Month: Feb 2016

This Land Is Your Land

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In 1940, the American folk singer and travellin’ man, Woody Guthrie, wrote an anthem to a vast nation that was then about as socialist-minded as it was ever going to be. He imagined his republic of the democratic ideal thus: This land is your land / This land is my land / From California to the New York Island / From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters / This land was made for you and me. Golden west to ye olde world east, northland of the giants to sultry south, the boy had all points covered.

While Guthrie’s folk song was being penned, America was rebounding on FDR’s New Deal. The presidential initiative –  aimed at putting a nation derailed by the Depression back on track – took the wreckage of the early 30’s capitalist crash and redesigned it, scaling back first-class, abolishing third and expanding premium economy-class so all could ride together onward to destination true democracy.

While this new deal was a big deal for Americans reared on the principle of freedom to do most everything, including fail, Roosevelt’s social programs and Guthrie’s mood made the true blues among them smell a rat. For those boatloads of new Americans who braved storm-tossed seas dreaming of one day staking out their own acre plot in some yet unpronounceable backwater west of the Appalachians, their idea of the new frontier hardly conjured up images of an America gone soft on elements borrowed from French or even Soviet republicanism. Authoritarian government of the old country and the cronyism endemic in it was the real poverty they were running from, after all.

In America, and that goes for the America lived by Guthrie in the 30’s and 40’s, private ownership was (and is) the endgame, and liberty meant (and means) the freedom to wall oneself in. Guthrie would write: Was a high wall there that tried to stop me / A sign was painted said: Private Property / But on the back side it didn’t say nothing / this land was made for you and me. When Dylan resurrected the song in 1961, presumably his choice of song was not only homage to Woody but also a lyrical effort to kick-start a movement rooted in the idea that America was best when shared, at its most sinister when ruled by them that build the big guns, build the death planes, hide behind walls, hide behind desks. Fair to say, they might have been bards in different eras but both artists were merely continuing America’s great, but seldom acknowledged, tradition of democratic socialism.

Was democracy ever the same music to everyone’s ear? Was it more so than to an America that loved the sound of liberté but had a funny idea of égalité and found fraternité discomfiting? Never have so many owed so much to one man: John Locke. So much a part of the American mindset, his English libertarianism elevated private property as a natural right, tall alongside liberty and the pursuit of life. Providing those propertied possessions kept migrating west indefinitely, growth and expansion could go on unchecked. Manifest destiny was moving west at a rate of knots, but so was population. By the time the final pieces were added to the federal jigsaw, the lower 48 states stretched to the Pacific. It would be that great divide that would put a natural check on geographic expansion, but not on population. From the Redwoods of the Pacific West to Gulf Stream waters of the Atlantic, America’s stretches were vast enough for a while to incorporate all its people before some of them decided to incorporate America.

In the space of two generations, the shift in the semantic of a single word, incorporate, has proven profound. The America Incorporate (Inc.) we see today seems a far cry from the America whose rift Roosevelt sought to heal by means of incorporating its tired, its poor, and its huddled masses, who – if not exactly yearning to breathe free, in the words of the stirring poem – were certainly looking to breathe again after years of extreme belt-tightening. Where New Deal strove to incorporate the public with unprecedented and unlimited scope, 21st Century America Inc. uses incorporation to mean private and limited. This has not gone unnoticed by those on the pulpit voicing discontent. Them is fighting words. Them used to be a dirty word. These days things are such that the battle cry of democratic socialism has become hip again.

