The books that defined a quarter century

 Anything said in retrospect of J.K. Rowling's momentous Harry Potter novels would risk underestimating, as opposed to the common rule, the momentous and against-all-expectation momentum these books rode on when dumped on the bookshelves, strictly short-term. I remember myself perfectly well, walking into a store in Uppsala in 2000, finding a stack of the second book - then just translated into Swedish, with the wonderful - and far less vexing than the first - cover by Tiden's Alvaro Tapia, as well as the original letter font, and being told by the nice lady that, as of that date, I couldn't have one. 

Being en route to Santorini (as I persist in calling it; if Mussolini be pleased to hear the word, who am I to deny that?) and with no ability to get a Swedish copy until our return, my mother insisted. And got through. As the wheels were turning to make contact with the tarmac on my journey home, I very memorably pushed through the scene where a shrieking, palsy-ridden Tom Riddle is lost in thin air as the first of many his horcruxes is destroyed by a yet again mortally wounded bespectacled boy of twelve. The first novel I mostly remember for jogging and spooling through in competition with my dear cousin Lotta - though not skipping, except for reading that short, fateful first sentence of the last chapter, "The Man With Two Faces", perhaps the best part of the novel, I must admit, and the only one I didn't quite enjoy reading (the fifth being a chunk of slough, but so was Godfather II the first time). The second through sixth, as far as I got before Tom Törnblom - "Thornflower", a surname being almost Harry Potter-adequate in its Englishness and brusqueness, and revenge I got years later, if somewhat imbued by the whims of Stephen King - ran across the stone-covered Hogwartsian hallway and cried out the words signalling the demise of Dumbledore, and by whose hand (I wonder, now more frequently, whether he actually got through to the momentous chapter which outlined whose hand, or rather words, guided that venomously self-loathing uttering of Avada Kedavra) it was. Then there was silence, and as I discovered many other things - the English language, for one, which I hadn't really tasted throughout those first six years - while Harry remained on the shelf. 

And then came the year 2009 and the sixth film. I had missed out on the fifth, in part a demonstration of which I had already, if just as passively, expressed against the more profound novels, but soon came to regret (and regret still, if not for the narrative or storytelling qualities of Mr. Yates, great as they may have been already then, and whose faults seemed to be identical to those of the one-off Mr. Goldenberg). Not for the sixth installment though, which for indescribable, inexplicable reasons I looked very much forward to watching, and did watch - somewhat troubled, as the only film where I had not, painstakingly, not fully read - with two dear friends and a great candy bowl which I believe I still possess (the contents being, through force of cinematic endurance, vanished as through magic, with other things). It was a slightly transcending experience, or at least enough for me to recommend it to a drove of people, including the (perhaps superior) novel on which it was based, and which had - I must admit I felt the gist of this, and lived it fully as I turned those pages to a conclusion already told, at least twice - resurrected Harry from the half-dead spun into my mind, quite more alive than he had ever been. Upon discovering this, I was only too late, in my judgment at the time, but precisely two years late (as I had, I guess, for the English edition regarding the first book) to acquire and read the final of finales, and in an experiencing only passably able to rekindle and appreciate the fact that it remained unspoiled but for the predictions of my mind, and oh... what a conclusion. Perhaps not so much as I expected, but in hindsight I can say I truly enjoyed it, and had the pressure been on my shoulders to conclude this adventure, and preferably quickly, with the gazes and desires and letters of the world adding to that pressure, I could only and justly have felt quite alright at penning those last words (not of the epilogue, which I fully believe preexisted them, in a reflection of that other writer, George of the lands in the West, where Catelyn and Robb were proclaimed dead before the party had even ceased).  

Colony, continuity, correspondence, colonoscopy...?

 

I first thought to name this article "the scourge of colonialism", but only one who has not thought fully or truly on the actual scourge of the Opium Wars, and their legacy, and the efforts sturdily "required" to ameliorate them once the dragon had raised its head throughout, 

On the issue of the treaties, I would expect no less from old Qing - even the ageing and collapsing older Qing - to approve of the treaties that so much bore the badge of colonial subjugation. Whether they were formally recognised, I would hold no jaw to drop were that the case, although if such a sentiment prevailed (and in my best guess it did not) the subsequent friendly cooperative readressment 

The Monarch

At the start of the last century finished, there was one queen whose reign was unlikely to be rivalled. In a sense it was, by the king-emperor Franz Joseph, who had followed her after eleven years and survived her by fifteen; a period best forgotten by those of that class to have seen it. And perhaps in this as well, the ruminations as well as the glories of the monarchy being at their very best in this new golden age of a sun already bent on setting. Why? 

