On lies and damn lies.

You have to confess to a certain ambivalence towards news journalists.*

One of the charges the postmodernists throw at historians of the old school is that they create the illusion of empiricism by the style they employ in their writing. No hint of a mention of ‘I think…’, an attempt to surpass the amount written in the actual text by the number of words in footnotes, and the skillful use of prose so uninspiring as to put the reader to sleep within the first few pages.

Yet in the selection of information, and its juxtaposition with other so called facts, a powerful argument is, in fact, created which reflects the preconceptions, prejudices and sometimes sheer whimsy of the writer.

Now you emphatically don’t agree with the extreme extension of the argument that it it is possible to say anything at all about any given topic and call it equally as valid as any other opinion, but you do admit that there is enough truth in their criticisms as to mean that any news outlet claiming to be totally objective is sailing as close to kidding itself, or, more importantly its audience, as makes no difference.

Yes, it is the BBC you are talking about here.

Today, on heavy rotation as part of the reportage on the Russia/ Georgia contretemps, there is an interview with the Georgian president who is making a powerful plea to the West to intervene in the conflict in the name of saving democracy.

Georgia, he says, a democratic republic, is in danger of having its democratic rights trampled by the undemocratic removal of its democratically elected government.

Now the BBC is an organisation who can barely mention Russia without some mention of the autocratic (and artificially extended) rule of Vladimir Putin, electoral irregularity, suppression of opposition and crushing of the god given right of the press to say whatever the hell it likes. Even if it’s a story about how some old babushka from Vladivostok who has roller skated backwards around the globe wearing nothing but a bikini and a purple feather boa in a bid to claim the ‘most completely pointless world record’ award.

However, the BBC are running this interview without any sort of balancing comment to point out that calling Georgia’s President democratically elected is a bit like taking Zimbabwean president Mugabe’s similar claims at face value.

And irritating. 

 

* To which a regular reader of this blog** will no doubt be saying ‘no shit, Sherlock’ at this point.

** you absolutely refuse to add the qualifier ‘all five of them’ here.

On Russia and Georgia.

What she said.

On more comparative linguistics.

Incidentally, you did find something new out in your first trimester, and that is that it is impossible to sing while pregnant.

Unfortunately, you discovered this by collapsing in the middle of the winter concert of your choir.

Interesting programme. You have now added two new singing languages to your repertoire: French and Russian.

French, the conductor spent a savage five minutes saying, is the Worst Language for Singing Ever. If you remember correctly, which you probably don’t, it has no proper consonants to punctuate the words and sounds like a bunch of muddy nasal vowels run together. It is possible, he claims, to actually fall asleep from boredom in the middle of what should be the most fantastic piece of music by someone like Debussy.

Certainly you find it incredibly difficult to sing in French. This is because you have never had much of a grasp on the French accent. You may have learned French for five years at school, but the best you have ever managed in that language is ‘I would like a kilo of tomatoes, please’ uttered in the broadest of dodgy sub London tones.

So it’s quite a good thing that presumably the audience were not picking much up from the mass nose singing in that piece.

The Russian pieces, on the other hand, were easy, despite the fact that you had no idea of what you were actually saying. Perhaps because a lot of it was in Church Slavonic, but probably because your Russian has always been much more use in asking people to pass you another cup of tea than capable of sophisticated abstract discussions.

Still, it was nice to know that the language is not familiar enough for you to do the consonant clusters, which really do look jaw cracking in Latin script, without thinking and for the next syllable to be thoroughly unsurprising.

You also found the conductor’s brief masterclass on how to speak Russian quite accurate. ‘Pretend you are swallowing a watermelon’, was the advice he gave. This just confirms what you have maintained for a while: English vowels are formed at the front of the mouth, and Russian at the back, practically in the throat.

There really isn’t much to beat some of the splendidly dark notes that this can produce.

Although you did find the conductor speaking Russian in order to demonstrate some of the strings of Russian sounds quite amusing. As a result of not having much idea of what he is saying, all the phrasing goes and it sounds much more like a record being dragged around backwards than actual Russian. Luckily, he is a fiend for getting it right when singing.

