Monday 31 January 2011
In These Times
The ubiquitous Fox News host offers followers an old-time apocalyptic vision
By Theo Anderson
We sit in the dim light of the theater, waiting for the full measure of entertainment and enlightenment the $18 ticket entitles us to. The cost is about double that of other movies, but we have been promised a plan to restore “trust, truth, and treasure” to the homeland. How can you put a price tag on that?
After the final preview fades, across the screen flashes a list of the ways that American government is broken. A pregnant silence follows, then the question: “Had enough yet?”
Enter Glenn Beck, our host for the evening, dressed in a purple sweater, jeans and Chuck Taylors. Beck is a former alcoholic and addict who was driven to the brink of suicide under the ministrations of “Dr. Jack Daniels” before sobering up and finding religion (Mormonism) in the late 1990s. Now a hero to Red America as the host of an early evening show on Fox News, Beck has promised to uncork some hard truths for our edification. But for now he just lets the love wash over him, mugs for the cameras, and grins.
This special December screening is the video companion to Broke, Beck’s October 2010 book, which will sell about 1 million copies if past sales figures are any guide. The movie is a two-hour affair, performed live in Pittsburgh and relayed via satellite to theaters in every major American city. It all adds up not just to a big pile of money—Beck made an estimated $23 million in 2009—but a sphere of influence among the substantial number of Republicans who are inclined toward Tea Party-ish enthusiasms and activism. In a recent poll of Republican Party activists, Beck was named the GOP’s second-favorite personality behind Rush Limbaugh.
Beck’s prop this evening is a deep-blue vintage Mustang in mint condition sitting on the left side of the stage. He explains that it is symbolic of the U.S. Constitution as it was originally drafted, before the nation put some miles on it and started “tinkering” with it. “The Founders gave us the perfect engine,” says Beck. Everything will be fine if we just restore its original condition.
What this means in practice is never clear. Beck avoids questions about slavery and voting rights for women and minorities in the 1780s. He mostly talks about personal virtue and empowerment, and rebuilding the nation’s faltering character.
“They” need you to believe you’re powerless to change things, Beck says. “They” signifies some combination of the federal government; the mainstream media, embodied by the New York Times; educational institutions; liberal-leaning religious institutions; and so-called experts, especially scientific experts associated with all of the same.
Beck returns to the theme of deficits again and again, which is curious because there is no connection between deficit spending and the Constitution. After all, borrowed money helped build the nation and some of the Founders certainly did support deficit spending. But what the Constitution signifies for Beck and his followers isn’t a set of specific laws or principles that should govern the nation. It is more like a code of virtue that should regulate individual conduct. The code’s highest values are freedom and personal responsibility. Government’s only legitimate function is to protect freedom. Everything else is left to the individual. What deficit spending does, from this point of view, is wear away at the code of virtue passed down by the Constitution. It makes us all debtors unable to fulfill our obligations.
Broke gets rolling. Beck brings up charts comparing our Medicare and Medicaid spending with the entire budgets of other nations. He talks about the fiscal crises past and present wreaking havoc in Europe. He warns about hyperinflation, citing the case of Weimar Germany, where people walked around with bundles of worthless cash in wheelbarrows. Experts can’t solve the problem, says Beck; it’s they who got us into this mess. “We’ve got to decide! We’ve got to be the greatest generation.”
“No chance!” snorts the man in the row in front of me, shaking his head. He’s the Loud Talker in the audience. Though he mostly agrees with Beck, he hates the idea that there might be hope.
His mood presumably lightens as the message turns darker, more apocalyptic. “I haven’t wanted to be the one to bring this message,” says Beck, teary-eyed and choking on his words. “It’s crazy to think the things I’ve said the past few years. But now they’re happening.” The nation has been subverted from within. “They” corrupted everything, with malice aforethought. “The rain is coming,” Beck says. “It’s time to build an ark.”
The Loud Talker is impressed. “He does massive amounts of research,” he says to his companion, who registers my pen and paper while glancing back. “We should be taking notes.”
When I was a kid, each summer my family piled into our Chevy and drove to my grandparents’ farm in northeastern Missouri. They weren’t farmers, but they bought the property—about 500 acres, a barn and a small house—and moved there in the early 1970s, when my grandfather retired from his job at a John Deere factory in Ottumwa, Iowa. The nearest town was several miles away.
Only a few years ago, on the way to my grandfather’s funeral, did I ask why they had pulled up roots and spent several years of retirement isolated from everyone and everything they had known. (They eventually did move back to Iowa.) It turns out they were preparing for the invasion of the American homeland by Soviet forces. All through the ’50s and ’60s, they had been reading books and pamphlets published by doomsayers, most endorsed by or associated with the John Birch Society. So the middle of nowhere seemed a good place to ride out the coming Communist storm. I thought about that farm as Beck choked out his words about the coming rain, the building of an ark.
One interpretation of Beck—whose early professional life was spent as a radio “shock jock” using vulgar humor to offend and entertain commuter audiences—sees him as an entertainer still playing a role. But things are more interesting, and more ominous, than that.
Beck has become a preacher. Turn down the sound and he is indistinguishable from the televised megachurch evangelists who hammer away at sin day and night. The relentless pacing of the stage, punctuated with pregnant pauses and abrupt stops; the impish “we know something they don’t know” grins; the fierce earnestness; the odd and inscrutable gazing into the distance; the weeping and wailing for the nation’s soul.
Beck has fashioned a faith that merges politics and religion—and he is its messiah. It is a faith that draws on and re-enacts the nation’s most enduring religious tradition: decrying a cancer within the body politic and calling for redemption and a return to wholeness. Think of witches, slavery, Catholics, Jews and blacks. Think of the John Birch Society and godless Communists.
What has replaced witches and slavery and minorities and Communism is the American state. Not the America that exists in Beck’s imagination, but “establishment” America, represented by the federal government’s bloated bureaucratic agencies, addiction to spending and secular humanism. “Those with the spiritual armor will save the republic,” Beck cries out near the end of Broke.
Of course, this is all an act: an act of faith. Faith is a conviction that goes beyond the available evidence and becomes true through the process of believing. Beck has constructed a story in which America is at war against itself—the “real” America against a usurper state. It’s the founders and their true descendants who believe in freedom versus the progressives—from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama—who believe in the enslavement of individuals and the ever-increasing power of the state.
A century of progressivism—which is to say, treason—brought us to this point. Now, the battle is on.
