Fear (Part IV)…

According to various news reports today Al-Quaida had multiple plots during 2003 to hijack aircraft in Britain, the US, Italy and Australia. Targets included Canary Wharf and Heathrow (here). Savvy to the new security measures introduced on domestic flights A-Q decided that international flights presented less of a challenge, and had various gimmickry including stun guns and bombs that they hoped to use to storm cockpits.
According to the report, in words which will no doubt send an icy chill down the spine of aviation industry executives worldwide:

"The Department of Homeland Security continues to receive information on terrorist threats to the US aviation industry and to the western aviation industry worldwide.
"But there is no recent information to suggest near-term operational planning for an aviation attack within the United States."
So that's alright then. Or is it?
After all, the thrust of the report makes clear that the threat is likely to come "less effective security screening at some foreign airports".
In some respects it's hard to know what to make of all this. The information relates to events three years ago. There has been no significant Al-Qaida attack in Europe since the Madrid train bombings (depending no what one's view of the London underground bombings and their provenance), and none in the US since 9/11. The information was garnered from a computer hard drive, as I understand it, yet in some respects it appears like back of an envelope musings, although it will be interesting to see the detail, should it be forthcoming. And what's the purpose of the exercise? There can be few people who board an international flight these days who aren't aware of the necessity to be vigilant.

The big problem here is that Al-Qaida as an international terrorist organisation has gone remarkably, and thankfully, quiescent in the past two years. That's not to say it doesn't exist, but so far no sleeper cells have manifested themselves in violent acts.

And this is puzzling, if only because as an organisation it appears to thrive on symbolic and murderous acts. Which makes one wonder just how many A-Q terrorist cells exist out there? Perhaps many, but perhaps more likely few, and with relatively little capability to act in concert at the level we saw on September 11. Perhaps the Afghanistan war by denying A-Q a logistics base (excuse the pun) undermined many possible actions it sought to take. But it's possible that the Iraq war, in a fairly ghastly irony, turned the focus of those who might well be motivated to join or imitate A-Q away from Europe and the US and towards Baghdad and environs.

A further thought. So far, and I'm aware that tomorrow or the next day's headlines might bring news that would undercut the ideas I'm expressing here, the 'imitation effect' of A-Q within Europe and the US appears to be limited.
And this leads to another problem. I can entirely accept the concept of 'asymmetric warfare', but the asymmetry appears to be such that, although a real and pressing danger exists from Islamist terror and Al-Qaida in particular, it is on a level which is – at this point – relatively containable. Those carrying out actions on behalf of A-Q or those imitating it have none of the nous or expertise of the indigenous terrorist organisations previously seen in Europe. That could change, but probably not rapidly.
This has ramifications which those in power in the US and Europe might do well to reflect upon.
I've criticised Madeleine Bunting for an overly rosy view of religion (not that she's noticed), but in one respect she's absolutely correct. Crucial to societal security in the near to medium term is a serious political engagement with the broad moderate Muslim community in both Europe and the US – which arguably has remained steadfastly moderate in the past five years or so.

Superheated talk about hi-jackings arguably detracts from the much more insidious threat from home-made explosives and suchlike, potentially alienates the very community one wishes to reach out to, and serves to exaggerate fears of acts that while possible remain unlikely.

Summer 2006: Treason Season in N. Ireland?

First the former British spook "Martin Ingram" accuses Martin McGuinness of being a spy, then UVF leader Mark Haddock gets the 50 Cent treatment after his side job as an informer is revealed. Now the INLA claims to have outed a Special Branch agent in its midst, and, in a gesture of surprising generosity considering the group's colourful history, has offered a one-week amnesty to any other spies within the organization.

This latest bit of news isn't that interesting in itself, and hardly falls outside the day-to-day skullduggery that makes Northern Ireland such an, err, eventful place. However, there is a fascinating revelation to be found in the Daily Ireland article, as the INLA claims that this alleged informer is the man behind the recent sectarian attacks on Orange halls in county Derry. The "sources close to the INLA leadership" maintain that this man has been organizing these attacks at the behest of the PSNI Special Branch.

