If we could learn...
Sometimes I wonder whether Individual 1 and the Brexiteers have some competition about most bizarre farce in politics going. Our lot tried with the endlessly drawn out drama around now finally sacked spy chief Maaßen of "there never were any xenophobic attacks! the greatest danger to Germany right now are left wing radicals in the SPD!" fame, which certainly was farcical enough, but good lord, is it ever left in the dust by Brits and Americans alike.
The Economist, itself surely as far from "left" as you can get, has chosen Boris Johnson for the worst damage causing idiot of the year award, reasoning:
In a big field, there was one outstanding candidate. He failed miserably as foreign secretary. He sniped at Mrs May while in Cabinet. He has agitated against her deal from the backbenches and in his lucrative newspaper column without presenting a real alternative. A demagogue not a statesman, he is the most irresponsible politician the country has seen for many years. Step forward, Boris Johnson!
Not that I disagree with any of this, but just look at the competition! Even if you leave aside the Orange Menace and his minions across the Atlantic and treat it as Brits only. And it doesn't show any signs of getting better any time soon, no matter whether or not May remains in office, for, as Jonathan Freedland puts it here:
The justice secretary, David Gauke, was right when he told the BBC this morning that “the parliamentary arithmetic does not change if you change the person living in Downing Street”. As prime minister, Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab might dial up the Brexit rhetoric, but the numbers in the Commons will remain obstinately the same. It will still be a government without a majority. It will still be a hung parliament with a majority of MPs who backed remain.
More to the point, the Irish border question persists no matter who is in No 10. Under the Good Friday agreement, Britain is required to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the republic. The EU is adamant on the same point, fixed in its view that there can be no hard border in Ireland, and yet equally certain that what would now be the external frontier of the EU necessarily involves customs checks and the like. No new PM will be granted a magic wand to wave away those facts, no matter how tightly they screw their eyes shut and insist they truly believe in Brexit.
Tory MPs don’t like hearing that they cannot have their cake and eat it, that there is no Brexit that comes without a severe cost, and so they are taking out their frustration on May. But any prime minister - Johnson, Davis, Raab, Mordaunt, Leadsom, Hunt, Javid - will eventually have to break the same news to them. The problem is not May. The problem is Brexit.
And thus we go for more endless reruns of the whole agonizing circus. It's like watching a friend drink themselves to death, it truly is.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Individual 1 had a temper tantrum on live camera in the reality show he's turned US politics into. this just about sums it up. You know, I've recently read Brecht's play The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui again. This is one of the plays where a few decades have completely changed my opinion on it. When I was in my early 20s, I thought it was an amusing satire on Hitler & Co., but also dated by this very fact, unable to function outside of the Third Reich context, which often is the problem with political satire. Now it's 2018, and I'm not surprised The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui is staged in the US, in Britain, and on German stages. If you don't know the play: Brecht wrote it in a few weeks, near the end of his time in Finland, waiting for US visas for himself and his entourage. It was supposed to be his debut on the American stage, using some key events of Hitler & Co. rising to power and telling them as a Chicago gangster story (in blank verse, with some witty parodies of Shakespeare scenes and scenes from Goethe's Faust to boot). This didn't work out. (In fact, the play was never staged during Brecht's life time and for years was regarded as a minor work. Not anymore, though.) According to his latest biographer, the potential US producers, far from appreciating the American location of the play, resented the implication that Americans could possibly be receptive to a fascist charlatan rising to power backed by a combination of rich industrials and thugs.
