Call it Islamic certainty, but what emerged in the course of the fertiliser bomb trial was such a hotchpotch of prejudice, ignorance, sexual immaturity, woman-hating and theology, that the only one murderous component we can identify with confidence is the absolute conviction of right. Most of us have horrible attitudes and wouldn’t mind putting a figurative bomb under something or someone or other; what stops us is that we think differently the next day. If we want to get to the bottom of why some young men don’t feel differently the next day we need to understand why one brain freezes and another doesn’t. Disaffection is not an explanation, it is a consequence. Blame religion if you like, but a half-baked university education can have exactly the same effect. It isn’t straightforward, charting the progress of fanaticism.
But the trial has thrown up matter which should embarrass more people than it can console. Good that we got the hateful little bastards, but lives might have been saved had we got them earlier. Much has been made of this, calls for a public inquiry into our policing and our security services etc., but I wonder how many of those calling for this inquiry were busy telling us not all that long ago that there was no terrorism for our security services to police. An invention of our respective governments – Blair’s and Bush’s – the lot of it. An inveigling us into fear for the purpose of controlling us.
In America the voice of the hour was Michael Moore’s – ‘There is no terrorist threat, somebody needs to just say there is.’ Over here a BBC2 series, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, spoke of the ‘dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world’, and in order to show that judges were not so easily made fools to an illusion, Lord Woolf warned us we had more to fear from violations of the Human Rights Act than from terrorists.
So is that a ‘sorry’ I hear amid the accusations that we have not been sufficiently vigilant? A sorry from those who thought vigilance was uncalled for and sinister?
Among the reasons to mistrust the rhetoric of human rights – not to be confused with our inalienable entitlement to freedom – is its politicisation. We most volubly declare the inviolability of the Human Rights Act where we deplore the government in power. Here is the danger of an incompetent and ignominious administration: it makes us incompetent and ignominious in our detestation of it, believing that whatever proceeds from it must be erroneous and whatever discomfits it worth praising. Our enemy’s enemy must be our friend. So we jeered when a Labour Home Secretary ordered tanks to patrol the perimeters of Heathrow, and we allowed partisans of the ideology of terror to win the day when they complained of police in protective clothing charging for no good reason through their neighbourhoods of peace. Terror? What terror? Bombs in Crawley, West Sussex? Who would make a bomb in Crawley, West Sussex?
Thus does hating Blair turn us into self-harmers. We would rather be wrong about what is necessary for our basic safety than wrong about him. Shame on us!
And when we weren’t accusing Blair of inventing terror for his own ends we were accusing him of fostering it – an extraordinary act of doublethink in which we clamoured for a person to be charged with a crime which in another part of our minds we didn’t believe had been committed. The terror whose existence we denied was the consequence of our invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the consequence of our neglect of the Palestinians, the consequence of a stream of attitudes and policies which it was impossible to construe as anything but anti-Muslim. And what was our evidence for this? Why, the terrorists who were not terrorists told us so. And for what reason do you do what you do? we asked – a question which any psychologist will tell you cannot possibly elicit the truth. And back came the answer: Iraq. Investigation closed. As though a person capable of planting a bomb cannot be capable of telling a lie. As though an ideologue of violence will not have worked out a self-justifying narrative of his actions.
So it is good if in other ways alarming news that the Crawley bombers were animated as much by disgust for what they saw in their own backyards as by anything we were doing in Baghdad. The words of Jawad Akbar in support of targeting the London nightclub the Ministry of Sound – not the Ministry of Defence, note, not the Ministry of Tony’s Lies – have rightly become famous. ‘No one can turn round and say “oh they were innocent”, those slags dancing around.’
More than one commentator has noticed a certain home-grown quality in Jawad Akbar’s language, something that has more in common with disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, or even amusingly appalled of Notting Hill, than Osama bin Laden. We should take the point. There aren’t many of us for whom the sight of pissed-up brides-to-be spilling out of stretch limos in skirts up around their tushes is an occasion for national pride.
Disdain is not a fertiliser bomb, but it is still a good idea to remember how much we once liked getting pissed ourselves, whether in, or in the company of somebody in, a skirt up around the tush. There is nothing like recalling we have two attitudes to everything to stop us drifting into terrorism.
But a closed mind has its allure. And disgust can feel like power. That is why we should never stop being afraid. Just because a government we don’t like tells us life is dangerous doesn’t mean that life is safe.
Art for Us
Though we abhor metropolitan self-engrossment in this column, we turn our attention today to an event that has brightened that dusty little corner of humanity we call the West End of London. The National Gallery’s decision to hang full-size reproductions of great paintings from its permanent collection on walls all over Soho and Covent Garden is what I’m talking about. And while you could argue that a National Gallery should live up to its name and distribute its largesse to the whole country, better somewhere than nowhere.
