. My friend was right. I should have read it before. It tells the story clearly and directly and devastatingly without ever spoiling its pitch by joining the Guardian on its high horse cantering across the moral high ground.

Read it here. It’s long, really long, but worth it. In a fun way.

Hackety hack

Last autumn, an American friend, a US TV news man in London, told me I should read the New York Times article on what was going on at News International. You won’t believe it, he said. It’s really serious, much worse than I realised. You really should read it.

I didn’t. I kept meaning to. But I didn’t.

Then the other day, I did. My friend was right. I should have read it before. It tells the story clearly and directly and devastatingly without ever spoiling its pitch by joining the Guardian on its high horse cantering across the moral high ground.

Read it here. It’s long, really long, but worth it. In a fun way.

And if that's not enough fun, try this. It's an NPR podcast of Joe Boyd (worked with Pink Floyd, produced Nick Drake, John Martyn, Fairport Convention etc etc) reading from his book. The book's worth reading, too.

Things change . . .

It’s the cliché of anarchism (etc): if voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.

Well, here is a good, clear of example of how voting changes . . . graphic design.

For something I was writing, I looked up government approaches to music education. Without realising it, I downloaded not, as I thought I had, two contemporary reports, but one produced under the current government and one under the former.

Here’s the old (new Labour) cover . . .


Here’s the new (coalition) cover . . .

Striking, no?

Old (new Labour) a large image, shot on 21mm (I think) lens, adding (rightly or wrongly) drama, with (as always in the last government’s publications) an ethnic minority (as per new Labour usual, a young ‘black’ person); a two-colour title, with the words unaligned (in builder’s terminology, ‘on the piss’); a subhead aiming at inclusion but begging a question (more music than what? more people than who?)

New (coalition) consciously sober title (it says what it does on its cover); conscious, perhaps archaic capitalisation (‘Government Response’ rather than the less stentorian ‘government response’); blue colour (an indication of coalition balance?); a seemingly pointless shadow rectangle with a grid pattern which perhaps hints at an underlying mathematical response to music (for better or worse)

It doesn’t stop at the cover, either, of course. The difference continues inside.

The new (coalition) document opens with a quote from Plato and includes this sentence: ‘Music is an enriching and valuable academic subject. Research evidence shows that a quality music education can improve self-confidence, behaviour and social skills, as well as improve academic attainment in areas such as numeracy, literacy and language.’

The old (new Labour) one aimed, among other things, ‘to develop a world-class workforce in music education’. Workforce, world-class — how quaint and early 21st century those words now seem. It included this statement from the then Arts Minister, Estelle Morris: ‘It's about everyone with a love of music coming together to create the soundtrack to young people's lives.’

Then love, everyone, soundtrack, coming together, young people.

Now research evidence, self-confidence, improve, academic subject, social skills, attainment, numeracy, literacy.

Plus ça change, plus ça change.

Plato (him, again) wrote: ‘Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them.’ And, it seems, vice versa.

What would Freud have thought of Gordon Brown?

Watching Gordon Brown give his resignation speech in the street, I felt unaccountably uncomfortable. There were obvious reasons for this — inside my head, if not everyone’s.

* I don’t much like Gordon Brown — everyone has their reasons (as the movie has it*) but mine include:
his self-martyring manner, unbecoming in the over-12s;
his spending my money like a drunken sailor;
his centralist, dogmatic micromanagement which has infested so much of government;
his use of the word ‘investment’ as a synonym for ‘spend’ (as in ‘we are investing 44 billion pounds in . . .’)

* I don’t much like celebrities parading their children — I didn’t much like Rooney bringing his newborn son on to the pitch at the end of the last game of the season

* I don’t much like the non-separation of the public and the private — I don’t think Sarah Brown should be hidden away in purdah — rather that she should be getting on with her life and work — would Gordon have turned up for her work leaving-do, with kids in tow?

Yet still . . . there was something else that concerned me about the scene. I couldn’t figure out what it was but it hung around, uncomfortably. Then, in another context, I recalled something the pioneering English female psychoanalyst Joan Riviere wrote in a review of Freud's New Introductory Lectures** . . .

'Among all the manifold significances one's child can have, a major one is abundantly clear in all analyses: it represents oneself as a child, one's own id.'

And that was it, for me. What I was seeing was Brown’s use of his own children as representations of his own self — not just his own childhood self but his secret, urge-drenched adult self. (Of course, as a parent three-times over, I know I’ve done this — still do, I’m sure. But even the guilty may point the finger at other sinners.)

