14 July, a time of celebration. Maybe tinged with foreboding

There are falsehoods that communicate great truths.

It is almost certainly untrue that Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, when told that the people of Paris had no bread, replied ‘qu’ils mangent de la brioche’ (which we usually translate as ‘let them eat cake’, though brioche works much better as just the kind of thing a well-bred queen might choose to partake of with her friends over a coffee in the morning).

She probably didn’t say ‘let them eat cake’. 

But she was hardly a benchmark for empathy

However untrue, the story reflects an attitude of mind that pervaded the French society of which Marie-Antoinette was such a jewel. Noblewomen, who wouldn’t have shown an ankle to a man of their own class, found it easy to bath in front of their servants, female or male, because domestics were barely human and it didn’t matter if they saw the ladies naked. 

Of the three estates, clergy, nobles and ‘third estate’ (commoners), only the third paid tax. And with the government desperately in debt, the burden of tax grew unbearable until in the end the long-delayed explosion took place. The people of France took to the streets and rounded on its masters and tormentors.

That’s the event celebrated in France today, 14 July, when the Paris mob sacked the notorious Bastille prison and released the handful of prisoners it contained while butchering its governor. The butchery continued and intensified for several years, degenerating into a reign of terror in which many of its revolutionaries were themselves sent to the guillotine. Ultimately, a reaction set in, leading to the execution in their turn of the terror leaders Robespierre and St Just themselves.

The reactionary governments struggled to achieve stability in the face of military action from abroad. Inevitably, France strove fiercely to build itself the army it needed for its defence and, attack being the best form of defence, to take the war to her enemies. Out of this effort there emerged a military strong man, Napoleon, who eventually took power in his own name, and the revolution that had been launched against the despotic power of a king and nobility, produced an Empire led by a single autocrat dependent on a war machine and in constant pursuit of a new military adventure to fund the one before.

In the end, the revolution took Europe through twenty years of war with military deaths of around 2.5 to 3.5 million and civilian deaths, even more difficult to calculate, of 750,000 to 3 million. A long and bloody agony, and all because the old regime in France couldn’t find a way to adapt to modern circumstances and the need to look after its people.

Doesn’t bode well for Syria and Egypt today, does it? Regimes that won’t give up power, that won’t meet any of the aspirations of their peoples, that ultimately rely on the brute power of the military to hold on to what they have.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take 20 years and a conflagration embracing the whole of that sad and troubled region. Particularly as it’s the powder keg of the world.

But if you happen to catch a glimpse of the parade down the Champs Elysées, and of the fireworks displays all round France, just remember: the events being celebrated had their roots in the refusal of power to accommodate its people. And, over two centuries later, we’re still struggling to find a way to do that.

Happy Bastille Day.

Such fun.
Though it's probably best not to think too hard about what lies behind it

Power: good at handing out the pain, maybe not so good at taking it

As the sun was rising on the morning of Saturday 4 May, a 53-year old woman stepped off the hard shoulder of the M6 motorway in the Midlands, into the path of an oncoming lorry. She was struck and died instantly.

Before she left home, she wrote notes to friends and family, one of them to a neighbour with whom she also dropped off her keys so that her cat could be rescued.

Why did Stephanie Bottrill take her life? To her son, she wrote ‘Don’t blame yourself for me ending my life. The only people to blame are the Government. I love you so much.’ She chose to die because the government had brought in the ‘bedroom tax’ which reduces housing benefit paid to claimants who have a spare room (a room ‘too many’ in the judgement of some of the wealthiest politicians in the country).

In a parliamentary debate in January, among a litany of such tales, Labour MP Steve Rotheram told the story of a constituent, Janine: ‘Her dad was thrown off sickness benefit in November after an Atos work capability assessment and was declared fit for work despite suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Six weeks later, on Christmas Day, Janine's father died.’

The government is no longer able to count the number of people who die each year after being judged fit for work: it costs too much money to find out. It might also cost too many votes. However, the generally accepted figure is that around 30 people a week are dying after having been refused incapacity benefits.

As part of the celebrations for the 400th anniversary of the King James’ Bible in 2011, David Cameron said ‘we are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so.’ Saying so is cheap, but acting as though it were so, seems to be beyond his powers. Here’s Matthew's Gospel (25:36): ‘Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.’