Elizabeth never served as Empress, missing out of that chance by mere years of her father's placable health, which would eventually collapse and ensure her a reign longer than her namesake - or even  

The Scourge of Henry

The man who - perhaps fittingly - made his last, and perhaps ultimate, appearance at Davos World Economic Forum this week, had only just escaped the clutches of the Nazi state in 1938, at a time when its territorial ambitions were as limited as its bloodlust was teetered (and limited to scions of its ruling party, its immature, unruly military wing, and thousands of Basque subjects of still-emerging Head of State general Franco) as Prime Minister Chamberlain - also just appointed - made a Faustian, or possibly Trumpian, "deal" with Chancellor Hitler over not only the disputed, and mainly German, Sudetenland but selling off Czechoslovakia as a whole in exchange for said Chancellor's autograph. Now, at the ripe age of ninety-eight and celebrating, presumably in Switzerland, a mighty riper ninety-nine tomorrow (thus entering his hundredth year) the old bastard and first European-born Secretary of State (preceding the pre-Munich-Czechoslovakian-born, and recently predeceased Madam Kunin) proposed to end the emerging security crisis-turned-disaster over Ukraine by a similar Faustian, or Munich-ian proposal of ceding Crimea, formerly Russian and more lately a claimant for independence, and its majority-Russian population, into the clutches of very-current and mighty active, for a near-septuagenarian and in age of being Henry's child, president Putin.  

In this, and in giving the Devil his due, I deem him right. Whereas the dilemma already postulated in his twenties, of a world where one - and then two - superpowers, armed with immensely destructive weapons well beyond the range of their own destructions, mankind (as it was then, and even 20 years later) must finally learn to behave. In light of this knowledge, matured into wisdom and praxis, the price of nuclear war over parts of Ukraine would seem a more ridiculous price than Korea, or Hungary, or even sweet Berlin. How such a handover, of undeniable Munich-esque proportions, is to occur - and not stretch beyond the Sudeten analogy into "Ukrainian Ukraine", for just as sure as Crimea may be just as, or decidedly more Russian, so Mr. Putin's speech is irredentist dogma in its denial of the Ukrainian nation undeniably, if regrettable to some, developing out of the eternities of geographical and topographical differences, centuries of linguistic, cultural, ethnic recompositions and realities of frontier life, and now decades of semi-self rule. His speech is as unlikely to vindicate a (self-assured) Russian spirit in independent Ukraine as he is to be elected its president, too, after a free multi-party election, or his stooges Pushilin, Pasechnik, Balitsky or Saldo, which itself would require the ejection of every Russian under arms from its space. Crimea is different, not only for security purposes but the popular sentiments "on the ground", so firmly expressed by the referendum of the rifle when green men overran it so effectively in 2014, and then pulled the trousers from the ostensible order of the past quarter century. While the efficiency, and subsequent slyly waged proxy wars, clearly concealed the Russian military might in its true glory, they also reflect a hard truth too substantial to be swallowed in tablet form, or resolved through calls for genocide. 

My ability to aptly finish biographies, long denied to reemerge with the Englishman Jackson's great De Gaulle biography last year, has been recently allured by Niall Ferguson's project to - with the statesman's ostensible cooperation, although we may wonder how far - 

Jackson's and Ferguson's countryman (still, in the latter case) Hitchens may have pointed out 

So, apart from that, what is he? 

Roe, and and the terrifying virtue of precedent

For the entire life of my great-grandfather, who I knew and remember quite well, up until him having aged into the second half a century of his existence, and for several years before his conception, the Supreme Court of the United States did uphold the now much disgraced notion of "separate but equal" for being, in fact, a thin veil over a reality of the most egregious inequality in American education. It has been said, by constitutional scholars across the proverbial but now ever-increasingly concrete aisle, to be a super-precedent. This term has been flung about not least in the now penultimate confirmation process, hurried and rushed over in much heat and fray, at the close of 2020 with an election already undergoing, with the question fluttered across news outlets 