So what did I see in that moment that made me uncomfortable? Well, the first thing to consider is that this was the two young boys’ first public appearance — to my knowledge anyway. Previously, they had only two public ‘faces’. One, sheltered behind pixellation. Two, as metaphors used to demonstrate their father’s humanity — eg, the worked-up gag comparing his adversaries’ adult conflict to his two sons squabbling in the bath. Patronising, heartfelt, intrusive, genuine, fake, clunky — so much of Gordon Brown was there in that brief phrase, which probably wasn’t even written by him.

At the leaving moment, though, he (and, I guess, Sarah) did something quite new with their children. He brought them into the public arena. He stood them on his office desk — see the Guardian photograph. He (or someone) bought them new formal jackets. He depixillated them. A bride stripped bare moment.

It was clearly a very deliberate — though, of course, not necessarily fully conscious — act. Why suddenly de-privatise such an essentially private element of his life? No one made him do it. It was clearly his choice to put his boys on show.

What was going on? Starting from Riviere’s observation, what did Brown’s act show us about what she referred to as ‘id’ but I’m quite happy to think of as ‘inner self’ or some such. What part of inner Gordon was he representing? Something fairly basic and simple (not to say universal), I think. He was — though probably better not to tell him this — expressing his inner child.

By using his children as simulacrums of the hidden Brown, he was able to represent all those qualities he (and his pals) claim — tenderness, caring, inherent humanity, sweetness. It was a last, almost desperate attempt to rewrite his public self. See little Gordon, he was saying. I’m just a little boy inside, really. I might be wearing a suit and tie but I feel like I’m wearing a new-bought jacket with my favourite trainers.

More than that, though, he was also — possibly — revisiting his self-pity. Would you throw a child out of his family home? Would you put a young boy through all this misery, all this rejection? You wouldn’t do it with a dog, would you? Why me? I’m a nice little boy really. You’d think that, too, if you got to know me. Which you never will now.

All supposition, clearly. I have only two pieces of back-up. One, the sheer and odd novelty of the event — why depixillate for just that moment? Two, the look on his wife’s face. Of course, there was distress there — a touching level of care about her husband, mostly, I should think. But there was more than that, I think. She looked uncomfortable — in contrast to his almost manic street preaching speech. Is it possible that, at some level, she realised there was something disquieting about this public parading of her two little boys?

* Regle de Jeu: ‘The awful thing about life is this: everyone has his reasons.’

** Being a polite (and orthodox Freudian) sort, Riviere didn’t crack the obvious gag. That is, whatever one may have thought of this late work of Freud’s, he could have been prosecuted under the trades description act for its title. There’s nothing (well, not much) new about it. It’s certainly not introductory. And they’re not even lectures but essays — written to be read and never spoken aloud.

PS1 If that was all a bit too psychopolitical for you, have a look at this brief disquisition on a marathon road trip, blood sugar levels and the relationship between the self and others.

PS2 It turns out that one of the young women playing with yogurt pots in the previous posting is the girlfriend of a friend of my elder son’s.

PS3 Forgive a childish moment of my own but here is something I heard a commentator say of Mark Webber’s placing on the grid for the Monaco Grand Prix: ‘It’s the first time he’s had back-to-back poles.’

PS4 I’m appearing at Women’s Word, a feministish book festival in a few weeks — more details in an on-its-way posting.

Next up The sound of silence — nothing to do with the absence of Gordon Brown in our public life but a little something left over from when I was still on the course.

What would Freud have said about the Socialist Workers Party?

Of the many small delights and delicacies thrown up and out by the election, my own favourite came during the Liberal-Conservative negotiations.

William Hague emerged from a Whitehall building to give a short press conference. As he stood on the steps of a neo-Classical lovely, some kind of background noise obliterated most of what he was saying. It took time to figure out what the noise was, but I got there in the end.

It was a chanting crowd, I soon realised. They were complaining — obviously — about William Hague and, I guessed, the Conservatives in general. After a little more listening, I was able to make out what they were chanting. It was: Tories out!

I thought: how fantastic is that! (I guess that means I have just used up my annual allocation of exclamation marks. Oh, well. It was in a good cause.) A party that hasn’t even come to power yet is being drowned out by a bunch of chanters who already want them out. That’s not politics, I remember thinking. It’s conceptual art.

Then the camera panned round on to the crowd. There was even a banner. (If I hadn’t used up my exclamation allocation, there would have been one a the end of that sentence, too.) I realised right away that it was the Socialist Workers Party. No one else has that kind of world-class overnight banner delivery system. And I thought: what would Freud have thought about this?

