Month: November 2009

Spiegel yet again, where Tobias “Easyjetset” Rapp has a delightfully cynical article on Rammstein finally getting their latest album (not quite) banned:

For the professional provocateurs it is almost a little offensive that a passé gay joke about homosexuals supposedly inserting hamsters into their bodies riled the censors more than earlier songs about the cannibal of Rotenburg and incest, or their Leni Riefenstahl video.

And he has the cultural situation of Neue Deutsche Härte precisely pinned down:

Rammstein, six East German musicians who played in various underground bands in East Germany, derived a successful business model from their understanding that there are no consequences for cultural rebellion in capitalism. Their recipe is simple: Cram sex and violence into a Dadaist vise (a technique that is probably most successful in “Pussy,” with lines like “Blitzkrieg with the meat gun”), add layers of loud guitar music and synthesizer noise, and gurgle out the words in a deep, throaty voice.

Nobody else seems much cheerier about Ashton than I am.

“

deep embarrassment…permeates the senior ranks of Gordon Brown’s ministerial team this morning…..”Shaming and dreadful” is how one prominent colleague privately put it

”

— Michael White in the [Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/nov/20/von-rompuy-ashton-eu-michael-white)

“

She has little experience and is a bizarre choice. It would be a sign that European diplomacy is downgraded to an economic policy post.

”

— French official quoted in the [Telegraph](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/6609229/Herman-Van-Rompuy-and-Baroness-Ashton-land-top-EU-jobs.html)

“

On the day of her election, the best that could be said of her was that she is a good listener”. “expectations are so low that Van Rompuy and Ashton can only be a positive surprise

”

—[Spiegel](http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,662357,00.html)

More justified grumbling elsewhere:

* [Crooked Timber](http://crookedtimber.org/2009/11/19/whether-or-not-it-is-good-for-europe-it-is-very-bad-for-belgium/#comments)

* [A Fistful of Euros](http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/the-european-union/eu-lisbon-jobs-open-thread/)

* [European Tribune](http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2009/11/19/13254/148)

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1) The Oubliette, a very impressive group of art-squatters. Currently occupying a building in Leicester Square, ffs. Previous squats: the former Mexican Embassy on Mayfair, and a language school on Oxford Street. And they’re

Doing Things

™ in the buildings.

2) Crooked Timber searching in vain for political novels. Even CT’s collective erudition doesn’t turn up much, at least in the Anglophone world. This is odd; surely politics

should

be the perfect backdrop for fiction? Constant conflict of duty, ideology, loyalty, and self-interest. Articulate, self-aware characters continually mythologizing their own lives for public consumption. A prefab Greek chorus of pundits and journalists. Day-to-day politics may be dull, cynical and idea-free, but that doesn’t stop it twisting people in fascinating ways. It’s hard to believe that

nobody

is doing anything with all that material. So, what excellent political novels should I be reading?

Today’s EU appointments are a catastrophe for anybody counting on the Lisbon treaty to give Europe a public face. The only chance to kick-start a pan-European public sphere was to populate the top posts with figures fit to be loved, hated, or at least recognized across Europe. Instead, as foreign minister, we get [Baroness Ashton](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroness_Ashton).

Baroness Ashton has no obvious expertise in foreign affairs before last year. Nor has she ever won an election. “

Even friends are stunned that someone so low key could have been elevated to such a high profile job

“, according to the [[FT](http://blogs.ft.com/brusselsblog/2009/11/cathy-ashton-10-things-to-know/)]

She’s an apparatchik. Worse, she’s an apparatchik who doesn’t even know Brussels. At least not until last year, when she was shuffled in as Trade Commissioner so that Mandelson could sneak home and salvage the Labour party. Before then, she was a backroom figure in the UK, working her way around charities, quangos and political posts. All worthy, but hardly preparation for Europe and the world.

How did she end up at the job? Was it Machiavellian manouvering by Britain? Talk up Blair, drop him at the last minute, and bounce Ashton in on the resulting pan-European wave of relief? Somehow I don’t think so; I just can’t see why they would go to all that trouble for somebody so unpromising. Instead, I’ll have to rely on the standard explanation for how every EU appointment happens: she was suggested at the last minute, and nobody knew enough about her to object.

Ban Ki-Moon was the last appointment to disappoint me this badly, and for similar reasons. Without a charismatic leader, the UN faded further into the shadows, and is losing influence month by month. Ban was chosen in part by people who wanted to keep the UN weak; what excuse is there for the EU ministers? Intentionally or not, they’ve just placed a brown paper back over the head of Europe.

I’d like to imagine the whole implausible campaign for Blair as EU president as a carefully-generated storm, bouncing in Baroness Ashton as a consolation prize. But then I can’t see anything about Ashton that would justify such Machiavellian shenanigans*. So perhaps she just happened to be hanging around in Brussels at the right time?

* As far as I can see, her only vague connection with foreign affairs before last year is a brief involvement with CND. I truly don’t understand this habit of dumping politicians into policy areas they know nothing about.

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In a (month-old) interview with Gerry Adams, Johann Hari emphasises the similarity between Republican movements in Ireland and a cross-Atlantic counterpart:

.

Over the next few years, Catholics in Northern Ireland – stirred by the black civil rights movement in the US, and the dream of Martin Luther King – started to peacefully organise to demand equality…. “There was a sense of naiveté, of innocence almost, a feeling that the demands we were making were so reasonable that all we had to do was kick up a row and the establishment would give in,” he says. But the civil rights marches were met with extraordinary ferocity. Protestant mobs attacked the demonstrators, and then the RUC swooped in to smash them up.

Following this line, the divergent outcomes for the two movements become a case study of the snowball effect of political choices. Also of the distortions of hindsight, which tends to elide the violent parts of the US civil rights movement, and the peaceful ends of Irish republicanism.