When they first went up, one at a time – a Caravaggio here, a Joseph Wright of Derby there – it was like waking to find that the malicious urban fairies who come and go unnoticed, scrawling and fly-posting while we sleep, had been busy again in the night. Except that this felt the very opposite of vandalism or malice. Not knowing how they’d got there initially I took them to be the charitable offering of some local millionaire eccentric. Then explanatory plaques began to appear alongside the paintings and the hand of the National Gallery and its sponsor Hewlett-Packard was declared.
Clever PR for both – ‘See what we’ve got,’ says the National Gallery; ‘See what we can reproduce,’ says Hewlett-Packard – but the intention remains benign. A long way from the demented desecration of the graffitist.
I’ve never got on with graffiti, even when it’s higher order graffiti. The thought for the day above my column a few weeks ago was Susan Sontag’s famous remark, ‘Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art’, and that’s how I understand the impulse to make graffiti – as interpretative in the sense that it doesn’t come about of itself, as art does, but must impose its will, parasitically, on what’s already there. It doesn’t matter whether that something already there is a train, a doorway, a sculpture, or quite simply the existing fabric of society, the graffitist will exact his critical revenge on it. He cannot leave alone what came before him.
This explains why we always read a sort of alienated envy in graffiti. Whereas the Vermeers and Fragonards which descended as on the wings of angels in the night . . . Yes, I know the counter-argument. Does turning Soho into a museum for showing work long accepted into the canon – turning it into a street version of a National Trust gift shop – do any more for art than giving it over to someone raging at contemporary life with an aerosol can? Might be prettier, but who ever said art had to be pretty?
The National Gallery attempts to tread the line between complacent connoisseurship and discovery. There’s a tour map you can download, showing you where every painting is sited – though you have to be careful not to get trapped forever in the version that requires a flash plug-in, because then you’re into installations that don’t install and boxes telling you that there’s no default application to open what you would install if only t
hey’d let you install it. Better just to print out the one that doesn’t flash or show pedestrians and cyclists moving like Mary Poppins across the West End skyline.
On top of that there are audio-guided perambulations that can be downloaded as Zip files which you can drag into the software for your MP3 player. The first of these calls itself the Grand Tour and takes in the entire offering of forty-five paintings. It was marred for me when I tried it, first by the rain, then by the sun, and finally by my discovering that though the paintings are numbered they are not numbered in any intelligible geographical sequence, so that you’ve dashed there and back ten times between Putrefaction Alley in Soho and Kitsch Court in Covent Garden and still only got to painting number three.
The second walk is called the Heavy Hitters Tour which doesn’t shilly-shally on the margins of greatness but takes you straight to da Vinci and Van Gogh. And the third, the Lovers Tour, guides you past the more sophisticated sex and tea shops in this part of London via Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid. If I have one complaint about the latter it is this: it shows, I think, a lack of nerve to suggest rounding this tour off with a bowl of noodles at Wagamama, but not come up with the name of a nearby hotel. Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid for God’s sake! – that’s the one where Cupid holds the head of Venus with one knowing boyish hand while with the other (between his index and middle finger to be precise) he rolls her rosy nipple. Small wonder that to the left of Cupid a grey-green figure, variously interpreted as Jealousy and Despair but which I like to think of simply as Deranged Desire, tears his hair and howls. Now tell me a bowl of noodles will do you as a sequel to my description, let alone to the work reproduced in all its grand salaciousness.
In the time it has taken me to write this column so far, four new tours have appeared on the National Gallery’s website, so we must assume the idea has taken off. Good. I approve the project unreservedly. I love running into a Rubens when I’m nipping out to buy the papers. Love having a Holbein to look at when I’m hailing a taxi, rather than a handbill or a road sign. And everyone I talk to feels the same. Even the most difficult to please of London’s bloggers report obediently downloading maps, charging their MP3s, getting on their bicycles, and marvelling over the sometimes fortuitous, sometimes brilliantly engineered juxtaposition of art, architecture and life. Snap a hooker hanging around Caravaggio’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist in a puddle of urine and the devil knows what else outside a Lithuanian whorehouse in Peter Street, or a couple of pisspots slumped in front of Rembrandt’s end-of-the-world Belshazzar’s Feast on the wall of the theatre where they’re showing Les Mis, and you’ve made a sort of art yourself.
Credit where credit’s due: this has turned out to be everybody’s idea of a good time. Art, you see. And not just any art, not another fatuous shop-window installation, but painting. By universal consent, the Grand Tour has turned a pig’s ear of a summer into a silk purse.
Now let’s start seeing the great paintings in our possession on walls all over the country.
Vengeance Is Mine
Another day, another killing. They get younger both ends – the killers and the killed. And we, meanwhile, we the wise ones, tear our hair, caught between calls to meet violence with violence, and calls to hold fast to our liberal ideals.
‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’ We forget sometimes that that was more a bargain than a threat. If we restrained the vengefulness intrinsic to our natures, He’d take care of the justice side of things on our behalf. In this way God fulfils the same function civil society entrusts to the judiciary. He does the dirty work with which we, in our boiling wrath, cannot be entrusted.
