WALKING LIKE EGYPTIANS

The offer of the ruling military council to install Mr. Ganzouri as the head of a new national government of Egypt is not going down well with the protesters in Cairo (30 degrees North, 31 degrees East). The protesters are walking to Tahrir Square and will walk further. The military elite are stood stock still.

While the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) presents its regrets for the deaths in Tahrir Square, anger among Egyptians sets them on the move.  Bangles rattling.

Slide your feet up the street bend your back 

Shift your arm then you pull it back 

Life is hard you know (oh whey oh) 

Money's short, food prices rise, tourist revenues decrease, religious fervour mounts, long-simmering angers boil up. And the barricades grow in the streets.

The Generals are behind them – well behind them – shielded by plexiglass and inertia. They are motionless hieroglyphs of a time past.

All the old paintings on the tombs 

They do the sand dance don't you know 

If they move too quick (oh whey oh) 

They're falling down like a domino 

Mr. Ganzouri is of the old regime, although he sometimes challenged it. The protesters in Tahrir Square – and people across the world - don't want challenge. They want change. They are on the move.

All the kids in the marketplace say 

Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh 

Walk like an Egyptian 

Even in the face of police and army violence, they are walking. Can they bring the Armed Forces with them?

If you want to find all the cops

They're hanging out in the doughnut shops.

Going on the Million Man March? Women too? Battles to be fought and won?

Walks to be completed. To deliver the genuine social change Egyptians desire.

 We are all Egyptians. Walking, in the deserts of al-Mutanabbi.

The desert knows me well, the night and the mounted men.

The battle and the sword, the paper and the pen.

Bangles rattling.

Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh 

Walk like an Egyptian; song; The Bangles; 1986; You Tube; various

Extract; poem; al-Mutanabbi; www.princeton.edu/~arabic/poetry/

JIM FIXED. ANT AND DEC WRECK

Symbols matter. Concrete matters attach to them. 

Jimmy Saville, former DJ, TV presenter, marathon runner and charity fund-raiser, is buried -  fixed in earth, not concrete -  at a forty five degree angle. As a symbol of his eccentricity, it is consistent and whimsical. 

Instead of presenting TV shows today, he would be on them, exploited as a freak, by the ubiquitously laddish Ant and Dec. They are currently in a highly stage-managed jungle, itself a symbol of the lengths popular culture owners will go to as they exploit the good. And thereby wreck it.

Alan Titley asks 'an bhfaca tú riamh billiún?', which translates to English as 'did you ever see a billion?' A billion is a symbol. A mathematical symbol, 1, 000, 000, 000. Or 1, 000, 000, 000, 000. It depends on whether you use the short or the long system of numbers. 

The jingoistic rows that erupt around this numbering are themselves symbols of unresolved historical, linguistic and cultural tensions. 

A billion is a huge number, in any system, especially stacked in Euros, and Titley's question is relevant in Ireland today as billions of them are handed over to nameless bondholders.

A million is another number, another symbol. The concrete reality behind the announcement that 1, 000, 000 young people are unemployed in the United Kingdom is evident in the destitute lives and broken dreams of each and every one of the young people the symbol represents. 

Will the symbolic act by the Arab League in shutting Syria out represent an improvement in the lives of people bearing the brunt of the repression by the state? 

The city of Homs (34 degrees North, 36 degrees East; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYzuh6iEdQU&feature=related), where much of the violence has been delivered, is itself a symbol. Of dissent and resistance to the al-Assad family oligarchy. 

In concrete terms, this means death and devastation. There are claims that security forces have killed more than 1,100 civilians in the city and its surrounding province since the uprising began. Syria gears up to endure a full-scale civil war.

Not quite civil war, but the threat by the First Minster of Northern Ireland to bring down the government if a symbol – the crown  - is taken off the cap badge of prison officers, certainly provoked political disquiet, in the same week that the power-sharing executive presented its long-awaited programme for government, itself a symbol of possible better futures. Citizens do not expect quick fixes in the fields of jobs, health and education.

With Jimmy dead and gone, propped at 45 degrees to overlook the sea, who will fix us? Not Ant and Dec, who will change their names to Pant and Feic to present their new show Strictly Come, Celebrities: Z Factor: No Talent. 

Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, advocates a symbolic gesture as a curative response to abuse in football matches. A handshake is patently not sufficient in the face of the concrete reality of racism. But it may be sufficient to unseat Blatter and set him up for the golden version. 

Jim'll sign off with his closing gesture, an eccentric symbol of dated TV innocence. At least he aimed to fix, not wreck.

...... kindly look after yourselves very very safely and don't let anything happen to you untoward at all.....

Crobhinge; column; Alan Titley; The Irish Times; 17.11.2011

Jim'll fix it; BBC TV; Jimmy Saville; You Tube; various

THE BERLUSCONI MYSTERY

In the days of the Greeks, the Salsetto had been a river. Later, in the days of the Romans, it became a brook, then a rivulet by the time of Italian unification, and later still, in the Fascist era, a stinking little trickle, before finally becoming, with the advent of democracy, an illegal dumping ground.