First, though, I should point out that I don’t have a problem with the SWP. For starters, they are a fine part of our national heritage — and should, by now, surely be supported by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and in line for a substantial National Lottery grant. Consider the SWP’s contributions to modern Britain:

* Those banners, of course, with their distinct modernist typography — a really substantial contribution to the surface of the modern world

* The design of Socialist Worker — one of the all-time best-looking tabloid newspapers

* Rock Against Racism — almost every inch an SWP front organisation — I don’t think it recruited many neophytes to the Trotskyist cause but it did give the world The Clash in Victoria Park and many other wonderful shows.

* Various chants — Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out was a hardy perennial (Its only real competitor, I guess, was: What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it? As soon as the pubs have closed!)

Further, not only do I appreciate the SWP’s contribution to English heritage, I was even — briefly — a member of its embryonic predecessor, International Socialists. The brevity of my association was, in good part, because head office (or whatever it was called — the central executive, perhaps, or something similarly Orwellian) disbanded the branch I was in — despite the fact that we sold more newspapers etc than anyone else. The reason given was that we weren’t serious enough. I took this somewhat personally — probably correctly. I never did, though, get to the bottom of what exactly this lack of seriousness involved. Was it . . .

. . . that my understanding and use of the word ‘party’ had un-Leninist ambiguity to it?

. . . that there was an immoderacy to my enthusiasm for the music of James Brown — Nixon voter, owner of several radio stations, ardent proponent of ghetto capitalism?

. . . that I came to realise that my comrades actually meant what they said?* While generally a good thing for the rest of humanity, such directness is necessarily inadvisable in the necessarily disingenuous world of politics.

. . . that, as someone recently reminded me, I was in the habit of pointing out that that in October 1917 a good number of Muscovites woke up and wondered why their bins hadn’t been emptied?

So what would Freud have thought of the SWP? I think he would have considered that mid-negotiations cry of ‘Tories out!’ and decided: repetition compulsion. Or: the compulsion to repeat. His proposition/theory, that is, that seeks to explain the meaning and genesis of neurotic symptoms. It’s the central thing in his 1920 version of his theory, Beyond The Pleasure Principle.

Roughly speaking (very roughly) and taking an everyday example, it’s the matter of why we keep on dating the same girl/boy — or, in David Bowie’s mordant phrase, always crashing the same car. Much beyond that basic point, though, Freud’s theory is somewhat hard to grasp and maybe even, er, incoherent — certainly according to Laplanche and Pontalis’ standard dictionary of psychoanalysis.

Why should we continue to do something that is manifestly unpleasurable for us? Freud’s idea was that it somehow linked with a fundamental urge for non-existence. ‘The aim of all life is death,’ he wrote. No, never really made sense to me, either. Though it must be said, of course, that there is something deathly about the SWP’s chant — or, at least, something that evokes an urge for death to steal over you.

Perhaps a more useful way to think of the chant, though, would be to concentrate on the joy it seems to give its chanters. Banished are those long Labour years when it was forced to lay, unneeded and unloved, in the deep soul of the far left’s memory. Oh, joy of man’s desiring.

I find myself thinking of the tango of sadomasochism. Who needs each other more? Which is the sharper desire, the hitter for the hit or the hit for the hitter? The Tories need for the far left or the SWP’s need for William Hague?

I find myself thinking, too, of some Lucinda Williams’ lyrics . . .

‘If we lived in a world without tears,
How would bruises find the face to lie upon?
How would scars find skin to etch themselves into?
How would broken find the bone?’

* To begin, I don’t think I really realised the comrades were talking literally — much as, when younger, I’d been deeply shocked out of my already vestigial Catholicism when told that transubstantiation wasn’t meant to be symbolic but an actual change of wine to actual blood and little white round biscuit thing to actual flesh. A precociously metaphorical child, I thought: I mean, come on! (Oops, now I’ve got a structural deficit in my exclamation account.)

PS1 If all that was a bit too politicky for you, try this gorgeously charming rhythm thing and/or this opportunity for cheap (but wholehearted) laughs at foreigners’ difficulty with the English language.

PS2 I’ve become — immodestly and selfishly — quite taken with this idea of guessing what Freud would have thought of various things. So . . .

Next up What would Freud have thought of Gordon Brown?

Who would Freud have voted for?

As the election was around and about, I found myself wondering about psychoanalysis and politics. Did I learn anything about the juncture between the two? Did the course give me anything special or extra to say about politicians and the political process?

So I thought about things like . . .

Projection and the way leaders' qualities are so easily built out of our own interior worlds - Hitler is the example psychoanalysts generally reach for but the same kind of thing applies to, say, David Cameron (though more obviously to Margaret Thatcher - obviously).