Funnily enough, that last bit, about prison, is particularly apt. In March this year, Bethan Tichborne, teaching assistant for disabled children, appeared in Oxford Magistrates’ Court, charged with disorderly conduct. Her offence? When David Cameron had been switching on Christmas lights in Witney, his constituency, she’d tried to climb a security barrier to approach him and protest against benefit cuts.

Bethan Tichborne,
troublemaker for reminding Christians of the plight of the poor

She claims she was beaten by his security entourage for her pains. However, it has to be said that she did shout at Cameron, telling him he had ‘blood on his hands’. This profoundly shocked the judge who heard her case: he found that her comments could ‘hardly be more insulting to anyone, whether a politician or not.’

It seems that Cameron is a sensitive soul. Not sensitive enough to want to stop harming the Janines of this world or the Stephanie Bottrills, but more than sensitive enough to need a judge to spring to his defence if someone says something nasty about him.

In other words, he’s OK about handing it out, not so good about taking it himself.

Tichborne was duly convicted of the charge and ordered to pay fines and costs amounting to £745. History does not record whether Cameron came to her, in observance of the injunction to comfort those who lie in jail, any more than he tried to clothe Stephanie or to visit Janine’s Dad.

Instead, yesterday George Osborne, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that he didn’t intend to raise taxes as part of his drive to reduce government debt. Clearly, he needs to do something because far from reducing the outstanding amount, he’s only managed to increase it over the last three years. So clearly he means to move away from his already eye-watering formula of 80% cuts and 20% tax rises, to focus even more on cuts.

So expect more Stephanies and Janines. 

The upside is that Osborne will continue to protect important people from the pain of tax increases. That’s important people like his boss Cameron, and Cameron’s friends, such as his neighbour Rebekah Brooks, now facing criminal charges over the hacking carried out in News International on her watch.

One wonders whether her judge will be as stern in applying the law as the one Tichborne faced.

Incidentally, where did I get the Stephanie Bottrill story from? My source was ‘Calum’s list’ which tries to publicise some of the cases of deaths attributable at least in part to the government’s benefits cuts.

And what was Tichborne trying to do when she was prevented approaching the Prime Minister? Why, disturbing the peace by reading Calum’s List to him. Not that it would have disturbed his peace. That good Christian wouldn’t have listened. And if he had, he wouldn’t have taken any of it in.

Neighbours from hell: the soap opera

After a hard day’s work, it can be quite relaxing to slump on the sofa and watch a soap, particularly if it’s written with wit and acted with talent.

It’s quite another matter to be caught up living in one starring our neighbour.

I’ll call her Hailey. That’s because I think it’s her name, though I’m not sure: she’s never felt it necessary to introduce herself though we’ve lived side by side for the best part of a year. Sometimes the worst part.

I admire people with a lively taste for music, particularly if that includes performance. Sadly, it’s less easy if the performance mode of choice is karaoke and the choice is made some time after midnight. And the performance only stops when the serious partying starts. And the partying stops at 10:00.

I don’t know what Hailey and her friends are on, but it must be potent stuff. Not even when I was her age could I have kept going that long unaided, and at that intensity. Impressive.

She doesn’t just sing. She and her friends enjoy lively conversation too. The subject matter, and we can tell because they’re not bashfully discreet about the tones in which they discuss this engrossing theme, seems to be procreation. At least, they do seem to keep telling each other to go forth and multiply. They also like to emphasise their statements, and it’s wonderful to need only one word to do that. That's what I call economy. So whether they’re declaring someone else’s statement to be true (occasionally), offensive (rather more often) or rubbish (the most common case), it’s always the ‘fucking’ variety of that attribute.

Fortunately, the overnight partying doesn’t happen that often – once a week or fortnight – but when it does, it’s certainly memorable. Particularly when we’re working the following day.

Hailey lives with her five-year old daughter. Quite often, a boyfriend (not the father of the daughter) comes round and they tell each other home truths – emphatically – and occasionally fling crockery at each other. At other times, the father of the daughter (not a boyfriend) comes round to take her out or drop her back. With both men, she talks a lot about fucking, to the point that I wish she’d get on and do some, if only because it might tire her out and shut her up.