So B, who had been clutching his sides in glee at the thought of quite what middle class Britishness was going to do to Rachmaninoff and the boys, was quite surprised to find that not only could he understand us in the concert, but that we actually sounded quite Russian. Once he had looked that the words in the programme, that is.

Perhaps there was hope for the French piece after all.

You rounded off the evening with what is, judging by the look of ecstatic contemplation that came over the conductor’s face every time he mentioned it, a real singers’ piece of music.

Durufle’s Requiem. Wisely written, despite the composer’s Gallic background, in Latin.

Here it is, although you really don’t think that the Cyberbass keyboards are going to do justice to the modern Gregorian chant thing Durufle has going on.

Anyway, the fainting.

Well, to be honest, after you had gone through three rehearsals without being able to stand for the whole thing, having to sit down in the middle of the cpncert in order to prevent yourself falling off the stage didn’t come as a big surprise.

It was, however, a phenomenon that was beginning to quite worry you, until a woman you had noticed sinking gracefully into her seat at about the same time as you in both the dress and the concert waved away concerned enquiries by telling everyone she was pregnant. You nearly kissed her. It apparently being a pregnancy thing rather than a Solnushka and pregnancy thing and all.

So one of the five million and two things They don’t tell you about pregnancy is: as an amateur, you can’t sing in a choir after about ten weeks.

On the refuge of scoundrels.

As a fan of formula one, your years in Russia were a bit frustrating.

It’s true that the races were generally available on one of the terrestrial channels, although it always seemed to take a few races for a deal for the TV rights to be struck. Missing the opening of the season every year and having to keep an eagle eye on the upcoming schedules to see who had been the lucky bidder this year did tend to leave you a bit irritated.

Of course, there was also the problem that any kind of delay on the day would not result in extra time being granted by the channel bosses, meaning that, given that this was the era of Schumacher domination, the one genuinely exciting race of the year would invariably be cut unceremoniously short.

And of course, the idea of showing the qualifying sessions, or having a pre race show to discuss the ins and outs of the championship so far were not even to be thought of. Even the commentator was phoning his performance in, complete with occasional black outs when he got cut off.

Not that this was much of a problem for you – you didn’t understand a word of what he was saying anyway. Sport has a whole vocabulary of its own and while you’d think that you’d have been able to pick a few of those words up over the years, just as you tended to follow the weather by looking at the pretty pictures rather than paying attention to what the weather girl said, you managed to watch season after season of racing and only ever learnt the Russian for ‘overtake’.

Probably as this happened so rarely it stuck in your mind.

So coming back to the home of motor sport should have been a delight. Hours of coverage on both days of the race, actual contact with most of the main names on a regular basis and former drivers in the commentary box.

Of course, the British think the UK is the home of every sport, or at least every sport worth playing. And yet to be honest you’ve never really thought of formula one as actually having much to do with a passion for patriotism.

Do you support the team whose engine manufacturer is located in your country? Whose technical director was born in your village? Whose second driver speaks the same language as you? Whose first driver used to share your nationality but now is a subject of King Albert? Or whose tyre manufacturer has done a lot to put jobs your compatriots’ way?

You can’t say you’ve ever given the subject much thought, and it certainly doesn’t dictate who gets your support.

The first two years, the obesession with Jenson Button not winning his first Grand Prix should have alerted you perhaps, but since he generally just continued chuntering around in forth or fifth place at best, not even the Brits could justify their comentators spending the whole race talking about him, and you remained blissfully unaware of what would happen if a British racer ever got a sniff of the title.

So you find yourself spectacularly taken aback that the new British hope Lewis Hamilton’s success seems to be some kind of national pride issue. Perhaps this was to be expected given that the British have so little other (sporting) success to make an issue of. But you do wish that a bit of perspective could be used, particularly in the ITV F1 coverage.

