England's Grey Men

If history had a screenwriter, they would be extremely bad at remembering to make things comprehensible to the casual viewer. Case in point is given by Wolf Hall, a show I am enjoying immensely but which has the unforgivable sin of featuring no less than four principal characters (including the lead) with the name Thomas: those surnamed More, Wolsey, Cromwell and Cranmer. Even George RR Martin, when attempting to create a totally convincing alternate medieval world didn't go as far as extending the realism to naming practices, or there would have been about twenty-one characters in Game of Thrones called Rickard. If viewers are having a hard time following Wolf Hall, then at the very least history's disregard for simplicity isn't helping.

Behind the scenes, too, there is a lack of nominative diversity, with Peters Kosminsky and Straughan, director and screenwriter respectively. Both of these men have the requisite back-catalogue to match the literary stature of Hilary Mantel or the dramatic heft of Mark Rylance and Anton Lesser, but it is Straughan's back-catalogue that suggested the most intriguing comparison to Wolf Hall to me: for he also wrote one of my favourite films of the last decade, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There is a running joke on the Kermode and Mayo show about this John Le Carre adaptation not being about spying in the same way Jaws isn't about sharks - this is possibly why the film hasn't had the lasting impact it deserved, because it was marketed as a thriller instead of what it is, a portrait of a decaying England with the last embers of Empire fizzling out and no idea of where it's headed. Tired old men choking down cigarette smoke in beige rooms, distrusting each other.

Tudor England is a rather different place to Cold War Britain - true, Europe is torn apart by a war of ideas, spies are everywhere and foreign powers are not to be trusted, but there is always a boisterous energy associated with the reign of Henry VIII - England looks like it might finally become a power to be reckoned with, springing out of the backwaters rather than sliding back in as George Smiley's country seemed to be. And yet Smiley, in Mantel and Straughan's telling, has a close forebear in Thomas Cromwell. These are an unexpected pairing, perhaps, the Machiavellian lawyer with the zeal of the reformer and the battered old spy, but they are two faces of an unsung archetype in the English imagination: the grey blur, the creature of the system, the man who could become Stalin or Karla or Smiley. I am intrigued, and worried, by the idea that so many Thomases became key Tudor players because no-one could remember which was which. Anonymity is a weapon in the hands of clever men.

We are introduced to both Smiley and Cromwell in shots that have them to the side, the men who in another movie would be functionaries, extras, the men who hand the clipboard to the hero. They are at the right hand of their master and apparent focus of the scene: John Hurt's Control and Jonathan Pryce's Wolsey. They are immensely loyal to the point of sentimentality to both, a pathetic father figure for men well past their middle-age for whom the system is a better family than they ever had themselves. Neither say much or emote much. Their words are careful, slow, with only the occasional bite of wit coming through to hint at the whirring machinery behind the eyes.

Drama, for me, is defined as not knowing what is going to happen next. The reason these characters make for such good drama is that they hide so much that they could be capable of anything. Even for those who know the Le Carre novel or know what became of Cromwell, the idea that Smiley might suddenly lash out from that cage of a face or Cromwell might express a human desire at any moment keeps you on your toes. It's like watching an action scene on someone's face. The tension is not in the plot, for in both books the plot is too close to reality to be sensational, but in when and how these men will move when they choose to.

It is only actors of the absolute first rank who can firstly succeed in making silence and greyness fascinating, and secondly succeed in convincing an executive that audiences will be enraptured by it. It is for this reason we see so few heroes as lugubrious as Oldman and Rylance (it's worth remembering that Rylance is almost exclusively a theatre man unable to count on the small gesture while Oldman is capable of this) and they are clearly revelling in their rare opportunity to dial things down.

