Could the Jews have shot their way out of the Holocaust? Or, Ben Carson and self-caricature in politics.

When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, Tom Lehrer announced that he would give up singing satirical songs. In a world in which that could happen, he felt there was no longer any place for satire.

Well, it’s curious to discover that things could decline still further from that low point. The US is once again providing us with a wonderful new political spectacle.

The front runner for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party – that’s the party of Abraham Lincoln, mind – is a man who prides himself on having dragged himself up by the bootstraps from colossal wealth to even more colossal wealth. Donald Trump is one of those characters who like to throw the abusive comments out there, and then apologise for any offence they may have caused, but in such a way as to suggest that their targets (in Trump’s case, principally women) are themselves at fault for lack of a sense of humour.

Behind him, in second place for the nomination, is Ben Carson. It’s a commonplace to describe something as not being brain surgery, as a way of saying that there’s nothing more complex or requiring more intelligence. Carson gives the lie to that facile notion. He’s a neurosurgeon but seems to show that either you can operate on brains without having huge capacity in your own, or having used up so much of your brain for the surgery, you have too little left for politics.

Ben Carson: proof that even if you operate on brains,
you don't necessarily make great use of your own

I suppose the clue was provided by Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted about Carson “what about a real black president who can properly address the racial divide?” Ah, yes. Carson is a real black, unlike the present occupant of the White House.

Murdoch has since said he was sorry for the tweet, proving that Trump isn’t the only exponent of the late, empty apology. 

In any case, if Murdoch likes Carson, that’s probably enough to make his candidacy deeply suspect. Carson has helped us out, anyway, and put the question beyond all doubt. First of all, we had his comment that no Muslim should run for President because Islam is inconsistent with the US Constitution. The US Constitution was written by men such as Madison and Jefferson for whom few principles mattered as much as completely equal rights between religions. Perhaps Carson hadn’t found the time to work much on the Constitution, between reading the medical journals.

No comment went so far, however, in proving the nature of the man than his crass comment, that had there not been gun control in Germany, the Jews might have been able to prevent the Holocaust happening. This is linked to the strange reasoning that the huge numbers of guns available in the US keeps people safe, against all the evidence (for example in 45 school shootings this year alone) that they put huge numbers at serious risk.

Even without that illogic, the Carson comment is based on extraordinary ignorance. There was resistance by Jews during the Holocaust, even armed resistance, most notably in the Warsaw Ghetto. And how did that work out? Inevitably, civilians – even with guns – were no match for a trained army with heavy weapons. Had the Russians intervened to support them, they might have won, but the Red Army stood still and waited while the Wehrmacht polished off the Jewish resistance. The mere possession of guns is far from enough.

Still. One wouldn’t expect Carson to know that. He belongs to the Tom Lehrer school of politicians or institutions that satirise themselves. Except that in his case, he’s more of a caricature than a satire.

VW, News UK, Barclays Bank: ignorance isn't cheap

On 3 July 2012, we learned that Bob Diamond had stepped down from his position as Chief Executive of Barclays Banks. The Bank was beset by scandal, specifically charges that it had rigged the London interbank lending rate LIBOR.

A week later, we learned that he had generously waived his right to some £20 million of bonus payments, so he would be leaving with the pittance of a year’s salary, amounting to £2 million. That would barely cover the pay of 195 people on minimum wage, such as the cleaners who made sure that he had a physically clean environment to work in, however morally polluted it might have been.

Diamond made it clear that he knew absolutely nothing about the LIBOR rigging.

In 2002, the voicemail of a missing thirteen-year old schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, was hacked by journalists working for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Because they were listened to, messages on the voicemail were automatically deleted, giving Milly’s parents the hope that she might have deleted them herself and therefore still be alive, when in fact she had already been murdered.

In July 2014, Rebekah Brooks, editor of the News of the World at the time Milly Dowler’s and great many others’ phones were hacked, was cleared of all charges arising from the criminal activity. She claimed that she knew nothing of the practice, although she was editor at the time it happened.