We’ve met the little girl a few times too. She likes to stick her head over the back fence and chat with us if we’re in the garden. Why, she even apologised to us for her mother’s noisiness, which made her seem quite charming. Then, however, we noticed her throwing stones at a neighbour’s greenhouse, and reaching with a stick into our garden to beat cabbages or lettuces, not a treatment calculated to help them flourish. It occurred to me that I was witnessing a curious form of inheritance, entirely independent of genetics: an essentially pleasant girl rapidly turning into a pest as exasperating as her mother.

Not hard to understand why. Her father brought her home yesterday. They were chatting away happily until Hailey emerged.

’Have you got some money for my mother?’ she asked.

’Oh, shit, I forgot.’

I could hear this all through the open window through which I was enjoying our glorious weather. Or had been.

’Well, are you going to have the money in the morning?’

I wasn’t really listening, but it was as though the conversation was happening in my living room. I concluded that her ex-boyfriend still had some kind of debt to her mother and was having trouble paying it off.

’Sorry, I can’t, I won’t have the time.’

And that’s when we got the explosion. No build up, no increasingly intense warning signs, just a sudden vitriolic outburst.

’Oh, for fuck’s sake, you’re fucking hopeless,’ Hailey screamed and there was a yelp from the little girl, ‘you’ve no fucking idea, you’re a useless fuck.’

He still wasn’t saying anything, even though the last bit was obviously wrong: the little girl was there to prove it.

’Just fuck off, will you just fuck off, I don’t want you anywhere near the fucking place any more.’

There was another little protest from the girl, ignored by the mother, but then one from the father, which wasn’t.

’Just fucking shutup. Just fucking fuck off. And never fucking come back.’

And there I heard a most odd noise, like the sound of an open hand on flesh. Was she slapping him round the face? I’ll never know because, though I moved over to the window, too curious about the living soap opera to ignore it any longer, she was already moving back to the house, little girl clutched by the hand, while he had run several steps down the street.

She hadn’t finished admonishing him though.

’Just fucking clear off. You make all this fucking noise in front of the neighbours. Outside my fucking house.’

That did seem unfair. He’d barely said a word. But he made up for it once she’d closed the door and he was relatively safe from further attack. He addressed a few choice apothegms at the house.

’You’ve always been a fucking bitch,’ he wittily informed her. Though he may have said ‘witch’. I hope so: we have a female dog who is infinitely superior to Hailey.

A fascinating experience all round. But the most fascinating aspect of all is that this is Luton, the home town of the anti-immigrant English Defence League. I’ve heard their supporters many times, and funnily enough they express themselves with exactly the same mastery of language, charm in expression and delicacy in accent as our neighbour and her entourage.

The EDL in Luton.
They expect us to prefer them as neighbours?

So here’s my question to them: what makes you think people like you are preferable to a few quietly spoken, courteous and hardworking arrivals from the Indian subcontinent or Eastern Europe? 

What on earth could give you that idea?

True commitment: football the Shankly way. Or Brazil's.

‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that,’ said Bill Shankly, legendary manager of Liverpool Football Club.

Bill Shankly, football legend and model of commitment

England has won the Football World Cup just once. Brazil has won it five times. That record suggests the Latin Americans have a different mindset from ours, one that corresponds rather more closely to Shankly’s. One can be forgiven for thinking they display a level of commitment usually reserved for world religions, major political movements or making large amounts of money (or are all those the same thing?)

Recent events shown the Brazilians are capable of all of that and then some.

I’ve heard of referees who take a dim view of the behaviour of certain players, and penalise them harshly in consequence. But stabbing them? Fatally, to boot? That’s really impressive.

Equally, I know that it’s easy for spectators to lose their rag with referees, demanding their expulsion (or at least that they visit the opticians). Another legendary manager, Alex Ferguson, who stood down at the end of last season from over a quarter of a century in charge at Manchester United, famously denounced refs in lurid terms on numerous occasions and was disciplined more than once in consequence.

Decapitating the ref, however, as happened to the unfortunate who stabbed the recalcitrant player? Generally, in England we like to reserve our mob decapitations for kings.

Brazil: serious enough about football even for Shankly

But, hey, the Brazilians have true commitment. The kind that makes you realise that Shankly was literally right and football is much more serious than mere life and death. Which, in this case at least, truly made it a matter of life and death. 