The moment at the end of the most recent episode of Wolf Hall when Cromwell responds to a wish for God to wreak revenge on Boleyn and her cronies with "no need to trouble God - I'll take it in hand" is stunning TV precisely because the audience have been waiting so long for this sad-eyed man to reveal that hand. And Oldman's Smiley too has only a couple of moments where he properly emotes - one when he's drunk and imagining his nemesis Karla, and another one that stays with me most, for some reason. When he finally has the mole imprisoned and at his mercy, the man who stole his wife away, who drove his adopted father Control to his death, who betrayed everything Smiley believes in, Smiley still refuses to show anything. And then, in retort to Bill Haydon's protest that he isn't Karla's "office boy", Smiley raises his voice, just a little: "What are you then, Bill?" Why this line reverberates around my head I don't know. But the rage of the quiet man is something awful and awesome to behold.

As with Cromwell's threat of revenge, isn't there something terrifying about the idea that the little grey man who stands in the corner of the room and takes notes or offers the odd point to his superior - that that man is plotting to destroy you? It is the snake in the grass, the unseen terror in the dark woods. Those who keep their eyes grey are to be feared. And both Cromwell the historical figure and Smiley the fictional one are terrifically good at their jobs. Are they good or bad people? Smiley and Karla work for different systems, but are mirrors of each other. Cromwell's reputation shifts depending on who's doing the telling. And Stalin killed millions. Could any of these men have become the others? We cannot know, because we have so little to read. And that's why they are scary, impressive, and make for such good drama.

I like the fact that Straughan has found the strands linking these little grey Englishmen. As I keep saying, the memory of England is poor, our Empire conquered by accident and never properly justified, mainly due to the work of the Smileys and Cromwells, not the slightly befuddled inbred aristocrats who line Whitehall in bronze. Our greatness, if you want to call it that, is drawn in a series of grey blurs: cunning merchants, conniving lawyers who can outmanoeuvre Imperial China, and civil servants who had the foresight to build education systems to teach locals why their subservient state was just. These men do not make morally great heroes. But they do make good heroes for television. Let us have more of them.

NB: I now remember that the other Peter, Kosminsky, also directed Rylance as a slightly more heroic grey blur, weapons inspector David Kelly. A man who found himself in the history books almost by accident, but no less tenacious and impressive for that.

Dark Memories

Tomorrow marks the end of Germany: Memories of a Nation at the British Museum, an exhibition so good it has proved in my mind that a well-curated museum can do more for your understanding than reading three history books on the same subject. I say "well curated" because the exhibition was also the first in which I can remember noticing the skill of the curator in the same way you would note the skill of a playwright or painter; truly Neil MacGregor is a master of his craft and deserves every honour and book sale bestowed on him. Much as with his Radio 4 series to go with it, his ability to draw entire stories from objects is the work of a supreme raconteur: the implications behind the Jewish prayer bag emblazoned with the imperial eagle of the Hapsburgs or the threatening, bizarre figure of Bismarck as a blacksmith at the forge.

I wanted to write something about the series and the exhibition, but there's not a lot for me to add, other than my newfound conviction that Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach may be the artistic pairing best placed to sum up the 20th century for future generations. I was interested, however, to note that there was a gap in the exhibition possibly there deliberately, possibly because it is impossible to fill. It is the gap between the dark and light sides of German history, and it occurs about two thirds of the way through the exhibition. From the sunny all-encompassing optimism of Goethe's world to the technical achievements of golden mechanical galleons and chronometers, Germany for much of this story has a forward thinking energy and verve quite intoxicating to behold. It's there in that prayer bag and in the Hebrew on coins and decorations - a reminder that many Jews felt safer in Germany than anywhere else in Europe.

The turn towards darkness is of course dominated by the Nazis, but intelligently MacGregor ensures it isn't a purely chronological shift - the pain of the First World War's famine is mixed in with it, and almost small enough to miss alongside that a print from the Thirty Years' War of a mass lynching, a cold reminder that the horrors of 20th Century Germany were history rhyming. Yet the Thirty Years' War is something quite unusual in the history of an Empire that for all its absurdities often proved a more peaceful and stable arrangement than its European contemporaries. I took to wonder whether German history was brighter than I often imagine it. Long periods of urban civic life whether in the Hanseatic league or the university towns along the rivers, unencumbered by imperial intervention, come across as pretty nice places to live if your alternative is, say, Hundred Years War France or Hungary under the Ottomans.