Cut to the second decade of the 21st century and that pally, egalitarian spirit of adolescent America has been distilled, bottled and labelled with parody sad as it is amusing: This land is my land / it isn’t your land / I got a shotgun / and you don’t got none / If you don’t get off / I’ll blow your head off / This land was made just for me (D.Pratter). Granted, the democratic socialist ideal has taken a bruising at the hands of every president since Reagan, either presidents who have actively set America against itself through legislation aimed at driving out cooperative spirit, or else good men doing the only thing necessary for social and economic evils to triumph: namely, not a thing or not enough. With the cards stacked against them, Democratic kingpins like Clinton and Obama have not had what it takes to hemorrhage the wealth that has been clotting in pockets of American society. Rising socioeconomic inequality, pump-action gun lobbies, a crisis of belief in American exceptionalism, televangelism, erosion of the nation’s founding principles, greedy bankers, shady campaign contributors, bumbling military incursions, diminishing global influence, irredeemable national debt, the middle class struggling to make ends meet, and more than anything, American pessimism – for decades an unheard of oxymoron: all of these factors, and more, have unleashed talk of oligarchy and even extinction.
“A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much while so many have so little”.
Ladies and Gentleman of this once great nation, I bring you the purveyor of no-bullshit: Bernie Sanders. Bernie, tell it how it is.

The Katabatic Wind That Shakes The Barley

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They blow cold these winds of change. Down from the mountain tops, down from the frozen plateau they come tumbling and whipping with crystal spurs. They are the spirit of malice.

Ever woken up feeling one day younger? Refreshed, maybe. Younger, no. Ever recalled a time when there was no news like good news to send shivers down the spine? Would human be worth being and success worth winning if life was not lived best with adversity’s mug staring it down? Game of Thrones would not quite resound with the same blood-curdling peals of war (the same old perpetual war that is reputed to make heroes of ordinary men) were its slogan – Summer is Coming. Howling as they career off the edge of the Antarctic high plateau, these katabatic winds have the oomph to slay dragons. A meteorologic southpaw, they are the nearest thing on Earth to the winds of Neptune. It is they and not the big, bad wolf that possess the puff to blow man’s house down.

Not all winds bring a malicious chill, particularly to those not standing upwind of them. The Shogunate had its Divine Wind, its kamikaze saviour. That typhoon proved propitious, not once but twice, seven cursed years apart for the Mongols. Taught a lesson they clearly did forget on that first shipwrecking invasion of the Japan archipelago, those marauding steppe nomads were sent home by the winds of change to stew over their expansionist future with moustaches dripping sour milk and hearts dripping sour grapes. Three hundred years later and half a world away, Felipe’s Armada were so brazen in their breastplates that they tempted the tempest. The cold, rushing air that scattered the Spaniards to the four winds – from the Hebrides to the coast of Kerry to name but two – must have been blowing change in all directions that fateful voyage. However, the weather-vane did not stop pirouetting madly there and then. Soon after, the vane pointed Southwest before swinging wildly Southeast when the Boston harbour winds let change rip in the Thirteen colonies. It was then that England let the polar front carry her south enough to catch the trade winds, setting a course that would keep the Empire’s mainsails billowing through the horse latitudes and into the roaring forties. Tearing downwind of the circumpolar, this wind would bring change alright. Terra Nullis became Terra Ours and, when the karabatic winds would, on occasion, reach Australia from the high plateau of Antarctica, the damp, wet soil never felt so fertile for Albion’s seeds transported in on that fateful wind. Historic climate change was truly underway, bringing with it a mini-ice age for natives everywhere. Meanwhile, missionaries, adventurers, sahibs and settlers alike settled in for an Indian summer of profits going through the barometer.

Which brings us to the political zephyr that was Harold Macmillan. His winds of change speech swept Africa into a new consciousness, one that would blow in Apartheid, death in droves, resource pirates, famine, and bloody dictators dressed as Citizen Smith.

“The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact”.

With all due respect, Mr Macmillan, that is precisely the problem. Nationalism is the scourge that won’t go away. It is the katabatic wind that tumbles down from the mountain top, making our journey to the summit a bitingly cold one.

