Nor are most Americans familiar with the details of the Constitution. In the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s annual Constitution Day survey for 2018, 74 per cent affirm that they can name the three branches of American government. Once questioned, however, only 32 per cent can name all three, and 33 per cent can’t even name one.

At least the Americans still believe that Jefferson and Madison existed. In Britain,  a 2008 survey found a quarter of under-twenties believing that Florence Nightingale was a fictional character. Though one in five refused to be tricked into believing in the existence of Winston Churchill, more than half believed in the reality of Sherlock Holmes. Just under half thought Eleanor Rigby a real person, and that Richard the Lionheart was a fictional character.

The shift from a textual to a visual culture began in the early 20th century with the advent of cinema and was completed at the other end of the century by the arrival of the internet. In 2010, a survey on the 70th anniversary of Churchill’s first prime ministership found that while 97 per cent recognised a photograph of Tony Blair, only 19 per cent recognised Churchill. The only consolation amid this dazzling ignorance is that, on current progress, Blair will be “extinct” in public consciousness by 2075.

“The historian is a prophet looking backwards,” Schlegel wrote in 1798. Looking backwards, the timing of our digitisation was unfortunate. After the limbo of the Cold War, history returned in the 1990s along with its old friend geography. But in the same decade, our attentions drifted online and our social presences dematerialised. The historical sequence since the 9/11 attacks has been so heavily mediated that, according to a 2016 report by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a third of American millennials believe that George W. Bush killed more people than Stalin.

History has always been divided between a popular, recreational mode and an executive, instrumental mode—between those who enjoy a good story or simply don’t care at all, and those who agree with Polybius that history is “in the truest sense an education and a training for political life”. Recent data confirms that the study of history is declining in the United States, as in the United Kingdom. But the public remains fascinated by history in the factual sense, and the past as a reservoir of memories and images.

In the universities, history is decoupling from the disciplines that train the elites who manage our political systems. Yet history remains persistently popular with readers and viewers. The balance of power in history is changing. The good news about history is that, as with political populism, the news is not all bad.

In the decade after the crash of 2008, the number of American undergraduates choosing a history major declined by 30 per cent, from 34,642 to 24,266. Though the undergraduate body continues to swell, history majors now constitute a smaller share than at any time since 1950. In the late 1960s, 6 per cent of male undergraduates and 5 per cent of female undergraduates majored in history. Fifty years later, those figures have collapsed to 2 per cent and 1 per cent. These numbers declined notably in 2011-12, the first year in which students who had witnessed the effects of the 2008 financial crisis could choose their majors.

The post-2008 decline has been sharpest at the private, elite universities. These are the educational anterooms to the chambers of government, and they possess the resources to sustain teaching, research and graduate training in history. While student demand falls, political fashion continues to transform the nature of academic history. Together, these trends threaten to collapse the profession.

Between 1974 and 1984, the number of history PhD graduates from American universities fell from nearly 1,200 per year to less than 600. From the mid-Eighties, the number rose for three decades on the economic updraft of the university business, where fees have grown ahead of inflation every year since 1980. By 2014, the number of PhDs was just short of 1,200 again. But the number of academic job openings in 2014 was less than 600. Between 1974 and 2008, the number of job-seeking PhDs tracked the number of job openings with a lag time of about five years, the time an effective student requires to complete a doctorate. In 2008, however, the number of jobs halved instantly. Though graduate schools continue to produce more than a thousand history PhDs a year, the job market has not improved.

The five-year lag time between enrolment and graduation means that the decline in the number of PhDs that began in 1974 derived from falling enrolments in the late Sixties. This correlates to the cultural revolution of those years, in which the living generation did its best to cast off its parents and its past, and to change the orientation, if not the function, of higher education, especially in the Humanities. Instead of training little capitalists and bureaucrats, the university now trained cadres of resistance. In the 1970s, the Gramscian graduates began their march through the institutions. They hired their friends, blocked their enemies, and reshaped curricula to reflect their radical chic. Eventually, they succeeded in severing Polybius’s link between history and government, albeit by the Pyrrhic strategy of dissuading undergraduates from going anywhere near their lectures.

In 2014, the American Historical Association advertised 587 university teaching posts for historians. Only nine were in the fields of diplomatic or international history. In 2015, that number fell to three out of 572. American political history, once the dominant pursuit of American historians, is disappearing from academia. Three-quarters of American colleges and universities no longer employ full-time researchers and teachers in the field.

Once, academics like William Langer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Ernest May and Richard Pipes advised presidents. Books by Schlesinger, Daniel Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter influenced public opinion on topical issues and the nature of the American political tradition. Since the Sixties, American academia has dumped those ideals of public service, and exchanged constructive engagement with policymakers with “speaking truth to power”. The policymakers no longer bother to listen.

“The historical profession is committing slow-motion suicide,” Hal Brands and Francis J. Gavin wrote in 2018. “It is not surprising that students are fleeing history, for the historical discipline has long been fleeing its twin responsibilities to            interact with the outside world and engage some of the most fundamental issues confronting the United States.”

In 2016, the American Historical Association noticed a decline in both the number of jobs and the number of applicants. Academic history in the United States has entered a death spiral.

The academics’ abdication has returned history to the people. The demotic taste remains resolutely Carlylean: great men and women, swords and sandals, emperors and battles, the costumed fantasy-land of Downton Abbey, The Queen and, in its most degraded and ahistorical aspect, Game of Thrones. But the American public remain, as it did in Jefferson’s day, students of history.

Alexander Hamilton was the forgotten man of the American Revolution when Ron Chernow’s Hamilton was published in 2004. The success of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical adaptation has made Hamilton the most-remembered of all the Founders. Every American child now knows who Aaron Burr was, and why it is that New York City is the capital of finance but Washington, DC is the capital of government. Hamilton introduces  children to difficulties of documentary interpretation once reserved for graduate seminars in political history: “No one else was in the room when it happened.”

Consider the spring bestsellers by Victor Davis Hanson and Ben Shapiro, The Case for Trump and The Right Side of History. Hanson has retired from teaching Classics to heavily Hispanic new Americans at Fresno State in California, which is as low on the totem pole of academic snobbery as you can get while keeping your health insurance. Shapiro excels at the online polemic whose purpose, in the millennial argot, is “owning the libs”. An Orthodox Jewish conservative, he requires a police escort when he speaks on campus. Both writers have bypassed the academic gatekeepers of historical discipline, Hanson though his longstanding column at National Review, Shapiro through digital ubiquity.

If a historian can be permitted a prophecy that looks forward, I predict that reading Hanson’s The Case for Trump will become obligatory for anyone seeking to understand the late-Roman mood of the Trump presidency. Even those who detest Trump are starting to admit that Trump’s “traditionally non-presidential behaviour” and “personal excesses” may have been “valuable in bringing long-overdue changes in foreign and domestic policy”. Hanson places Trump in the tradition of the tragic hero who produces social transformation as much because of as despite his “obnoxious and petty” character. Oedipus was also “rudely narcissistic”, and Sophocles’s Ajax complains about “a rigged system and the lack of recognition accorded his undeniable accomplishments” like Trump on Twitter.

