Why do we write?

It's such a jaded world that even publishing has devolved from a calling to a black art ruled by a bottom line figure. Which begs the question: why do we write? Why?

Because there is a need. A desire. It wells up from deep inside us and does things which make us want to overflow with words and ideas.

Publishers do not get this. So authors are left struggling unless we make it big and then the only revenge is to make them pay.

Politicians should do drugs at least once

Politics is a funny game and politicians are…well. Ok, let’s not get too overindulged. Politicians are human like the rest of us and what we expect of them when we vote them into office is neither the purity of a friar nor the connivance of a Svengali. Most of the times we expect them to do their job more efficiently than the rest of us because (let’s face it) they are on a gravy train at our expense, and when push comes to shove we expect them to display the higher attributes of the human condition one expects of public figures invested in a position of authority or leadership.

So that means no pettiness, no back-stubbing and lots of sagacity, wisdom and generousity of spirit. I know, I know, in a few more minutes the effects of the class C substance I am smoking now will wear off and I will see them as they really are, but while I am under the influence I just cannot bring myself to write anything bad about them, which is exactly the point.

Jaqui Smith came clean with this and admitted to smoking cannabis and, you know, because she’s in charge of the government’s drugs campaign I felt – really- that much more reassured. Here was a person who had the strength of character to own up to having done what probably half the country did back in the 80s and earlier, except perhaps of former US President Clinton who had the presence of mind not to inhale, but that is an exception. The rest of the world not only inhaled but puffed and puffed and almost forgot to exhale.

So Alistair Darling and Ruth Kelly all joined that tier of politicians who understand the human condition, are part of it and when it comes to legislating have at least a perspective which those who publicly started that they haven’t and what’s more, may not possibly even imagine, have no recourse to and are therefore incapable of legislating about except in a blind, lip-serving (and possibly sycophantic) way.

So let’s keep it real. The sins of the past, in retrospect, do not instantly make us incapable of deciding between right and wrong or even understanding the set of conditions which lead us down certain choices.

We are, in the 21st century, balanced upon the edge of radicalising the very way we perceive those who are in public office. If we are happy to have asexual, puritans who have never spent a day living in the real world and understanding its pressures, then fine, but those are not the kind of people who get my vote and just to put things in perspective, we have troops involved in two war fronts in the Middle East precisely because there were societies ran by just such men, which we perceived as a threat.

So next time a politico admits to a little sinning, let’s laugh, ridicule and crack some funnies and also feel confident that they know their current job and duties and our expectations are in safe hands.

Things under the sun

Bright sunlight and the sea have a way of making things appear simpler than they are. It becomes difficult to think that there is anything wrong with the world then and even harder to care if you actually start thinking that there is something wrong.

The question that is raised here is are we subject to our environment to the degree that our thoughts and concerns are shaped by it? Is this why Eskimos have never started a war or why Brits have started so many?

Why Salman Rushdie deserves a knighthood

I first came across Rushdie's writings and the power of his words to move the reader in the book that propelled him into literary stardom: 'Midnight's Children'. I felt moved, humbled and informed in equal parts and in that volume Rushdie became one of the greatest ambassadors for India and Pakistan explaining cultural differences without sinking into the debasement of exegesis, contrasting the East and the West in such stark, yet gentle terms that I often, in retrospect felt ashamed not to belong to a culture whose roots went as far back as that.

I loved the 'Satanic Verses' and laughed at the Iranian regime's fatwa except it cost the British tax payer a cool £1 mil a year to protect him. We have come a long way since then, we are in a new century and Rushdie, it seems has lost none of his power to polarise opinion, arising the hatred of the very people who should be supporting him as their ambassador to the West and being liked by those who should be less sympathetic to him.

I am, quite deliberately, going to take a balanced view here, precisely because it will serve to better make the case. Rushdie and his knighthood have become focal points by a chagrined sandal-footed throng (and yep inflammatory imagery is deliberately used here) precisely because it gives focus to their ire against the West (which somehow is held responsible for all the ills they experience at the hands of their own governments and societies).