That, of course, is if He notices or remembers. Of all God’s promises this is the one we find it hardest to forgive Him breaking. And when at last enough crimes go unavenged, we become unbelievers. Thus our disappointment in God becomes the model for our disappointment in the judiciary. We might not like a hanging judge but a judge who cannot bring himself to hang at all we feel betrays us. And that’s because we’ve ceded anger to him and when he does not adequately honour the outraged morality of which our anger is, so to speak, the spokesperson, it is left without a voice.
The problem with a liberal society – an impassioned defence of which was mounted by this newspaper last week – is that it can fail to take account of how dearly we attach ourselves to our anger, how many of our frustrations in an unjust world it speaks for, and how reluctantly we part with it.
Hence the bitter arguments that have broken out as a consequence of Learco Chindamo, killer of Philip Lawrence, winning his appeal to stay in England after his release. To near universal sympathy, the murdered headmaster’s widow has voiced her ‘devastation’ on learning that Chindamo will not be deported to Italy, the country of his birth. For this paper, Mrs Lawrence’s devastation, though entirely understandable, cannot be the final arbiter of justice. Whereas for the ‘gutter press’, as it pleases us to call it, her distress mirrors a greater sense of disillusionment with the way we punish crime in this country. It is an opportunity to rail against asylum laws, the EU, the Human Rights Acts, and whatever else seems to favour foreigners against nationals, and the criminal against the victim. What about our human rights? they shout, and we are off.
There’s no doubt that the legal and liberalist arguments for Chindamo’s staying here have been made. A good prison system must rehabilitate; a just society allows the criminal to pay his debt; Chindamo is a citizen of the EU and free to move within it; his staying violates no one’s rights. All reasonable and true, but an objection still remains: such reasoning doesn’t stop another killing on another day, and is cruelly deaf to the blood that crieth from the ground. A liberal conscience is a fine thing, but a liberal conscience isn’t all we’re made of.
It’s hard to believe that what really matters to Philip Lawrence’s widow is the country in which the boy who widowed her will spend the rest of his life. At the heart of this is the question of whether Learco Chindamo should have any life left to spend. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord, ‘I will repay.’ ‘Then repay!’ saith we back. Chindamo was fifteen when he knifed to death a headmaster trying to break up a fight. A boy but not that much of a boy. You know, at fifteen, what a knife can do, which is why you choose to carry one. If he is released next year he will have spent twelve years in prison. Not much, twelve years. An eye for an eye was the recommendation of that vengeance-bearing Lord from whom the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims learned justice. No more than an eye for an eye, and no less. Twelve years for a life is not an eye for an eye. Twelve years for a life is the nail of a little finger for an eye.
Already we’re wondering how little time in jail the killers of Rhys Jones will get. And how little that will deter the next ones.
Mrs Lawrence feels that someone has broken his promise to her. Someone has. We were all promised when we plumped for a more civilised society and abolished the death penalty that soft sentencing would not be the consequence. Play about with tariffs and you play about with the value of the life the killer took. It is not querulous of Mrs Lawrence to ask, ‘What about our rights?’ A profound disordering of things takes place when we feel that the dead, and those who must go on living in the icy shadow of the dead, are not given justice, for justice is all the dead ask at any time, and when the dead are the murdered dead their unanswered cries are terrible, not only for those who loved them, but for us all. Any unrequited crime unsettles us. An unrequited murder deranges us.
This is why the Furies in Aeschylus’ great trilogy, the Oresteia, are never stilled. With every humane advance a liberal society appears to make, there is an answering retrogression. Take the concept of redemption – a noble idea, but profoundly unjust. For by what presumptuous logic of the soul do we grant a person who has knowingly taken another person’s life the right to redeem his own? Perhaps this, more than any other issue, divides us. To some, the criminal’s willingness to own and expiate his
crime is the proof that good exists. The God of redemption is civilisation’s answer to the God of vengeance. But to others, redemption is a spiritual impertinence and a travesty of justice. ‘Only the overweening spirit takes on itself to dole out forgiveness,’ D. H. Lawrence wrote. ‘But justice is a sacred human right. The overweening spirit pretends to perch above justice. But I am a man, not a spirit, and men . . . can only live at length by being just, can only die in peace if they have justice.’
That liberal society to which we all aspire demeans us when it disavows the force of human feeling which its liberalism cannot contain. The popular press will seize on the distress of Mrs Lawrence and the parents of Rhys Jones, and in the process whip the old gods into fury; but we make a grave mistake if we consign this to the ‘gutter’ and call it mischief. The old gods speak for sacred necessities and will be heard.
‘A Gentle Vacancy of Spirit’
Discovered a new pleasure: lying on the beach reading writers describing lying on the beach. It’s awkward reading on the beach if you’re not sufficiently flexuous to get the right degree of shoulderly twist to read the words, or the right degree of cranial lift to turn the page, and if you don’t have the bodily or astronomical savvy to work out how to get the sun on the book but not on you. But that’s the joy of reading about someone who manages it no better. Reading is never more satisfying than when you feel allied with a writer in discomfort. So lying in agony on a beach with a book that excels at evoking the agonies of lying on a beach is the most perfect reading experience of all.
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