It is not necessary to approve of Trump or of Hanson’s argument to appreciate the democratic value of a bestseller that expounds hamartia, the tragic flaw, in a modern political context. Shapiro’s The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great is a similarly uncompromising work of popular education. Like Hanson, Shapiro is determined to recover the linguistic and theoretical materials abandoned in the academic historians’ retreat from society. The reader is served generous self-helpings of the grad-school terminology of telos, critique and ancien régime, along with accurate and informative summaries of pale, stale and male has-beens like Saint Augustine, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, as well as true      giants like Fromm and Marcuse. 

As the title suggests, Shapiro has his telos, but he is erudite as well as enthusiastic: “Like Kinsey, Marcuse rejected Freud; instead he posited a world of liberated eros, and called for ‘the concept of a non-repressive civilisation, based on a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations’.” This is a fair summary of Eros and Civilization, and much fairer than Marcuse’s hooligan heirs are to conservatives like Shapiro when they come to campus.

The once-compulsory “Great Books” curricula is now a rarity, due to its terminal caucasity. The Right Side of History may be the first time that the holder of a bachelor’s degrees has encountered the “narrative” of “Western Civ”, in which the clashing harmonies of the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” are reconciled with “Greek reason” by Jefferson and company—a reconciliation which their modern heirs must continue if their democratic polity is to survive.

Books such as The Right Side of History and The Case for Trump sustain the American tradition of democratic self-education. Intelligent, readable and useful, they connect political history to current affairs, and provide non-specialists with the “education and a training for political life” that is the inheritance of all modern citizens. When the academy wrote itself out of American history, it passed history back to the American people, populism and all. As Jefferson said, “Every generation needs a revolution.”

The post The rewriting of American history appeared first on Standpoint.

The family’s story is that Greta launched a one-girl “school strike” at the Swedish parliament on the morning of August 20, 2018. Ingmar Rentzhog, founder of the social media platform We Have No Time, happened to be passing. Inspired, Rentzhog posted Greta’s photograph on his personal Facebook page. By late afternoon, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter had Greta’s story and face on its website. The rest is viral.

But this isn’t the full story. In emails, media entrepeneur Rentzhog told me that he “met Greta for the first time” at the parliament, and that he “did not know Greta or Greta’s parents” before then. Yet in the same emails, Rentzhog admitted to meeting Greta’s mother Malena Ernman “3-4 months before everything started”—in early May 2018, when he and Malena had shared a stage at a conference called the Climate Parliament. Nor did Rentzhog stumble on Greta’s protest by accident. He now admits to having been informed “the week before” by “a mailing list from a climate activist” named Bo Thorén, leader of the Fossil Free Dalsland group.

Independent journalist Rebecca Weidmo Uvell has obtained an earlier email from Bo Thorén’s search for fresh green faces. In February 2018, Thorén invited a group of environmental activists, academics and politicians to plan “how we can involve and get help from young people to increase the pace of the transition to a sustainable society”. In May, after Greta won second prize in an environmental op-ed writing competition run by the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Thorén approached all the competition winners with a plan for a “school strike”, modelled on the student walk-outs after the shootings at Parkland, Florida. “But no one was interested,” Greta’s mother claims, “so Greta decided to do it for herself.”

Fortunately, Greta’s decision coincided with the publication of Scenes from the Heart, Svante and Malena’s memoir of how saving the planet had saved their family. Unfortunately, Malena omitted to tell her publisher that Ingmar Rentzhog had commandeered Greta’s stunt.

“We had a problem,” says Malena’s editor, Jonas Axelsson. “Journalists asked if it was promotion for the book. It wasn’t at all. It was a nightmare.”

It was, however, a dream for Ingmar Rentzhog. When Rentzhog combined Thorén’s plan and Malena Ernman’s musical fame with Greta’s uncanny charisma and We Have No Time’s mailing list, he turned Greta into a viral celebrity.

“I have not invented Greta,” Rentzhog insists, “but I helped to spread her action to an international audience.”

Trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, Rentzhog set up We Don’t Have Time in late 2017 to “hold leaders and companies accountable for climate change” by leveraging “the power of social media”. Rentzhog and his CEO David Olsson have backgrounds in finance, not environmental activism, Rentzhog as the founder of Laika, an investment relations company, and Olsson with Svenska Bostadsfonden, one of Sweden’s biggest real estate funds, whose board Rentzhog joined in June 2017. We Don’t Have Time’s investors included Gustav Stenbeck, whose family control Kinnevik, one of Sweden’s largest investment corporations.

In May 2018, Rentzhog and Olsson of We Don’t Have Time became chairman and board member of a think-tank called Global Utmaning (Global Challenge). Its founder, Kristina Persson, is an heir to an industrial fortune. She is a career trade unionist and a Social Democrat politician going back to the party’s golden age under Olof Palme. She is also an ex-deputy governor of Sweden’s central bank and a New Ager who has discussed her reincarnations and communication with the dead. Between 2014 and 2016, Persson served as “Minister for the Future” in the Social Democratic government of Stefan Lofven.

Petter Skogar, president of Sweden’s biggest employer’s association, is on Global Challenge’s ten-person board. So is Johan Lindholm, chairman of the Union of Construction Workers and member of the Social Democrats’ executive board. So is Anders Wijkman, president of the Club of Rome, chair of the Environmental Objectives Council, and a recipient in February 2018 of Bo Thorén’s call for youth mobilisation. So is Catherina Nystedt Ringborg, former CEO of Swedish Water, advisor at the International Energy Agency, and former vice-president at Swedish-Swiss energy giant ABB.

Catherina Ringborg is also a member of green energy venture capital firm Sustainable Energy Angels. Its members are a who’s who of the Swedish energy sector. Sustainable Energy Angels’ president and chair of investment committee are ex-ABB personnel, and so are four of its 17 members.

When Greta met Rentzhog, he was the salaried chairman of a private think-tank owned by an ex-Social Democrat minister with a background in the energy sector. His board was stacked with powerful sectoral interests, including career Social Democrats, major union leaders, and lobbyists with links to Brussels. And his board’s vice-chair was a member of one of Sweden’s most powerful green energy investment groups.

Greta and her parents probably did not know this. Rentzhog seems to have wanted to keep it that way. On September 2, 2018, a week after Rentzhog claimed to have stumbled on Greta, Dagens Nyheter ran a long op-ed on the need to force the greening of the global economy by “bottom-up” action against national governments, including “broad social mobilisation . . . reminiscent of what takes place in communities threatened by war”. Greta’s mother was one of the nine signatories. Ex-Minister for the Future Kristina Persson and three other Global Challenge board members signed the op-ed but cited other affiliations. Only Rentzhog admitted that he was associated with Global Challenge.

An English edition of the article identifies Rentzhog and Wijkman as its authors. Rentzhog claims that “many of us involved in Global Challenge were also involved” in writing it. He admits that he showed Malena Ernman “the article and the other signatures, but not their titles for Global Challenge”.

