Sticks and Stones

It’s a weird graphic. A pyramid, an eye, the number thirteen. The iconography looks like it could originate from all sorts of places. It certainly doesn’t fit in with the pomp and glamour of other American insignia. In fact it looks fairly creepy. That eye is daunting, the pyramid is unfinished and yet already has weeds growing under it, and then the number thirteen which we all know to have many historical and sinister connotations.

Other American emblems are full of the grandeur expected of the world’s dominant power, and of an incredibly idealistic (in the very best sense of the word) young nation. The soaring eagle, strong bold colours, stars and stripes all indicate the vigour and idealism which epitomise the American way of life. On the other hand, there is the Great Seal which looks ancient, secretive, and malevolent.

From the International Herald Tribune:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Seal’s 66th and current custodian, on Tuesday inaugurated a new exhibition to commemorate its 225th birthday and trace the history and evolution of the symbolism.

“This exhibit honoring the Great Seal affirms our continued belief in the values of our founding,” she said. “The Great Seal symbolizes the unity, strength and independence of a new nation, the United States of America.”

Debunking some of the conspiracy theories:

1. Masons (including Washington and Franklin) did not design the seal.
2. It’s design can be summarised as such: it uses elements of traditional heraldry, such as the unfinished pyramid to symbolize a work in progress, arrows for war and an olive branch for peace.
3. The 13 does not refer to Judas, but to the 13 colonies. Like the 13 stripes in the flag.
4. The two latin phrases “Novus Ordo Seculorum” and “Annuit Coeptis” are not as sinister as ‘New World Order’ and ‘Chosen ones’ but ‘A New Order for the Ages’ and ‘Providence favours’ suggesting democracy and peoples’ sovereignty overcoming tyranny.

Whether you believe these explanations is up to you.

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Well, now it all makes sense. The Blairite, New Labour years were all a cover, just to get elected and in power in order to carry out the real, socialist work that the Labour party was founded to do. At long last, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have begun to undo the damage wrought by the bourgeois Conservative Party under Thatcher.

I refer, of course, to the long-overdue nationalisation of Northern Rock, which must be the right course of action, if for no other reason than the fact that Osborne doesn’t like it and will be opposing the legislation in the Commons. The real incompetence, of course, as many wiser and more knowledgeable spectators than myself (Anatole Kaletsky, Richard Lambert, et al.) have commented, was that this step wasn’t taken earlier. One hates to appear in any way similar to Vincent Cable, and I have no way of proving this, but I’ve been saying this from the start.

Of course, I’ve been advocating the nationalisation of all wealth since long before this ‘crisis’ started, but that’s another matter completely. The issue at hand is that Labour have lived up to their former ethos, and, as the Conservatives have moaned, taken Britain “back to the 70s”. Now, I have a lot of problems with the 70s (John Lennon, alive? No thanks), and many reasons that I wouldn’t want to live through them - and it’s probably true that if Labour had had their way back then the country would now be in ruins. But, of course, that is their plan.

Brown, like the dyed-in-the-wool Commie I always knew him to be, along with the Radical Darling (that man is a nutter on acid) and bona fide Bolshevik Straw, is flying the red flag high over Britain. Northern Rock today, the collapse of the capitalist behemoth tomorrow. This was truly a glorious day (or, perhaps, yesterday, by the time of publishing) for Marxists throughout the land.

And as for the shareholders - good riddance, say I. They made a gamble, it didn’t pay off, and now they are understandably upset. Fortunately, that hasn’t stopped Comrades Brown and Darling from setting the dynamite under the decaying and dilapidated structure of the capitalist system and unhesitatingly setting it off.

We can look forward to a future free from class boundary and the evil influences of capital and its bourgeois fetishists.

P.S. I’m joking.

P.P.S. But only a little bit.

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It was with considerable audacity that Pervez Musharraf told the world that today’s elections in Pakistan would be “the Mother of all elections.” In fact, since the assassination of Pakistan Peoples Party leader Benazir Bhutto, it has been eminently clear that this would far from be the case.

Following Bhutto’s death, rioters took the streets in droves and estimates place the death toll from political violence at over 450 thus far. On Saturday a suicide bomb attack left 46 dead and only yesterday a candidate for Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League party was shot and killed in Lahore.

We should not be surprised to hear then, that fewer than 35% of Pakistani voters are thought to have ventured to the polls today. In one province in Lahore, for example, where 800 women were registered to vote, by midday, only three had arrived to do so, leaving the presiding officer of the polling station to reflect, “God willing, the ladies will come out after they’ve finished their house work.”