He’s great, of course, is Hamilton. He’s quick. He’s consistent. He’s extremely tough minded. He’s got good judgment. He’s not afraid to have a go. He’s very skilled. He’s extremely commited. It’s his first year and he’s been off the podium once. Because of circumstances largely beyond his control.

Why it doesn’t seem to occur to people that he’s just as ready to play head games and put one over on his teammate as the next ruthless competitor you don’t know. Especially as he’s very good at it.

Take this weekend’s debacle.

For those readers not as into formula one as you are, Fernando Alonso – Hamilton’s teammate – screwed up Hamilton’s qualifying session so successfully that Alonso finished on pole position (or ‘in first position’) for the start of the race with Hamilton one place behind him.

Unfortunately, he did it rather obviously, by sitting in front of Hamilton after having been given a public signal to move off while they were both waiting to get their tyres changed for just long enough so that Alonso was able to go out before the session ended but Hamilton wasn’t.

Now the race officials, presumably feeling that blatantly blocking another driver, even if he is your teammate, is a precedent they cannot allow to go unpunished, then dropped Alonso five places on the start grid on a circuit where it is notoriously difficult to pass. Just for good measure, they also decided to punish the team too, who had tried to limit the damage to Alonso’s position by claiming that it had been an argument about tyres that had held Alonso stationary rather than a willful desire to spoil Hamilton’s race. The team will not score any points for the constructors’ championship this race. 

Now, fair enough. It amused you and made for a lively programme today, but it was, perhaps, a bit much as a move, even for the cut throat world of formula one.

But after the initial outburst of indignation, everyone seems agreed that this wasn’t just Alonso being particularly spiteful.

It seems to have been a retaliation against Hamilton for disobeying instructions from the team to let Alonso past earlier as, for various technical reasons which it has occurred to you that explaining would have everyone here well past bedtime and has just impressed upon you how much time you have wasted keeping up with the sport because you actually understand them, in order for both drivers to have an equal shot at top spot when it came to putting in a fast lap, Alonso needed to be ahead of Hamilton on the track at that point.

Which just goes to show, you think, that Hamilton, as well as probably being the best all round driver on the track, is also the best all round manipulator. Had Alonso not lost his rag, the most the rest of the world would have heard would have been James Allen exclaiming again at how sick as a parrot Alonso must be at being beaten to the pole by a rookie. Even as it was, the best response Alonso could manage was so lacking in the finesse of Hamilton’s move as to be seriously compromising  for him in all sorts of ways.

Yet the whole thrust of the commentary today was of Lewis, the determined driver who is confident in his ability, knows how to look after himself and is not to be pushed around by anyone, even his own team versus Alonso, the verging on a cheat for having the temerity to object publicly to Hamilton shafting him.

You thought it was a particularly nice touch that an in depth interview with the man himself had Hamilton saying sadly, and with just the right amount of disappointed regret, that at least today had taught him who he could trust in this sport… and who he couldn’t. You were hard put to stop yourself falling off the sofa and rolling around in delighted gales of laughter.

Anyway.

The race has just finished, and sure enough Hamilton won, with Alonso fourth.

Hamilton has now extended his lead in the championship over his nearest rival who is, now let me see, I wonder if this is significant, Alonso, to seven points…

Mind you, did I mention he’s from S______? Yes? Ah.

On irrisitable urges.

You should have been reading about the barbarian hordes rampaging across Britain in the 500s. You should have been preparing lessons - this week’s topic is ’love’. You should at least have been scrubbing the bathroom.

Instead you decided to cook a Moroccan feast. It’s from your new cookbook. Arabesque by Claudia Roden. You’ve been staring longingly (and pointedly) at this book in bookshop windows for months now and when nobody took the hint, you just went out and bought it. And having bought it, you needed to use it.

                                       

Quite why you decided to cook a meal which involved boiling first carrots, then potatoes, and roasting a chicken, which meant you had to have the oven on for half the afternoon on a day which, although not actually hot, was sticky, damp and close, is a bit of a mystery though. It is also a mystery as to why you decided, in addition to the actual meal, to make two entirely superfluous salads as well. Of course, it’s always nice to add more salads to the repertoire.