Greta’s father Svante, who now devotes himself to managing her career, declined my interview requests and refused to reply to a detailed list of written questions about Ingmar Rentzhog and Global Challenge. Instead, Svante issued an evasive three-paragraph statement through an intermediary. He says that “neither I nor Greta feel qualified to answer” questions about Rentzhog’s business connections, and when the family might have known about them. Svante also claims that “we have never worked with” We Have No Time or Global Challenge. Yet Greta served on We Have No Time’s advisory board between November 2018 and January 2019, and Malena Ernman signed a letter with four Global Challenge board members.

When I asked Rentzhog if he had introduced Greta and her parents to other Global Challenge board members, he replied, “I don’t know, maybe I did, but if Svante says no, maybe it was not connected.” Svante refuses to answer my questions about whether he and Greta have met members of the Global Challenge board. But Global Challenge board member  Anders Wijkman remembers.

Wijkman leads the anti-growth Club of Rome. Its alarmist 1972 report, A Limit to Growth?, has become a cornerstone of the “climate emergency” campaign. In December 2018, We Have No Time and Global Challenge launched the Club of Rome’s latest vision of apocalypse, the Climate Emergency Plan. Greta, Rentzhog told me, was invited to the launch event, but was unable to attend as she was already booked to deliver a TED Talk. 

The Climate Emergency Plan’s talking points are Greta’s talking points. “Around the year 2030, in ten years, 250 days, and ten hours,” the Scandinavian Cassandra told British parliamentarians, “we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it.” The only way to save ourselves is to follow the Climate Emergency Plan, and instantly green the global energy business through massive government investment and emergency legislation. Wijkman of the Club of Rome sees Greta as vital to pushing the “climate emergency” strategy on Europe’s political class.

“We had many scientist and climate researchers who’ve been speaking in terms of emergency for a number of years,” he told me, “but it’s only now, in the last couple of months, that the concept of emergency has been more or less accepted.”

Greta, Wijkman says, has been “instrumental” to this breakthrough. “Young people seemed not to pay much attention only half a year ago, but now obviously they do. So she has been a lightning rod or catalyst of this.”

Has Ingmar Rentzhog been essential to Greta’s rise?

“Yes, yes,” Wijkman agrees, though he finds it hard to quantify. “I don’t know how much he’s been influential. I think that Greta and her father and mother are quite skilled.”

Greta’s father Svante claims she “acts independently of any organisation or individual”. But Wijkman says Greta has “good advisers”, such as climate change professor Kevin Anderson. Anderson claims only to “discuss” Greta’s ideas and “correct” her manuscripts.“I know that he has given her a lot of advice in terms of substance,” Wijkman says.

In January, Rentzhog and We Have No Time used Greta’s face and story in promotional materials for a share issue for a new venture. Rentzhog claimed that the family knew, but Greta and her parents parents insisted that they did not. They announced that their association with Rentzhog was over—a curious statement, considering that Svante claims they had never associated with him in the first place. Greta’s new press agent, Daniel Donner, works from the office of a Brussels lobby group, the European Climate Foundation. Still, We Don’t Have Time retweet Greta as if nothing has changed. In a way, nothing has.

Whatever Greta or her parents know or think, her eco-mob increases the likelihood of legislation and investment that will make colossal profits for people like Global Challenge, We Don’t Have Time and Sustainable Energy Angels. For Sweden’s energy titans, saving the planet means government contracts to print the green stuff. Green energy lobbyists use populist scare tactics and a children’s crusade to bypass elected representatives, but their goal is technocracy not democracy, profit not redistribution. Greta, a child of woke capitalism, is being used  to ease the transition to green corporatism.   

The post Greta’s very corporate children’s crusade appeared first on Standpoint.

Pelosi, still reaching for Clintonian high notes in her eighth decade, leads the Democratic majority in the House. She also does a mean duet with Chuck Schumer, who lowers the tenor of the Senate as leader of its Democratic minority. Chuck and Nancy, as Donald calls them, have received the ultimate accolade, an invitation to perform at the White House. But these stars from the golden age of Democratic centrism are losing the big-ticket Millennial audience.

Enter the New Voices, stage left. They’re an all-female vocal trio, close-harmonising on the phone-friendly socialism of the younger Democratic crowd. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a perky and fact-free Hispanic environmentalist from the people’s republic of Brooklyn. She promises universal healthcare, open borders, and a “Green New Deal” to rebuild or refit every building in America. Ocasio-Cortez can’t explain where the money will come from, but she insists that she’s a policy realist. “We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero admissions,” she explained, “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.”

You may say that she’s a dreamer, but she’s not the only one. Jahana Hayes, a former National Teacher of the Year, is the first black woman to be elected to Congress for Connecticut. The same House intake included Ayanna Pressley, the first black woman to be elected to Congress for another allegedly “liberal” state, Massachusetts. The rules of rainbow coalition-building meant that Pressley failed the Rolling Stone audition. And, in a rare case of the Democrats rewarding individual attainment rather than collective attributes, Hayes deserves the spotlight.

Hayes is a conscientious mother of four and an expert on America’s failing schools. Having overcome a drug-addicted parent and teenage pregnancy, she is living proof that the dream of upward mobility is not yet dead. But Hayes is overlooked by the media and taken for granted by the party managers. In the Supremes, reedy-voiced Diana Ross overshadowed Mary Wilson, a better  singer. The star of the New Voices is the reedy-voiced, tone-deaf Islamist Ilhan Omar.

“Israel has hypnotised the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel,” Omar has hinted on Twitter. She also has some mind-bending tricks of her own, and knows how to pull off the complex rhetorical backflip of the anti-Zionist paradox: “Drawing attention to the apartheid Israeli regime is far from hating Jews.”

The first black Muslim woman in the House, one of the first two Muslim women, and the first black representative from Minnesota, Omar came to the US as a refugee from Somalia. After she won the heavily Somali 5th District of Minnesota in last November’s midterms, Pelosi and the party managers gave her a seat on the House Foreign Relations Committee (HFRC). In late January, Omar admitted that the “hypnotising” line was “anti-Semitic . . . unfortunate and offensive”, and apologised, claiming that she used it “unknowingly”. Two weeks later, she showed that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are foundational to her concepts of global affairs and American politics.

After her apology, Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, called for Congressional “action” against Omar and the other female Muslim newcomer, Rashida Tlaib, who also specialises in maligning American Jews and Israel. The hard-left anti-Zionist Glenn Greenwald jumped in on Twitter: “It’s stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans.”

“It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” Omar replied. She was quoting the rapper Puff Daddy. Though Mr Daddy has yet to take a position on the two-state solution, we can infer that he is a realist in foreign policy as in domestic: he has outsourced production of his Enyce clothing line. Omar’s next tweet clarified any doubt as to what she was inferring: “AIPAC!”

Everyone started shouting at once, online and off. “I don’t believe that in any way Representative Ilhan Omar meant to disrespect our Jewish brothers and sisters,” Abdul Basit, chairman of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said the next day. “She was specifically talking about the impact that lobbyists have in this country when determining their own interest.”