The results speak for themselves. Five world cups. To our one.

Try opportunism: at least it works

Opportunism always seems terribly distasteful. Unfortunately, it’s highly effective.

In Britain today we have a government that assured us, when campaigning for office, that the only way to emerge from the financial crisis was to reduce the national debt, whatever the price, to allow for growth to take off. Three years later, the only growth has been in the debt itself, though the price has been high: 300,000 more children plunged into poverty, healthcare costs climbing while resources and quality fall, education in disarray.

In those circumstances, you’d expect the opposition to be making serious gains. Instead, after having moved ahead by as much 11-13 points in the polls, itself not a comfortable cushion two years before an election, the Labour has drifted down to as low as 5-6 points recently. It looks now as though the fall has stopped and the lead is back up at around 8 eights, but that’s still low.

Against a government without either competence or compassion.

What the government has is a good sense of PR and a lot of friends in the media. That’s made it possible to pull off a remarkable propaganda stunt: they’ve persuaded too many voters that the financial crisis is the doing of the Labour Party. This is a view they hold despite the fact that Labour wasn’t in office in the US, in which most of the toxic banking took place, let alone in Ireland, Spain or Greece which were among its most badly-hit victims.

Even so the Labour leadership of the ‘Eds’, Miliband and Balls, should really be landing a few more blows on a government with so weak a track record. Which makes it disappointing to see how often the Eds seem to be on the back foot, defending their own position rather than attacking the government’s.

There are those who talk of keeping Labour’s powder dry until nearer the next election. But there’s not a lot point in having lots of dry powder if you don’t start firing it until the battle’s lost.

This is the backdrop to the latest scandal to hit Labour. The largest Trade Union, Unite, which as you’d expect is proving a major force for disunity, has been caught trying to stuff its own members into the Labour Party in Falkirk in Scotland. Those new members would have a vote in the selection of a candidate to fight the forthcoming by-election in the constituency, and Unite no doubt expects them to choose its favoured candidate.

Len McCluskey, leader of the Unite union.
A stick for the Tories to beat Labour? Or – the opposite?

It hardly made the show more savoury to discover that some of these new Labour members didn’t even know that they’d applied.

Manna from heaven for the Tories, who have leaped on the opportunity to brand Miliband as the puppet of the unions, a mere front man while real decisions are taken in unpublicised meetings of union barons behind closed doors. It doesn’t help that Miliband’s election to the leadership of the Labour Party, ahead of his brother, owed a lot to the votes of Unite delegates.

Now you might expect a counter-attack on the secret decisions that really affect our daily lives, such as those taken in the boardrooms of banks or major industries. But the Eds are no more inclined to tackle those guys than the present government is, or indeed the previous governments led by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.

So it was fascinating to read this morning’s news that Miliband is referring the shenanigans in Falkirk to the police, for investigation of possible criminality. That’s a striking move. It looks like he’s throwing down the gauntlet to Unite, biting a hand he wants to prove doesn’t feed him.

Now suddenly the talk is of his breaking the link between the Unions and Labour. That would be a historic move, since it was the Unions that set Labour up in the first place. They’re also the Party’s major source of funds. Now, while I’m not always happy about the way the Unions use the influence this buys them, I’m pretty sure that things would be a lot worse if Labour found new sources of finance from nameless billionaires, just like the Tory Party. Certainly, I can’t see how they’d long stay different from the Tories.

But I don’t really see the link being broken: there’s too much at stake. What’s more likely is some kind of showdown followed by a compromise in which the Union voice is reduced further in favour of ordinary members. That might allow Miliband to emerge looking rather stronger and more decisive than he does today.

In other words, he might finally start to look like a fighter, but not by taking on his opponents, whom he seems to have trouble confronting, but some dubious elements among his own supporters.

Which strikes me as pretty opportunist. But it worked superbly for Tony Blair: rather than concentrating his fire on the Tories, in the run up to his first election victory, he focused on repealing Clause 4 of the Labour constitution that committed the Party to nationalisation of major industries. By taking on forces within his own party, he won himself a reputation as a strong man and someone the political centre could trust. Three landslide victories testify to the success of the tactic.