To me, this presents two real possibilities. The first is that the INLA has expelled this man for other reasons, and has tacked on accusations of touting to discredit him among other republicans. The second is that this individual really is a spy, and that the PSNI have either been allowing sectarian tensions to escalate by not arresting him, or even encouraging such communal conflict, as the INLA claims. 

If the latter case is true, this should give serious misgivings to anyone who still believes the British security forces in N. Ireland simply want to prevent Protestant-Catholic violence. I wouldn't draw any sweeping single motivation out of this one incident, but, if these allegations are true, it lends credence to the theory that certain elements of the British state are primarily concerned with justifying their own continued existence.

Faith(s) of our Fathers…So farewell, Madeleine Bunting

Sad news yesterday to read that Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting is leaving the paper for a new job. Not just any new job either, but the somewhat prestigious new job of Director of Demos, the leftish public policy think-tank.

I've followed her columns for some now and found her one of the most consistently entertaining columnists on the paper. The problem being that she's entertaining for many of the wrong reasons….

As she modestly notes in her final column, "As a columnist I have championed particular issues – and some, I'm glad to see, are now part of a new progressive consensus of both left and right, as David Cameron takes up a politics of wellbeing and quality of working life. Soon, I hope, he and Gordon Brown will even start to talk about the care ethic – the vital principle alongside the work ethic at the heart of any society" (here).

Her future ambitions are oddly not a million miles away from the purpose of this blog, as she says "I plan to devote more attention to in my new capacity: for example, the regeneration of an intellectual grounding for centre-left politics beyond the tired managerialism and bankrupted concept of choice". So good on her.

However, her big idea in the past couple of years has been that religion should be much more central to political and social life in Britain, that the values of religion should inform the 'national conversation'. But not just any religion, because she's not hugely exercised by the fuddy-duddy Church of England, or the dull as ditch water Roman Catholic church, nor indeed tedious Zoroastrianism, or tiresome Buddhism. For Bunting has discovered that, "For the first time in a generation, religion is part of the national conversation; people want to talk and read about it. This is in large part due to Islam, which is prompting in a western audience a combination of fear and bewildered fascination (how can women want to wear veils, and have arranged marriages; how can Muslims still believe in angels and a divinely inspired scripture?). But there is another, albeit less pronounced, driver to this debate, which is that the collapse of communism and decline of socialism has left a vacuum of purpose, value and meaning on both the left and the right".

Now, being a somewhat critical fan of Edward Said I'm fairly inured to the dangers of orientalism in both it's positive and negative formulations, but I'm not so certain about Bunting.

She writes that: "To be fair, if the secular left is to be coaxed into a more knowledgeable and intelligent conversation on religion, then those of faith have a comparably large mountain to climb. There are two non-negotiables for the faithful if they are to warrant attention. First, the secularism of political life in this country has sunk deep and precious roots for good reasons and that should not be reversed – no jockeying for institutional advantage, please. Second, no exclusive claims for any tradition. Instead, what's needed is an ever-ready openness to understand the metaphors of other faiths".

Unfortunately there is an inherent contradiction here. Firstly, because the secular should be enormously wary of allowing the confessional onto it's turf. Not for nothing have we seen a degree of confrontation between religion and state in both the US (between fundamentalist Christians seeking to have religious texts placed within state buildings) and in Europe (particularly in the dispute over the use of religious garb in state schools). Above and beyond the rights of those involved, and there is right on both sides, the division between church and state is fundamental to the nature and possibly the well-being of societal balance in both areas.

Secondly for Bunting to even couch the discourse as being framed within the 'metaphors of other faiths' is to entirely misunderstand the ground stands upon. For Islam, or Roman Catholicism or the Church of England, the elements that the religion is constructed from are not 'metaphors' but core beliefs. To my mind this approach is arguably more disrespectful than a pro-religious yet strongly pro-secular state viewpoint (similar to that which I hold) that at the very least understands and respects the sincerity with which beliefs are held without pretending that those beliefs are mere 'metaphors'.