With the fate of humanity’s last best hope, America, hanging in the balance, this is a powerful story. For a large percentage of the conservative movement and the GOP, it is also a true story.
“Kill me. Jail me. Hate me,” Beck thunders. “My convictions are the only thing that matter.” “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall,” Bob Dylan once sang, in a very different political context. Now Glenn Beck says it’s raining and he’s building an ark. Brace yourself—it looks to be a rough ride.
Dissident Voice - A Radical Newsletter in the Struggle for Peace and Social Justice
by Ron Ridenour
Long time in the making! Long time suffering poverty, inequality, official murder-torture-imprisonment, despotism, fundamentalism, and governments lackeyed to US/Western powers.
I am no expert on Arabic/Middle East history or politics, other than knowing that US/Israel-led imperialism has had a grip on the entire area for decades, and before that there were other foreign oppressors. I know that in part of the Arab world – not currently involved in this uproar – the US-led “humanitarian” operation has cost upwards to two million Iraqi lives, millions of migrants fled and fleeing, tens of thousands tortured, and the destruction and thievery of much cultural wealth and history. European allies assist in this butchery. Something similar is occurring in Afghanistan, and extending into Pakistan.
Wikileaks’ dispersal of US Embassy cables from Tunisia, posted in the British Guardian, December 7, 2010 and January 28, 2011, how how duplicitous and corrupted all US governments are with the Ben Ali family government for the past two decades.
US ambassador to Tunisia, Robert F. Godec, wrote, on July 17, 2009, that the Ben Ali regime is: “sclerotic;” and that “Tunisia is a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems.”
On the other hand, Godec expressed the need to continue supporting this regime because, “The government is like-minded on Iran, is an ally in the fight against terrorism…the US Mission has, for the past three years, [responded] by offering greater cooperation…notably in the commercial and military assistance areas.”
The US government supports Egypt with $1.3 billion in military aid annually, second only to Israel.
Most shamefully, a number of Arabic governments aid and abet the US in its “war against terrorism”. Egypt, and Tunisia, where the courageous uproar began a month ago, are among them. In others — Yemen, Algeria, Lebanon — many thousands of people act supportively with the Tunisian people, and with their own similar demands.
Will this lead to revolution, to socialism, as a rejection of misery under capitalism? Marxist analysis of what it takes before a socialist revolution can break out and grow entails two aspects. First, objective conditions must be present: too much poverty, exploitation and oppression to ignore; plus sufficiently high level of technology (industrial or?), and acutely antagonistic productive relations.
The second condition is subjective, in which a significant number (majority or?) of the most productive and exploited of industrial workers (perhaps also or either a significant number of land proletariat and small peasants) are conscious enough of their position as exploited, and are angry enough to take up the call for revolt. Overthrowing oppressors — as is occurring now, or is in the process of occurring, in some Arabic nations — is a good indication that a huge percentage of folk (in many places the large majority) are ready subjectively. Many have been murdered, thousands more arrested, yet they persist, especially in Tunisia and Egypt.
(Iraq, also an Arabic nation, has not moved into supportive action. Most of its people are too brutalized by the US+ invasion and their accomplice national governments, supported by the Persian neighbor, Iran, to come into the streets. But I suggest that many have their hearts beside their Arabic brothers and sisters in uproar, and time may bring them to fore. But this will probably not occur shortly in Saudia Arabia where the US-backed multi-billionaire government leaders rule with a fascist fist.)
The objective material factors for Tunisia and Egypt are, in large part, present as well. Does the high level of production relations necessary exist? I do not know. Are the workers antagonistic enough with the bosses and do they know that (condition two)? I’d say yes to both.
I do not seek to become an oracle. I wish merely to shed us of illusions. It takes more that what is occurring now to win over not only the national oligarchies and their armies and police forces well-equipped with US-French-British armaments, but also the very Empire itself awaiting in nearby skies and waters for the signal to move in if all else fails. The people are not armed well enough.
Nevertheless, I am encouraged by a sense of pan-Arabic unity, a sense that they are all one brethren no matter the name of the State. I do not see, however, in many of these areas, that the people are well organized, that they have their own parties or unions that lead with sagaciousness, or that they lead at all. There is great spontaneity and determination. All to the good! But people never win over the oppressors unless they have organizations that formulate policy and direction.
In Tunisia, however, I see a positive development with the January 14th Front, forces involved in the revolt. The eight organizations and political parties forming it, several illegal and operating underground, gathered into a united front on the day that the dictator fled the country. They propose 14 points to move forward, to form a people’s government and change the economic foundations.
Among the key points are anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist demands, coupled with democratic and social demands to raise the people out of poverty and exploitation:
• Eliminate all temporary governments that have any relations with the Ben Ali government and party (the RCD).
• Dissolve the existing state apparatus and create an assembly of peoples’ organizations for a new constitutional foundation.
• Eliminate the secret service and the political police.
• Jobs, health care, civil and social rights for all.
• Solidarity with all forces for liberation, especially with Palestinians in opposition to Zionism.
Most of you who read this commentary are not in the Arabic region. To you I say: we are all brothers and sisters in our common struggle! Take up what arm you can and support these people today, and hope that, one day, we will all support one another to build a universe where we are all one free people living with essential needs!
Ron Ridenour is an activist who has written many books on Cuba, including Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads (2006) and Cuba at Sea (2008). Read other articles by Ron, or visit Ron's website.
Human Rights Watch - Kuwait
Kuwait carried out a major crackdown on freedom of expression and assembly during 2010, Human Rights Watch said today, in issuing its World Report 2011.
The 649-page report, the organization's 21st annual review of human rights practices around the globe, summarizes major human rights issues in more than 90 countries worldwide. During 2010, the government tightened restrictions on public gatherings and began using violent methods of enforcement, Human Rights Watch said. Kuwait should allow activists to assemble peacefully and halt both state security cases and criminal defamation prosecutions against peaceful political activists, Human Rights Watch said.
"This year, Kuwait's government grew more and more comfortable harassing Kuwaitis who dared criticize the government," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Watching what's happening in the streets of Egypt and Tunisia, the Kuwaiti government should think long and hard about depriving people of their basic human rights to free speech and assembly."
In April, government security agents arrested and summarily deported over 30 Egyptian residents who had gathered in a local café to discuss support for the Egyptian reform advocate Mohammed El Baradei.
In September, the interior ministry issued a decision banning public gatherings without prior approval. The ministry later said this ban included a prohibition on outdoor gatherings, in particular gatherings outside of diwaniyas, or traditional discussion salons held in private homes that occur almost daily in Kuwait. Local civil society activists criticized the decision as an unduly burdensome restriction of their freedom to peacefully assemble.