Religion has always been a powerful focal force. In the West we use to burn apostates and heretics and brand anyone not falling in line as a witch. So in that respect we were no more enlightened than Pakistan is today. But our darkness was over 1000 years ago and we have since come such a long way that Amazon freely sells books like: The case against Christianity and The Atheist Manifesto which takes a remarkably balanced view against all three of the world's religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

What is remarkable here is that goatherds (and please correct me if I am wrong, but sandals and white robes went out of fashion back in King Herod's time) feel so strongly about literature that they are prepared to go to war against the West, threaten acts of terrorism and consider killing a writer.

Either they all possess a remarkable genetic mutation which allows them to appreciate literature to a degree that must be truly remarkable or else they are all a bunch of ignorant fanatics listening to equally ignorant (but far more sly) self-titled clergy which have a hidden agenda and can whip them into a frenzy to suit their own purposes.

In all his writings Rushdie did not ever come near again to the potency of 'Midnight's Children' and yet he has the ability to stir up such passions (which he no doubt revels in) simply because of ignorance, illiteracy and fanaticism, the very things literature is supposed to stand against.

Should people in Pakistan learn to read they will realise that the most effective weapon against a writer is obscurity. Then again, should they learn to read they might take it upon themselves to study the Koran rather than have it read out to them by those who serve not God, but themselves.

Have we got religious zealots in the West? Welllll, looking at the reaction to Gibson's 'Passion of the Christ' should be enough to answer that question. If Islamic countries really want to be taken seriously then they will need to somehow pull themselves up out of the primordial soup where they currently mentally reside and try and reclaim some of the past intellectual glory of the civilization that made inroads in mathematics and medicine the West could only dream about.

Then, and only then, they might command some respect. But until they get to that stage, they will serve only as a reminder that en-mass they hold about as much credibility as last year's zucchini salad (and I am probably doing now a huge disservice to zucchini salads everywhere).

Barbarians all around

Rome was sacked by Alaric, King of the Visigoths in 410 and then again 45 years later by Geiseric, appropriately named King of the Vandals and in 546 Totila, King of the Visigoths sacked it and depopulated almost as an aside in his war against the Byzantines. Yet none of these managed to even scratch the Aqua Virgo (or Virgin Water) one of the city's underground viaducts supplying one of its most famous fountains, until this month of course when in 2007 Ano Domini, builders building an underground car park damaged its structure and then, adding insult to injury and sealing for eternity the cretinous nature of their ilk (and I will explain why I so strongly word this here in a minute) they walled it off stopping the waterflow and causing further damage (which they thought they had successfully hid).

We live in an age where most things are permissible. We can all get hold of 'recreational' drugs that would knock out an elephant and we all are capable of finding the kind of porn online that would have got us behind bars a few short years ago.

Our children go around, if you believe the pundits, in a perpetual, mind-warping sex, violence and video-game fuelled fugue which will serve in little more than dissociating them from reality to the point that they become aliens to their own world. Yet none of this is really worrying. Whether you think the arrow of progress points north or south it is all part of evolution, the flip side of moving on and we have to learn to deal with it.

Yet there are a few things which are sacred and that is the beauty found in objects from our distant past.

Whether it's the structure of the Aqua Virgo, created to flow water to a fountain in the ancient world's most important city, or the world's tallest statues of Buddha mindlessly destroyed by a bunch of illiterate, bearded, goat-herding, insecure misogynists (and guys feel free the Fatwa me over this allegation) they are sacred because in them we see not what they are but what they represent.

Their existence, their creation, speak volumes of thought and human passion. Ingenuity, endeavour, the ability to overcome problems, the ability to dream and the ability to hope. In them we see not just the past but also the future because they are part of what makes us intrinsically human rather than better-equipped apes.

There are exceptions. The builders in Rome. The Taliban in Afghanistan. Mindless acts of such destruction repudiate not the past but our future. Our ability to be human. Our sense of being special. Everything that we can be as well as many things of what we were.

