Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Monday

Alex Massie

The American Way of Empire

Actually, the existence of any such imperial ambitions is generally denied, even though the US has been an expansionist power almost since its inception. The inter-war years of "isolationism" are the great exception, not the natural way of things. At least not in Washington. Still, we are where we are. Two recent columns, by Thomas Friedman and David Frum respectively, are worth considering when one ponders the state and fate of the American Empire. First, Friedman writes about the anti-American "Narrative" that dominates muslim opinion. This, he says, is most unfair since: Yes, after two decades in which U.S.

Alex Massie

Red Toryism by Merle Haggard

Iain Martin has an excellent post on Philip Blond and his Red Tory project. But it occurs to me that Mr Blond could have more concisely explained Red Toryism if he'd simply played Merle Haggard's Are the Good Times Really Over? True, Merle puts an American spin on matters, but the basic idea seems broadly similar.

Alex Massie

An Open Letter to Alex Salmond

Dear Alex, Happy St Andrew's Day! Today you publish your mildly-awaited plans for a referendum on Scottish Independence. Alas, unless the Liberal Democrats can be persuaded to endorse the bill, there's little prospect of any such referendum actually happening. Such are the traumas of minority government. Of course, you find yourself trapped: if the SNP were stronger, the Unionist parties would refuse the referendum for fear they might lose it, but with the SNP seeming weak, and heading for a tricky Westminster election, they've concluded that there's no point in having the referendum either. Why, they ask, give you the satisfaction? Some of the opposition is certainly personal. This, you may say, is small-minded. But we are a small country and Holyrood is a tiny parliament.

Sunday

Alex Massie

Plucky Little Balkans

Many thanks to Christopher Snowden for alerting me to this little piece by Euan Ferguson in the Observer today. It begins with this photograph: Photo: Nikola Solic/Reuters As Euan says, only one small detail gives this photo any glamour at all: A whirl of tutus in a Zagreb cafe-bar during a break in ballet rehearsals: poise, and skin, and fabulous discs of swan-white tuile, and yet what are our eyes drawn towards? Exactly. A little paper tube, being happily smoked. The smell will be of black Balkan tobacco, yes; but it is also the smell of rebellion and the first successful example of people-power since the idea of smoking bans began sweeping the developed world. How so? Well, it seems the Croats are made of better stuff than we are: What have the Balkans ever done for us?

Alex Massie

Autumn Rugby Round-Up

So, now that the autumn internationals have been completed, we can assess who's best advanced their preparations for the Six Nations this spring and, longer-term, the next World Cup which, while still distant, is now within sight. In descending order, then, of satisfaction (not quite the same as achievement), the rankings might go something like this: 1. Ireland: The only northern hemisphere side to survive November unbeaten, even if they were mildly fortunate to escape with a draw against Australia. Better than anything on the scoreboard, however, was the emergence of Jonny Sexton as a true international-class fly-half. Next projects: finding a fresh tighthead prop and a genuine open-side flanker.

Saturday

Friday

Alex Massie

The Sins of the Fathers

The least surprising thing about the latest revelations of the Irish Catholic Church's complicity in thousands of cases of horrific child abuse is that almost none of it is surprising at all. Shocking, yes, but not surprising. Even those of us with an appropriately cynical view of the Chuch, mind you, can only marvel at the breathtaking mendacity displayed by the Church. The Archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary, says he is " mindful of the perceived hollowness of repeated apologies" and he has a point. Because until they were caught, the Church displayed no remorse whatsoever.

Alex Massie

Caledonian Blues

Ochone, ochone! The plight of the Scottish Tories has been receiving attention again this week. As Pete pointed out, the latest Tartan poll puts the Tories at just 18% north of the Tweed. This means, 12 years on from the 1997 disaster, that, in Iain Martin's words, "They’re getting absolutely nowhere, slowly."  True. In 1979, Scottish Conservatives won 22 seats and comprised 6.5% of the UK parliamentary party. It's fair to say they'll get nowhere near that next year. But look at this list of some of the seats the Tories won thirty years ago: Aberdeenshire East, Angus South, Argyll, Banff, Galloway, Moray &Nairn, Perth & East Perthshire. Most were taken from the SNP, whose own representation slumped from 11 to just 2 MPs.