But she wasn’t. Omar was specifically talking about the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC does not donate to elected officials. If its failure to block Obama’s Iran deal is anything to go by, its lobbying bark is less than its legislative bite. Last year, AIPAC spent $3.5 million on lobbying, which made it the 157th biggest donor in Washington DC. But Omar believes that America supports Israel not for a mass of reasons strategic, economic, evangelical and sentimental, but because AIPAC bribes American politicians.

As Jewish Democrats circulated the draft of a letter condemning Omar, Nancy Pelosi immediately issued a statement: “Congresswoman Omar’s use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters is deeply offensive.” Pelosi called on Omar to apologise “immediately”.

“I unequivocally apologise,” Omar tweeted three days’ later. “I am grateful for Jewish colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes. My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole.” She then equivocated about the “problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA or the fossil fuel industry”. She forgot to mention CAIR, a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood, for which Omar raises funds in Pelosi’s home state of California.

Three weeks later, Omar did it again. “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” she told a public meeting in Washington, DC in early March. House Democrats from New York responded with a draft resolution warning against the “dangerous consequences of perpetuating anti-Semitic stereotypes” and “hateful expressions of intolerance” against Jews. Pelosi promised to bring it to a vote, but then discovered that she has lost control of the House Democrats.

The Congressional Black Caucus, many of whom are shameless about their racial solidarity with Louis Farrakhan, refused to condemn anti-Semitism alone. James Clyburn — black Democrat, Farrakhan supporter, House majority whip — said that the Holocaust was a long time ago, but Omar’s experience as a child refugee was “more personal”. Pelosi had to cut Omar some slack.

The resolution was so diluted that even Ilhan Omar voted for it. Anti-Semitism was condemned in the same breath as “anti-Muslim discrimination”, the spurious category of “Islamophobia” endorsed. Omar went unmentioned but “white supremacists” were accused of persecuting a hierarchy of victimhood: “African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other people of colour, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and others.” The party had rallied around Omar, not the Jews who have been the mainstay of its donors and liberal centrism. White people had become the source of Omar’s Islamist racism — and Jews, listed separately from “people of colour” — were on the white people’s side. “I don’t think our colleague is anti-Semitic,” Pelosi said afterwards. “She has a different experience in the use of words, doesn’t understand that some of them are fraught with meaning that she didn’t realise.” Omar, who came to the US as an eight-year-old, is a college-level graduate of the American educational system, but she apparently cannot understand English as it is spoke; Jamana Hayes has a point.

Omar is also a product of the Obama-era restructuring of the Democrats’ ethnic alliances, and the anti-Semitic whispering campaign that accompanied the Iran deal. The Jews are degraded, and Muslims promoted. The alliance with Israel is dismissed, the deal with Iran defended. Out with the Clintonites and the capitalists, in with the permanently aggrieved and actually existing socialism.

Omar is an intersectionalist’s fantasy made flesh. A black Muslim woman immigrant, she hates capitalism and Israel, calls Donald Trump less than human, and believes that Jewish money is corrupting American politics. She isn’t exactly enamoured of the nation that has given her refuge and then promoted her to high office, either. But patriotism, like plastic surgery, is for older Democrats.

As a black, female Muslim anti-Semite, Ilhan Omar strikes all the wrong notes for Democrats of Pelosi’s generation. But she’s music to the ears of the young leftists who chorus their approval of the New Voices on social media — and also to the old leftists who, having endured the long centrist winter, are rewarded with the Democrats’ regression into boomer fantasies. A third-worldist supergroup is on the cover of Rolling Stone, and the left-Islamist pin-up Linda Sarsour and her bodyguards from CAIR are Mau-Mauing the halls of Congress, shoving reporters aside while Sarsour and Rashida Tlaib confer on how to protect Ilhan Omar. Polls for the Democratic nominee for 2020 place Joe Biden, for whom time stopped in 1992, only slightly ahead of Bernie Sanders, for whom time stopped in 1968.

The young radicals now burrowing into the Democratic Left are the twins of the angry whites who have fallen out of the Republican Right. They are dialectical materialists because they have grown up amid the Hegelian disaster of America in the 21st century: the failure of G.W. Bush’s wars, the shock of the 2008 crash, the rise of Donald Trump. Their common cause with Islamists such as Omar and Tlaib is more than an alliance of electoral convenience. As in Europe, the Left and the Islamists are friends because they have existential enemies in common: the abstractions of capital and American power, and their physical symbols, the Jews and Israel.

Thoroughly embedded into the party’s roots by the digitised sectarianism of Obama’s campaign of 2008, the Democratic young guard has launched a permanent revolution against their centrist party managers. Omar’s supporters, encouraged by older leftists such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, faced down centrist managers like Pelosi and HFRC chairman Elliott Engel. Their defence of Ilhan Omar is their first Congressional victory and a watershed in American politics. American Jews are not going to dissolve their ties to the party overnight, especially with a Trump-led Republican Party as the alternative. Still, the Democrats are being “Corbynised”.

To retain her position, Pelosi has fed her party’s most loyal supporters and donors to the crocodile. But she has not regained control over the party. The base is stirred up for Bernie Sanders. The young tribunes are promising to launch impeachment proceedings against  Trump after the Mueller Report. Combine that with the public bearding of the Democratic leadership in the Omar fiasco, and Trump has a good chance of retaining the White House in 2020 — if he can be bothered.

The post Music to the ears of the anti-Semitic Left appeared first on Standpoint.

It is not my job to provide comforting fictions. We have folk singers for that. Especially English ones who peddle an inauthentic, anachronistic and commercial music bearing little or no connection to its purported origins. So much the better.
People have always performed songs peculiar to their time and place. And of course, some of those people were rural folk. But the notion of “folk music” as a discrete style is a Romantic invention. To call any musician before the age of Johann Gottfried Herder a “folk musician” is akin to calling Cleopatra a feminist or Moses the pioneer of adventure tourism. Like most anachronism, it tells us more about the present than the past.

In 1597, Thomas Morley’s Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke described English music of “the last degree of gravity” as “villanelle, or country songs” whose composers, eschewing “perfect chords”, set “a clownish music to a clownish matter”. As Matthew Gelbart explains in The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”, Morley could not have wondered whether this music originated among “professional composers” or “the folk”. These categories did not exist.

As a style, the Elizabethan villanella had variable origins and uses. The Romantics redefined such music as a testament of Volkische spirit and creativity: the sound of soul and soil. The nationalistic “folk” genre was defined as local and rural — the antithesis of the literate cosmopolitanism of the new cities. The same values produced the similarly anachronistic categories of “high culture” and “low culture”. Thus “folk” was the high culture of the future because it was the low culture of the past.

When Romantic folklorists went fossicking in the countryside for old tunes, they selected their material with arbitrary preconceptions. In England, mediaeval church music was the true common inheritance of the Volk. But that music was Catholic and Latinate. The Georgian antiquarians were anticlerical patriots, seeking Anglo-Saxon or pre-Christian origins. Similarly, the collectors preferred oral transmission to notated transcription. They took a recent variation on a loosely fixed lyric or melody for an original and standard form of the kind recognised by the recently-established Copyright Acts.