Stoning was too good for the Taliban and as a liberal Westerner raised on accepting other people's faiths I was all for nuking them after they destroyed the Buddhas for in that act they showed that they cannot be reasoned with any more than one would be able to reason with a herd of cattle, without the means of a cattleprod.

Ok, now it's your turn. What do you think should happen to the builders in Rome? They succeeded in doing what even the barbarians who sacked the city failed. I've had a few issues with builders in the past (albeit not Italian ones and over a conservatory rather than an aqueduct) so this now makes me a little biased (though nuking is out of the question, Rome is full of antiquities), so let me know what the punishment should be.

A blow for free enterprise

I tend to sometimes walk too much in my inner dark side. Depending on your demographics you will think that either I am unusually moribund, dwell too much in the opposite direction of the Force or have issues which need resolving and, as it happens, you will most probably all be right.

The thing is that I took the decision this morning to expand the brief here a little bit and the news on the Albanian Crowd (rented, right?) and the President's wristwatch proved to be so auscpicious that I took it as a sign and forfeited the ritual sacrificing of the goat (I could not find a virgin and I was assured the goat was that way untouched), that my decision was right.

Now Bush is so keen to visit countries where Capitalism and free market enterprise is taking hold that he has, on this occasion, led by example. Ever since Robin Hood "robbed the rich to give to the poor" a little light-handedness has gone a long way towards equalising the dispersion of wealth amongst the masses. Not that I am condoning this in any way, shape or form. Far from it. But if we stop being judgemental and laughing at the US President's apparent misfortune at the moment (and the excuse about him taking it off is about as believable as the evil pretzel attack) we must, at length, concede that stealing is about as democratic an activity (albeit fraught with risks) as any free market enterpreneurship can possibly be.

Let's analyse it for a moment. Here are the ingredients needed to make it happen (and they are all true in this case):

1. Opportunity - such activity cannot flourish in an environment that is inherently deprived. Historically, such environments produce solidarity and group desperation and dispiritedness, but not entrepreneurial activities. For these to happen you need the opportunities created by inequality. The demands made by those who have in terms of goods, services and habits (not to mention behaviour) create the opportunities while at the same time inspire those who have not to aspire to a higher status.
2. Talent - ok, this does not need a lengthy explanation. Either you have it, or you don't.
3. Planning - and in the lifting of President Bush's watch we have ample evidence of it. The other alternative is to believe that such talents as stealing wristwatches are second nature to most Albanians (it is possible you know) and accept that here was an individual, unfazed by circumstances and willing to seize the opportunity presented.
4. Style - without it no business an ever hope to take off the ground. Imagine Robin Hood doing his bit with a grimace instead of a smile and yelling in rage instead of homespun, witty repartee. He would have been a mere brigand.

Put those ingredients together and presto you have the formula which spawned Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I realise, of course, that I have forgotten the seasoning: A hefty dose of desperation. Because stealing, like entrepreneurial pursuits, is a high-risk activity we need to have a sense of desperation and a clear-cut lack of alternatives for it to really flourish.

So all you louts who read this Blog (and I hope there are some) and are now laughing at the leader of the free world, consider that at least his presence affirmed values which, taken to their natural conclusion may one day help Albania become the next world-leading economy (or at least, failing that, stop being the butt of jokes - it now has more than one set of traffic lights which was operational on special occasions, you know).

And the paranoia just grows and grows!

Traditionally, technology has always been on the side of government. Prior to the age of the net governments were the ones employing superior technology to spy on their own people, erode personal liberty and, in the name of security, create a climate of control.


In democractic countries this was less noticeable though still present, in countries which did not even bother to pay lip service to democracy. The net changed all that by moving technology faster than governments and politicians could understand it and by putting it squarely in the hands of the 'little guy' who now had the power to project his voice and views and seek information beyond what a government might approve.

Governments are catching up. The latest story is on the rise of censorship on the net. and it points to hoe fast the practise is expanding.

At some point we will all need to make a stand in some way or face the fact that we have nowhere to run and no means to do so. The paranoia must stop, somewhere, some way.