In December, security forces violently dispersed a diwaniya on constitutional debates at the home of a member of parliament, Juma'an al-Harbish, injuring participants, including four other members of parliament and a Kuwait University law professor, Dr. Obaid al-Wasmi. The clash between state security and those attending sent shock waves through Kuwaiti society, and many activists told Human Rights Watch that they had not seen this type of state violence in recent memory. An interior ministry spokesperson said attendees had violated the September ban on outdoor gatherings when they assembled in the garden of al-Harbish's residence. A few days later, the Information Ministry shut down the country's Al Jazeera news station, based upon its coverage of the events.
"If the government sees a national security threat when Kuwaitis gather in their own homes to discuss the constitution, then the Kuwaiti government is really in trouble," Whitson said. "And as if silencing Kuwaitis wasn't enough, the government is trying to cover their eyes and ears by banning Al Jazeera."
Despite these setbacks, Kuwaiti activists remained determined to speak their minds and demand their rights. Activists such as the journalist and government critic Mohammed al-Jasim and the former head of Kuwait's National Democratic Alliance, Khalid al-Fadhala, faced government backlash after criticizing Kuwait's prime minister. Both were charged with criminal libel and slander against the prime minister. In June, the public prosecutor's office also charged Jasim with crimes against the state including "instigating to overthrow the regime," and "slight to the personage of the emir."
A court ordered Fadhala's release after he spent ten days in detention, deciding that he had served adequate time, while Jasim was released on bail. But in November, a trial court found Jasim guilty of libel and slander based upon an article criticizing the prime minister, and sentenced Jasim to a year in jail, which an appeals court later reduced to three months. ِHe was released on Monday, January 24, after Kuwait's court of cassation, overturned the ruling against him.
"Laws that jail people for insulting government officials have no place in the 21st century, and no place in Kuwait," Whitson said. "The emir should be working to ban criminal libel suits, not putting citizens in jail for healthy political debate."
The rights to free speech and peaceful assembly are protected under international human rights law, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by Kuwait in 1996. Some members of the Kuwaiti parliament have called for amendment to the country's criminal code by repealing all measures that make peaceful political expression crimes.
International law allows individuals much greater freedom to criticize public officials, and does not apply the same libel threshold for public officials as for private individuals. The freedom to criticize officials, and even accuse them of wrongdoing, is a necessary part of holding officials accountable for their actions and supporting public debate, Human Rights Watch noted.
The country signaled a significant commitment to reform during 2010 in two areas of critical concern - protections for the rights of expatriate workers and of the Bidun, or stateless people who claim Kuwaiti citizenship, Human Rights Watch said. The government pledged to abolish its repressive immigration sponsorship system and to pass a new labor law for the protection of domestic workers. It also promised to resolve the plight of stateless persons in Kuwait within the next five years. Human Rights Watch said the pledges were a positive step and urged prompt action in 2011.
"Sponsorship reform should allow all workers to quit jobs without fearing criminal penalties or police detention," Whitson said. "Moreover, the government should act without delay to pass a labor law for domestic workers, who have long remained the most vulnerable to abuse, despite their essential role in Kuwait's homes."
Saturday 29 January 2011
Dissident voice - The Egyptian Revolution
by Gary Leupp
I’m watching live coverage of the Egyptian revolution on Al-Jazeera TV. Cairo is swarming with hundreds of thousands, defying the curfew, hurling stones at the police. The images recall the Palestinian youth waging their Intifadas. The National Democratic Party headquarters is in flames. Downtown Suez has been taken over by the people, two police stations torched. The security forces are out in strength and shooting into crowds. But the people have lost their fear.
Reporters and commentators on Al-Jazeera and other channels have no choice but to note that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is widely hated, and that those in the street are seeking freedom from a dictatorship. But they also keep saying “The situation is getting worse.”
Worse?
I think of Mao Zedong’s response to critics of peasant rebellion in China in 1927. He noted that “even progressive people” saw uprisings as “terrible.” “But it’s not terrible,” he declared. “It is anything but ‘terrible.’ It’s fine!”
Watching the live coverage, I see the people of Egypt, fed up with their oppression, and inspired by the revolution in Tunisia, doing something very, very fine. It is inspiring. It is profoundly hopeful.
The Obama administration line (as summarized by Joe Biden, interviewed by Jim Lehrer on PBS), can be summarized as follows: Egyptians have the right to protest. Many are middle class folks, with legitimate concerns. But we should not refer to Mubarak as a dictator. It’s not time for him to go. He has been a key ally of the U.S. and Israel, in the “Middle East peace process” and the War on Terror. Egypt is dissimilar to Tunisia, and it would be “a stretch” to suggest that a trend is underway. The U.S. should encourage those protesting and Mubarak to talk. Everyone should avoid violence.
The mainstream infotainment media spin can be summarized like this: The “unrest” in Egypt puts the U.S. in a difficult position. On the one hand Mubarak has abetted U.S. “national interests” and been Israel’s only Arab ally. (These two are always assumed to be closely linked; the notion that an Arab leader is a friend of the U.S. to the extend that he kisses Israel’s ass is never questioned.) On the other hand, U.S. officials have been saying for years that the Middle East needs “democratic reform.”
This puts in the U.S. in bind, we are told. The U.S. confronts a “dilemma.” The talking heads depict the U.S. as somehow a victim in this situation. (Isn’t it terrible, they’re implying, that the Egyptian people by their militancy in favor of supposed U.S. ideals are trying to topple the USA’s best friend in the Arab world? What a headache to have to deal with!)
Seems to me, however, that this is another of those instances of chickens coming home to roost.
The U.S. has supported Mubarak primarily in appreciation for his stance towards Israel. (The mainstream media is referring to him as an “ally” of Israel.) It’s not really because he’s been a “partner in the peace process”—because there is no real peace process. Relentless Israeli settlement activity on Palestinian land supported by the Lobby in the U.S. has insured that.
Wikileaks documents indicate that Mubarak has been content for the “process” to lag indefinitely so that he could represent himself as the vital Arab middleman while enjoying two billion in U.S. military aid per year. But Palestinians hate him for cooperating with the demonization of democratically elected Hamas and the embargo imposed on Gaza. And Egyptians hate him for, among many other things, betraying their Palestinian brothers and sisters.
