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musicandchips
Thoughts from 30-Something London
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Wednesday, September 24, 2003 :::
Hugo Young RIP
It was with great sadness that I read of the death on Monday of Hugo Young, in my opinion the greatest political commentator in my lifetime. Never allied to any political party, he wrote with an honesty, integrity and incisiveness that made him somewhat of an outsider in political circles, and all the more important for it, and to some degree inluenced my decision to try my hand at writing on this very site. If in the course of my scribblings I produce even one paragraph with just a tenth of his brilliance and insight I will be a very happy man. As a tribute to his genius, I transcribe some of his final column for the Guardian, from last Tuesday, here.
"The great over-arching fact about the war that Blair will never admit but cannot convincingly deny [is this]: he was committed to war months before he said he was. Of course, he wanted it buttered up. He wanted a UN sanction. He fought might and main to push Bush in that direction. But he was prepared to go to war without it.
He needed skewed intelligence to make the case, and he didn't mind what he had to say to get it. He had made his committment to Bush, stating among other extraordinary things that it was Britain's national task to prevent the US being isolated. But he was also in thrall to the mystic chords of history. He could not contemplate breaking free of ties and rituals that began with Churchill, and that both Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence have cultivated, out of fear and expectation, for decades.
He was driven by something else, which none of his predecessors, not even Margaret Thatcher, has succumbed to. Without exception they all kept their eye on the British ball. They could all make a kind of case for a profitable connection between the hard British national interest and occasional benefits from the special relationship. For Blair this has been a lot more theoretical: the theory of pre-emptive intervention in a third country's affairs, for moral purposes, at the insistence of the power whose hyperdom he cannot resist.
What does this mean? That we have ceased to be a sovereign nation. This is Blair's war and, except for Bush, hardly anybody else's. There are two ways to see him. The first is as the great deceiver. Driven by his own juices, compelled by moral imperatives obliterating pragmatism, forced by those compulsions to avoid levelling with his people, in the grip of a high belief in the need for the intervention of good guys against bad guys. This could yet be the end of him, if [he] is found to have twisted truth, for whatever good motive, too far.
There is another person emerging from the mist though. This is a great tragic figure. Tony Blair had such potential. He was a strong leader, a visionary in his own way, a figure surpassing all around him. His rhetorical power was unsurpassed, as was the readiness of people to listen to him. He had their trust. He brought credibility back to the political art.
It is now vanishing, though not before our open eyes. All this seems to be happening below the radar screen of opinion polls. The country carries on at least as semi-normal. Our boys are out there dying in a futile war. The leader goes about his business. Yet something big is happening. This concerns not merely him and whether he survives, but our country and what becomes of it in abject thrall to Bush and his gang." - Hugo Young (1938-2003) in the Guardian, 16.09.2003
Also on the subject of writing (or, more accurately, reading), a friend sent me this. Apparently it's quite old, but I was amazed when I saw it for the first time yesterday:
"Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer
in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht
the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a
total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit any porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the
huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a
wlohe."
I never came across anything like this during studies for my psychology degree, but I find it absolutely fascinating. Perhaps armed with further insight into this curious aspect of visuo-linguistic processing some clever spark will finally find a permanent cure for dyslexia.
Today I've had El Hula on repeat on the stereo. Fantastic crooning pop with a tex-mex twist.
::: posted by Andy at 9/24/2003 01:53:00 PM
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