However, what is really mind boggling is the fact that you chose a recipe involving couscous. Well, not really, as it was the only recipe in the book which involved you going out to buy only half, instead of all, the ingredients. But you hate couscous. Admittedly you’ve only had it once before but that was in France. And if the French can’t cook couscous, you’d think…

It turns out that French school canteens are not an infallible guide to which unusual foods you may or may not like. Despite the fact that you accidentally mixed the honey with the main marinade for the chicken far too early, and came over all British and boiled the vegetables for the salads at least twice as long as the recipe stated, this did not seem to have any appreciable effect on the outcome. Any cuisine that can stand up to your sublime disregard for any process you can’t be bothered with and your habit of doubling everything just in case is definitely worth attempting again. Although possibly with a bit less oil next time.

And couscous, when mixed with orange blossom water, almonds and raisins is really very nice indeed.

It’s a shame there isn’t a recipe for kasha. But perhaps that is beyond help.

On how to produce a good Eurovision entry.

You adore the Eurovision Song Contest and you say this totally without the kind of qualifiers that Brits usually add at this point. Such as ‘it’s so tragiclly kitsch’.

In fact, you are rather bemused by the fact that the British persist in regarding the thing as a monumental joke and yet follow programmes like Pop Idol with depressing sincerity. On both shows the musicianship these days is pretty good, but whereas the Eurovision entries are varied, interesting and sometimes quite original, the other shows are wall to wall bland.

The UK spectacular missing of the point is usually neatly encapsulated in their total inability to send a decent song along.

This year, we fielded the sort of entry we fondly imagine the Eurovision is full of. Except, of course, ours was better because we were doing it ironically. So we had people in flight attendant uniforms making suggestive remarks about champagne bottles, doing aeroplane impressions and singing about how they wanted to fly the flag over all the countries in Europe.

Fly the flag over all the countries in Europe? The flag? The flag?

Really, you were quite disappointed anyone voted for us at all after that rampant display of unrepentant imperialism.

The French entry, on the other hand, was funny. Since the French, year after year, have traditionally rather humourlessly sent women stubbornly singing ballads in French even when everybody had succumbed to doing it all in English, the fact that they did it in Franglais showed a proper entry into the spirit of things. And they wore pink PVC, were jolly, and it was a much better song all round.

But to really get the full beauty of it you had to be quite good at both English and French. You don’t think many people are that good at English or French. The default language of the tournament may be English, but the trick is to try and string together the English words which are universally recognised (‘love love love love love love love love’) in some kind of logical order rather than anything more sophisticated.

 So nobody voted for it either. Except you.

Actually you are quite pleased that the rise of digital TV systems which allow translations and such seems to have encouraged people to start singing in their own language again.

The whole point, for you, of Eurovision is to enjoy a small lifting of the fog cutting the continent off from the UK, and this does not include having to pay attention to the words, which really don’t deserve it, particularly when they are written in someone’s second language. You positively enjoy listening to the other languages in fact.

This year you had your own awards for ‘ most random English lyric’ . Russia won hands down for some really ill-conceived ‘ummy’ rhymes and calling each other bitches. You are so proud. The UK came a close second though, which is really quite embarrassing when you think about it.

Anyway. You generally refuse to vote for anyone singing totally in English, although you streatched a point for Georgia this year because, although the song was a blatant rip off of Madonna’s Ray of Light, you did feel that the ethnic dancers pulled one back for national flag waving. Plus, the singer was, as a singer, rather better than Madonna, and you happen to like that song.

B was forced to vote for Romania, on the grounds that they were the only people singing in Russian.

But there’s a bit of good humoured patriotism and then there’s the Ukraine.

Who sent along a well known TV personality of the Dame Edna Everage type to do a bit of techno bopping.