Rather, the U.S. has supported Mubarak because he’s provided an Arab fig leaf for the unequivocal support for Israel that the U.S. has provided for decades. U.S. diplomats have, as Wikileaks reveal, at times expressed concern that the dictator might be causing some problems by his “heavy-handed” treatment of dissidents. But this is not a matter of moral indignation, or concern about the lives of Egyptians. It’s nothing more than an expression of concern that his fascistic rule might jeopardize his ability to help U.S.-Israeli policy in the region and keep the Suez Canal open.
And now that brutal rule has caused an explosion. The reaction from U.S. officials and political commentators is, “We never expected this.”
Well surprise, surprise! (These folks were dumbfounded by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as well. Don’t they understand that people eventually fight back?)
I think of that old Langston Hughes poem:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Egypt is exploding. The deferred dreams of the Arab world are exploding. And even the corporate media acknowledges that the people are jubilant (while warning that none of this might be in “our interest”). But for people with some basic morals, concerned about the happiness of humanity in general, is this not totally fine?
Al-Jazeera shows viewers how U.S. officials are changing the tone of their comments, backing off more and more each day from support of Mubarak. They’re reiterating with increasing emphasis that the demonstrators indeed have legitimacy. (Did these people just figure this out?) What sheer opportunism!
Obama, always the centrist opportunist wanting to be everybody’s friend, wants to be the Egyptian people’s friend. He showed that in Cairo in 2009. In his celebrated speech to the Muslim world he on the one hand spouted platitudes about U.S. acceptance of Islam and on the other insulted everyone’s intelligence by calling the invasion of Afghanistan a “war of necessity.” He (accurately) described the vicious assault on Iraq as a “war of choice,” but said anything about how those responsible for such a crime ought to be punished. He does not support any investigation that would show how neocon Zionists in his predecessor’s administration faked a case for war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Arabs.
His real message is: the U.S. can lie and kill, and then posture as the moral exemplar (maybe even apologizing slightly when crimes are embarrassingly exposed). Even so, the people of the world are supposed to understand that alignment with the U.S. is their best hope.
And now Obama wants the best of both worlds: an ongoing engagement with Mubarak (if he survives), and a hand outstretched to the people of Egypt, tainted by so many other handshakes with so many dictators so far.
Demonstrators in Cairo note that tear gas canisters on the street are marked “Made in USA.” What should they make of that? Who’s really encouraging their dreams? Who’s caused them to defer them, decade upon decade? It’s the same foe that has caused the deferment of dreams here in this country and around the world.
I learned to say shukran in Cairo. To my friends there now, engaged in this fine, fine battle, I say that now.
Shukran, shukran for inspiring the world, showing that another world might be possible.
Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu. Read other articles by Gary.
Tuesday 25 January 2011
SEX & RELATIONSHIPS
Not this time.
Before I get into everything that's stupid and annoying and just plain wrong with the sexual politics of No Strings Attached -- and believe me, there's a lot that's wrong with these sexual politics -- let's get this out of the way: This is not a good movie. A romantic comedy (and I use both words with grave reservations) about long-term acquaintances who try to turn their friendship into one with benefits, No Strings Attached is fake, implausible, and entirely disconnected from human reality. It's not even interested in being authentic, plausible, or connected to human reality. It's interested in aggregating some cute moments and raunchy moments and heart-tugging moments and a bunch of juvenile sex jokes that would make a 12-year-old cringe... and half-assedly stringing them onto a tediously predictable storyline that plays like it was written by a computer programmed by a committee who all read the same stupid screenwriters' bible. The moment when Emma casually invites Adam to "this thing she's doing," and it turns out to be a family funeral... that was the moment I knew that this movie was aiming solely for cheap laughs, and was not remotely interested in any of the things human beings actually do. It's a moment that takes place approximately 10 minutes in.
And that, in fact, is a huge amount of what's wrong with the movie's sexual politics.
They're fake.
I suppose I should summarize the plot here. But there really isn't much to summarize. Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher) are long-time friends -- acquaintances, really -- who've always been a little interested in each other. They have an impulsive sexual tryst one day, and decide, for not very well explained reasons, that instead of being lovers, they should be friends with benefits, with no romance and no commitment and no strings attached. Wacky hijinks ensue. Or, more accurately: Hijinks ensue that are intended to be wacky, but are, in fact, predictable to the point of tedium. Hijinks ensue, not because it would be natural for the characters to hijink in that manner, but because said hijinking is what the screenwriters think will be funny.
Which brings me back to the fakery. The sexual politics of No Strings Attached have nothing to do with the sexual things people actually do. They have nothing to do with how sexual relationships are changing: the ways that people are questioning assumptions about what sexual relationships have to look like, breaking down the standard categories and inventing new ones... and how these re-inventions from the fringe are filtering into the mainstream.
Quite the contrary.
No Strings Attached wants desperately to be all modern and cutting-edge and sexually transgressive, with gags about menstruation and tag lines like "Welcome to the new world of relationships." But it consistently runs back to the safe ground of predictable formula and conventional sexual morality. It daringly asks the question, "Can two friends hook up without love getting in the way?" But then -- spoiler alert, but if you didn't figure this out you haven't seen many Hollywood movies -- it answers that question with a resounding, "No!" It flirts with the titillating edges of sexual exploration, but ultimately chides the explorers for being afraid of commitment, and settles everyone into cozy, coupled, "happily ever after" conventionality. If your first reaction to seeing this movie's ad campaign was a roll of your eyes and a jaded sigh of, "I know exactly how this movie unfolds and where it ends up"... you're right. That's how it unfolds, and that's where it ends up.
Where to begin, where to begin? Well, the first problem is with Emma's motivation for resisting romantic love.
There isn't any.
Emma's reasons for not wanting to get into a capital-R Relationship are pathetic. They're like a first draft that never get hammered out in the rewrites. The reason she gives Adam is that she's working 80 hours a week on her medical residency and doesn't have time. The real explanation, though, the one she tells her friend, is that she's afraid of getting her heart broken. Note, please, that she's not gun-shy for any particular reason, a bad breakup or anything. She's just scared. Because the screenplay demands it. Because if she isn't, then she and Ashton Kutcher will happily fall in love in the first 15 minutes, and the rest of the movie will consist of stock footage and light music.
But this lack of plausible motivation doesn't just make the movie baffling and pointless. It trivializes the entire premise. It frames the very idea of sexual friendship -- of pursuing sexual relationships that aren't romantic and aren't going to be -- as ridiculous on the face of it. Doomed to fail at best; emotionally cowardly at worst.
