1. Rail paralysis 2. Dumbing down 3. Al Bore 4. Israel
1.Britain's transport: paralysed by precaution
The deaths of four commuters on a train derailment at Hatfield on 17 October led to a nationwide collapse of Britain's transport system. The tragic accident was the catalyst to a bizarre policy of institutionalised precaution in which the privatised company Railtrack bowed to demands that the network be made entirely risk-free. In fact rail travel is at least 15 times safer than going by car. Railtrack drew out the consequences of the demand for absolute safety to their logical conclusion, and paralysed the entire rail network, now beset by cancellations, line closures and delays as track repairs are carried out simultaneously at 366 different locations.
As the consequences of the demand for a literally risk-free rail network became apparent, prime minister Blair pleaded with Railtrack bosses to strike a balance between safety and running trains: but the idea of a balance is one that is entirely alien to the precautionary policy demanded by Blair's own government. Blair's policy demands that no risks whatsoever, however slight, should be undertaken. This amounts to an unreal expectation that life could be made free of accidents. Midland Mainline Rail Operator Kevin Johnson warned passengers to avoid using trains at all.
The impact of the rail paralysis might not be so disastrous if this government had not at the same time set out to cripple the road network. Under the 1997 Road Traffic Reduction Act local authorities are guided to reduce road use at the same time as more and more people are getting cars. Road humps, bus and cycle lanes and other 'traffic calming' measures had already succeeded in reducing speed in central London to an average 10 miles per hour in the morning peak (Focus on London, 2000). Now with the train network disrupted, more pressure is being put on a system where new roads have not been built for nearly 10 years. For years now all the major political parties are agreed that Britain needs an integrated transport policy. Now we know what it is: stay home.
2. It's official: Britain is getting dumber
The Guardian reported its ICM poll results on the comparative intelligence (or at least informed-ness) of those aged 18-24 and other generations with a sense of hurt surprise and disbelief: it really is true, young people know less (29 October 2000). Pillorying the conservative critics of a dumbed-down culture, like VS Naipaul and John Tusa, as 'grumpy old men', the Guardian always presumed that the progressive point of view was that we are getting smarter. 'The nation's ignorance is unexpected', wrote a shocked columnist Mark Lawson. But nobody should be surprised by the poll results. The official culture of Britain celebrates emotion over reason, and recoils from challenging questions.
With Diana-schmaltz as its formative government experience the cabinet is proud of its emotionalism. The media celebrate the 'journalism of attachment' over factual reporting. The educational establishment avoids questions of standards to boost rolls: so much so that this year's 'clearing' of degree applicants (the process of finding places for those who failed to make the required grades for their first choice) never happened as colleges simply accepted students whatever their results. In high culture, artists, such as those exhibiting under the titles of 'Sensation' and now 'Apocalypse', strive to strip out any intellectual content to their work. In fact the distinctions between high and low culture are pointedly repudiated - not least by the middlebrow culture secretary Chris Smith - as outmoded and judgmental. Since the elite does not value its own culture, the mass of Britons, not surprisingly, does not aspire to attain it either.
Who's Dumbing Down? http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM112/LM112_Dumb.html
3. Al Bore
Republican presidential candidate George W Bush exposed the underlying weakness of the Clinton-Gore years when he said that their vision was determined by the morning news and their legacy was the quest for a legacy. Though they saw themselves in the mode of the Roosevelt White House, the Clinton-Gore team flailed around for a sense of purpose. Al Gore's singular contribution, the 'reinvention of government' was supposed to be a reduction of bureaucracy, but mushroomed instead into a vast bureaucratic policy document that covered everything from the problem of bovine flatulence (see G Stephanopoulous, All too Human). Gore's personality deficit on the stumps is only the psychological expression of the policy deficit in government.
The incumbent Democrats are left struggling to cut Bush junior's poll lead with only days to go. Their strategy can only be to attack Bush, hoping that the spotlight of critical scepticism can be re-directed on to the Republican challengers. Painting Bush as a right-wing demagogue won't work. His own reinvention of the Republicans as an 'inclusive' party is a real distancing from the old policy nostrums, even if it offers as little as the inclusivity of the Clinton team that it imitates.
4. Israel: the viciousness of victims
For several weeks we have seen on our TV screens uniformed soldiers shooting live rounds at children and youths throwing stones. More than 100 of those targeted have been killed. How do Israeli soldiers do it? Aim their guns at children with stones and shoot them dead in full view of the television cameras. And how is it that they get away with it? Israeli ministers who tell Western TV interviewers that they want the violence to stop are not asked the obvious question: so why don't you order your soldiers to stop pulling the triggers? Imagine the press reaction if on just a single occasion Serbian or Iraqi soldiers had done the same.