Alex Massie

The Woman in White

I've had Wilkie Collins on my To Read list for, well, for years now. Somehow it's never happened. And with a dozen or so still-not-finished books at the moment it would be foolish to add another to that menacing pile. On the other hand, it's 150 years since The Woman in White was first published by Charles Dickens's All Year Round (Does exactly what it says on the tin...) and so really one ought to read it this year... The first episode appeared in the issue of November 26th 1959.Now some canny fellows are "re-publishing" the novel in serial form. Each week's episode will be available to read online here and you can also email them and they'll send a PDF of the chapter to you every week. Hurrah for the internets! The web, in fact, would seem made for the return of the classic serial.

Alex Massie

Blond & Liberty

So Philip Blond's new think tank ResPublica (that's how it's spelt, leaving one to wonder whether it's actually a pretentious electricity company or something) and his "Red Toryism" is this week's non-Iraq, must-talk-about political gizmo. And my, what an odd beast it is. Blond's speech on Thursday was a strange thing indeed. Part of the time was spent wrestling with a series of impressively tiny Straw Men ("In order to reclaim a civilised society, market and state should not be regarded as the ultimate goal or expression of humanity") and rather more of it was preoccupied with the kind of high-falutin' gobbledegook of the kind favoured by the smarter-dressed confidence trickster. ("We can create a civic economy based on trust, sustainability and reciprocity." Sounds good!

Thursday

Alex Massie

Happy Thanksgiving

Sasha Obama, the daughter of U.S. President Barack Obama, looks at a turkey named 'Courage' during an event to pardon the 20-week-old and 45-pound turkey at the White House November 25, 2009 in Washington, DC. The Presidential pardon of a turkey has been a long time Thanksgiving tradition that dates back to the Harry Truman administration. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images. A Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends and readers. Thanksgiving is, I think, the best of all American holidays. It's like what Christmas might be if it weren't for all the hassle and the vast expense of it all.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Obama Breaks A Promise to Britain

Perhaps there's more to this than meets the eye, but on the face of it the Obama administration has not only broken a promise made to Britain but reneged upon a vital agreement that would have given the UK full "operational sovereignty" over the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters we're supposed to be buying for our new aircraft carriers. Back in December 2006 Lord Drayson, minister for Defence Procurement, travelled to Washington for urgent talks to save Britain's participation in the programme. Crucial to this was the signing of a memorandum of Understanding that would give Britain, the only "Tier 1" partner, full access to software codes that would allow UK personnel to upgrade the JSF as and when needed.

Alex Massie

How to Save Test Cricket?

Test cricket in crisis! Again! That's the headline you could draw from an MCC survey that finds just 7% of Indian cricket fans prefer Test cricket to other, lesser, forms of the game. On the face of it this is indeed a troubling , dispiriting, finding. The survey, which was conducted by TNS Sport, sought, via the internet, the opinions of 1500 fans in India, New Zealand and South Africa to try and discover why Test match attendances have been falling and what might be done to reverse that trend. Peter Roebuck, always a gloomy bugger, summarised the findings thus: "It's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there" and worried that the greatest form of the noblest game is now on the brink of extinction outside England and Australia. Perhaps. But I think that's too simplistic a view.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Cool Pictures of the Year

Nazroo, a mahout, poses for a portrait while taking his elephant, Rajan, out for a swim in front of Radha Nagar Beach in Havelock, Andaman Islands. Rajan is one of the few elephants in Havelock that can swim, so when he is not dragging timber in the forest he is used as a tourist attraction. The relationship between the mahout and his elephant usually lasts for their entire lives, creating an extremely strong tie between the animal and the human being. Photo and caption by Cesare Naldi. The Boston Globe offers a selection of photos from this year's National Geographic photography competition here. National Geographic's galleries are here and you can download many of the entries to use as your desktop wallpaper here.