As a longtime sex writer and educator, I find this irritating because it trivializes a fringe sexuality. It makes people who are engaging in it feel alienated and shamed; it makes people who are considering it give up before they even begin. As an off-and-on participant in these sexual friendships over the years, and as part of a community that often enjoys these kinds of friendships, I find it irritating because... well, for the same reason, basically. Because me and my friends are the ones being trivialized and shamed and marginalized. And as a moviegoer, I find it irritating because it makes me feel like a dupe. If even the writers couldn't be bothered to take the premise seriously, why on earth should I waste my time and money on it?
It's not like a plausible motivation wasn't possible. In fact, when my friend Rebecca and I saw this movie and then enthusiastically dissected everything that was wrong with it, we came up with an alternate plot that might have actually worked -- and in particular, a motivation for Emma's romantic reluctance that might actually make sense. In our version, Emma and Adam meet, hook up, feel sparks... but while he's interested in pursuing something more, she has genuine good reasons for not wanting it to get serious. The fake reason she gives to Adam, that she's working 80 hours a week on her medical residency and doesn't have time for a romance? That would do nicely. That's a genuine conflict, not a stupid fake movie one -- wanting love, but also wanting a medical career, and not knowing how to juggle the competing demands on time and energy and commitment. In fact, in Rebecca's version, Emma's actually had several friendships with benefits before this one, which mostly worked out neatly and well -- and so the romantic sparks she starts to feel with Adam take her by surprise, and she has to not only figure out what's going on with her emotions, but make real choices about where to go with them.
That's a movie we would have happily seen. It would have treated sexual friendship as a valid option, a workable alternative that reasonable people might get real value from. And it wouldn't have had to be some heavy relationship drama. It could easily have fit into a light, goofy, romantic comedy format.
But that movie would have taken, you know, work. Attention to coherence and plausibility. Maybe even some research into what people with fuckbuddies actually do with them. (Other than the obvious, of course.) And it would have taken a willingness to question the dominant relationship paradigm... instead of pretending to question it, but having the stock answer in its pocket all along.
So there's that.
But there's more.
There is, in fact, the foundational premise of the movie: the assumption that sex inevitably leads to love.
This premise gets treated like a law of Newtonian mechanics. You have ongoing sex with someone you like -- it turns into romantic love, with the inevitability of planetary orbits collapsing. There's no point in fending it off. It's ridiculous to even try. Entertaining to watch (well, in theory, anyway) -- but ridiculous.
Okay. Here's the bit where I get all TMI on you, and inappropriately disclose details about my sexual history. I promise, it really is relevant.
I've had sex with a fair number of people in my day. I can't be exact about that fair number, since I stopped keeping track a long, long time ago. But it's somewhere in the high two figures. Possibly the low three, depending on how you define "having sex."
And of those roughly 80-120 people that I've had sex with, I've fallen in love with exactly three. David. Richard. And -- most importantly, by several orders of magnitude -- the great love of my life, my partner of thirteen years and my wife of seven, Ingrid.
Now, to be fair, many of those roughly 80-120 encounters were very short-term indeed, with no time for love to blossom. Brief flings, one-night stands, people I met at sex parties whose names I never knew. But some of them were ongoing relationships -- that's small "r" relationships -- of some duration. Some were friendships that became sexual; some have been sexual trysts that became friendships. Some of those friendships were fairly easy-going; some have been among the most central friendships of my life. Some have had sex as a central defining component; some were sexual only tangentially, or intermittently. Some of these people I'm still friends with; some aren't -- not because sexual friendships can never work, but for the same reasons that any friendship can sometimes drift apart.
And of all of these people, I fell in love with three.
Three, out of 80-120.
That's some really crappy Newtonian mechanics you got there.
And I'm not the only one. I move in a community where sexual friendships are fairly common, and I know a whole lot of people who have them, or who've had them in the past. Some of these friendships have worked out; some haven't. Sometimes they've lasted in more or less the same form for a while; sometimes they've changed over time. Occasionally they've led to romantic love; usually they haven't. A lot like, you know, non-sexual friendships, or work partnerships, or school chums, or every other kind of human relationship on the face of the planet.
That's the reality.
But it's a reality that the writers of No Strings Attached seem entirely uninterested in.
Yes, I know. It's silly escapist entertainment. And that's fine. Not every movie about love and sex has to be a blazing insight into the deepest realities of the human heart. But even silly escapist entertainment is better -- funnier, more engaging, more actually entertaining -- when it has a whiff of plausibility. Escapist entertainment works better when you're not scratching your head trying to figure out why on earth the characters are doing what they're doing... or playing a silent game of "Predict the Movie Cliche" to pass the time until the sweet, sweet credits finally roll.
There are a handful of likable things about No Strings Attached. I actually sort of loved the bit about the menstrual-themed mix CD. The running gag about silly covers of raunchy pop songs -- the mariachi band playing "Don't Cha," the country-Western version of "99 Problems" -- is pretty freaking funny. (The latter, in fact, was weirdly awesome, and I may even wind up downloading it.) Chris "Ludacris" Bridges is dry and smart and hilariously understated, and I definitely want to see him do more acting. And the idyllic sexual montage of Emma and Adam's early hookups is both genuinely hot and genuinely sweet. It was one of the few stretches of the film where I felt that the characters were, you know, real people, with real chemistry, taking genuine pleasure in one another's bodies and one another's company, experiencing emotions that were honest and joyful and subject to change without notice. It was one of the few stretches of the film when I felt like there was a real movie in there, itching to come out. (Maybe the one Rebecca and I came up with.)
So yes, it definitely could have been worse. There could have been fart jokes. There could have been vomit jokes. There could have been overturned fruit carts, wacky cases of mistaken identity, people falling into wedding cakes. The sexual libertines could have died tragically at the end, of disease or violence, the last words on their bloody and tormented lips, "I know that our life of sin has led us to this sorry fate." It could have starred Adam Sandler.
It could have been worse.
But not by much.
Thursday 20 January 2011
BBC News: Science and Environment
By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News
2010 was the warmest year since global temperature records began in 1850.
Unusually cold December weather in some places distracted attention from warmth elsewhere
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) concludes 2010 was 0.53C warmer than the average for the period 1961-90 - a period commonly used as a baseline.
It comes in just ahead of 1998 and 2005 - but the margins of uncertainty in measurements means the three years are statistically identical.
The WMO analysis combines data from three leading research agencies, and is regarded as the most authoritative.
The three records are maintained by the US-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) and National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and jointly in the UK by the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).