And there's a ghost at the banquet. She entirely ignores the fact that religion has always been part of the national discourse in British politics on and off for decades. Indeed the Labour party itself was often considered to "owe more to Methodism than Marx". Blair has publicly noted his own fusion of Christian and socialist beliefs. The Conservative Party has had an uneasy relationship between mammon and God, occasionally pitching towards the more socially conservative. Indeed she's tilting towards the territory occupied by P. Hitchens and Melanie Phillips which sees the woes of contemporary society as being the result of the 'liberalism' of the 1960s. Indeed she actually namechecks that poor old decade in the article…

Yet the contradictions are not simply within her text, but also between this and other articles she has written. Back in April 2005 discussing pamphlets on morality and politics she noted: "The point is that morality and values are no soft option. You can't slap them on with some fine phrases in an effort to get the electorate to listen to you. Morality in a post-Christian and post-socialist age is a fiendishly difficult subject to talk about. The shared-purpose common values with which Alexander peppers his text are meaningless to most people.

Debates about the moral purpose of politics in this election are unlikely to offer Labour any lift. Rather, they expose the inevitable attrition rate of any government's moral credibility after two terms. The record can be described, at best, as patchy, while Blair's "right thing" was much worse, and has left a distinctly queasy feeling".

In the light of the 'fiendish difficulties' she notes above, it's hard to see how she proposes to synthesise radically different belief systems and then allow them some degree of influence within the public sphere. And she knows that, hence her point about 'fear and bewildered fascination' (Incidentally I think her point about a 'bewildered fascination' is over done. Western European societies are only four or five generations into universal suffrage, for most of us, conservative liberal or socialist, there is a fairly clear idea of what we want, and what we don't want). Yet, it's difficult to think of any other generation of self-styled 'progressives' not knowing exactly where they stood in relation to such issues, respectful of individuals and religions as they had a coherent body of thought to call upon as regards equality, fraternity and liberty within the public context.

Her parting shot is telling, "So to all those readers (and there are more than a few) who will be delighted to see the back of me and my habit of referencing the religious traditions that have inspired me, I say that your prejudice is rooted in a misreading of history and a western cultural hegemony that has formulated a self-serving fantasy of its own superiority. Our future as a species is too precarious to allow for such vanity. We need vastly more humility and more sustained curiosity about how previous ages and other cultures have understood the nature of the human person and our yearning for freedom".

While enjoying the somewhat eschatological gloom of the paragraph, I find it difficult to understand how a belief in a fair and appropriate distance between religion and state is the result of a misreading of history or a 'superior' western cultural hegamony. Or perhaps it is that having been brought up in a state where political/religious disputes have had a rather more pointed resonance in recent times than in (most of) the UK I'm a tad more wary and less willing to give the benefit of the doubt than Bunting to those organisations who have apparently better 'understood the nature of the human person and our yearning for freedom' than countless scores of individuals who have had to chip away at building a public space where all can speak freely from the American and French Revolutions onwards…

The Last High King and his Faithful Bard

Long time fans of the True Voice of the Irish Psyche, John Waters, will remember a brief period in the mid-1990s, before he took up arms against the oppressive feminist tyranny we clearly all tremble under, where he trotted out half-arsed, poorly-understood misrepresentations of post-colonial theory every week, as a way of understanding the legacy of the Famine.

Well, it looks like the unread copy of Black Skin, White Masks has been dusted down and wheeled out in ‘defence’ (if you call a bizarre, nonsensical rant a ‘defence’) of the legacy of Haughey in yesterday’s Irish Times (sub required).