Alex Massie

Obama as the Liberal Reagan

So Barack Obama's approval rating in Iowa has slipped below 50%. Indeed, he receives negative ratings from Iowans in every area except foreign policy. So much for all that Hope and Change, eh? Well, not quite. As a savvy Democratic lobbyist emails: More and more, the overlays between Obama and Reagan seem to match.  Succeeding disastrous presidencies, charm/star power, awful off year elections, bad first mid-term, laggard economy on the cusp of growth, and a badly fractured opposition trying to figure out purity vs. change within their own ranks.  Reagan was, of course, unabashedly conservative and more and more, it seems that pre-presidency predictions of Obama as a closet moderate were wrong. There's a lot to this.

Alex Massie

Death of the Novel & the Birth of the Everlasting Telephone

From a letter written by the American novelist F. Marion Crawford, on August 23, 1896: The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?...A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius—over the everlasting telephone of course—published every morning for the whole world.... As Marbury says, that's a pretty good description of the internet, though, of course, access to the everlasting telephone is scarcely restricted to men of genius... But Crawford - who seems to have been an interesting chap himself -  was wrong.

Alex Massie

What about Climategate?

A reader writes to complain that I haven't written anything about "Climategate" (please, can we stop the use of the suffix "gate"?). Well, the main reason I haven't is that climate change is even more crushingly tedious than health policy, the European Union or, for that matter, just about anything else. Worse, the bad faith of the participants, on both sides, and their certainty on matters about which we cannot possibly or plausibly be certain is dispiriting. That being the case, Megan McArdle writes my reaction to this "scandal" for me: Scientists are human beings.  They react to pressure to "clean up" their graphs and data for publication, and they gang up on other people who they dislike.

Alex Massie

New Police Mission: DNA-Farming

Can this really be true? Apparently and alas unsuprisingly the answer seems to be yes: Police are routinely arresting people simply to record their DNA profiles on the national database, according to a report published today... The revelations will fuel the debate about the DNA database, the world’s largest. They are included in a report by the Human Genetics Commission, an independent government advisory body. It criticises the piecemeal development of the database and questions how effective it is in helping the police to investigate and solve crimes. [...]Professor Montgomery said there was some evidence that people were arrested to retain the DNA information even though they might not have been arrested in other circumstance.

Alex Massie

Lou Dobbs 2012?

Apparently it's a possibility. At the very least such a run would help Dobbs sell a few more books. Whether a Perot-like third party anti-immigration, anti-globalisation, anti-Wall Street crusade will be as appealing in 2012 as it seems right now must be a matter that's open for discussion. Perot wouldn't have been nearly so effective in happier economic times and 2012, one trusts, will bring cheerier economic news than 2009. Nonetheless, there's no point denying that Dobbs represents a set of sentiments that, generally speaking and most of the time, don't get much of a hearing or great respect in Washington. Still, if one of the most important things in politics is being lucky in your politics, thn Barack Obama must be licking his lips at the thought of Candidate Dobbs.

Monday

Alex Massie

Gordon Brown is a Rescue Donkey

Brother Liddle asks "Why is it unravelling for Dave?" and, while this may be a mild exaggeration, it's true that, in as much as he can ever look jaunty, there's a spring in Gordon's step right now. Perhaps, Labourites dare to dream, the worst is over? Maybe. One poll showing the Tory lead cut to just six points is a pretty shoogly nail upon which to hang your hopes. Nevertheless, the story of the day is this alleged mini-revival. In the end it may be no more than a dead cat bounce, but, just for a moment, let's assume it's not. So, how to explain it? Firstly, Labour's core vote may be firming up. Some waverers have returned to the comfort of the fold. Secondly, this mini-revival, if it even exists, is a proof of Gordon's predicament, not proof that the worst is past.