Meanwhile, industrialisation dragged the English off their fields into the cities. By the 1850s, the English were the first modern people to have a majority-urban population. The English Volkseele (national soul) now resided in the music hall and the piano rags of London pub music, which echo in the “Rockney” of Chas’n’Dave. But the folk fetishists have always reviled these urban English styles. For them, “Folk” is pre-modern and rural.

Nor do folkies accept the other modern urban music, the songs of African Americans which white intellectuals call  “blues.” If it’s played acoustically, they call it “folk blues”, a fictional genre from the “folk  boom” of the Sixties, when singers like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, who had been playing electric urban music for years, realised there was money to be made from gullible students in Europe.

Yet electric blues already met every “folk” criterion. It was unique to African Americans, was sung in English, and used the same instruments, harmonies and chords as English music, especially the I-IV-V chording of the hymnal. But it did not originate from Europeans, and used the modern abomination of electricity. The only possible conclusion is that “authentic” folk music is a Volkslied for Luddite whites only.

English folk music is largely the creation of the 20th-century revivalist Cecil Sharp, who  added Edwardian chord sequences and harmonies to the solo acapellas he found in Somerset pubs. He also invented a national style of Morris dancing, based upon the vestigial stumbling he observed near Oxford. He did the same for the “rapper sword” dances of Tyneside, for which no evidence exists before the early 18th century. Inevitably, Sharp was a vegetarian and socialist.

Sharp’s William Morris mediaevalism hardened into Popular Front folkiness in the Thirties, then softened into the commercial Folk Boom of the Sixties. Its best songs were written by Jewish college dropouts such as  Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Its worst performances were given by the Seegers, a family of Harvard-affiliated communists. The adoption of American “folk rock” by English hippies produced the cider-folk of free-festival noodlers such as Fairport Convention. All harmless if you have time on your hands and weed in your pocket, but all inauthentic.

Even in Morley’s time, English “folk” was urban and commercial. Consider the quintessential English folk song, “Greensleeves”. The notion that Henry VIII first plucked  out the melody while trying to get into Anne Boleyn’s wimple is a typical folk fiction. In fact, the number originated in the Elizabethan music business. In 1580 a tunesmith named Richard Jones registered a ballad called “A Newe Northen Dittye of ye Ladye Greene Sleves” at the Stationers’ Company in London. The Elizabethan equivalent of Tin Pan Alley cashed in, and six variations on “Greensleeves” were registered over the next year, three of them by a student of musical economics named Edward White. The tune became a pop standard, familiar enough for Shakespeare to joke about it in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

“Greensleeves” didn’t come out of English folkmusic. It went into it. When Jones called “Greensleeves” a “northern ditty,” he was either making a joke or a sales pitch. All hip Elizabethans knew  “Greensleeves” was a Spanish jam. The verse sequence is the “Andalusian cadence”, familiar from Flamenco or, for deutero-Elizabethans, Del Shannon’s “Runaway”. The chorus uses the romanesca variation on the passamezzo antico, a rhythm  from the courts of Renaissance Italy. “Greensleeves” became a “folk song” because the ears of English folk were already attuned to foreign music.

Just over 400 years later, Elvis Costello repeated Richard Jones’s joke at the Live Aid concert of 1985, by introducing “All You Need is Love” as “an old northern folk song”. As Costello recognised, ever since Elvis, the music of the English folk has been electric pop. Like “Greensleeves”, the song didn’t emerge from “folk music”, but it has become the music of the folk.

So there’s nowt so fake as English folk. Like all popular music, it’s at its best and most authentic when it’s at its most modern and least authentic.

The post There’s nowt so fake as “folk” appeared first on Standpoint.

Billy Bragg is perhaps England’s most popular faux-folk perpetrator. He is proudly inept on the guitar, and cultivates the vocal stylings of a sea lion in labour. These qualities alone identify him as a musical fake.

Real folk musicians are skilled manual workers who can pitch a tune, play a fleet melody and improvise on a theme. They absorb the tradition in which they are raised. Bragg’s folk epiphany came when he heard Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” on the radio. His musical chops are a pastiche of first-wave punk, which was sold as the sound of a deskilled working class but packaged by middle-class Situationists.

Just as John Lydon went from frightening the horses with the Sex Pistols to advertising butter and partaking in I’m a Celebrity, so Bragg has drifted from irritating Maoist busker to national treasure as the George Orwell of pop.

The music business is always the entertainment business. Bragg, a professional anti-capitalist, has always played the game. In his early days, he heard John Peel tell his listeners that he was hungry, so rushed to Broadcasting House with a mushroom biryani. Peel ate it, and played Bragg’s record.

This culinary payola was not the last time Bragg collaborated with a state broadcaster. In 1986, he played in East Germany. He permitted Amiga, the Party-run record company, to release a live album whose sleeve note propagandised Bragg as a “folk hero of British working-class youth”. In 2006, Bragg admitted that the reality of the GDR had been “pretty salutary”, but not enough: “It didn’t stop me being a socialist.”

Nothing can. Bragg’s response to the end of the Cold War was to record “The Internationale” using the traditional Soviet accompaniment, brass band and choir, but with updated lyrics. “So comrades come rally, for this is the time and place,” he sang, like King Canute’s jester. “Don’t cling so hard to your possessions.”

By 1990, Bragg was possessed of a healthy royalty stream, much of it stemming from the kind of left-wing agitprop that was not suitable for miners in the Eighties but went down well with the students and Guardian readers. He remains a bourgeois deviationist.

It is an iron law of history that only middle-class people fall for the working-class blokery of the “Billy Bragg” persona. Bragg is an actor, his role that of Gramsci’s organic intellectual. He stops more glottals when he is on stage than on Radio 4. He offers his studiously untutored voice, his acoustic guitar, and his folk memories of trade unionism and the Depression as proofs of authenticity, like Tony Benn’s routine with the pipe and the builder’s tea.

But he is selling a fantasy. The English working class loves electric music from America. The rest is kitsch for sentimental middle-class socialists, Orwell’s beardy-weirdy, sandal-wearing vegetarians — people like Bragg’s friend Jeremy Corbyn.

These days, Bragg preserves his brand and calls himself a “progressive”. His hometown, Dagenham, Essex, has named a street after him, Bragg Close. But his politics remain stuck in the dead end of the hard Left. Last summer, three of Britain’s Jewish newspapers, in an unprecedented protest, ran identical front-page editorials calling Corbyn an “existential threat” to Jewish life in Britain. Bragg sided with Corbyn.

“Austria is forcing Jews to register, the Alt-Right are chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’, but Labour pose an ‘existential threat’ to British Jews?” Bragg tweeted. “How are we supposed to conduct a reasoned debate about anti-Semitism in such a febrile atmosphere?”