At least the previous Haughey piece we looked at tried to make some sort of case, albeit a spurious one. Waters, however, sticks with his tried-and-trusted faux-mystical tripe which, like the worst kind of New Age hack, he seems to think is an adequate substitute for boring old facts and arguments supported by evidence.

He wheels out the same old clichés we’ve had barked at us ad nauseam over the past week. “Everyone hated Charlie Haughey except the people” (no, everyone hated Haughey including vast chunks of the people, even the always useful to the budding reactionary ‘plain people of Ireland’). He had an “empathy with the people” (no, he was a populist with a barely disguised contempt for lives of ‘ordinary’ people). He was the one who made us all rich (no, he was around at the time when the economic policies which contributed, in part, to the current boom were initiated – with the cooperation of a Fine Gael party in opposition which acted, with the Tallaght Partnership, in a way unimaginable to someone as self-serving and power-mad as Haughey).

However, at least those others who come out with these kind of apologetics tend to at least acknowledge some kind of wrong-doing on Haughey’s part, even if it’s just the inevitable consequence of a ‘tragic flaw’ in his character.

Not John Waters. On the contrary, for Waters (via his wikipedia-like understanding of Franz Fanon), Haughey’s greed, corruption and ostentatious lifestyle are what made him great. He didn’t live in a huge mansion in North Dublin, or acquire his own, private, island and squander his wealth on overpriced shirts and overpriced dinners for himself, you understand.

No, no: he was doing it for you:

He sought to subvert the delusions of post-colonial Ireland, to manipulate the iconography of wealth and power so as to deliver himself and us to our potential.

You see, by being a rather comical anachronism (assuming the mantle of Ascendancy lord at a time when the Ascendancy had all but disappeared, and those who remained in the Big Houses, were impotent reminders of a bygone age) he was somehow undermining that image. One wonders if Haughey himself was aware that he was the living embodiment of subversive irony, or if he was just fond of being very, very rich.

Waters continues:

He stole Ireland back from the elite who had stolen it for themselves – by aping their pretences and self-importance and exposing the inadequacy of their charades; by creating a new drama of elitism: spectacular, attainable and democratic. (…)He showed us a way we might live, by living it himself.

Even more bizarrely, he claims:

He refused to settle for less than his own due, so refusing on behalf of the dispossessed; the men of no property; the women of less property; and the citizens who wouldn't have minded their telephones being tapped if, back in the grey and wireless reality of early-1980s Ireland, they'd had telephones worth tapping. To the people of flawed pedigree, Charles Haughey said: anything is possible, poverty is not natural, and you do not have to accept your place.

Aren’t you grateful? Apparently, he was leading by example, like the Marxist who travels first-class to remind people that, come the revolution, we all will. He was, in Waters words, “the Fat Chieftain who promised to make his people as plump as himself”.

Except, of course, that he wasn’t. This kind of argument only makes sense if Haughey was, in any sense, a self-made man rather than the grasping, insatiable crook he was in reality. He was able to live the lifestyle he did only because he was bankrolled by his rich friends, and because he was a tax-evader, a point which Waters conveniently elides with an oblique reference to Haughey’s ‘methodology’ in acquiring all this wealth. If Haughey was genuinely trying to show people how they too could aspire to a lifestyle like his, he could at least have been a little more forthcoming in revealing the source of his wealth when asked.

Not only, however, does Waters refuse to admit that Haughey ever did anything wrong, he seems to argue that Haughey, by virtue of his greatness, exists outside this kind of petty ‘morality’.

Being perhaps unable to achieve release from the cocoon of post-colonial illogic, you will "point out" that he was himself the prime beneficiary of his own dramatisation. This was unavoidable and therefore morally unexceptionable. There was no other way of demonstrating the possibilities.

The ‘dramatisation’ Waters refers to being, of course, the acquisition of massive wealth. He goes on:

His fingerprints are all over the transformation of Ireland, but the explanation is too complex and amazing for easy acceptance. Before he came, we were poor: now we grow rich. Before he came, there were hovels, now a housing boom. Before he came, there were dirt tracks, now motorways and flyovers. Before he came, we were afraid to speak in whispers; now we proclaim our worth to the world.