Terry Wogan described it as incomprehensible, mainly because the entirety of the lyrics submitted for the Eurovision’s subtitlers to play with were pretty much ‘I want to see… Lasha Tumbai.’ Although the silver costumes complete with a hat with a large five pointed star and energetic dancing might have had something to do with that too.

You have visions of the BBC’s researchers running around and trying to find out who Lasha is in Ukrainian popular culture and why she’s a suitable person to sing about at Eurovision.

They should have ignored the spelling and had a go at imagining what it might mean if you are singing in English with a strong Ukrainian peasant accent and you don’t want to tip your hand too blatantly.

It’s supposed to stand for ‘I want to see… Russia goodbye.’

Which you find incredibly insulting not primarily to Russia, but to the competition, which sees itself as one of these goodwill hands across the border type affairs. And you also find mean spirited the the fact that they presumably deliberately set out to trick Europe into singing along.

So you were hugely relieved when Serbia won with a perfectly pleasant, well executed song sung in Serbian about love.

On being lost in translation.

Having discovered that you had slightly misinterpreted the setting of the book by a Spanish author – with large chunks of it set in Spain simply because Spain is the centre of the universe, as opposed to somewhere suitably Continentally decedent for odd Art to take place – it got you thinking about the other series you are reading at the moment, where the action mostly takes place in Moscow.

This is The Night Watch and The Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. It’s a trilogy. The third one is coming out (in translation) soon.

                       

Good books. The whole premise, that supernatural forces are among us and in constant battle, is made interesting by the fact that this fight is now extremely hedged about by bureaucratic bylaws and policed rigidly for any overstepping of the agreed boundaries. Which is amusing and quite inventive.

The books are structured as three almost separate stories, but which nevertheless link together and resolve themselves into a whole in the end. There are multiple points of view too, as each story is mainly told by a different character. Both Light and Dark characters get a look in, which adds dimension to the world the author has created.

It’s not without it’s flaws though. You found yourself wondering if it wasn’t cheating a bit to have a first person narrative when you are also dropping in on the thoughts of other characters occationally, for example. And the author can be a bit heavy handed with his explanations. But overall it’s clever, if not very profound, and you’ve ever been a sucker for that.

However, somewhere in the middle of the first book, you realised that had the author been British (or Spanish, or from anywhere else), Moscow wouldn’t have been the first choice of location.

Modern British authors only send their heroes to the Russian capital if they are writing some kind of thriller. That’s it.

It’s important that while they are there they stay in a cockroach infested Soviet style hotel – in the Jasper Fforde universe Muscovites must keep a few rooms intact just for such visitors - where the mod cons are hot and cold running prostitutes and little else. The hero will take up with a sad eyed, chain smoking member of the world’s oldest profession, partly because there are, apparently, no other women in the city other than prostitutes, partly so that she can glower and look miserable and save the author time on further description by standing for all the other Russians around who we are to presume are constantly glowering and looking miserable, and partly because  her father will turn out to be a former colonel in the KGB.

Just so that we can have a nod to modernity, they also have to ritually go to the nightclub where the mafia runs its extensive business empire from. There will be pumping techno music and every man will be wearing bad shirts. Which is a good fifteen years out of date as an image, but then that’s probably the least of our problems at this stage. Everyone will be drinking vodka. Without any food in sight.

And to get there, there will be a drive through a forest of ugly concrete tower blocks, more tower blocks and nothing but tower blocks (with more prostitutes signalling wildly from the side of the road all the way). The hero may remark on the lack of vegetation in the way of trees, grass or flowerbeds. Although it’s more likely to be winter and therefore the city will be covered with (grimy) snow and temperatures will be at least minus 25.

Once you’d pinpointed that, you realised that one of the reasons you are enjoying this book is that Moscow just happens to be the place where they are, where the author lives and where most of his audience will recognise. So his characters trot round the place interacting with the scenery doing things like opening fridges (to get out a bottle of human blood), riding up escalators on the metro (in a vampire induced trance) or going on a jaunt up the distinctive Ostankino TV tower (to attack the temporary HQ of the Dark Forces). You, of course, are sitting there happily exclaiming “I had a fridge like that” or “I know those escalators” or “So that’s what the restaurant up there looks like”

But while the events are (melo) dramatic, the scenery isn’t part of that, really. And that’s got to be the first novel set in modern Russia you’ve read that you can say that about. Which tells you just how many novels set in modern Russia you’ve read which were written by Russian authors.