They use broadly the same data from weather stations, ocean buoys and satellites across the world; but each analyses that data in different ways, leading to slight differences in their conclusions.
The University of Alabama at Huntsville team, which runs the satellite temperature record, has already called 2010 as the second warmest year in its 41-year series, just behind 1998.
"The 2010 data confirm the Earth's significant long-term warming trend," said WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud.
"The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998"
Other indications of 2010 warmth flagged up by the WMO include the lowest extent of sea-ice cover in the Arctic since the satellite record began.
Regions of the world experiencing particularly warm conditions during 2010 included Africa, southern and western Asia, and the northern extremities of North America, including Greenland.
The possibility that 2010 would emerge as the warmest year on record was raised by scientists after the year began with a period of El Nino conditions - unusually warm waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, which transfer heat from the ocean to the atmosphere.
However, a switch to the opposing La Nina conditions halfway through the year cast doubt on whether the record would be broken.
Although December was exceptionally cold in some places - the coldest for 100 years across the UK - other regions, such as Greenland and eastern Canada, saw unseasonably warm weather.
The WMO notes a number of extreme weather events ocurring during 2010, including:
- the summer heatwave in Russia
- severe monsoon-related floods in Pakistan
- the worst Amazon drought in recent memory.
The variation between El Nino and La Nina can alter the global temperature by half a degree or so.
But the variations it produces sit on top of a slow, steady warming trend dating back half a century, ascribed to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from industry, agriculture, deforestation and other human activities.
Wednesday 19 January 2011
"The Emperor is Naked": Newscast from the Corporate World of Make-Believe
Celebrity Endorsements: Money for Nothing?
According to the consumeristic decrees issued in the make-believe world of advertising, sports and entertainment celebrities' product endorsements are supposed to add, by mere association, that all-important "Midas touch" i.e. their most tangible and profitable placement...
Well, this is not necessarily the case, according to a study of published in the Advertising Age, under the banner: “Celebrities in Advertising Are Almost Always a Big Waste of Money” ...
"We set out to understand whether celebrities today are really worth the significant investment that brands were making. We studied every nationally televised ad for the first 11 months of 2010 and found that celebrity ads performed either below average or merely equaled it. Specifically, our study, 2010 Celebrity Advertisements: Exposing a Myth of Advertising Effectiveness, 2010, showed that fewer than 12% of ads using celebrities exceeded a 10% lift, and one-fifth of celebrity ads had a negative impact on advertising effectiveness."
Read more...
JFK's inaugural speech: what makes it great oratory?
By Max Atkinson, BBC News Communications researcher
President John F Kennedy would have been delighted to know that his inaugural address is still remembered and admired 50 years later.
Like other great communicators - including Winston Churchill before him and Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama since then - he was someone who took word-craft very seriously indeed.
He had delegated his aide Ted Sorensen to read all the previous presidential inaugurals, with the additional brief of trying to crack the code that had made Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address such a hit.
Fifty years on, the debate about whether he or Sorensen played the greater part in composing the speech matters less than the fact that it was a model example of how to make the most of the main rhetorical techniques and figures of speech that have been at the heart of all great speaking for more than 2,000 years.
Most important among these are:
But great communicators differ as to which of these techniques they use most.
Presidents Reagan and Obama, for example, stand out as masters of anecdote and story-telling, which didn't feature at all in JFK's inaugural. Mr Obama also favours three-part lists, of which there were 29 in his 10-minute election victory speech in Chicago.
Stark warning
Kennedy, however, used very few in his inaugural address. For him, contrasts were the preferred weapon, coming as they did at a rate of about one every 39 seconds in this particular speech. Some were applauded and some have survived among the best-remembered lines.
He began with three consecutive contrasts:
People of the developing world were "struggling to break the bonds of mass misery."
JFK vowed to "assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty" and that "this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house."
He sought to "begin anew the quest for peace before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity", hoped that "a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion" and issued a "call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle."
First inaugural designed for the media?
Impressive though the rhetoric and imagery may have been, what really made the speech memorable was that it was the first inaugural address by a US president to follow the first rule of speech-preparation: analyse your audience - or, to be more precise at a time when mass access to television was in its infancy, analyse your audiences.
In the most famous fictional speech of all time, Mark Antony had shown sensitivity to his different audiences in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by asking his "Friends, Romans, countrymen" to lend him their ears. But Kennedy had many more audiences in mind than those who happened to be in Washington that day.
His countrymen certainly weren't left out, appearing as they did in the opening and towards the end with his most famous contrast of all: "Ask not..." But he knew, perhaps better than any previous US president, that local Americans were no longer the only audience that mattered. The age of a truly global mass media had dawned, which meant that what he said would be seen, heard or reported everywhere in the world.
At the height of the Cold War, Kennedy also had a foreign policy agenda that he wanted to be heard everywhere in the world. So the different segments of the speech were specifically targeted at a series of different audiences:
The fact that so much of the speech is still remembered around the world 50 years later is a measure of Kennedy's success in knowing exactly what he wanted to say, how best to say it and, perhaps most important of all, to whom he should say it.
Dr Max Atkinson is the author of Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Public Speaking and Presentation and Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy
President John F Kennedy would have been delighted to know that his inaugural address is still remembered and admired 50 years later.
Like other great communicators - including Winston Churchill before him and Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama since then - he was someone who took word-craft very seriously indeed.
He had delegated his aide Ted Sorensen to read all the previous presidential inaugurals, with the additional brief of trying to crack the code that had made Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address such a hit.
Fifty years on, the debate about whether he or Sorensen played the greater part in composing the speech matters less than the fact that it was a model example of how to make the most of the main rhetorical techniques and figures of speech that have been at the heart of all great speaking for more than 2,000 years.
Most important among these are:
- Contrasts: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"
- Three-part lists: "Where the strong are just, and the weak secure and the peace preserved"
- Combinations of contrasts and lists (by contrasting a third item with the first two): "Not because the communists are doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right"
- Alliteration: "Let us go forth to lead the land we love"
- Imagery: "The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans"
But great communicators differ as to which of these techniques they use most.
Presidents Reagan and Obama, for example, stand out as masters of anecdote and story-telling, which didn't feature at all in JFK's inaugural. Mr Obama also favours three-part lists, of which there were 29 in his 10-minute election victory speech in Chicago.
Stark warning
Kennedy, however, used very few in his inaugural address. For him, contrasts were the preferred weapon, coming as they did at a rate of about one every 39 seconds in this particular speech. Some were applauded and some have survived among the best-remembered lines.