(…)

To deal with such a legacy by counting "good" and "bad" and weighing the difference is simple-minded and pointless. At its best, politics steers closer to magic than logic. To calculate the impact of Charles Haughey, we must add positives to negatives, hate to love, to know the sum of what he inspired and what he overcame to make the impossible banal.

This is nonsense, of course, but it’s dangerous nonsense as well. It exemplifies the kind of mysticisation and aestheticisation of politics beloved of fascism, where the lives and destinies of individuals are subsumed into the destiny of the Nation or the People (as a collective) conveniently embodied in this single great man (and, let’s face it, it’s always a man); the great man who doesn't have to live under the same laws nor is subject to the same moral standards as the rest of us.

It feeds on the myth of the establishment, where the Taoiseach, Tanaiste, the government, the owners of the media and millionaire businessmen like Michael O’Leary are all plucky underdogs and where Fintan O’Toole and Ivana Bacik really run the country.

It’s an unhealthy and profoundly anti-democratic worldview which serves to keep people docile, complacent and unquestioning and where an essentially conservative agenda can be presented as a radical.

Pretty typical John Waters, all in all.

You say you want a revolution…but I want detail.

A discussion on Politics.ie (here) has set me thinking about just what is the left looking for, particularly the revolutionary left. After all, so much of leftism these days is defined by what it's against rather than what it's for… Mostly anti-war, generally anti-capitalist, broadly anti-racist/sexist etc. But what's the goal, the end-point? The withering away of the state? A goal shared by anarcho-capitalists as much as the most fervent Marxist. Entirely new social relationships? Well there I suspect the Catholic Church, or indeed many Southern Baptists would be in agreement. I'm not entirely sure of the end goal, and I'll bet most people aren't either.

There are good reasons for vagueness. Marx was rather good on Capital, but much less so on what came after. Historically revolutionary left regimes have when implemented tended to the worst rather than the best. Failed is another word one can use. And it's a bit like having someone over for a bite of food. Often it's best not to tell them what's on the table for fear of heightening expectations unreasonably. But the future shape of society isn't a meal, and it's also unreasonable not to tell us what the outcome is going to be…

First one has to consider the way in which our society has altered over the past quarter of a century or more. One doesn't have to be a techno-utopian to notice that personal autonomy and individualism has extended into new spheres of daily life. Partially this is on the back of new technologies which centre on the individual. This has led to some degree of dilution of hierarchy, and it's striking to me how rapidly workplaces have altered from entirely top down enterprises to more nuanced negotiated enterprises. Having said that there's no point in being starry eyed about these things. Owners own, directors direct, managers manage and workers work.

Secondly, if one considers the situation on the right there is a fairly clear outline of an optimal society, depending on which strand of the right. Social conservatives offer a traditional, hierarchical, conservative society, sometimes diluted by capitalism, often not. Libertarian conservatives offer a much more free-form society with little regulation of public or private spheres. Moderate conservatives tend towards caution in everything, although it's interesting to consider David Cameron and what the UK might be like under his administration.

By contrast, beyond the confines of social democracy it's difficult to envisage exactly what leftists want. It's a bit like a car where the driver has the foot down on the accelerator, as we leave the Social Democracyville we screech through Democratic Socialist Town, speed past Command Economy Heights and then onto…where? More regulation in the economic sphere? Or none at all as the society slides towards a left-libertarian utopia? Or on into Anarchism, but is it anarcho-syndicalism or autonomous collectivism?

Reading Paul Foot's The case for socialism: what the Socialist Workers Party stands for, many years ago, I was struck by how little was mentioned of the future society. Indeed something of a fetish has been made by the Trotskyite left of how this is a transitional period. Yeh, sure, but transition to what?
It's disturbing to think that the Communist Party of Great Britain's New Times project of the late 1980s might have been the last serious effort by an anglophone non-social democrat party to mark out the future, and while it was interesting, it was extremely flawed in that it came across largely as a paean to the market. No surprise then that the party collapsed within three years of it's publication.