And yet, and yet, the gates of Buchenwald loom heavy over the whole thing. Are there hints of what will come in the insecurity and identity crises of the 18th and 19th centuries, the attempt to find a true "German"ness? Historians have been attempting to explain the Holocaust almost since the last oven went cold, and I don't claim that thee exhibition gives a new insight into it. But going by MacGregor's telling of the country's history, there is no slow slide into darkness and barbarism, no slowly building catastrophe, no attempt to use the power of hindsight to pick out the seeds of the slaughter in medieval or Enlightenment or Romantic thought. There is just that implicit warning that barbarism can come out of nowhere, at any time, to a free people who can write the St Matthew Passion with their heads and build moving golden galleons with their hands.

Je Suis Charlie, Et Ma Femme Aussi

A riddle: how many times must you poke a Muslim before he becomes used to it? 

I have no answer to that one, actually. Neither do any of the papers and tweeters continuing to share the images of Muhammed from this week's Charlie Hebdo, which is a shame because it is the question they all implicitly ask with their "defiance".

My original response to the attacks was that the cartoons should be reposted as many times as humanly possible on the basis that Islamists wouldn't be able to kill everyone who shared these drawings and therefore might at some point get tired of trying to do so. Similarly to when Twitter users reposted a Twitter joke that got a man convicted with the hashtag #iamspartacus in order to point out that since the law couldn't prosecute everyone who did it, the conviction was by definition unjust, I felt that maximum visibility of the cartoons would point out to Islamists that any attempt at redress was pointless.

The problem is that basically one of my ignorance, yet again. I don't hold anything sacred myself, though my empathy can just about stretch to, say, imagining being a black person seeing a caricature of black people as monkeys and feeling offended by that. To make that leap I can draw on times when I have felt belittled myself, and imagine what it is like to feel my very personhood diminished by association with a caricature - in that case I can understand the pain caused. But I have no reference point at all for the pain felt by Muslims when they see the prophet depicted.

They tell us they feel that pain and we must believe them. But because I can't empathise, just believing them isn't really enough. I can nod along and say we must respect their sensitivities, but deep down nothing will stop the voice saying it's a bloody picture! A picture, incidentally, that hasn't even been forbidden throughout Muslim history! I don't deep down believe the picture can be offensive, and yet clearly it is painful to some people, so who am I to say whether we should or shouldn't post the image?

Because to a large degree I am relying on my own flawed empathy, I assume that once Muslims have seen enough Muhammeds they must get used to it, like getting used to insect bites on holiday. After all, it's not like it can hurt that much. The effort involved in getting angry every time someone publicly mocks the prophet will just exhaust them, and after getting slapped around the face seventy times seven, they'll throw up their hands and forgive.

Obviously, understanding that this course of action will leave Muslims feeling humiliated and marginalised, we would need to add some kind of "we love you really" disclaimer to it all. I'm sure they'll understand that if they just stopped being offended, we'd stop it and we could all be friends. 

Once again I am reminded of the following exchange from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:  

Galahad: Let us taunt [the killer rabbit]. It may become so cross that it will make a mistake.

Arthur: Like what?

The progressive response to just enrage conservative forces until they either make an error or give up is always tempting, but rarely good strategy. The wells of rage and resentment are deep, and self-replenishing. It is quite possibly the Muslim citizens of the west simply get more and more angry, which solves no one's problem. A considerably more complex solution is required than just thumbing our noses, even if Spartacusing is legitimate as far as it goes.

In any case, whether liberals provoke them or not, Muslims are going to have to get used to having their faith routinely insulted. The Terry Jones fiasco of 2012 demonstrates that there's not much of a way of stopping racists and nutjobs from insulting the religion in a free society, nor much of way of explaining to mobs around the world the difference between a citizen doing it and the state endorsing it. Since Muslims live in a world where technology if not states allow for anyone to say anything, they physically can't stop these insults from happening. The target is too massive. Arabs don't have the energy to riot every time someone somewhere does or says something Islamophobic, and the quicker they realise that the quicker they can come up with a new less violent strategy of redress. 