You also wonder what will create the most sense of dislocation in a foreign reader who isn’t familiar with Russia. You suspect it would be the frequent references to legendary rock musicians and their works, whose music and lyrics the author has, quite neatly, worked into the plot and none of whom anyone in the West will ever have heard of.

On activating your schemata.

You can be very boring on the topic of grammar. And punctuation. Particularly commas. The rules are comforting, even if you do treat them as something of an abstract concept when it actually becomes time to apply them.

You are considerably more interested in how we actually use language, though. And the routines we follow and the skills we employ when doing so. Pragmatics. Discourse analysis. Psycho and sociolinguistics and all that jazz.

And reading.

Isn’t it interesting to discover that we do not read word by word and certainly not letter by letter? Instead we chunk words together in groups of about four or five and hop our eyes along the page from chunk to chunk. In fact, if we were to watch someone read, their eyes wouldn’t be moving smoothly across the page, but going along in a series of little jerks. The chunks aren’t random either, but grouped for sense. We’d be more likely to group together ’there are four chairs’ followed by ‘in the kitchen’ than ‘There are’ followed by ‘four chairs in the’ followed by ‘kitchen’, for example.

There’s also the issue of schemata. This is all the background knowledge about a subject that you have that helps you process new information, written or spoken.

Imagine coming downstairs and seeing a letter on the front door mat. Looking at it, it’s generally clear from the style of the envelope whether it’s a bill type letter or a personal one. Imagine it’s a personal one, although goodness only knows who writes real letters these days. Picking it up and looking at the address – assuming it’s handwritten - might give away who it’s from. We tend to recognise the handwriting of our nearest and dearest, after all. If that doesn’t work, the Preston postmark might help. Only 90 year old Auntie Doris lives in Preston and she hasn’t been told about email yet in case it over stimulates her. Which explains the anachronistically handwritten letter.

However, let’s just imagine for a minute that it isn’t from Auntie Doris, but old friend Tom. Look his computer is clearly being particularly bloody minded at the moment. OK? Hence the letter. No, his mobile doesn’t work either. Or the land-line. Oh shut up.

Next time, remember to choose email for this illustration.

Anyway. It’s Tom, and we tend to know what’s going on in the lives of our friends – to the extent that we have a reasonable idea of which country they are in, whether they are still married, that they have a particular fondness for flinging themselves off bridges tied to a bit of knicker elastic and such. We also know the sorts of things which we gossip about with them. And so, by the time we open that letter, we are going to gave a very good idea of what it contains, which will help us charge through it, hoovering up the information it contains very efficiently. Although we may pause and reread a bit more closely if he reveals he’s just seen the light and is moving to a small commune on the outskirts of Las Vegas to await the second coming of The King.

Anyway, the reason you mention this is because you’ve just had a rather dislocating experience, somewhat akin to finding out Tom’s hitherto unsuspected obsession with Elvis, or that the letter you thought was from Tom reveals itself, after a few confusing paragraphs, to be from Auntie Doris after all.

There you are happily whomping though a new detective story and all of a sudden you start noticing that there are a lot of references to Spain and all thing Spanish. This could be because this particular section of the book is set in Spain, of course, but you’d rather assumed that this was just a sort of shorthand for underlining that the subject of the story is High Art and therefore demands the sophistication of a continental location. And the fact that we had already been dragged around Vienna and Holland by the author did nothing to dispel this notion.

So why the obsession with Spanish motifs? It nagged. And so when you came across a particularly incomprehensible skit involving an Argentinian character’s pronunciation of ‘w’, you were actually forced out of the book and onto the blurb in search of enlightenment.