The reference to Austria was fake news, circulated after a single regional official had suggested that Jews and Muslims should register in order to purchase kosher or halal meat. This, and the invocation of the American alt-right, was classic what-aboutery from the school of Stalin and the Socalist Workers Party. So was Bragg’s sinister suggestion that the Jews are the working man’s misfortune.

British Jews, Bragg continued, have “work to do” if they wanted to rebuild trust with Labour. By complaining about record levels of anti-Jewish violence, vandalism and incitement, they were “pouring petrol on the fire”. They should shut up and trust the dear leader.

When it comes to the party line, Bragg remains, as he once said of an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, a “dedicated swallower of fascism”.

The post Overrated: Billy Bragg appeared first on Standpoint.

As Books & Arts editor of the New Republic, Wieseltier appointed himself court jester to the bicoastal elite: movie nights with Barbara Streisand, supper with Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post. An Olympic-class social mountaineer, Wieseltier promoted himself as the philosopher king of the Republic of Letters. This left him little time for actual writing. He did, it now emerges, find time to grope, kiss and harass the New Republic’s female employees.

By the Nineties, Wieseltier looked like a casualty from a Seventies rock band — cowboy boots and scarves, puffballs of white hair over his ears, red eyes and bloated face. Still, when the internet devastated print publishing, his survival at the New Republic attested to the possibility that digitisation might not wholly degrade America’s public life.

In 2012, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes bought the New Republic and set about infantilising it for a millennial audience. In 2014, the senior staff revolted, and Wieseltier resigned very publicly. The hero landed on his feet: a teaching job at Harvard, a fellowship at the Brookings Institution, and a spot on the masthead of the Atlantic. Best of all, Wieseltier promised to avenge the dumbing-down of America’s media by launching Idea, a culture journal funded by the Emerson Collective.

This is a curious name for a collective. Waldo Emerson, freelance journalist and Yankee individualist, was utterly opposed to collectivism. Society, Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance, is “everywhere in conspiracy” against the individual, and works like “a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater”. Anyone who has bought one Apple product, and found that using it involves further purchases, knows that feeling. But the Emerson Collective isn’t really a collective. It is a philanthropic behemoth, one of those distinctively American machines for the generation of good works and tax breaks, and it belongs to one person: Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs.

Emerson Collective describes its objectives as “removing barriers to opportunity so people can live to their full potential”, and executing “innovative solutions that will spur change and promote equality”. It has donated generously to schools, and to media businesses including film production companies, journalistic start-ups like the California Sunday Magazine and  the news website Axios, and non-profit journalism outlets like the Marshall Project and ProPublica.

In July, Emerson Collective bought a majority stake in one of Waldo Emerson’s regular gigs, the Atlantic magazine. The price was undisclosed, but the deal gives Emerson Collective the option of taking full ownership of the magazine and its ancillary businesses in the near future.

The Atlantic, founded in 1857 by Emerson and his friends, and mostly unreadable since the late Nineties, is what they call “legacy journalism”. This is an unfortunate phrase, for it admits that someone or something has died. In this case, the corpse is the print business model. Advertising used to keep print magazines afloat, but Facebook and Google now monopolise the advertising business.

The Atlantic’s “legacy” is not its journalism, most of which should also be in quotation marks, but its brand. The Atlantic made nearly $80 million last year, but only 20 per cent of that came from print sales and advertising. The rest came from Atlantic Media’s digital side, and its consulting and events divisions.

“It was a friend of many of us here, Leon Wieseltier, who first put me onto the possibility that Laurene might come to love the Atlantic as I have,” Atlantic Media owner David Bradley cooed in July. That was before Wieseltier’s methods of loving came to public attention. When they did, the Atlantic and the Brookings Institution dropped him, and Powell Jobs cancelled the funding for Idea, whose first issue was at the press. 

In October, Powell Jobs spent $500 million on a 20 per cent stake in Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Washington Wizards basketball team, the Washington Capitals hockey team, and their home venue, the Capital One Arena. The Washington Post noted that with this investment, Powell Jobs “instantly commands an influential position in the male-dominated ownership circles of the ‘Big Four’ professional sports leagues”.

Since 2013, the Post has belonged to Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Chris Hughes destroyed the New Republic and sold its remains in 2016, but the Post has survived under Bezos. And now Powell Jobs brings big Apple money to legacy journalism. As Silicon Valley comes to Washington — and as Washington struggles to absorb Silicon Valley before the internet giants swallow America’s politics along with its media — the pattern of 21st-century journalism is emerging.

In part, the new news business resembles the old. As in Citizen Kane, buy a newspaper, and you buy a seat at the table. The commercial interests of the owners and the journalistic interests of their editors have always been in tension. Atlantic Media already exploits its legacy by running a Davos-style corporate salon at the luxury ski resort of Aspen, Colorado. Will the Atlantic investigate the companies that sponsor Atlantic Media’s conferences? Probably not. But in the digital era, even legacy outlets cannot, as Wieseltier presumed to do, “police the culture”. The problem now is whether the culture fits their business model.

American democracy, Emerson believed, depended upon democratic culture. Idea was a great cultural idea, but it was never going to make money or find a mass audience. Digital media collectivises clicks, and “aggregates” for the advertisers. Now that new media have degraded print culture into  multi-platform entertainment, how much of the culture remains? And what does that mean for digital democracy?

The post Collectivised clicks appeared first on Standpoint.

It was 40 years ago today that Malcolm McLaren never taught the band to play. They’ve never been out of style, but they’re guaranteed to raise a smile, because they broke up after one album, and had a saucy postcard wit. The Sex Pistols, whose sole digression into good taste was to quit while they were ahead, still define our image of punk. The legend, though, is only half true. Which half you choose depends on whether you view punk as an art movement or a social one, and how long you believe it lasted.

As art, punk was American music with a British accent. Its performers were largely working-class, its managers mostly Jewish, and its youthful rebellion entirely compatible with show business. Only one of 1976’s “Big Three”, The Damned, signed to an independent label; the ostensibly anti-capitalist Sex Pistols and Clash followed the money to major labels. In all of this, punk was no different to earlier British pop music. In the Fifties, Larry Parnes had groomed a stable of likely lads with daft pseudonyms: when Sid Vicious was in nappies, Parnes had Dickie Pride and Vince Eager. In the Sixties, Brian Epstein had spun major label gold from four “foul-mouthed yobs”, just as McLaren did with the Sex Pistols and Bernie Rhodes with The Clash.

Sonically, punk instrumentation, harmonies, and song structures were nostalgic; the real innovation came in the Eighties, when the synthesisers and computers took over. Apart from its amateurish and accelerated delivery, early punk differed little from its Fifties and Sixties forebears: guitar-driven songs about teenage life. After the rococo improvising of Seventies rock, punk’s return to three-chord, three-minute songs had a neoclassical clarity. The middle eight in a minor key, an artefact from Tin Pan Alley, survives wordlessly beneath the guitar interlude in Anarchy in the UK.