The paradox, or reliance and innate flaw of legal reasoning, and the ability of a decision so wrongly decided to endure and flourish, is at the heart of the legal argument concerning Roe v. Wade and the actual, governing precedent currently subject to debate, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Casey so often, or sometimes, discussed being the much-dead (and long before without a heartbeat) Democratic Governor Casey of Pennsylvania, who mixed pro-union and workers' right policies with pro-gun and pro-life (or should I say anti-life and anti-choice) policies, represented nobody's actual belief - save, perhaps, the centrist Justices who crafted it out of the crumbling tower of Roe, but nonetheless is upheld as the shield safeguarding the most-spoken right of American women. Whereas the current senator Casey, of the body of voluntarily ejaculating Casey Sr:s body, has very much been touted in line with a new Democratic orthodoxy, whether of the neoliberal or of the extreme left (I think a little of both, in a ghastly mixture challenging the old left coherent with a more Democratic-governed, as well as more equitable America) the battle lines have been greatly redrawn, with the example of Governor Kennedy of Louisiana - one of few blue states in a red band of ostensible backwardness - being mostly ignored, when not condemned. In this realignment, casting the GOP as the now abominated party of cranks and puritanical extremists ostensibly  wishing to impose, by the point of a gun, a Calvinist autocracy (ostensibly welcoming the Papist likes of Casey, who argued the case of life before the Supreme Court by crafting the pitiful law then challenged) and the Democratic party as, well, "not Calvin, not Hitler, not the rape and destruction of the Earth within the next electoral cycle". In the context of abortion, this spells to the maintenance of a right either clearly spelled out in the constitutional ahadith issued throughout a period of the 1940s through 1970s or in the metaphysical realm of natural rights, versus the gradual disintegration of said constitutional (if not metaphysical or natural) jurisprudence. 

On the question of jurisprudence, in essence two camps have emerged, with a number of (symptomatically more intelligible) voices pressing the virtue and value of the precedent, whether it can be salvaged through the preserving mists of time, but in essence talking - or sputtering - their gall against the object allegedly worthy of the greatest scorn: The draft itself (this not being an opinion, and much less law, and even as the final majority opinion it would not redraw any existing law) or the leaker (whose hand thus, again ostensibly, could shape and twist the minds and hands of the supreme nine so as to change the governing majority) and the poor example set by unleashing, let alone regarding ulterior motives concerning the final result, this half-baked fetus or jurisprudential change, tantamount to revolution. 

It has also been said, very vitriolically and (it must be said) frivolously, that Brown v. Board of Education, Obergefell v. Hodges and possibly Lawrence v. Texas (in short, the great legacy of the ever-praised Justice Kennedy) would be evicted similarly, and very lately, in spite of - shall we say - substantial reliance interests. We know, 

This in effect 

On the question itself I suspect, as had also been said, if 

"She might have it"

 

In my last scrutinisation of the last (to this date) presidential election of the Fifth republic - and the glorious or sordid prospect for a sixth - I conceded the grand, if not exactly Gaullesque ambitions of Madame Le Pen might yet result in her combustion. 

To this backdrop, even with the many, and very French, cases of resistance to - I would not call it incompetence, who for his coldness or banker-ness or presumed betrayal of a programme he announced very clearly, or the party which took him there and which he stepped out of without really changing - M. Macron it would seem apparent, even appropriate, to recognise his unprecedented (since, bar a case of chalefing Le Pen Père, Mitterrand in 1988) re-election as expected. But whereas his election in 2017 was certainly expected, it was never taken for granted as the just-mentioned case of Le Pen's father losing out in 2002. Certainly heavy voices expected a "left-oozing" Macron, just out of the Socialist party once of Mitterrand, Mauroy and Jospin, to fight a heavy fight with a right-wing bloc firmly, if not blazingly, standing behind his opponent. 

But as any Leninist would tell you: Fascism is little but capitalism in decay, or rather or more precisely, the most extreme, chauvinistic and violent elements of finance capital (ofttimes composed of "lower" elements pressed by the said decays of capitalism) hence created and tactfully unleashed, guided and financed against the rising tides of a potent workers' movement. And in order to put that label at Le Pen one would have to acclaim, even in 2017, that she was the candidate of big business. This assertion, while a case semantically could be spelled out, is so patently untrue that nobody bothered to make, lest they would immediately maim it. Unfortunately, such an analysis force us to consider some unfortunate truths about the Macron candidacy, and why this man formerly of the left (as was Mosley, Mussolini, and other M:s) is now the given, decent choice of big business. 

