At around the same time as the Monica Lewinsky Affair was dominating the news, he found himself accompanying then-Conservative Party leader William Hague and former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to a function in Manhattan.

Kissinger asked Hague if this sort of brouhaha happened in contemporary British politics.

“With Labour,” Hague replied, “The scandals tend to be about money, while with Tories it’s usually sex.”

“So,” surmised Kissinger, “Your money is safe but your wife isn’t.”

Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.

The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.

However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.

One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.

(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)

Click on images above to enlarge data tables.

Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)

Gracq was a contrarian French author who shunned the fame and honours garnered by his work. His best known book is the war novel Un Balcon en Foret [A Balcony in the Forest]. According to the obituary, Gracq had his doubts about the style-cult which marks modern literature in France and…

believed in the importance not so much of style but of form. As his example, he gave the sayings of the countryside. Many of them are about the weather. These sayings are accepted. No one seeks to verify whether they are accurate. It is the form that makes them authentic.

Johnson: Julien Gracq: French novelist who refused the Goncourt The Guardian, Dec 24th, 2007

Image: ‘Death Applications’ by Raphco on Flickr

• a megalithic tomb
• a hilltop cairn
• a medieval parish church
• the site of a watermill
• a smattering of ringforts or coastal promontory forts, and
• a number of miscellaneous hut and house sites”

He is hardly exaggerating: the average Irish square mile, like the average Irish soul, seems to teem with the workings of a long human history.

Reference: The Mayo News, Oct 9th, 2007

Similarly with life. Though our recent move to the West of Ireland undeniably involves escape, it will only succeed if fresh challenges are raised, fresh insights attained–and fresh failures endured.

Such is Life…and Art.

Onward!

In Edouard Roditi’s Dialogues, painter Oskar Kokoschka talks about this curious German word, defined by him as the “panic that breaks out before the closing of a door”

Given its usefully precise meaning, the word has been used in English on occasion: the OED records the following instances:

1963 P. Bracken I Hate to Housekeep Bk. ix. 92: The random housewife is often prone to Torschlusspanik, or fear of being locked in the park at night, after the gates are closed.

1977 Time 8 Aug. 21/3: She was haunted by Torschluss-panik (mid-life crisis).

1980 Times Lit. Suppl. 14 Mar. 287/2: Mme de Staël is perhaps history’s most outstanding case of Torschlusspanik: the panic at the shutting of the door.

and our lexicographer ventures beyond the painter to offer a more metaphorical definition:

Torschlusspanik [Ger., lit. ‘shut door (or gate) panic’] A sense of alarm or anxiety (said to be experienced particularly in middle age) caused by the suspicion that life’s opportunities are passing (or have passed) one by; spec. that manifested in an ageing woman who longs to (re)discover the (sexual) excitement of youth, and who fears being left ‘on the shelf’.

Either way, the door closes in two weeks…

The shift–or downshift–is all the more painful coming as it does on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their last memorable exercise of unilateral power: the retaking of the Falkland Islands.

Now Britain is characterized as the impotent partner in the transatlantic alliance: a perception verified as actual by President Ahmadinejad who has expertly demonstrated how pitiful is the UK’s friendship with continental Europe and even, to some extent, with the US (arguably the US laid low in order to keep the situation calm–but the plight of limey sailors also failed to capture the American public imagination).

Geopolitics aside, the behaviour of Faye Turney and her 14 colleagues has exposed some ugly division, none more so perhaps than in a Jan Moir piece for the Telegraph whose anger at Turney in particular for “singing like a canary” to the Press and “writing screeds of damaging propaganda” for Iran after being “lightly coerced” shades into a classist subtext.

How, one senses the traditional Tory class wondering, did this ignominy come about? Moir provides the answer: desire for ‘cash and celebrity’ among the cannon-fodder multitudes, the “low-ranking workhorse…personnel” as she calls them.

British elites have always been somewhat embarrassed by their working classes, upon whom the whole show has always depended–as Kipling knew but the world, before mass media at least, did not.

The saddest aspect of this generally happy day (apart from the fact that moderates have been so sidelined) is that it took almost forty years to get the two sides to share power in a jurisdiction that is so tiny.

In an ideal world Paisley and Adams would be provincial councillors or part-time local politicians. Instead they are known throughout the world, from Tehran to Tulsa, very often for their sectarianism and, betimes, more or less veiled approval of political violence.

Now we may be headed for a situation, once unthinkable, where Ian Paisley is in charge up North and Gerry Adams is President down South. Who’s to say now that such a thing could not happen?

Joint authority has much to recommend it. It incarnates the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement in giving equal expression to both traditions. It neuters all the paramilitary organisations. It draws a clear line between politically motivated actions and criminal actions. It encourages all of our parties to move beyond the suffocating parameters of the Troubles.

Dublin Ministers running key departments would also neatly yank the DUP back into the real world.

Reference: Bradley: Political vacuum is no longer an option Irish News, Feb 3rd, 2006

Image: 10, originally uploaded to Flickr by bartmaguire.

It’s worth remembering, at this point, where the Provisionals came from and where they ended up. A de facto mandate was seized by them when Civil Rights were denied to Catholics in the late 1960s. But they bungled it: rather than defend their people, they succumbed to a harebrained ideological dream, which quickly devolved into death-worship and, more recently, a brutal criminality. The courage of the McCartney sisters reasserted the voice of a decent society too long silenced by shame, fear, and grief. The IRA’s decision may mean, at last, an end to the nightmare.