...Yeah. Anyway, read today, I think the play would work best if you ditch the explanation signs as to which event in the fictional Chicago matches which in German history altogether and don't let your Arturo do a Hitler imitation. The Cauliflower Trust and old Dogsborough, that supposedly honorable white haired man corrupted by a mixture of money and vanity, thinking they can use small time gangster Arturo Ui and then, when it turns out they are the ones used by him, cravenly falling in line; Ui's mixture of lethargy and temper tantrums; the matching of gangsters and their crooked schemes with grandiose overblown rethoric; no, you don't need to look at the past for this to work at all. There are no heroes in this play, and no larger than life villains; that the lot of them are pathetic and still gain power, wrecking terrible havoc, was part of Brecht's point. No wonder the last lines of the play these days are among the most regularly quoted Brecht lines (here in the translation by George Tabori):
“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1317835.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
The Economist, itself surely as far from "left" as you can get, has chosen Boris Johnson for the worst damage causing idiot of the year award, reasoning:
In a big field, there was one outstanding candidate. He failed miserably as foreign secretary. He sniped at Mrs May while in Cabinet. He has agitated against her deal from the backbenches and in his lucrative newspaper column without presenting a real alternative. A demagogue not a statesman, he is the most irresponsible politician the country has seen for many years. Step forward, Boris Johnson!
Not that I disagree with any of this, but just look at the competition! Even if you leave aside the Orange Menace and his minions across the Atlantic and treat it as Brits only. And it doesn't show any signs of getting better any time soon, no matter whether or not May remains in office, for, as Jonathan Freedland puts it here:
The justice secretary, David Gauke, was right when he told the BBC this morning that “the parliamentary arithmetic does not change if you change the person living in Downing Street”. As prime minister, Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab might dial up the Brexit rhetoric, but the numbers in the Commons will remain obstinately the same. It will still be a government without a majority. It will still be a hung parliament with a majority of MPs who backed remain.
More to the point, the Irish border question persists no matter who is in No 10. Under the Good Friday agreement, Britain is required to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the republic. The EU is adamant on the same point, fixed in its view that there can be no hard border in Ireland, and yet equally certain that what would now be the external frontier of the EU necessarily involves customs checks and the like. No new PM will be granted a magic wand to wave away those facts, no matter how tightly they screw their eyes shut and insist they truly believe in Brexit.
Tory MPs don’t like hearing that they cannot have their cake and eat it, that there is no Brexit that comes without a severe cost, and so they are taking out their frustration on May. But any prime minister - Johnson, Davis, Raab, Mordaunt, Leadsom, Hunt, Javid - will eventually have to break the same news to them. The problem is not May. The problem is Brexit.
And thus we go for more endless reruns of the whole agonizing circus. It's like watching a friend drink themselves to death, it truly is.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Individual 1 had a temper tantrum on live camera in the reality show he's turned US politics into. this just about sums it up. You know, I've recently read Brecht's play The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui again. This is one of the plays where a few decades have completely changed my opinion on it. When I was in my early 20s, I thought it was an amusing satire on Hitler & Co., but also dated by this very fact, unable to function outside of the Third Reich context, which often is the problem with political satire. Now it's 2018, and I'm not surprised The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui is staged in the US, in Britain, and on German stages. If you don't know the play: Brecht wrote it in a few weeks, near the end of his time in Finland, waiting for US visas for himself and his entourage. It was supposed to be his debut on the American stage, using some key events of Hitler & Co. rising to power and telling them as a Chicago gangster story (in blank verse, with some witty parodies of Shakespeare scenes and scenes from Goethe's Faust to boot). This didn't work out. (In fact, the play was never staged during Brecht's life time and for years was regarded as a minor work. Not anymore, though.) According to his latest biographer, the potential US producers, far from appreciating the American location of the play, resented the implication that Americans could possibly be receptive to a fascist charlatan rising to power backed by a combination of rich industrials and thugs.
...Yeah. Anyway, read today, I think the play would work best if you ditch the explanation signs as to which event in the fictional Chicago matches which in German history altogether and don't let your Arturo do a Hitler imitation. The Cauliflower Trust and old Dogsborough, that supposedly honorable white haired man corrupted by a mixture of money and vanity, thinking they can use small time gangster Arturo Ui and then, when it turns out they are the ones used by him, cravenly falling in line; Ui's mixture of lethargy and temper tantrums; the matching of gangsters and their crooked schemes with grandiose overblown rethoric; no, you don't need to look at the past for this to work at all. There are no heroes in this play, and no larger than life villains; that the lot of them are pathetic and still gain power, wrecking terrible havoc, was part of Brecht's point. No wonder the last lines of the play these days are among the most regularly quoted Brecht lines (here in the translation by George Tabori):
“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1317835.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.