As a metaphoric whizz through Sicilian history, the words of Andrea Camilleri, who writes the Inspector Montalbano Mysteries, ring true. 

As for Sicily today:

The police stations had no petrol, the court had no paper, the hospitals had no thermometers, and meanwhile the government was thinking of building a bridge over the Straits of Messina. But there was always plenty of petrol for the useless escorts of ministers, vice-ministers, under-secretaries, committee chairmen, senators, chamber deputies, regional deputies, cabinet chiefs and under-assistant briefcase-carriers.

A modern-day Commedia dell' Arte troupe presided over by il Cavaliere himself, Silvio Berlusconi, who, having passed his 'sell-by' date, is being dumped by the powers that be, the Markets.

Democracy is not an illegal dumping ground. It is a best effort by citizens to organise in the face of exploitation. 

The call for a referendum on the European Greek Cuts Programme by the now-former Greek Prime Minister, Papandreou, albeit something of a stunt to save his political bacon, did European citizens a favour by pulling the mask from the faces of the False Gods of the Markets. 

As Fintan O'Toole noted in The Irish Times, these False Gods explicitly ranted:

..... that the most reckless, irresponsible and ultimately impermissible thing a government could do was to seek the consent of its own people to decisions that would shape their lives.

Markets and Banks rather than citizens call the shots, never more explicitly than in Ireland where the government handed over Euro 700 million to 'vulture capitalist gamblers' (O'Toole), aka unsecured bondholders, because of a threat from the European Central Bank: give the spivs your taxpayers' money or we’ll bring down your banking system.

This is the mesh (not mess) that links modern capitalism and democracy. Events in Greece, Ireland and Italy are obscene. They unmask the fraud that modern capitalism is good for democracy. 

Fintan O'Toole concludes:

We can have the form of rapacious finance capitalism that has become the dominant force in our economies and societies. Or we can have democracy. But we can’t have both.

There is no great mystery here. We name the criminals. We are Inspector Montalbano and the criminals in the Markets and the Banks are our biggest case.

The Wings of the Sphinx – An Inspector Monatalbano Mystery; book; Andrea Camilleri; Mantle/Macmillan; 2010

Triumph of the spivs as democracy is sidelined; article; Fintan O'Toole; The Irish Times; 8.11.2011

THE CULTURE THREAT

An entity called Palestine (A country? A nation? A state? A geography? A territory?) joins UNESCO, and the USA, a nation of great power, objects and withdraws US$ 60 million of funding from the UN agency.

Is it the E word, Palestinian Education, that is so threatening? Or is it the S word, Palestinian Science? Or could it be the C word, Palestinian Culture, that sends alarm bells thrilling through Washington (38 degrees North, 77 degrees West)? 

This move is pre-mature, Washington states. It should wait until a comprehensive agreement between Palestine and Israel, a state recognised by the UN and with whom it has a complicated relationship, is achieved. 

It appears as if the geo-political entity Palestine has had enough waiting and is nudging doors open at the UN. The USA is threatened and responds accordingly.

Al Pacino, the marvellous American actor, plays a training officer in a CIA film drama, The Recruit, inducting new recruits to that USA government covert agency. In a speech outlining threat and response, he asks and answers the question   'why are we here?' :

... I say we are all here in this room because we believe. We believe in good and evil, and we choose good. We believe in right and wrong, and we choose right. Our cause is just. Our enemies...everywhere. They're all around us....

Choices of good/evil and right/wrong, assertions of just cause, naming of enemies and placing them everywhere, even within, are all political matters and thus butt against the C word, Culture.

According to Edward Said, a Palestinian academic who spent a long career in America, Culture

means all those practices, like the arts of description, communication and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principle aims is pleasure.'

Could it be this P word, Pleasure, that is so threatening? As in the pleasure of building peace in the minds of men and women, as UNESCO would have it?

Said adds that Culture is:

..... each society's reservoir of the best that has been known or thought......

Perhaps this is the threatening aspect of the C word? That attention might need to be given to the stories peoples and nations know and think as they contest land and history. Thus, again according to Said, Culture

is a sort of theatre where various political and ideological causes engage one another.

Violence erupts on the ground and on the seas of Palestine. Military engagements between the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and Hamas and other armed groups continue. Armed engagements are likely between the IDF and a flotilla of vessels, including Canadian and Irish ships, off the coast of Palestine in coming days. Israel cuts funding to UNESCO and test launches a ballistic missile.

Edward Said found himself feeling:

... even with regard to the Palestinian movement, and certainly in the context in America in which I find myself – I still feel finally, somehow misplaced...... 

Is that what is so threatening about Culture? That it is not easily fixed?

The Recruit; film; Roger Donaldson; Touchstone Pictures; 2003

Culture and Imperialism; book; Edward Said; Vintage; 1994

Edward Said: a critical reader; book; Michael Sprinker; Blackwell; 1992