I don't want to be unfair, it's difficult to envisage the transitions some would see as necessary. But envisage them they must.
One thinker who offered a better outline was French post-Marxist André Gorz whose Farewell to the Working Class depicted a future society informed by environmental and social concerns. I remember reading this around 1985 or so and being mightily impressed by the idea of…bus lanes, and thinking "that'll never catch on". But I was also mightily sceptical of his ideas for a television or radio studio in every tower block. And yet, although the collectivist impulse he to hasn't quite worked out it's certainly true that the internet has permitted a reflection of that to fold into our contemporary society, at least on an individual level. And let's be honest, that's down largely to market forces. But Gorz was writing for his time, the 1980s and the technological developments of the last quarter century have perhaps altered the emphasis again to one of tone rather than specific policy.

And this is important too, perhaps it's the general ethos which is most important, that a society is about society rather than simply the individual. However, the challenge now has to be that non-social democratic leftism stops talking in platitudes about democracy and social good and starts charting out a clear course. Because we've been here before with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the masters of tone over policy, or perhaps more accurately tone masking policy. Tone is great, but it's not enough.

On Politics.ie I had a discussion with a member of the Socialist Party (Ireland) about democracy and the party (here). I was assured that democracy was a key component. And why was this? Because Lenin had apparently mentioned it in the State and Revolution. Very true, Lenin did mention it, in a couple of sentences, a rather aspirational piece which frankly would be laughed out of if were it presented in a contemporary party manifesto. That's simply not good enough. If one seeks the transformation of our economic, political and social relationships the very least that can be done is to tell us exactly what are the mechanisms that will constitute the new situation. In the US and the UK there are serious public policy think-tanks of right left and centre working away on these issues. Documents are produced, positions put out in the public domain. But that sort of serious thinking on the – shall we term it – 'further left' is absent. We need information, because we already have a society, and for all it's faults, flaws and imperfections we have a reasonably good idea how it works and how it's going to work in the future.
Provide us with proper detailed information and then maybe it'll will be easier to convince the rest of us who are hoping there might be something better ahead…

Bread and circuses and me …

No po-faced lefty blog would be complete without the obligatory post denouncing the World Cup for its pernicious influence on society. So, with all the scorn which paid-up members of the Dublin 4 (mind-set, not postal district) Liberal Elite reserve for the interests of the working-classes, I present mine.

I could start by looking at the tournament in terms of Chomsky's analysis of professional sport, the corporate media and power structures in society:

(The media) tries to entertain (the population) through means which will intensify attitudes that support the interest of elites. For example . . . let me give some cases. Take the emphasis on professional sports. It sounds harmless but it really isn't. Professional sports are a way of building up jingoist fanaticism. You're supposed to cheer for your home team. Just to mention something from personal experience – I remember, very well, when I was I guess, a high school student – a sudden revelation when I asked myself why am I cheering for my high school football team. I don't know anybody on it, if I met anybody on it we'd probably hate each other. You know, why do I care if they win or if some guy a couple blocks away wins. And then you can say the same thing about the baseball team or whatever else it is. This idea of cheering for your home team -which you mentioned before – that's a way of building into people irrational submissiveness to power. And it's a very dangerous thing. And I think it's one of the reasons it gets such a huge play.

Yes, it's an interesting and not unattractive thesis: these big 'plebdazzle' events are held to ensure that ordinary people spend their free time and intellectual powers analysing one arbitrary groups of men's prospect at beating another arbitrary group of men at an essentially pointless activity. It does seem a little optimistic, though. If there was less football on the television, would people really be rushing in their masses, desperate to get hold of a copy of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists?