Despite her blessed ignorance, Rebekah Brooks had to suffer the indignity of seeing the closure of the newspaper that she edited while it was hacking phones. She also had to step down as Chief Executive of News International, the representative on Earth, or at least in Britain, of the equally blessed Rupert. In consolation, all she could turn to was the £10.8 million payoff that Murdoch’s organisation gave her. That’s quite a long way short of what 1000 workers on minimum wage might make in a year.

Fortunately, however, the Sun on Sunday has filled the gap left by the loss of the News of the World. And, equally fortunately, we heard just this month that Rebekah herself was to be appointed as Chief Executive of News U.K., as News International is now known. It seems that the industry she graced for so many years is not to be deprived of her special skills any longer.

VW: a dirtier story than we'd been led to believe

On 23 September this year, the then Chief Executive of Volkswagen, Martin Winterkorn, stood down from his post, following the scandal over emissions test rigging. That took the form of fitting special software on the emissions monitoring system of diesel VW cars, so that it could detect when tests were being carried out, and run emission control systems that were turned off in normal driving.

He went despite claiming that he had absolutely no knowledge of the fraud. He was paid a little more than 15 million euros last year. That’s the equivalent of around 850 German workers on minimum wage.

What do these cases all have in common? They involve people who took massive salaries. Such payments are generally justified by the responsibility accepted by the senior executives who are paid that much. Responsibility, some might feel, requires an understanding of the organisation these people lead. But that’s the other point all three have in common: on their own admission – claim, actually – they had no knowledge at all of the wrongdoing in their teams.

Still. Who are we to question whether our major enterprises are making any rational link, between the remuneration they offer their top people, and their competence?

Tony Blair: place in history, place in soap opera

Few Prime Ministers can have been as preoccupied with their place in history as Tony Blair. 

Sadly, he’s rather torn that one. He still thinks that history will exonerate him, but then I suppose we all need our comforting illusions just to get through life. My view? His name will be as indissolubly linked to catastrophe in Iraq as Anthony Eden’s is with debacle in Suez.

Still, if an honourable place in history is rather beyond him these days, at least he can aspire to a significant supporting role in soap opera.

Let’s set the scene. For over a decade and a half, Blair’s been a close friend of Rupert Murdoch, the Berlusconi of the English-speaking world. People in Murdoch’s circle like to put it about that he more or less put Blair into office, and the two of them pretty well ran Britain together for the best part of a decade. Sadly, rather a lot of us think that picture wasn’t terribly far from the truth.

Even after he left office, Tony remained close to Rupe. Tony even became godfather to Grace, one of Murdoch’s daughters by his then wife, Wendi Deng. The baptism took place in the river Jordan, as though Murdoch (or possibly Blair) was a kind of latter-day John the Baptist and Grace, or possibly her sister Chloe, baptised at the same time, was the Messiah returned in female form.

Good taste of the kind we’re well used to from Murdoch’s papers.

Within his media empire, Murdoch was in the meanwhile promoting the career of one of his finest editors, Rebekah Brooks, who eventually became Chief Executive of his News International corporation.

When David Cameron became Prime Minister, he decided to appoint a former BBC journalist, Guto Harri, as his Communications Chief at Downing Street. When Brooks learned that this was about to happen, she rang Cameron and told him that he should do no such thing, but appoint Andy Coulson instead. Coulson had been her successor as editor of the News of the World.

Cameron in those days thought that ‘lol’ meant ‘lots of love’ and used to text Brooks with ‘lol’ as his sign off. All that love – he could hardly deny her wish to see Coulson in the Downing Street role, and he was duly appointed.

Sadly, the News of the World, the paper that loved to break scandals about other people was about to face its own: the accusation that it had been hacking the phones of celebrities and victims of crime to feed its ravenous craving for sensational, or salacious, news. The paper eventually closed and both Brooks and Coulson were arrested, Coulson having to resign from the post Brooks had arranged for him to be given.

And Blair? Well, just before Brooks was arrested he apparently gave her advice to stand firm and tough things out. So she had the incumbent Prime Minister and an illustrious former one as close and personal friends. She must have taken comfort from such protection.