Link: IRA Statement

Posted: July 29th, 2005

It was not…just [in] eastern Europe [that Communism collapsed] but across the world, above all in Russia and China. Once these countries, with their billions of skilled but largely impoverished inhabitants, began to become market economies, the writing was on the wall for high-cost welfare settlements in the developed world.

Source: Kettle: Germany and France are struggling with a new world, The Guardian, May 24th, 2005

For Clinton and Blair, adepts of spin and ambiguity, such conditions were perfectly suited to both the aspirations and pretensions they share. Together with local players and former Senator George Mitchell, the two overseas leaders made it their business to understand and accommodate the grassroots consensus for peace throughout the island.

Both men relished the late-night conference calls, the marathon negotiations, the legalistic contortions, and probably too the gallery of characters involved–from wannabe Ché Guevaras to fire-and-brimstone shitstirrers. The Irish Problem, you get the feeling, was something from which Clinton and Blair, Boomer Idealists bogged down in domestic governance, got a real buzz.

Not so the current President, who famously avoids the epic briefings ingested by his predecessor and has no peacemaking ambitions, at least where vital interests are uninvolved.

Why, indeed, bother with such a small, squalid, conflict? There is no strategic U.S. interest in permanent settlement, other than the removal of an occasional irritant in the “special relationship” enjoyed (or, latterly, endured) by the two largest English-speaking powers. And any number of needier countries in Africa could do with the diplomatic attention lavished on the provincial chieftains of tiny Ulster. But Ireland and America go back a long way–after all we saved civilization (Guinness; Thin Lizzy; James Joyce) and you once rescued a few million of us from starvation. We built many of your cities; you built many of our dreams: if any two countries can claim to be sister nations, they are Ireland and America.

But for all the complexities of the world beyond Crawford, Texas, the need for justice and freedom, as recent events in Beirut, Bishkek, and Belfast have shown, can be piercingly simple. In Ireland, an unexpected revolt against terror has come from the steadfast, outspoken courage of five remarkable women–sisters of a working-class Catholic called Robert McCartney, battered and sliced to death by IRA men in a crowded bar in spring of 2005.

Sinn Féin, political wing of the nominally dormant Irish Republican Army, has been caught on the back foot by the near-universal demand, even among their own supporters, for their paramilitary cohort to submit to the rule of law, release the many witnesses of the pub murder from threat of reprisal, and then “go away”.

IRA disbandment [see below] would leave the community, including an unshackled Sinn Féin, to rebuild their lives in peace. And it may surprise some to learn that the best way to achieve a reunited Ireland would be for the IRA, increasingly active in organized crime, to retire themselves into history.

In their pain, the McCartneys’ moral clarity has proved a beacon by which to guide the often-benighted ship of Irish peace. Washington’s job now is to provide a calm and prudent escort to safety, without brinksmanship or name-calling.

Update: Dropping the Armalite

Post Date: March 25th, 2005

I sometimes think that much of the public life of [Ireland] since 1963 has been an attempt to fill the hole in our self-image that Kennedy’s visit [to Ireland] had exposed. We were supposed to be a deeply spiritual people, concerned with God, the land and the nation. The ecstasy evoked by the appearance among us of the first citizen of the great republic of the West revealed to us how utterly bedazzled we were by all the things we were not meant to want: his cool, sexy, glamour, his impregnable aura of wealth and his ability to embody the fridges and TVs, the porches and pools that our American cousins conjured up in those family photographs. We were embarrassed by our sudden, naked impulse to worship the golden calf

Source: Fintan O’Toole What We Think of America Granta #77, March 28th, 2002

After Beverley Hills I am taken to speak to the Las Vegas Literary Society. There are more society ladies, and the event there is even grander. I sit opposite the wife of the last Governor of Nevada. She has two guests to entertain that week, the other one being Mr Gorbachev. The night before, whispers one of the other ladies, they took him to a Russian Restaurant. I nod: the Russian Restaurant is in my hotel and I have noticed it. You couldn’t fail to notice it: it has outside it a large statue of Lenin and they have chopped the head off it. Then they have covered it with artificial bird droppings. It is a gesture of quite unbelievable triumphalism. I reflect on the fact that they took Mr Gorbachev to dinner there. Even by the standards of Las Vegas that defies belief.

After lunch and the signing of books, I jump into the powerful car of one of the society ladies and am taken off to the Liberace Museum. There is much to be seen there, and in a very curious way it is rather touching. The human spirit, I have decided, moves in mysterious ways.

Source: Alexander McCall-Smith: A flea in your ear can be a very pleasant thing, The Scotsman, April 12th 2004

I remember feeling something similar in Ireland. As a child, indeed, I thought one had to be English to be a proper writer. There was a sense of impoverishment attached to those few Irish writers (Patricia Lynch; Sinéad de Valera) I was aware of. Ironically, my favourite author was himself Irish but the extensive biography at the back of my Narnian books revealed that he had been born in “British” Ireland, boarded in England, and was now (or had become) a thoroughly Oxbridgean figure, as English as warm beer and cricket bats. C.S. Lewis’ journey, and the books borne out of it, proved my prejudice incontrovertibly: books belonged to the English.

There were other literatures I was aware of, of course, chiefly Francophone (the Tintin and Astérix comic-books; Dumas; The Little Prince), but these were all piped to us through London: not only was England the origin of stories, it was the arbiter of stories from elsewhere.

It was quite something therefore to discover, in my late teens, that Ireland was so teeming with writers that the “Irish Writer” had become almost a stereotypical figure.

Carey quote comes from Writers and Company, CBC Radio, Dec 14th, 2003

And, like milk, there is no trace of the “secret heart” in the final product: Wodehouse is devoid of cliché.