Equally, it's a somewhat patronising view of people, denying them any agency and seeing them as little more than mindless automatons, happy to accept without question whatever the idiot-box in the corner churns out at them.And given that I'm a little disappointed that Grace, rather than Nikki, was evicted from Big Brother tonight, I doubt I'd be on very sure footing if I attempted to make such an argument.

An alternative line of attack might be to point out how the World Cup, perhaps more than any other international sporting event, tends to enflame national feeling in participating states, often creating an almost hysterical jingoistic fervour (which, as every good internationalist socialist knows, serves only to elide class difference and serve the interests of the ruling elites).

On the other hand, though, maybe there's a positive aspect to the whipping up of 'national pride', in terms of promoting multiculturalism (whatever that actually is, rather than the strawman version racists, fascists and other assorted crackpots would like it to be) and tolerance. If members of a minority ethnic group are visibly part of a country's football team, might that make it easier for others to see the ethnic group as part of the 'nation', rather than as immigrants or outsiders, loosening the grip ethnicity can hold over national identity, if not entirely breaking the link between the two.

To make this argument, though, one would have to (a) have some evidence to support it and (b) actually know something about football, and the makeup of different teams. I fail on both counts.

It seems, therefore, that my only alternative is to release my inner Roisin Ingle, and come up with some kind of generalised moan about how boring and ubiquitous the whole thing is, and the terrible suffering endured by the minority of football-averse men every time the tournament comes along. Admittedly it's not the greatest adversity man has ever faced, but it can get somewhat grating having to explain (almost apologise for, at times) the fact that you're really not interested when someone tries to make small-talk by inviting your opinion on 'the game'.

There are the small mercies to be thankful for, such as Ireland's absence from the current tournament. Four years ago, suggesting that you had little or no interest in the person of Roy Keane, or that you wouldn't actually be watching the match anywhere, was tantamount to suggesting that your questioner's mother was a poorly-paid, though highly experienced, streetwalker.

For those football-haters who seek a quiet life, it's probably best to avoid most pubs (apart from those honorable exceptions which don't have a television), don't get your hair cut (particularly if you haven't booked a holiday this year – you'll have nothing at all to talk about) and whatever you do, don't get a taxi. There's no silence more awkward the journey home after telling the taxi driver that you don't follow football (no, not the G.A.A. either) especially if you feel he's a bit hostile to the gay, or student, or gay student you so obviously must be.

However, one can only avoid the subject for so long. If pressed to give some kind of opinion, therefore, one could do worse than look to Gary Younge's 'Ethical World Cup' column, running daily in the G2 section of the Guardian. Younge selects a match taking place on a given day and, with tongue nudging against cheeck, suggests which team might be the ethical choice to support. Today's piece gives a nice flavour of what the concept's about:

The impact of international football on nationalism is clear; it inflames it. Its impact on domestic politics is less so. Victory should favour the incumbents. But in Mexico, where the incumbent is resigning and leftwing presidential candidate Luis Obrador leads in the polls, it is difficult to predict whom a Mexican victory would benefit. As members of the UN security council both Mexico and Angola stood firm against US pressure to endorse the war. Safest, then, to back the Angolans, emerging from years of civil war with a life expectancy of 41 – just a year older than the tournament's oldest player.

If that doesn't sate your appetite for a middle-class, Arts graduate, bobo opinion on football, you might want to check out Dave Eggers' by turns bizarre and fascinating piece on 'The True Story of American Soccer'. In it Eggers informs us that, among others thing, the reason why so many Americans lose interest in soccer when they give up playing it at the age of twelve or so is because 'people of influence in America long believed that soccer was the chosen sport of Communists.'.

The essay is taken from The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, which looks from the table of contents to almost be interesting enough to buy.

Almost, however, but not quite. Thinking? Maybe. Fan? Definitely not.

Doh! #1

The slogan accompanying the picture (below) currently up on the Labour Party site doesn't seem to have been thought through very carefully.

Note the look of fear on the little girl's face.

Are you thinking what we're thinking?