Today, though, she’s had to take the stand in her own trial, and what emerged? That she had a ‘car crash’ of a private life, as her marriage to actor Ross Kemp fell apart. Among other things, this involved ‘periods of intimacy’ with the very Andy Coulson she’d done so much to promote. Not an affair, you understand – just intimacy. 

Rebekah and Andy
Good friends, good colleagues and periods of intimacy

See what I mean about soap opera? The femme fatale with two powerful men at her beck and call, and working for a third, arguably more powerful than either of the others. She’s in a failing marriage with a celebrity. She seeks consolation with a subordinate whose success she promotes. It’s the first season or two of – what shall we call it? Perhaps We Make the News.

But, I hear you cry, what about Blair in all this? Surely he has only a walk-on part, not a major supporting role as you claim.

Not so. For as in all successful soap operas, season 2 has seen new plot lines added. Now it seems that Murdoch and Blair are themselves involved in what looks, on the surface, like another love triangle. It’s around that Wendi Deng, mother of Tony’s goddaughter Grace.

Bright and feisty, she intervened in defence of her husband when he was attacked with a cream pie within the hallowed precincts of the Palace of Westminster. She was there even before the security guards whose job it was to ensure – well security. Tough lady.

It seems she has a softer side too.

‘Oh shit, oh shit, whatever why I’m so missing Tony … he has such a good, body and really, really good legs …’ she wrote on one occasion, and it’s hard to deny the sentiment even if one might question the English. 

Wendi, Rupe and Tony. The love triangle for season 3?

Did they have an affair, or even ‘periods of intimacy’? Who knows. It seems that Murdoch thinks so, and to justify his divorce, latched onto the times Blair and Deng spent alone together in his house – his house, just imagine – while Rupe was away. It seems Tony can’t get Rupe to take his calls any more and has given up trying.

Well, there’s plenty of smoke around, and who knows what fire is smouldering away underneath it? Sounds like a great theme to explore in season 3 of We Make The News.

You might say it’s a bit grubby, but then so was the whole Iraq affair. And at least the soap opera’s unlikely to leave some hundreds of thousands of civilian dead in a devastated nation.

Unlike the history.

Time for the best witches

Had a great e-mail a couple of days ago, from a friend who had a generous, warm-hearted and much-appreciated New Year message for us. 

But the subject line was ‘Best witches for 2014’.

Now this is obviously just another case of the wonderful, mysterious workings of predictive text or auto-correction.

It created a problem for the woman who texted her boyfriend, ‘Screw the gym! I'm getting pregnant tonight!' He replied that they ought to discuss the matter first. She had to explain that her actual intention was to get some Pringles for the evening.

Pringles: may make you fat if taken instead of the gym,
but they don't usually lead to childbirth

Equally, the text message ‘I’m going to stay home and eat a slave’ didn’t refer to a return to one of the darkest periods of our history, abducting Africans from their homes to be transported in bondage to the Americas, and compounding the horror with cannibalism, but merely to a desire to stay home and have a salad.

Nor was it best to reply to text question ‘Do I look like a cow?’ with the answer ‘Moo’, especially if what was meant was ‘Noooooo’.

Still, it struck me that some good witches wouldn’t go at all amiss in 2014. After all, we’ve had plenty of bad ones in the past. Last year, Maggie Thatcher passed away and a humorous if slightly malicious group of her opponents set out to organise sufficient downloads of the song ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ from The Wizard of Oz, to make it to number one in the charts. And came damn close...

Not all the bad witches have been female. One thinks of Tony Blair, looking us all in they eye and telling us he was a fundamentally straight sort of guy, and then contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on the basis of false (if not falsified) intelligence. Or of Rupert Murdoch, casting his spells and weaving his webs of deceit, through control of more and more of the communications media.

So some of the best witches, or even just some better ones, would be most welcome in 2014. Perhaps Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg would be a good move. They’re a bit infuriating, wandering around sticking their noses into anything they choose without asking whether it’s even their business, but they’re always well-intentioned and the results are usually pretty good.