And it turns out that the book is in fact written by a Spanish author. And has been translated from the Spanish. Which explained everything.

It was extremely disconcerting to discover that all the dialogue of the last few chapters had been conducted in Spanish, though.

It’s a good book, by the way. The Art of Murder by Jose Carlos Somoza.

                                   

Calling it a murder mystery is a bit misleading, actually. You’d say it was an alternative universe construct, but again, you are sure the author isn’t much of a sci fi geek.

Nevertheless, everything in this universe is the same except for the word of Art, which is now all about using people as canvases, specially trained to be quiescent and hopped up on mind and body altering drugs. The killing of various of these canvases, who have all been painted by the same artist, is not seen by the Art world as murder, but as the destruction of masterpieces.

What you like about the book is the in depth exploration of the ins and outs of this artistic trend and the way that this is woven into the story neatly rather than, as so often happens, being dumped in unwieldy chunks awkwardly all over the plot.

And this world turns out to be absolutely fascinating and very well thought through by the author. 

Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that the whole thing is one big satire on the absurdities of Modern Art, with the author clearly giving a lot of effort to topping the outrageousness of any pieces the real Art world can produce. You vigorously approve of this sort of thing.

Although the expose would be more convincing if you weren’t finding the descriptions of the art works he’s created so utterly compelling.

On Women’s Day.

Today, ladies, it is International Women’s Day, a phrase with all the semantic meaning of the Americans’ World Baseball Series. It’s big in the Former Soviet Union though.

You are rather fond of it as it means flowers and a card without either having to get up early and make pancakes or go to the effort of producing babies to become an official Mother first.

In fact, if it all goes really well and you look really pointedly at people, you can get cards and flowers from virtually every male of your acquaintance with no need to sleep with any of them at all.

So Happy Women’s Day. May it become more well known.

Я поздравляю Вам с праздником международный женский день.

On supporting the troops.

A chap called Hobgoblin, who you came to via Charlotte and Aphra Behn‘s postings on the topic, has requested movingly and persuasively that people blog about what it means to support the troops. This seems like an admirable project, even if it didn’t run headlong into your latest train of thought, so here goes.

It’s not something you feel you have the right to comment on usually.

No one in your family has ever, as far as you know, been a professional soldier. You also can’t say that any of them particularly distinguished themselves when forced to take part in times of mass conscription. One of your Grandads, for example, was laid out in a London hospital with hepatitis and missed the landings on D-day as a result. And your family doesn’t talk about the other one.

B’s family tended to be more on the receiving end of armies – half of them starved to death in the blockade of St Petersburg and B’s Grandmother had her house burned down around her by advancing German troops down Lipisk way ten days after giving birth to B’s mother. And don’t mention the civil war. The menfolk of his family who have had anything to do with it tend to have practiced desertion, getting themselves disappeared, being assigned to suicide squads – either we shoot you or you let them do it - or draft dodging. B’s family were, in fact, enemies of the people (with certificates and the stint in Siberia to prove it) although they never covered themselves in glory by becoming out and out dissidents.

This doesn’t mean, though, that you don’t have an opinion, which you are sure will surprise no one. Here’s what support means to you:

Soldiers should not be used as cannon fodder. This means not getting involved in unnecessary wars - and there’s an obvious way we could support our troops there - and also having effective commanders of armies and strategies so that they are not wasted once they are committed. Quite apart from the obvious benefits of there being fewer opportunities to get killed, you think it would be better for the soldiers if they could believe in what they are doing. It also entails using the new technology which allows the armed forces not to put soldiers at any more risk than they have to be. This is a dangerous line to walk though as the technology mostly involves killing at a distance and that very distance makes killing very easy. 

So soldiers should not be asked to do utterly indefensible things. There should be loud debates about what sort of acts are permissible and what are not. There seems to be a general acceptance now, for example, that involving civilians in wars is inevitable, yet it’s this that puts the most stress on soldiers on the ground. If our outrage were loud enough, would more alternatives be found?