What then, would make the fantastic words (I use the adjective not in the subjective sense) of Le Pen President in 2017 more of a reality in the world of today? Whereas the "fascist" label seems more distant - and admittedly less potent . with a Macron now labelled as a president des riches, of the capitalists in decay hoping for his resurrection (and the recapture of his reformist movement of the National Assembly, which between a strong, reformed Rassemblement and a united left seems more far-flung) for yet another five years, the frenzy with which the candidate of darkness must be denounced more firmly and earnestly than the decent, yet unabideable president of the wealthy, . The "woke", pseudo-progressive phenomenon so ostensibly portended by French intellectuals seems far less potent, so to speak, in France, and not least within the Melenchonist left, and with it, the outright support - if with token demonisations - of the candidate of the "decent", corporate-friendly center-left more concerned with teenagers' underwear and a vague unspecified "hatred" emanating, above all, from these opaque lower elements rather than spilling from the factually privileged down on them, than the rift which predisposes these classes in the first place. The left, if it was not clear already in 2017 - or well before then - is dead.  

Le Pen President! So, why not? Why not in 2017? Well, it is aphoristically true that if the candidates are of the brand . Or, less phlegmatically, a candidate of the moderate center will gauge the extremes on one side alongside some of the moderates of the other, and thus conquer. But this asks only the further question how the candidates are placed on this scale, who gets to say whether Macron is in fact center-left or center-right, what the attributes of these "far-thing" people are, and if it does not align with the general presumptions on economics; who gets to distribute them. Who gets to paint you , and thus assure your opponent the presidency, and for how long will that work? 

The presumption of Le Pen as the leftist in the race is thus more enticing than it was in 2017, and against the furore against Macron as a president or bankers, but not of brownshirts (as if the former were not behind the latter, remember?) and the experience of his factual policies for half a decade is now turning the wheel against this simplicitous case, "better (to be fucked by) the banker than the fascist". Well excuse me, but after five years (of wild, bloodied thrusting, and accompanying shrieks), who will repeat that chant but the most simple-minded? This is only exacerbated by the seeming unwillingness - very understandable, even if it could be called reckless - of Macron to see and care . To his credit, his has been a very open, announced and consistent journey across not classes, but actors on the political spectrum. He has, without apology and with very little disinformation (this word) claimed the French must work longer weeks, more years and possibly with less complaints and less pay, and they love him for it. 

In a dictatorship, this insanity of coupling, or rather not-decoupling yourself from the one you hate, may well be explained in the imminent harm, rather than emptiness and despondency, such a divorce might immediately entailed. But this is a democracy, and supposedly a fair, broad and (in my own view) vibrant one, so, where are the options? 

Melenchon, the man who would take the place not of Hollande, or Jospin, but of the broad leftist boglands they emerged from, the alligator not hesitant in striking out and grabbing for the chunk the workers' and students - and other groups but not foremost all these considered at the expense of the first, and with no identity considered before that of wage-earner - should have stood against Le Pen, and if he does, conventional wisdom will tell you that he might actually have it. I consider this one of the most apparent avenues for a Madame Le Pen victory, for reasons previously stated - a centre-right, or rather centrist candidate against a "far-left" breed will mobilise the entire right, and so by force of secret ballot there is less to keep the far-right stench out of the booths as keeping the previously (?) maximum-wage Melenchon out of their account books - but I am quite hesitant. Rather, and perhaps more depressingly, the solution of electing a Melenchon, a Saint-Just but thrice as old and short-sighted and with a glint of Obi-Wan (not only in his holographic performances) and emasculating him by dealing him an indelible right to far-right National Assembly with a majority kept by Republicans and Macronists, and a mongrel government eluding from that, and the defeats and shortfalls coming, would be preferable, even if the highest office would now truly (as it were, for a few years, in the 1980s) held by an enemy of bankers. This would be likely, and perhaps more easy to contain than Le Pen, and in fairness deal her supporters a number of key victories, particularly regarding trans-national financial and political institutions. 