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg
Not always welcome but they generally do some

Our governments are just as infuriating when it comes to interfering in things where they’re not needed – such as gay relationships or abortion rights – and their intentions wouldn’t usually stand much scrutiny, while the results are generally mediocre to lousy.

Best witches for 2014? Yes, I’d be in favour. So let me pass on my friend’s best wishes, and hope you all enjoy the very best of witches in the the coming year.

Murdoch: time to cut him some slack

Hasn’t Rupert Murdoch suffered enough? Is it time to show some compassion?

Everyone seems to have a knife into the poor fellow these days (you understand that I’m using the word ‘poor’ in a purely metaphorical sense)

My view: it’s time to stop. He’s had to withdraw his bid to buy the whole of satellite broadcaster BSkyB and with it his ambition to go from being a baleful influence in British broadcasting to becoming a veritable Sauron (OK, OK, Voldemort for the younger generation). That’s a hell of a blow and I say it’s time for decent Englishmen to stop kicking him. We just don’t do that sort of thing to a man who’s down.

Instead we should be offering him encouragement.  

Personally, I’d like to encourage him to enjoy the extended rest his long labours have surely earned him. Yes, Rupe, it’s time to get on with your retirement. In fact, why not see if you can’t share it with the only other man who can hold a light to you when it comes to lifetime achievement, that other great media mogul and present Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi?

You should retire together. Why, that would mean that a stroke you'd be immeasurably benefitting not just one counrty but two. At least.

Perfect company for each other and ripe for retirement

You could while away the lengthening evenings over a good bottle or two and have a laugh about all the people who made the mistake of trying to get in your way. I see the two of you doing that in some idyllic setting – I understand that Silvio has a lovely place, just right for the purpose, on the island of Sardinia. And it’s not just the spot that’s superb, I’m told that he’s a dab hand at making sure the entertainment leaves nothing to be desired. Or to the imagination.

What’s more, if a few Italian magistrates have their way, Silvio may not be needing to provide his own accommodation for too much longer. In that case, Rupe could have it to himself.

Of course, it’s true that Murdoch has his own minor issues to sort out with the law. But hey, let’s take these things one step at a time. Tomorrow can look after tomorrow’s problems – you know, sufficient unto the day and all that stuff.

I shouldn’t let the prospect of a judicial enquiry in Britain put you off at all from getting on with your retirement. My advice to you is get on with it just as soon as you can - it can't come a moment too soon.

An appeal - and an afterthought on Bin Laden

For a long time, I thought it was unbelievably difficult to write a novel. But now I’ve written three, it seems to me that it takes a lot of time and some persistence, but it’s not that hard. I don’t say it’s easy to write a good novel, and certainly one of my three needs such heavy rewriting that it may never be worth tackling at all, while the jury’s still out on the other two. But just getting the words on the page is less hard than I thought.

Much more difficult, it seemed to me, was getting a novel published and then winning some sales. But what I hadn’t thought about was just how difficult it was even to get a publisher’s attention. It’s like that moment in Sartre’s Roads to Freedom when French prisoners of war clamour for the bread the German guards throw them, and fight each other for it. The admirable character, the one we’d doubtless all hope to emulate, is the one who refuses to join the scramble.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I like the idea of going that hungry.

So it is with the 4000 or so of us who’ve put novels up on the ‘Authonomy’ website. You have to get your book to climb up to the top 5. Harper Collins have promised to review (not, I stress to publish) only that number. Like Sartre’s prisoners of war, we’re all therefore clamouring for notice. To be honest, to push the analogy a bit further, fighting for bread might not be enough – we’d have to borrow a guard’s machine gun and mow down our fellow captives.

Within Authonomy, each of us chooses up to five titles that we can ‘back’ by placing them on our virtual ‘bookshelves’. The more bookshelves a book appears on and the longer it stays on them, the further it climbs. There’s a lot of bartering – ‘I’ll put you on mine if you put me on yours’. I’m trying to be a bit more like the Sartre character, and only put a book on my bookshelf if I think it’s worth reading, though I have to confess that one of my two is there because I mistook ‘back’ (the book) for ‘back’ (to the previous page). It’s still there (for now) because I didn’t have the heart to remove it though I don’t really like it.