The Israelis can massacre children so shamelessly because they believe themselves to be the victims in the Middle East. It was certainly the persecution of the Jews in Europe which prompted the original Zionist movement before the First World War. The Palestinians who were evicted from their homes and land by the Jewish settlers in 1948 would have reason to dispute the idea of Israelis as victims, but in the early days there the experience of European Jewry would have provided some basis to the Israeli self- perception.
After the 1967 Six-Day War sustaining the idea of the Jewish settlers as victims became more difficult. In 1967 Israel decisively crushed the armies of its Arab neighbours and occupied their territory. Since then Israel has defeated Egypt and Syria in war, invaded and occupied Southern Lebanon and repeatedly massacred, imprisoned and tortured Palestinians who resist anywhere from Beirut to Bethlehem.
Now the Israelis demand that the Palestinians concede all of a grossly enlarged Jerusalem to the Jewish state in the 'peace' negotiations, and they once again back their demands with lethal force. Yet, if anything, their sense of themselves as victims has intensified over the years to delusional levels. Israeli critic Aki Orr notes that ordinary Israelis tend to suffer from a persecution complex in which every invasion and atrocity committed by the Israeli military is the Arabs' fault. Israelis cannot imagine that they have any choice in these acts. Orr cites a common Israeli outburst: 'I hate the Arabs for forcing our boys to behave like animals' (see Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises, 1994, p59).
The Israelis' feeling of lack of control can only have been reinforced by their increasing practical dependence on American largesse. But it is the Holocaust that ideologically articulates the sense of victimhood. It is a curious irony that in the period when the Holocaust was still a recent memory, supporters of Israel made little of it. As Norman Finkelstein points out in his book Holocaust Industry it is only after the Six Day War, and 20 years after the foundation of the state, that supporters of Israel began to promote the memory of the Holocaust. It is only when, to any objective observer, Israel had become Goliath to the Palestinian David that the memory of the Nazi slaughter was raised. Nevertheless since 1967 the Holocaust has become one of the defining experiences of Jewish identity (see Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life).
But, while insecure Israeli Jews may well suffer from a persecution complex based on an overidentification with past Jewish suffering, why is Western, and especially American, public opinion so ready to indulge these illusions - to the tune of nearly $50 billion during the Clinton years alone? (See Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 2000, p27)
Wholehearted US support for Israel only dates from the early 1970s and the dollars only started to flow in their billions after Israel's victory in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. During the seventies and eighties American influence in the Middle East came to rest increasingly on the US relation with Israel. But, as American foreign policy analyst Edward Luttwak emphasises, the gains for the USA from their patronage of the Jewish state were not merely regional. Support for Israel was part of American Cold War strategy on a global level. Between 1968 and 1974 the US military took a beating from Vietnamese peasants equipped with Soviet arms. The Vietnam War became a traumatic humiliation for the USA and an enormous boost for radical nationalism in the Third World and Soviet influence over it. But in 1967, and again in 1973, the pro-Western Israelis had decisively defeated Soviet-backed Egypt and Syria. Backing Israel was backing a winner and efficiently converted tax dollars into diplomatic leverage. (See 'Strategic aspects of US-Israeli relations', in G Sheffer (Ed), US-Israeli Relations at the Crossroads, 1997)
Today, Israel serves no geo-political purpose for the USA. Western dominance in the Middle East is unchallenged and the PLO is more pro-US than the Israeli cabinet. Nonetheless, American identification with Israel remains profound, and in a sense global, but on a wholly new basis. The victim culture that was once unique to Israel now dominates the Western world. Rather than being a throwback to the Cold War past, Israel is a trailblazer for contemporary victim politics.
Although the real experience of the historical 'final solution' steadily recedes, the cultural icon of the Holocaust is more vivid today than it was in 1945. The persecution of the Jews back then is re-lived today as an emotional event in Western societies. Where they were despised across the West in the 1940s, today Jews are objects of empathic identification in the victim culture that predominates in Europe and America. The belated Zionist promotion of the Holocaust as an apology for Israeli oppression has been enthusiastically taken over by the West as a permanent object-lesson against political extremism. Western cultural representations of the Holocaust invite the public to identify with the suffering of the Jews. Americans and Europeans get a vicarious frisson by imagining themselves in the position of the persecuted.
Their victim status written-in to Western culture, Israelis are not only immunised from the sort of 'human rights' crusades which other regimes with a record of torturing, 'ethnically cleansing' and massacring their neighbours are subjected to. It seems they can confidently expect to be sponsored by the USA, not for geo-political or pragmatic reasons, but as the manifestation of the victim culture. The tragedy for modern-day Israelis is that they are condemned to live in an outdoor Holocaust museum, acting out a dream-reality in which the Palestinians they slaughter are psychotically transmogrified into the Nazi oppressor. -- James Heartfield