Whatever the intentions behind retweeting or reprinting these cartoons, it may well be that repeated viewings of offensive material are the surest way to smooth Islam's titanic collision with modernity in all its messy and confusing glory.

The Failure Of Satire

We've seen a bunch of paeans in the wake of Paris to the wonder of satire  in western culture, to how we have always responded so bravely to evil by mocking it. Our hero is Charlie Chaplin for doing the globe dance in The Great Dictator. But every hero we are bringing forward today: Voltaire, or Chaplin, or Twain - they are all useless in the face of yesterday's carnage. They all mocked the power structure in their own societies. Monty Python could mock Christianity because they understood it. They had all been to schools where the religion was drummed into them.

But in Holy Flying Circus, the post-modern docudrama on the reaction to Life of Brian, the following scene makes a very important point:

However much the Daily Mail may moan, there is a reason we don't satirise Islam. We don't know anything about it.


Since Voltaire is being brought up so much, what would he have done today? He would have been as powerless as the rest of us. His enemy was Christianity and monarchy, and Chaplin's enemy was fascism, and Private Eye's enemy is government. All things we understand, come from our own cultural context, and have power over us.

The reason Charlie Hebdo wasn't funny enough was simply because it broke the cardinal rule of comedy: don't punch down. Muslims are poor and dispossessed in France, and in insulting their prophet they come across racist, ignorant bullies. The problem is that Islam is also powerful and for that reason deserves mockery. But we are not the ones to do it, because it will never be clear enough just where our fury comes from whether bigotry or righteousness, and that doubt is enough to fatally wound well-delivered satire.

The horror we must now face is that our greatest strength as a civilisation, our boisterous open free-for-all of irreverence, is completely useless against the greatest threat to liberalism in the world today (though I would say there is a tight contest between wealth inequality and Salafism for that title). And there is very little in the recent history of global Islam to suggest that such a culture of righteous mockery will emerge from within it, although there is perhaps more further back in history to give us some hope on that front.

We like to say that the gunmen attacked the cartoonists because they were a threat. If so, they were wrong. Western satire is no threat to Islam of any stripe. Satire only works when directed at its own culture, or it fails in its primary task of being funny. The jihadis needn't have bothered.

L'Etendard Sanglant Est Levé

It is with great regret and not a little fury that I follow a post about France and its ability to withstand endless punches by marking a genuine gut punch, not just to that indefatigable country but to all the liberal world. You could not dream up a more telling, more brutal, more slavishly, thuddingly dull response to the boisterousness of the open society than a massacre of cartoonists. Cultures that cannot stand laughter have never lasted long, for laughter bubbles out from human existence as irrepressibly and inevitably as air escaping a tyre, and those creeds that would deny it will spend their time in an endless chase of covering up this or that puncture to the point of exhaustion. That such a culture as Salafist Islam could last as long as it has is only a function of it being on the margins, forever spurned by a majority or using force to keep itself in place, forever broiling in resentment and forever doomed to stay there.

I have little else to say on the matter except that I have never felt as French or at least as European as today. Solidarity often means so little, but here I feel strangely as close to the front line as those who were murdered. They were killed for expressing opinions, and they let me live only because I was not  visibly expressing those opinions, which hardly seems a decent reason to outlive them. Part of me wants to run onto that Paris street neck bared like Cicero shouting to empty space "kill me too", since I am equally as guilty in the eyes of these killers for denying that Muhammed is the prophet of God. These cartoonists merely made that more apparent than me. Solidarity, it seems, is linked extremely closely to survivors' guilt.