Winter is coming. Put another log on the fire and beside it crouch, for the chill answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. Down from the north it flows, a gaseous floe. It might be Putin, the Iceman, it might even be second coming of Leif Eriksson and his Valhalla boys. But whatever it is that is blowing in, it is bound to shake your windows and to rattle your walls. It might even be the wind that shakes the winter barley.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

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Alexander Selkirk, the real life privateer whose solitary exploits on a tiny and remote South Pacific island were later served up in the fictional guise of Robinson Crusoe, by all accounts struggled to adapt to life back on home soil. He struggled so much to resettle, in fact, that he chose to cast himself out again from the land of his birth. He sailed for Africa with the Royal Navy where he contracted fever. Selkirk, the outcast, would never see home again.

There has to come a point where removing yourself from the society you once thought you knew so well becomes a journey of no return. How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a hobo? Does it take a year in Provence to come up smelling of lavender? When does the exiled stop being a person and start existing as a memory?

There is a scene in the film Interstellar when Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper floats amid an infinite library of bookcases like those he left back home in the spare room. In this extra-dimensional projection of his mind, an acid-trip nightmare the likes of Escher’s famous staircase to nowhere confronts a brave Cooper. By now he has been away for decades and his beloved young daughter, Murph, is a grown woman. Nothing matters more to him than finding her again across trillions of black, empty miles. From shelf to shelf he spacewalks until through reality’s answer to a junk shop he finds a way to communicate through dimensional spacetime. It is then, at the sticking of the little hand of the watch on the bookshelf, his gifted daughter realises her father has found a way to reach out to her from a place she can scarcely conceive of. Suddenly Cooper ceases to be a memory and re-institutes himself as a living father in the mind of his daughter. He has spoken to her for the first time since she was a child across the arc of space and time using good old Morse code. The symbolic value of the watch is huge, coming to reify what had been an abstraction for Murph, a memory of abandonment lodged in her mind.

Living in a desert is not quite so extreme as falling into a wormhole off the coast of Saturn, but it might as well be an extra-dimension. Here where the sky turns milk blue every morning and burns in the west most evenings, where the treeless landscape never undergoes seasonal transformation, the feeling is cosmic. On this barren planet that lies on the event horizon – dangerously close to the black hole that is the Middle East with its information irretrievably lost in a Hawking paradox and its physical states tipping into one of infinite Daesh blackness – here a month might as well be a year and a year a lifetime, as far those back in the home quadrant of Eurospace are concerned. Time’s elasticity really does get to stretch itself in the mind of the exile. While he is busy hopscotching from past to future, skipping the bit they refer to as the now, he imagines that the world he left behind is one that spins at the right tempo and all who reside in it are likewise living in that blissful state they refer to as the now – a state the exile struggled to get to grips with. Maybe it does rotate in temporal stasis, or maybe it doesn’t in any mathematical sense, but who cares when all he feels is the pull of another planet.

The past is another country and the future another still. When the present tricks you with its mental mirages, it is to the two countries either side that the attention moves. The past is Nepal, where once is never enough. The future is that big trip around South America you keep telling yourself you are going to do. The present, that is wherever it is, but not where you always want it to be.

‘For who would bear the whips and scorns of time?‘ mused Hamlet. Well, not Shakespeare himself as history would have it. Far from whipping and scorning him, time has stroked him tenderly.  So, is there a way back for the time-travelling exile? Can that exile retrace his steps back to square one without it being a homecoming worthy of a weighed-down Christ looking miserable on the Via Dolorosa? How far can a man walk before it is too far to walk back? Would anyone care to guess without sending smug responses in on a postcard from some remote Tahitian isle, where they are currently having the time of their lives intending not to return home any time soon? Some sensitivity, please.

Dead men walking the earth, dead women, too. Leave for a while on your peregrinations and those you left behind will keep your grave. They’ll soothe you with words and questions as if expecting an answer. When leave they must, they’ll whisper into your granite ear, ‘back soon.’ Naturally, the visits will grow more infrequent until they cease altogether. For the best way ultimately to remember someone is not to pretend they are right there. It’s to accept they have gone, that being gone is as good as being gone for good. It’s to make peace with oneself in the way that the departed could never with himself. That’s the price we pay for going away. That was the price that Selkirk paid for being a castaway on that island for four long years.