But it is not just widespread violence (or ‘house work’) that is to blame for voters’ reluctance to queue up at polling stations; fears of extensive rigging seem also to have stymied many. Aside from prevalent reports from the two main opposition parties of electoral corruption, Human Rights Watch also claim to have a telephone conversation featuring Pakistan’s Attorney-General, Malik Qayyum, boasting that the election would be “massively rigged” in favour of Musharraf’s party. Stories of Police firing at journalists and roadblocks set up outside polling stations (to keep out voters in opposition strongholds) will do nothing to dispel such reports.

In the event of a vote in which each of the main parties placed their confidence, a hung parliament would seem the most likely outcome, with the possibility of the two main opposition parties mounting a formidable opposition to the incumbent’s regime. However such political concord in Pakistan seems wishful thinking. More likely, dissatisfaction and frustration will see Pakistan’s streets once again ablaze and Musharraf’s pledge to see that “nothing of the sort will be allowed” will only serve to exacerbate violence.

The Mother of all elections? Perhaps not. But Pervez Musharraf kindly reassures us that he will nonetheless co-operate with whoever is elected ‘harmoniously’. It’s just a shame no-one believes him.

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“We can expose the duplicity and opportunism of the Tories” said Ms Harman to rally support for the Labour party in the May local elections. The words pot, kettle and black come to mind.

Would that be the same duplicity in spending 10 years in office espousing the need for electoral finance reform before it turns out that almost every candidate in the deputy-leadership election did not adhere to the laws they helped pass on the topic?

Would that be the same opportunism, Ms Harman, as when Gordon Brown decided to call an election in 2007… then call it off when the Tories looked too strong in the polls? Would it be the same opportunism as nicking their policy on inheritance tax in the process? Surely the right honorable Labourites would not steal the policies of “the same old nasty party” as she described them…

This is a fairly typical display of why I find it so hard to support Labour - not only do they display complete incompetence in government (election that never was, credit crisis, data handling, campaign financing and I am sure I have missed one or two other blunders from the last few months) but they also have the audacity to opportunistically accuse other parties of opportunism to save some face.

Well, Ms Harman, you have certainly lost my vote, and many others’ besides. Not that you ever really had mine in the first place.

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Before his death, Vladimir Nabokov, one of the greatest writers in English of the 20th Century (as demonstrated by the fact that, like Joyce, Borges, Kafka and Proust, he never won a Nobel Prize, but that’s another post for another day), gave express wishes that the unfinished manuscript of his latest novel, ‘The Original of Laura’, be burned. Thankfully, as yet, these requests have not been carried out, and the decision now rests with his son Dmitri, who says he is “torn”. It is my belief that the manuscript should be published and distributed, and this is based on three main factors.

First, unlike Stoppard (who hasn’t won a Nobel Prize: a rarely correct decision from the Nobel jury), I feel that the author’s wishes are, quite frankly, irrelevant. To be blunt, he’s dead.

Kafka famously asked for his unpublished works - practically his entire corpus - to be burnt after his death, and his literary executor, Max Brod, unhesitatingly ignored his wishes, luckily for us.

Virgil likewise asked that his masterpiece, the Aeneid, possibly the finest work of extant Latin literature, be destroyed after his death; the Emperor Augustus himself stepped in to ensure that this did not happen - one of the few occasions on which we can be thankful for supreme autocratic power. I for one feel no guilt or compunction in reading such literature, which the author explicitly requested be burnt, nor would I in this case.

Second, from what I’ve read about the would-be novel, it looks truly fascinating. Even if the novel doesn’t quite live up to Nabokov best, a standard set by such works as Lolita and Pale Fire, it is always rewarding to read the work of a genius, and the premise of this novel is the proof. Dmitri, the son, who has the final say on this matter, described it as “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity”. That’s a pretty large claim to make, and even if it is only partly true, makes it a matter of critical importance that the book be published. As I have said, Nabokov is one of the most highly regarded and important writers of the last century, and if this last work lives up to even half of its promise, then burning it would be nothing short of a travesty.

And finally, I am just very uncomfortable with the whole idea of burning literature. It is a symbol of suppression and ignorance, and should be a practice restricted to religious fundamentalists and other fascists.

Who can compute the quantity and quality of the literature burned by the Christians and later the Muslims in the Great Library at Alexandria?

Modern day book burning tend, thankfully, to be restricted to copies, rather than unique versions, but in this case we are discussing snuffing out a work of literature entirely, never to be read by anyone, to be lost to posterity completely.

In the interests of full disclosure, I probably ought to mention that I have somewhat selfish motives in wanting this book, however incomplete, to be published: I really want to read it. But I want others to be able to read it too, and can merely express my heartfelt desire that Dmitri Nabokov not deprive the world of this work of literature.

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