Grandiosity and the almost cute way that some politicians (Gordon Brown, say) have of actually believing in themselves with such certainty.

Narcissism of small difference, of course - to exaggerate tiny differences to the point of bonkersness (technical phrase: look it up in a psychoanalytic dictionary) is essentially and profoundly human. See That's Why I Hate The French by Goodall, Atkinson et al (1980, Belfast). Politicians do take it to new levels, though. Which leads to . . .

Hysteria and a recent conversation with a political activist. I'd said, quite lightly, that I thought change of party was essential to democracy. (If I thought I could have got it right without checking I'd have quoted HL Mencken's guide to voting: Chuck the rapscallions out!) The activist's reply, in all seriousness, was: 'That's what they said in Germany in the 1930s.'

Then? Then I found myself asking a more interesting question - for me, at any rate. Did studying psychoanalytic thought change my political views? To my surprise, I decided it did. Not in any obvious, party-political way but in a subtler and more profound way.

It wasn't just general stuff that made me think and rethink. It was a couple of specific things - one historical and personal, one conceptual and theoretical.

The personal, historical one was Freud's own life. Being immersed in all those details of pre-WW1 Vienna gave me a real sense of how different a society can be from ours while still being culturally rich and - despite there being an emperor on his throne - surprisingly free. Not that that the same thing can't be said of our modern democracies - just that I wonder if we sometimes easily assume that democracy begins and ends with the political process.

Freud's Vienna was structured and corralled and hidebound in all kinds of ways - capital punishment, anti-semitism, minimal suffrage etc etc. But still it gave space and time to not just Freud but Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, Brentano and Wittgenstein, Berg, Mahler and Schonberg. The Wiener Werkstätte, too. (Not that Freud took much, if any interest, in any of them.)

I found myself thinking the same when reading 1599, a book about how that year was for Shakespeare and England. That year, he wrote Hamlet and As You Like It - in a city where theatres could be closed down at a monarchical or bureaucratic whim and religious fundamentalists stalked the land, banning ancient celebrations and painting over church wall paintings. I thought of Tehran, of course, and the Taliban. Maybe there could be a Shakespeare there - or at least a Thomas Middleton. Also, naturally, I thought of that fatuous little speech in The Third Man about how all four hundred years of peaceful Switzerland had given us was the cuckoo clock*.

The conceptual and theoretical thing that changed my political underpinnings was Freud's Civilization And Its Discontents, written and published in the shadow of the gathering holocaust. Commentators generally describe Freud's politics as conservative - and it's true that he seems less than overwhelmed by the wonders of communist Russia. Further, he was unconvinced by the belief that universal suffrage was a universal panacea or that heaven would ever descend and merge with our sitting rooms.

It was a specific section in Civilization that stuck in my head, though, and turned it a little - not in a conservative or even cynical direction but certainly in a worldly one, maybe even a slightly world-weary one. A little distance and scepticism before dinner is always a good stomach-settler.

Freud was writing about the Biblical injunction 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'

This is (some of) what he wrote. 'Let us adopt a naïve attitude towards it, as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection . . . If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way . . . my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them . . . What is the point of a precept if its fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable?

'On closer inspection, I find still further difficulties. Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and show me not the slightest consideration . . .

'The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.' I think he included women in his ungentle humanity. 'As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to torture and to kill him.'

A bleak, depressive reading of the human psyche. But, in the lead-up to the Nazification of Europe, not an inaccurate one. You could say that its that view of mankind underpins the creation of the EU - an elaborate supra-national structure designed to protect us all from that reality. You could disagree with Freud entirely - whether or not you believe in the possibility of big rock candy mountains.

But you can't dispute its power as a guide to humanity. At least, I can't. Still, as Romain Rolland had it, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Or, in the words of Hill Street Blues, be careful out there.

PS So who would Freud have voted for? Well, he liked his cigars and was a big believer in the basic rules of capitalism - see his guide to how analysts should deal with getting money out of their patients. So I reckon Cameron - though he'd have been deeply wary of all that 'Big Society' and 'Change' stuff. Still, like the rest of us, he knew you always have to hold your nose at the ballot box.

Next up Freud and free will - at overlong last

* Yes, I know the cuckoo clock is actually German. Though I guess the person who first made the gag didn't. That was Ruskin, the 19th century art critic. Graham Greene borrowed it - in a last minute panic. Then, embarrassed (and worried about being rumbled), he let Orson Welles and his unfeasibly large ego convince themselves that the great big actor had written it himself.