One other thing. I say "front line" very carefully here. I know very little about the thinking of the Salafists or Qutbists or whatever these people can be called, but the more I learn about Islamic history the more I realise just how grand is the narrative these little shits think they're playing in. This is a grand battle played out in the shadow of the end-times, Ishmaelites fighting Israelites, the whole shebang. The whole Salafist ideology requires that the West is set up as a mighty enemy paradoxically always on the verge of collapse, our liberalism and institutions doomed to fail by their basis in man's and not God's law. As Simon Jenkins says today,

To them, western democracy is skin deep in its freedoms, while the simple disciplines of their form of Islam are more powerful, more courageous, more lasting.

They are engaged in a war we don't even recognise. ISIS garnered ridicule for promising to "march on Rome" from people who didn't understand that "Rome" has variously meant Rome, Constantinople, Vienna, or whatever the nearest bulwark of the West is at the time. And the shellshocked response this Paris attack has elicited is that of one side in a war that only the other side actually imagines is being fought. Deep in their hearts, and for all the impressive firepower deployed by the West over the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is probably a part of the jihadis thinking "Is this it?" Is this all the massed armies of Rome have to offer? Where are the mighty hordes we fought at Yarmuk and Hattin and Mohács? We're meant to be fighting an apocalyptic total war, not a bunch of half-hearted counterinsurgencies.

For them the defence of their prophet, as they see this attack, is an attempt to have us ride forth to meet them on an appropriately impressive battlefield. It must disappoint them that we simply howl in impotent rage at them, being such spoilsports as to not understand the terribly important epochal battle we're meant to be fighting. We should remember that we are essentially engaged in battle with especially vicious LARPers eternally annoyed that we don't get what elves and orcs are or why we're supposed to care about them.

How do you fight a battle where the whole battle is not getting pulled into a battle? I don't know. But we cannot be brought to violence by all this. We must laugh at them and mock them and show them that if they want to slaughter people who mock their religion they're going to have quite a heavy workload ahead. But we must not fight. We must dance around their rage and make them feel ever more stupid, pathetic and closer to what they must on some level know themselves to be - overgrown children playing Cowboys and Indians with inappropriately deadly weaponry.

Tant Pis

Via Krugman, this chart points out just how bad the UK has had it under Osborne's economic stewardship. Looking forward to May, I am reminded of the dictum that the perfect election strategy is to deliberately collapse the economy for four years so when growth comes in the fifth you can point to your resounding success. Never mind. It's how France has fared that really interests me here.

Yes, France seems have done surprisingly well from the 2007 basepoint, despite being shackled to a horrible currency and suffering the innumerable problems of high unemployment, stagnant labour market, low competitiveness and everything else traditional for France. That's sort of my point, really. Even under a very poor leader with a weak political system and terrible economic times, France seems congenitally incapable of actually going into decline. God knows it's been threatening to since at least the time of Louis XIV.

If you quickly skim over the history of France, it can at times seem to be the history of permanent crisis. Even the period from 1780-1815 on its own should have been capable of knocking the country out of the running for Great Power status. Bankruptcy, famine, revolution, civil war, political turmoil, fighting absolutely everyone else on the continent for twenty years and losing most of your money and manpower in the process should put paid to a country. Later years involve being devastated by Germany three times in a row, a political system that could very rarely be called stable, expensive colonial wars, and on and on. And yet after seemingly being on the edge of terminal decline for pretty much two centuries, here they still are. Never was Adam Smith's "much ruin in a nation" quip more apt than for France.

How has France managed to be simultaneously the butt of jokes about efficiency and ability and more resilient than any other country? There are plenty of economic arguments to be made about what underpins the endless resurgence, I'm sure, although I have a strong feeling that the economic shackling to Germany postwar has had a curious effect of downplaying French success: that French corporations tend to be well-run and have high productivity rates, for example, is overshadowed by the more cliché-friendly if no less accurate similar observation about German ones.

As 2015 begins I am strangely sanguine about the future of Europe if only because the French experience proves that morale very rarely has an impact on the long-term prospects anyway. France, despite pessimism, sclerotic institutions, incompetence and instability has continued to win at history in the long term. I would be quite happy if the future of a united Europe was merely a rolling barrage of disaster, since that seems to have served one of its largest countries pretty well.