So why not woo her? Is this a question of brand, of the left having so firmly entrenched itself in a war against the dirty plebs and proles that have amassed themselves under the Rassemblement banner, hardly washed since last, and now poised to destroy the France of... who? Of Hugo, Balzac and Moliere? The France dreamed up by European bureaucrats? Why not select a Le Pen, give her a leftist ? Is this just too implausible? 

An oath, sans-tennis court

If the republic of Tunisia seems a wonder child of the now very surpassed Arab Spring, and perhaps the only in the league to live up to the name (or, at least, epitaph) of republicanism, it is with a profound sadness and symbolism that the emerging womb, flowering by the new year of 2010/11, so long ago and yet so recent, the smothering of Tunisian democracy and restoration into a shape similar to its progenitor is the expected result. 

This was expected, somehow, but yet 

As the ambassador told me, with a fitting blockade of plastic between our mouths: Read my lips, the Tunisians will not accept another dictatorship, okay?! Truth be told, and with all respect to the heroes of the first, unprecedented (that year, and turn of a decade) of the Arab revolutions, I would have accepted the cry more if made by a Lebanese. For whatever the identitarian-based, sectarian, never particularly stable democracy can welter itself into, it has understood the plight or tyrants or tawagit (borrowing the Dawlah's favourite phrase) and the core of civilised political structure's understanding of anti-autocracy; perhaps better, indeed, than some Western constitutions... such as the one of the country whose bonds it let slip. But Tunisia, while enacting a , surely Tunisia should have stood firm. Or not? If so, what were the causes, and were they as ingrained as seemingly those of the Egyptian counter-revolution of 2012-14, and of Yemen, which was condemned to a plebiscite of weapons pretty much before the shot was fired; perhaps, in earnest, since "unification" in 1990? 

Tunisia is at a crossroads as no Arab country is, and its political and civic culture is - predictably - a reflection of this sad reckoning with its positive legacy as the sole healthy child of the revolutions of 2010-11. The fact that it had its taghut - the blissless and unresponsive Ben Ali - and its founding tyrant, the admirable but much-overstaying his metaphorical welcome (and very real faculties) Bourguiba, is not eclipsing this fact more than the obvious half-baked nature of French retreat from its ex-colonial possessions ("ex" as in still living in, or returning to the apartment, storing her stuff, emptying fridge and porcelain cabinets and taking earnings from the kitchen counter to pay the rent, of the Elysée that is). Half of Africa, or a good third for a less grand phrase, is owned by France rather than any "exterior" force, and it is France which will, in competition with China, Russia and America the Liberator, battle for the fate and soul of the continent. The Tunisian backslide is only one blot in this trend, if particularly tragic with liberal democracy, and perhaps electoral politics as a whole, now dying in the metaphorical darkness. 

Who is then this man, Kais Saied, who aims to undo what has been fought and preserved and fought still for many years, even the promises of generations, and who are his backers? Unlike Ben Ali and, yes, Bourguiba, it is not enough to secure properly the reins he, too, has fought and (metaphorically, if not eventually) died for. Being a seasoned constitutional scholar, and lacking the generation up to his popular and somewhat transient predecessor's age, he seems to unite the old and new Tunisia and firmly putting the mechanisms of authority for the purpose of delivering independent Tunisia into the future. But what will his constitution bring? 

While the development of the decade past may seem for nothing, it also spawned a political culture which I like - a bit optimistically - to associate with the more long-grown fruits of the Arab socialist and nationalist movements, and what might tenuously be described as "secular Arab social democracy"... now speeding onto a highway, at a gear and pace set by its domestic conditions, with unpleased co-motorists making their best to holler and interfere with the process as they please. Now, will they? Certainly, secular regimes would - or ought - to interfere with individual liberties less, and safeguard the ideals of popular sovereignty more smoothly, if not necessarily respectfully. But as this is subject to our definition of secularism, and islam has (somewhat tautologically) been associated with civil society resistance against authoritarian governments, and all but certainly may against the one . Feeble resistance, if the first Bourguibist state is a guide to follow, with the chaos and bloodshed following, less so in blessed Tunisia, with its social democratic-minded islamists, its French quasi-worship of the state, and a professional bureaucracy (unfortunately keen to top the politicians, when they cannot be them ex officio, with tenure. Well, the question is whether this undoubtedly professional, undoubtedly competent, arguably popular (let us see, if not hope, for how long) and undoubtedly authoritarian professor of law should have tenure for his new office, and whether the alternative is worse.