I’m taking my time over my other three choices, reading passages here and there until I find titles I think deserve support.

Would get by better with a little help from my friends

Meanwhile, what of my own Good Company? It may be a drawback that I chose to give it the form of letters (OK, I’ve called them ‘e-mails’ to be more contemporary, but it’s basically the same thing). I chose that form because I write letters with some fluency and ease. Unfortunately, that kind of epistolary novel was popular in the eighteenth century but may not be so appropriate to the twenty-first. The kindest comment I’ve had on Authonomy was from someone who said she’d love to receive letters like mine, though it may be significant that she didn’t actually back the book.

So far, Good Company has done reasonably well, climibing the rankings in just over a month from 4179 to 946. It’s great to be in the top 1000, but that does leave the small matter of 941 further places to climb. It feels to me as though the book needs a bit more support.

So do I get down in the mud and claw at my fellow prisoners with the rest of them? I’d prefer to find a compromise which avoids swallowing quite that much pride. A sensible compromise might be to turn to friends for help. And aren’t the readers of this blog my friends?

So this is my appeal to any of you who can spare the time, to:

• Logon to www.authonomy.com
• Register (you don’t have to use your real name)
• Navigate through to “David Beeson” 
• Read as much or as little of Good Company as you want
• Back it, please, if you think it deserves a review by Harper Collins.

And to those who find the time to do that – why, many thanks.

Unrelated postscript

Back here in Britain, The Sun, a so-called newspaper belonging to that noted philanthropist Rupert Murdoch, carries a headline today:

 

  Bin Laden unarmed – just like his 9/11 and 7/7 victims

 

Let’s get this straight, I think the world’s a better place for no longer containing Bin Laden and I applaud the US operation that rid us of him. On the other hand, I feel less good about the enthusiastic celebrations the event triggered – death may be a cause for relief, when it’s that of a truly heinous criminal, but joy always seems inappropriate.

 

As for The Sun’s headline, it implies that the behaviour of terrorists should be a benchmark for us all.

 

Am I alone in feeling that this sets the bar just a tad low?

The saints of the football pitch

Some character called Wayne Rooney has recently been in the news a bit in this country. His is one of those names which, annoyingly, is vaguely familiar, that you feel you ought to recognise, despite the suspicion that its owner doesn't deserve to be hauled out of obscurity – you know, like Sarah Palin or Victoria Beckham, well-known without having done anything useful.

Then it came to me. Rooney is the footballer who gave us his autobiography when he was about twenty. He didn't actually write it all himself, of course, since many of the words had multiple syllables. At that age, getting out of nappies is still a major event, so you can imagine how gripping the 300 odd pages are.

He’s been talked about these last few days because he used foul language to a cameraman from Sky TV. The only surprising thing about this is that anyone's surprised. Sky TV belongs to the international philanthropist, Rupert Murdoch, so even thinking about it without swearing is hard. 

Rooney showing his rigid adherence to the best of good manners

It’s true that Rooney had just scored his third goal in a match between his side, Manchester United, and struggling West Ham (theme tune, ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’. Presumably their fans were blowing raspberries on the night). He’s employed as a striker and, in my limited understanding of football, this means that he’s supposed to score goals, he’s paid to score goals, but perhaps he just hasn’t got that used to doing his job yet so it makes him excitable when he does.

The Football Association is apparently most upset with him and is taking disciplinary action.

Can they be serious? Do they think that swearing at a cameraman is going to bring football into ill-repute? What reputation do they think football already enjoys?

There may be people out there who think that football is run and played by a bunch of saints. That the game is a stranger to bad language or other forms of unsuitable behaviour, including subservience to big money, corrupt practices and self-obsession. That it is played by individuals dedicated to athletic excellence and managed by people exclusively concerned with the entertainment and edification of the public.

But presumably they live on a planet unknown to the rest of us, where the only other inhabitants are the senior exeuctives of the football authorities.