As that title suggests, punk’s controversy lay in “the filth and the fury”: alienated lyrics and antisocial behaviour. McLaren and Rhodes, two situationists replaying the Sixties, packaged this anarchic exuberance as political anarchism. Their art school pranking turned punk into a fashion phenomenon and a career opportunity, but, just as the French situationists of 1968 had failed to control the striking workers at the Renault factory, it failed to commodify punk’s politics. These, having begun in creativity and generalised disgust, ended in stupidity and fascism.

The first wave of punk was over by the time the Thatchers moved into Downing Street. The Sex Pistols had broken up, The Clash had become a conventional rock band, and The Damned had done both. Punk staggered on, splitting amid the class war of the early Eighties. The art students went for synthesisers and New Romantic pop. The working-class punks doubled down, creating Oi!, some of the worst music ever made.

Not all of the Oi! bands were fascist thugs. Some, like the Angelic Upstarts, were Communist thugs. Others, like the Cockney Rejects, were sporting thugs; the Rejects’ execrable music soundtracked the hooligans of West Ham’s Inter-City Firm in the way that brass bands accompany a May Day parade. Garry Bushell, the journalist who named and promoted the movement, was a Trotskyite. But all the Oi! bands were white and liked a punch-up. All complained, not unreasonably, that mainstream politicians had abandoned the English working class. Most of them thought that “Enoch was right.”

Recruiters from the National Front and the British Movement targeted Oi!, along with other symptoms of working-class breakdown, the football yobs and the resurgent skinheads. The boneheads were halfway there already. Bushell had titled the first Oi! compilation Strength Through Oi!. Apparently, he had believed that “Strength Through Joy” was the title of an EP by The Skids, not a Nazi slogan. Then again, Bushell had also airbrushed the swastika tattoos from the barechested skinhead on the album’s cover — one Nicky Crane, who was precluded from attending Oi! soirées because he was in prison for racist violence.

The truth is, punk’s politics were always closer to John Tyndall than Guy Debord. The first wave of punk had glamourised violence and fascist imagery. The Clash and The Damned emerged from a rehearsal group called London SS. The Damned took their name from Visconti’s eponymous film, a prurient fantasy of Nazi sexual decadence. The Sex Pistols, egged on by McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, used the swastika to épater le bourgeoisie. It was only a small step from antagonising the generation who had fought the war to declaring a new one. “I feel like a wog,” The Stranglers said. “Too many Jews in here,” sang Siouxsie and the Banshees. Not all of this was attention-seeking or naivety. Confirming prejudice as she denied it, Siouxsie Sioux changed the line to “Too many businessmen in here.”

What happened to the glue-sniffers and football thugs? Nicky Crane acted in gay porn films and died from Aids. Garry Bushell became a tabloid newspaper columnist. The sons of the dockers who marched for Enoch became the fathers of the English Defence League and moved to Essex. The disappearance this year of the BNP from the Electoral Commission’s register does not reflect the eclipse of racist sentiment so much as its battening on to UKIP as the NF once attached itself to Oi!. The UKIP stronghold of Clacton-on-Sea happens to contain Frinton, one of Britain’s whitest towns.

Musically, punk died with the Callaghan government. But socially and politically, as they used to say, “Punx not dead!”

The post Probing Punk’s Politics appeared first on Standpoint.

Once, when I was young enough to be impertinent, I sat on George Bernard Shaw’s bicycle. The bike, like everything Shavian, was a museum piece, as rusty as Shaw’s beard and as wobbly as his morals. It stood in his sitting room at Ayot St Lawrence, by a table set for tea, as if the master of the contrived eccentricity had just ridden in for a slice of lemon drizzle cake.

Why did I do it? The bike had magical powers. A great man had ridden it, and I knew that some of that greatness might rub off. Hence, the market in autographs, association copies, and objects fondled by celebrities. As Sir James Frazer wrote in The Golden Bough, the scientist and the magician both believe that the “performance of the proper ceremony” elicits the “desired result”. The magician merely misunderstands the laws of physical nature — but not those of human nature.

The homes of the great or merely famous become museums. Every modern museum needs to do “outreach” through “interactive” events. In literary museums, the interaction is between a living writer and the genius loci. The thinking is that the guest, temporarily inhabiting the space of the dead, will absorb genius by osmosis, or be inspired to summon some up.

The great shrine of this fetish is the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Since 2005, and the restoration of the Frank apartment to its wartime state, the entertainment includes writers in residence. Each year, the Amsterdam Foundation for Cities in Refuge invites a “foreign writer threatened with censorship or persecution” to an Anne Frank-themed holiday; the first inmate was Algerian poet El-Mahdi Acherchour. Unfortunately, the writers live in the three-room flat, not the secret annex.

The poets’ housing crisis has further been eased by residential programmes at the cottages of Wordsworth and Ted Hughes, and now by the saving of the cottage in which William Blake wrote “Jerusalem”. Only two of Blake’s nine residences survive: a London flat in Great Molton Street, and this seaside house in Felpham, West Sussex. “Away to sweet Felpham, for Heaven is there,” Blake wrote, “The ladder of Angels descends through the air.” He lived there from 1800 to 1803 when, having turned a soldier out of his garden and been tried for sedition, it seemed time to return to London.

Heather Howell, who had lived in William Blake Cottage since 1928, wanted to sell the house to the William Blake Society. But the society’s members, like their man, are not really business types. They could only raise £93,000 of the necessary £520,000. Fortunately, a mystery donor, one hopes not the proprietor of a dark satanic mill, ponied up.

These days, Felpham is the smart annex of Bognor Regis. This does not preclude the lowering of the ladder of Angels for a writer in residence, though the neighbours might object to Blakean nudism in the garden. Bognor’s literary pedigree is often overlooked. Gandhi, whose autobiography is one of the great modern fables, holidayed there as a law student. Marx and Krishnamurti visited too. In the original draft of The Waste Land, before Pound decreed that Margate Sands was the place, Eliot wrote “three weeks at Bognor” — more than enough time to feel that “nothing connects with nothing”.

Down on the wild coasts of the western Peloponnese — the Greek Bognor — Patrick Leigh Fermor’s house decays. In the Eighties, Leigh Fermor, squeezed by a tax demand, made over his house to the Benaki Museum of Athens as a writer’s retreat. He lived until 2011: three years longer than the Greek economy. With the Benaki unable to fund the house’s conversion, a group of British readers have formed the Leigh Fermor Society, and offered to maintain the place. Meanwhile, fans climb over the walls. Last summer, the London Review of Books carried a letter from a Paddy-phile who, having climbed up from the beach, infiltrated the garden and found two topless sunbathers and Italian writer Roberto Calasso in residence.

The Benaki plans to host academic conferences in the summer, and needy writers in the winter. Applicants interested in spending the winter on a cold, windswept promontory in the company of a small group of neurotic strangers — a Hellenic Jamaica Inn — are encouraged to apply.