He began with three consecutive contrasts:
- "We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom"
- "Symbolizing an end as well as a beginning"
- "Signifying renewal as well as change"
- "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich"
- "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate"
- "My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man"
People of the developing world were "struggling to break the bonds of mass misery."
JFK vowed to "assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty" and that "this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house."
He sought to "begin anew the quest for peace before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity", hoped that "a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion" and issued a "call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle."
First inaugural designed for the media?
Impressive though the rhetoric and imagery may have been, what really made the speech memorable was that it was the first inaugural address by a US president to follow the first rule of speech-preparation: analyse your audience - or, to be more precise at a time when mass access to television was in its infancy, analyse your audiences.
In the most famous fictional speech of all time, Mark Antony had shown sensitivity to his different audiences in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by asking his "Friends, Romans, countrymen" to lend him their ears. But Kennedy had many more audiences in mind than those who happened to be in Washington that day.
His countrymen certainly weren't left out, appearing as they did in the opening and towards the end with his most famous contrast of all: "Ask not..." But he knew, perhaps better than any previous US president, that local Americans were no longer the only audience that mattered. The age of a truly global mass media had dawned, which meant that what he said would be seen, heard or reported everywhere in the world.
At the height of the Cold War, Kennedy also had a foreign policy agenda that he wanted to be heard everywhere in the world. So the different segments of the speech were specifically targeted at a series of different audiences:
- "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill"
- "To those new nations whom we welcome to the ranks of the free"
- "To those in the huts and villages of half the globe"
- "To our sister republics south of the border"
- "To that world assembly of sovereign states, the United Nations"
- "Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary"
The fact that so much of the speech is still remembered around the world 50 years later is a measure of Kennedy's success in knowing exactly what he wanted to say, how best to say it and, perhaps most important of all, to whom he should say it.
Dr Max Atkinson is the author of Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Public Speaking and Presentation and Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy
Sunday 16 January 2011
Hub Pages
by Frank Sanello
First identified in the 1930s by an Israeli psychiatrist, Jerusalem Syndrome describes a cluster of psychotic symptoms endemic to the Holy Land.
Were the Portuguese Children Who Saw the Lady of Fatima Hallucinating Psychotics?
The syndrome has various manifestations. Some tourists in Jesus’ place of death believe that they hear the voice of God. Other victims think they are God or the reincarnation of saints and archangels shortly after arriving in the city that gives the syndrome its name.
A 1998 Israeli documentary about Jerusalem Syndrome featured a particularly disturbing patient who claimed to be the Archangel Michael and dressed for the part, wearing a long beard, a white robe, and feathered wings. He resembled the forbidding title character in director Luis Bunuel’s 1965 classic, Simon of the Desert.
The film was based on a real-life saint in 5th century Syria, who spent four decades on top of a tall pillar to distance himself from sinners and temptation. From his lofty pulpit he delivered sermons condemning spectators at ground-level for their sins. Trickle-down guilt. Holy hermits who traded the traditional cave for a penthouse perch were known as anchorites.
During the Great Depression, unemployed daredevils engaged in similar stunts atop flagpoles to earn a few bucks from passersby. Flagpole squatters were high-flying panhandlers who kept a hat at the base of the pole to collect money from gawkers.
Early Christian anchorites also hurled curses down on sinful spectators with the usual millenarian warning that the end of the world was nigh. Their earthbound counterparts today sometimes wear sandwich boards that express the same warning: repent before it’s too late.
Jerusalem Syndrome made it to the screen in the 1998 Israeli documentary of the same name, but the pathology has yet to crack the DSM-IV, the encyclopedia of mental illnesses. Some psychologists, however, believe that Jerusalem Syndrome is covered by a entry in the DSM, Delusional Disorder - Grandiose Type.
Grandiosity in the clinical rather than popular sense plagues people who believe they can accomplish or have accomplished feats for which they have neither the training or natural talent. The type is endemic in Hollywood, where pathological liars from all over the world gather with dreams of becoming movie stars.
Fake Rockefellers and Kennedys Prey on the Rich and Credulous
Delusions typically take hold later in life, which may explain why 40-year-old bus boys who moved to L.A. in their 20s hoping to make it big decide to pretend that they have succeeded. Scam bags claiming to be Kennedy or Rockefeller relatives cheat naïve, rich groupies out of fortunes.
Bogus “movie producers” who have never produced anything but fantasies lure credulous young women fresh off the bus from the boondocks with promises of starring them in movies that will never get made. Preproduction conveniently fails to progress to principal photography because the project only exists in the imagination of the fake filmmakers. While waiting for their big break, young women often succumb to sexual overtures from sham producers.
Such scams are contagious, and the rip-off artist may come to believe the fantasy himself, which turns the scamster into a victim of psychosis as well. A more toxic cousin of grandiosity, also in the DSM, is grandiose narcissism, a synergistic combination of incompetence and remorselessness typical of narcissists, who again, in the clinical rather than popular connotation, believe their needs are all important, while the needs of others, if recognized at all, are of no importance.
Mummification Without Preservatives: The Corpse of St. Bernadette of Lourdes Never Decomposed
The DSM reserves a subcategory for grandiose individuals whose lack of remorse is so powerful they can commit murder without the guilt that prevents healthy people from acting on their primitive impulses. These psychopaths are called malign narcissists. Besides Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein have been diagnosed with this virulent form of grandiosity.
Exhibiting the typical lack of remorse, Saddam liked to feed enemies feet-first into wood chippers until he got bored and accelerated the process by inserting his victims head-first. A TV documentary showed the Iraqi dictator smoking and laughing as his henchmen hauled away government officials condemned to death.
Hitler - The Ultimate Malign Narcissist With Delusions of Grandeur
The all-time contender for the title of grandiose narcissist is Hitler, who thought he could conquer the world and didn’t care how many toes or corpses he stepped on to achieve that goal. His dream of world conquest was a daydream because he lacked military training and experience beyond serving as a courier in World War I.
Since childhood, grandiose narcissism had afflicted the dictator, who felt qualified to overrule his high-ranking military advisors. A high-school dropout, he despised and resented intellectuals who made him feel inadequate, a rare instance of a correct self-assessment by Hitler.
In his febrile imagination, the Austrian corporal of World War I was field marshal and generalissimo. Genuine military experts considered him an incompetent strategist who would destroy Germany. Conspirators among his inner circle made more than 40 documented attempts to assassinate the Fuehrer without success. Hitler’s blunders were so helpful to the Allies that they eventually called off all plans to assassinate him. They considered the bumbling warlord more valuable alive than dead.