Is Miliband doing the same thing? It feels a bit like it. Which is ugly but, regrettably, I find myself holding my nose and hoping he succeeds. After all, Unite’s underhand behaviours isn’t smart or helpful, and if slapping down its leader Len McCluskey is what it takes to make Labour look like a party of government again, it may be a price worth paying just to get rid of the present dismal shower.

If that sounds like opportunism, it is. And if that seems distasteful, well, as I said at the beginning, that’s what opportunism is like.

It’s almost enough to make one cynical about politics.

Friends spying on friends: as Obama says, we all do it

John Le Carré is the outstanding writer of spy novels of the Cold War, and one of his best came unbidden to my mind in the middle of the febrile, spook-filled atmosphere of the Edward Snowden scandal this week.

Peter Egan as Magnus Pym
in the excellent BBC adaptation of the Le Carré masterpiece

Do you know A Perfect Spy? If not, I can’t recommend it too warmly. To give you a small taster, it contains what must be about the most upfront pickup line you’ll ever read. A Czech interpreter, who we later discover has more to her than meets the eye – and she has plenty to meet the eye – asks the protagonist Magnus Pym:

‘You want I give you Czech lesson on Saturday?’

When he tells her that he would like that very much, she continues, severely:

‘I think we make love this time. We shall see.’

The driver of the car they are travelling in nearly takes it into a ditch.

The novel charts the progress of Pym from his childhood with his father, a professional embezzler, into a series of betrayals of increasing severity, until he gravitates into British intelligence and the greatest treason of them all.

At one point, the CIA are closing in on him and Grant Lederer, the man leading the hunt, attends a meeting with senior agency operatives at the US Embassy in London. He announces with pride that he has just had a phone call, in the Embassy, from his wife in Vienna, where she has spotted Pym’s wife being contacted by a known Czech spy.

Sadly, Lederer does not receive the congratulations he expects for this dramatic news. In the first place, involving his wife was a breach of his orders for the operation against Pym. But there's a second reason for the dissatisfaction of his superiors, which emerges at the end of the discussion. One of them asks:

‘Next question, what the hell do we tell the Brits and when and how?’

And another replies:

‘Looks like we told them already. That’s unless the Brits have given up tapping US Embassy telephone lines these days, which I tend to doubt.’

That last line came back to me as I followed the row over the latest stage in Snowden’s revelations. It seems that the US has its agents gathering intelligence on many of its ostensible allies. They spy on the French. They spy on the European Union, a dear old institution which surely has barely a secret that can’t be found out in a Brussels bar or that’s worth knowing anyway. Worst of all, they spy on the holy of holies in Europe today, the Germans. 

Everyone’s scandalised.

Obama’s response has been highly instructive. 

‘Every intelligence service, not just ours, but every European intelligence service, every Asian intelligence service, wherever there’s an intelligence service, here’s one thing they’re going to be doing: they’re going to be trying to understand the world better and what’s going on in world capitals around the world from sources that aren’t available through the New York Times or NBC News.

‘If that weren’t the case, then there would be no use for an intelligence service. And I guarantee you that in European capitals, there are people who are interested in, if not what I had for breakfast, at least what my talking points might be should I end up meeting with their leaders. That's how intelligence services operate.’

Yep. Spy agencies exist to spy. Obviously, first and foremost on their enemies but, hey, why not on their friends too? After all, a country may well be an ally, but it’s a competitor as well, and it’s always worth knowing what the competition’s up to.

So I’m sure Le Carré’s right. British intelligence must routinely bug the US Embassy – I really can’t believe they’d pass up such an opportunity.

So why all the anger? 

Some of it’s synthetic, no doubt. Some of it’s routine: you have to protest if someone’s found to have been spying on you. But I wonder if some of it’s not just plain envy. The US has such technology, and such a well-resourced intelligence community, they’re much better at spying than the others. 

Isn’t the problem that the Germans, the EU and above all the French, are just annoyed as hell to discover that US spies on them far more effectively than they can spy on the US?

Down the ages, the phrase ‘we’re all in this together’ is just the prelude to your being ripped off. Again.

I hate it when we turn human beings into secular saints. 