The only thing worse than living in the mausoleum of a dead writer is living with a bunch of living ones: peevish small talk about word counts and agents, and always trying to deduce each other’s advances. At William Drummond’s old home, Hawthornden Castle near Edinburgh, batches of writers reside four at a time, with unlimited porridge at breakfast and a “quick snifter of sherry” before dinner. One 2012 inmate, Vanessa Gebbie, describes having gone “stir crazy” there. Some of the guests went to Edinburgh at the weekends, and Gebbie went to London. Just like day release from a psychiatric hospital.

As I limber up to remount Shaw’s bicycle and write my masterpiece, I am planning the posthumous use of the coffee-spattered, chocolate-smeared cell in which I work. The committee — my widow, a couple of famous friends, the daughter who edits my unwritten letters — will solicit proposals on Procrastination in Non-Fiction, and select a lucky victim.

To preserve the inspiring ambience of Daddy’s Study, speakers will pipe in nothing but Beethoven, Vivaldi and The Clash, with interruptions from the disembodied voices of small children, demanding sweets. The inmate will be expected to drink all the coffee and eat all the chocolate, ride out the mid-morning panic attack and the mid-afternoon sugar drop, and keep at least three webpages open at all times. Immortality: my name will outlive my work, I shall remain the most important person in the room, and my lifelong project, counting the leaves on the tree outside the window, will finally be completed. 

The post Writers In Residence appeared first on Standpoint.

For 12 days in late November, members of “Brandeis Students of Color” and “Concerned Students 2015” squatted in the corridor outside the president’s office, demanding that the university hire more black faculty and admit more black students. On a Facebook page detailing their “activism” was guff about the “intersectionality” of race, class and gender oppression, mixed with requests for vegan food, accusations of “white supremacy”, and encouraging comments from various faculty members. “This is a revolution,” one student opined, before falling silent, stupefied by his own vacuity.

True to Sixties precedent, the Humanities faculty suddenly noticed that they were jailers at a racial gulag, and issued messages of support. Helpfully, several departments offered to undo academic apartheid by expanding their budgets for faculty hiring. Interim president Lisa Lynch surrendered immediately.

I took my doctorate at Brandeis. I could feel my degree devaluing as I read Lynch’s email. To foster a “more diverse, inclusive, and academically excellent community”, Brandeis will hire a Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion, to issue an annual “report card” on the university’s moral failings. More “faculty of colour” will be hired, more “students of colour” admitted; degree requirements may be lowered accordingly. Still, many of Brandeis’s non-academic staff are already cleaners and gardeners of colour, so full marks to Brandeis on that front.
“Brandeis University has RE-COMMITTED to their founding values and principles,” the students announced, displaying the grammar that your children too can acquire at an elite college costing $60,000 a year. Not that President Lynch, who aspires to make Brandeis a “more academically excellent” place, would spot the error.

“Please respect that emotional labour and the time needed to heal from administrative lies and violation,” Kiana Nwaobia posted on Facebook. “For now, allow us just to be here in this moment of after, even as it exists at the intersection of success and pain, and to experience our moment of after in the ways we see fit.”

Immaturity, narcissism, mob politicking, radical posturing, racial pandering, and bad grammar: the New Left’s march through the institutions. Or some of them: the science and business faculties did not issue letters of support. The Sixties radicals lost the economic argument in the world, but took their “safe space” in the Humanities as a consolation prize.

It’s the parents’ fault. The students are only doing what they’re told. Their teachers claim that education means talking truth to power, but they have been in power for decades. Their revolution is institutionalised, and they are now the enemy.

In this, our moment of after — after the revolutionary mobilisation of the Humanities, and the post-1970 collapse of enrolments — we can only hope for the bursting of the private education bubble. Bad teaching aside, the Humanities are becoming too expensive to study. Why should rich private universities use the Humanities as a political playpen? Power to the people!

The post Political Playpen appeared first on Standpoint.

The art of medieval religion thus becomes the religion of modern art. Mark Rothko, who called a painter’s concept of space a “statement of faith”, compared Giotto to Thomas Aquinas, who had bolstered the Church against a “newly rising world” that eventually bore it away. Giotto’s “spatial divergences” are early “rumblings of disintegration”: an individuated, rational perspective is challenging the “Christian synthesis” between imagination and reality. Like Aquinas, Giotto offers an “objective statement” of religion, but he seeds the old image with subjective impressions.

Giotto’s religious context, the unity of site, society and subject, survives in a modern mockery: you have to go to church to see his frescoes. He was also, though, the first itinerant artist, whose individuality was prized highly enough for him to work all over the Italian peninsula, from Naples to Milan. So it is no less true to Giotto’s spirit that a collection of 14 portable works, including the stunning Baroncelli Polyptych, has been gathered at the Palazzo Reale in Milan under the title Giotto: Italy (until January 10, 2016). The show includes works from all phases of his career, as well as two of only three autographed pieces. Unless we have the time and money to tour the frescoes chronologically, the show is a rare chance to view Giotto in the perspective of the modern unity, biography.

Giotto was born at Vespignano, a village near Florence, in 1266, the son, Vasari reports, of “a tiller of the soil”. In the first of a trio of legends that record his natural talent, Cimabue came across Giotto as a ten-year-old shepherd, “portraying a sheep from nature on a flat and polished slab, with a stone slightly pointed”, and whisked the prodigy back to Florence as his apprentice. In Vasari’s second legend, Giotto painted a fly on the nose of one of Cimabue’s portraits; his master tried to brush it off. In the third legend, Giotto, asked by a Papal emissary to demonstrate his talent, simply drew a perfect circle.

Vasari wrote that Giotto replaced the “rude Greek manner” of Byzantine stylisation with portraying “living people” from nature. But Giotto’s realism is staged with a sophisticated technical effect that owes much to Byzantine “primitives”. He creates three-dimensional impressions by modelling geometric space, but the space is not that of Brunelleschi’s stable geometry.

De Chirico, one of the many moderns inspired by Giotto’s articulate distortions, wrote that in Giotto, “architectural sense attains high metaphysical space”. In his polyptych altarpieces, the success of the spatial design triumphs over the rules of representation, creating an otherworldly intimacy. The five framed panels, divided by decorated pillars, work as window frames. The saints can look out, and we can look in. In the Badia Polyptych (1295-1300), St Peter is thoroughly human — he looks like Peter Ustinov after receiving bad news — but at the same time, thoroughly transformed by his sacred, timeless responsibilities.

The unities of the Baroncelli Polyptych, a late masterpiece created for the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, are especially powerful. Again, the spaces are compressed and the perspective distorted. The perspective is so foreshortened that the back of the picture rises up, stacking the priests and nobles against a golden field, and pushing the consort in the foreground towards the viewer. Mary and Jesus are gentle giants; in reality, the angels attending them would be midgets. Yet together these images attain the condition of music. It is impossible not to stand before them without hearing heavenly harmonies from the viols, harps and trumpets of the musicians.

Italy creates another fleeting unity, by reuniting the polyptych with its decorative triangular cusp, borrowed from the San Diego Museum of Art. Two angels float towards God’s visage, holding smoked glass over their eyes, like airborne astronomers looking into the sun. Physical reality may never change, but the greatest art always changes before our vision. 

The post Giotto The Great appeared first on Standpoint.