Unfortunately this is one of those areas where critisism of the policy is seen as being criticism of the troops. Mainly because it often has meant that. Remember all those ‘baby killer’ comments to the Vietnam veterans? You always felt that it was the sixties only fine moment, that such an energetic anti war movement existed. But you also felt that it was their worst moment as well as so much of the ire seemed directed at the soldiers themselves. Which in turn meant they came home to hostility and a determination to brush the whole thing under the carpet. At best.

Soldiers should be protected from themselves. You’ve posted at length about what atrocities people can commit in extreme circumstances, and in war soldiers have a habit of going off the rails. This is a failure of army discipline and structure and so support of the troops includes guarding against creating the conditions where such acts become possible, and preventative policing so that the conditions which can lead to them are nipped in the bud.

Soldiers also need acknowledgement. World war vets were probably able to integrate back into civilian life more easily partly because, unlike Vietnam vets for example, they were uncontroversially recognised as heroes. And continued to be fiercely celebrated. Presumably when the doubts set in or the nightmares rise up, this is of some comfort. However, you also wonder if it wasn’t also because when they got back home everybody there had also been caught up in the conflict – everybody and society as a whole was in the same boat of having to go from a war footing to a peacetime footing. You wonder how much harder it is for soldiers coming back from Iraq to be met with, by and large ringing silence. Not just on the subject of their hero status, but about the experience they have been going though as a whole. It’s an extreme form of culture shock and the worst of culture shock is watching everyone else wonder round behaving as though everything is perfectly normal.

More fuss, then, should be made about returning soldiers by the communities they return to. Not just when they return but repeatedly thereafter. Our Remembrance Day is important – it doesn’t do to forget the costs of war entirely. But you wonder if  we are being a bit self indulgent and trying to purge ourselves of the guilt of engaging in war at all with it sometimes. We know war is indefensible but as long as we are sorry then that’s alright. This day allows us to maintain the moral high-ground, but probably doesn’t do much to boost the moral of those who didn’t, in fact, die. There are celebrations of the end of the second world war, but perhaps more fuss should be made of veterans of all kinds.

Mind you, the problem of having a Veterans’ Day is that people have a tendency to take the observance of such days as the only thing they need to do in order to contribute towards whatever problem is being acknowledged. Still, while you’d prefer to get paid more, you were always pathetically grateful for the acknowledgement the Russian habit of continuing to celebrate the Soviet holiday of Teachers’ Day gave you. Just because it’s a bit of a cliche, doesn’t mean it doesn’t actually have benefit.

But soldiers also need practical help when they get back. It really is a bit much to send people out to do a most unpleasant job which you recognise is pragmatically necessary but which, frankly, you aren’t prepared to do yourself and then not ensure that there is adequate recompense and support when they get back. You’ve noticed a few stories in the news recently about the substandard accommodation soldiers are expected to put up with when they return and while by and large you disapprove of media campaigns faking outrage to sell newspapers, this one might have some useful purpose. There’s not much on this topic though around and perhaps it’s time to try to get it more prominently talked about. You have decided it might be time to make a few enquiries and send a few letters to the relevant institutions.

And then of course there’s Hobgoblin’s original request:

So, here is my plea. I want to start people talking more and more and more about supporting the troops. I want people to think more about how we treat the people who have made the sacrifices for our country. I want people to think about how cynically politicians exploit the troops for their own ends. I want people to think about how a drunken frat boy draft dodger can be seen as a hero and biggest supporter of our troops, and I want people to think about just what this absolute and complete collapse of meaning says about our country. Please, write something about this. Spread the word. Talk about how we need to support our troops in real, tangible, material ways–starting with bringing them home from this evil, stupid, stupid war. Reference me or not, link to me or not, but talk about it. Ask everyone who reads your blog to write about it–just one post–until everyone in the blogosphere is talking about it. Create a chain blog, an enormous pyramid of entries. It may mean nothing–probably will mean nothing–but things only start to happen when people talk and agitate.