In these sad days, which I fear are going to be the last of Nelson Mandela’s life, I’m particularly dreading the overblown tributes we’re going to be given by people who once declared him a terrorist. Almost as bad as the hypocrisy, however, one of the worst effects of that kind of adulation is that it spreads legends that submerge the truth, making it difficult to discover the reality of the man beneath the myth. And yet the man is always more interesting than the saint.

This thinking was one of the main reasons I’ve tended to keep away from studies of George Washington, despite my fascination with US history. All that stuff about ‘I cannot tell a lie’ and throwing a silver dollar (none of which existed in Washington’s youth) across the Potomac (not his local river and a mile across at its nearest point to him) is just that: so much stuff.

So I’m delighted to be reading Ron Chernow’s masterly study of Washington’s life, racily entitled Washington: a life. An excellent gift from my mother. Chernow only mentions the cherry tree myth to debunk it, and doesn’t even dignify the dollar-across-the-Potomac story by mentioning it at all.

A fine biography of a remarkable man

What emerges is a rounded picture of a noteworthy man.

Let’s say at once that he wasn’t an exceptional general, whatever the legends say. He was unusually courageous, forever exposing himself to fire on the battlefield. In fact, if we did want to canonise him, we might point to the fact that he was never injured (though he did have two horses shot from under him) as evidence of something miraculous. However, a military leader needs more than personal courage, and the verdict of history is that Washington was excellent at planning an action, and successful when everything went to plan; he was however far too slow to adapt when circumstances abruptly changed.

What he did have was another quality which to me seems far more admirable. He understood that as their leader, he had to share his men’s pain. It was the custom in his time for armies to fight only in good weather (in passing, let me say I think that would be an excellent defence policy for Britain: warfare could only take place here on about ten days of the year).

In winter, armies stopped and concentrated on keeping warm. For the Continental Army led by Washington, that was no easy task. Winter after winter, they found themselves trying to shelter from bitter winds and snow, with inadequate clothing and far too little food. Why? Because Congress was practically bankrupt and the States weren’t prepared to finance it properly. So Washington was forced to sit and watch his men wasting in cold and dying of hunger, while all he could do was keep begging for funds.

It made it particularly difficult to hold any kind of force together, because many of his men were on short-term enlistments. Given the terrible conditions, which included long periods without even their pay, it was hard to persuade them to stay and fight again when the next season came round. And yet keeping the army going was all that won the war: the British could, and did, occupy American cities; they could, and did, win battles; but while they couldn’t finally destroy the Continental Army, while it survived to go on harassing them, they couldn’t win the war.

Washington lived in marginally better conditions than his men – usually in a stone house rather than in rickety, overcrowded shacks – but he was there, among them and knew their sufferings. It was that capacity for sacrifice as well as his courage that held his army together and ensured ultimately that the war would be won and the US successfully born.

For that, all Americans owe him a great debt of gratitude, which no doubt inspires the veneration felt for him to this day. However, in among the admiration, it would be well to remember a little more about the behaviour of the Americans of his time.

His armies starved in areas of rich agriculture. There was food around. It just wasn’t getting to his men. Principally, this was because too few people were prepared to dip into their pockets to finance the war. In addition, though, many of the farmers around his encampments preferred to sell their produce to the British, who paid in good, solid, hard currency than to the Congress with its rapidly devaluing credit.

And the farmers were far from alone in putting their pocket books ahead of their country. Far from it. As Washington himself saw on a visit to the capital, many were profiteering from the war, lining their pockets very nicely. And a great many others, without directly turning the war to their advantage, continued to live very comfortably off their civilian incomes, while paying lip service to a common cause to which they expected others to give their all.

The story of Washington and the Continental Army is a glorious illustration of how many of those who talk of national causes and general dedication, prefer in practice to see others make the sacrifice while they keep making the bucks.

I’ve learned to think more highly of Washington than I did before, if only because he rose above the petty self-serving attitudes of those around him, and sacrificed his own comfort to ensure his nation gained its freedom.

However, I’ve also learned again a lesson I learned a long time ago: never trust those who tell you ‘we’re all in this together.’ Like David Cameron’s  government, what they really mean is that there are bad times ahead for those least able to defend themselves: the vulnerable, the poor, the unskilled, the disabled. But they and their friends will go on doing just fine, thank you.

It’s true that there’s often no gain with no pain. Trouble is, they aren’t both felt by the same people.