Despite its label, Jerusalem Syndrome has no geographical limits. The syndrome has been reported all over the world, where it’s an equal opportunity destroyer, afflicting not only Christians, but Jews and Muslims as well. For unexplained reasons, a related pathology called Paris Syndrome only afflicts Japanese tourists after one too many bus trips to the Louvre and Notre Dame.
The granddaddy of these delusions is Stendhal Syndrome, named in honor of the 19th century French novelist who fainted after being overwhelmed by artistic masterpieces in Florence and Rome.
You Don't Have to Be in Jerusalem to Suffer Jerusalem Syndrome
Victims of Jerusalem Syndrome Often Believe They Are the Archangel Michael, Joan of Arcs's Favorite Hallucination
Because Jerusalem Syndrome is not limited to its namesake city, the phenomenon may explain the actual cause of miracles at Lourdes and Fatima and other venerated sites. Forensic psychologists speculate that psychotic children were hallucinating when the Mother of God appeared to them in Portugal and France.
None of the thousands of worshipers at either shrines ever shared the children's hallucination, but gift shops at both shrines still do a brisk business, especially Lourdes. The faithful believe the spring at Lourdes contains curative water which is sold in miniature bottles for tourists who take them home for later medical emergencies.
In fact, Lives of the Saints and other hagiographical works describe mystics who chat with God. These saints may have been psychotics whose divine visitors would have disappeared had antipsychotic medications been available in the Medieval era, the heyday of thaumaturges, Medieval Latin for miracle-workers.
Many thaumaturges and others who had God on speed dial did not knowingly defraud the faithful. They may have had schizophrenia, a particularly debilitating form of psychosis that causes hallucinations and delusions. Schizophrenics have abnormally high levels of the neurochemical dopamine, which can be regulated with an antipsychotic drug like Risperdal or an antidepressant like Zoloft, America’s bestselling drug for beating the blues.
Unlike Lourdes' bottled water, these medications have truly miraculous healing powers. The agitation and hallucinations associated with schizophrenia disappear within days, while delusions vanish after a few weeks of drug therapy. Seventy-percent of schizophrenics and other psychotics respond to drug therapy and regain sanity until they feel "cured" and stop taking their meds, which plunges them back into their personal hell on earth.
Joan of Arc - Saint or Psychotic?
Joan of Arc, Saint or Schizophrenic? Did God or Bad Brain Chemistry Cause the 15th-Century Saint's Visions?
Who can say? The judicious use of antipsychotic medications, had they been available in the 15th century, would have silenced Joan of Arc’s imaginary visitors - God, Saints Catherine and Margaret, and the Archangel Michael. The delusional doppelgänger of the archangel appeared in the Israeli documentary about Jerusalem Syndrome. Suspiciously, the message of Joan's visitors was political, not spiritual. The apparitions ordered her to expel the English army from France. Medications would have spared the life of history’s most famous burn victim by banishing the holy troublemakers’ dangerous military advice.
Jerusalem Syndrome may sound like an impious joke, but the disease is no laughing matter to those who experience its more pathological forms. An average of 100 tourists in Jerusalem require hospitalization every year. A survey conducted between 1980 and 1993 by Kfar Shaud Mental Health Centre in the capital of Israel reported that 1,200 severely ill victims of the syndrome turned up at the clinic during the 13-year study.
Skeptics dismiss the virulence of the epidemic, noting that two million tourists flock to the Holy Land annually. The 100 patients who require hospitalization each year are statistically insignificant, researchers say, but the syndrome is not insignificant if you are one of the unlucky psychotics who comes to believe he is Jesus or His Mother reincarnate.
Martin Luther, Victim of an Ungodly Variant of Jerusalem Syndrome
Demons not Saints Appeared to Martin Luther, Who Threw an Inkpot at One Uninvited Guest From Hell
There’s an ugly, evil twin of God and other heavenly visitors to earth. Martin Luther, a reformer who condemned the superstitions of Roman Catholicism, nevertheless endured a horrific permutation of Jerusalem Syndrome.
But instead of divine apparitions and conversations, Luther believed the devil had appeared to him on many occasions. Like most hallucinations, Luther’s sighting seemed real enough that he hurled an inkpot at the satanic intruder, according to a psychoanalytical biography, Young Man Luther, by the late Harvard child psychologist, Erik Erikson.
The devil or Luther's hallucination of him pursued Luther to his deathbed. "A few days before his death, Luther saw the devil sitting on a rainpipe outside his window, exposing his behind to him," Erikson wrote.
Devout Protestants condemn Erikson's depiction of Luther as blasphemous, even though hermit monks, like St. Anthony in fifth century Egypt, also played unwilling host to houseguests from hell. So many demons converged on St. Anthony’s cave dwelling, the venue was SRO.
The Son of God Had Second Thoughts About the Deal He Made With Dad
Perhaps the most famous victim of Jerusalem Syndrome was Jesus Christ, who talked to His Father on at least two occasions. In the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion, Jesus had second thoughts about His sadistic Dad’s plans for His son’s death when Jesus prayed to be relieved of the “cup” of crucifixion.
On the cross, a ghastly form of execution reserved for cheeky slaves and rebels against Roman rule, Jesus seemed to repudiate his earthly mission when he asked His Father rhetorically, “Why hast Thou forsaken Me?”
According to the propagandists who created the New Testament, God the Father and God the Son had made a deal that the Son would die to atone for the sins of mankind, in particular, the dubious sin of eating forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.
This so-called Original Sin committed by Adam and Eve was inherited by all their descendants, except the Virgin Mary. Jesus’ death on the cross somehow absolved baptized Christians from a sin they never committed, unless you believe in generational guilt.
How Can Jews be Guilty of a Crime Authorized Two Millennia Ago by a Roman Bureaucrat?
Until the mid-20th century, Catholic ideologues still referred to contemporary Jews as Christ-killers or deicides, Latin for God-killers. Vatican dogma moves at glacial speed. It wasn’t until the Second Vatican Council, in 1965 that Pope Paul VI finally absolved the Jews of killing Christ.
During the Third Reich, Pius XII justified Hitler’s genocide as punishment for the crime allegedly committed by ancestors of the Jews. Morality aside, history is on the side of the angels, but not the papal inhabitants of heaven who have been canonized.
In ancient Judaea, Jewish leaders were not allowed to impose the death penalty, a power reserved for the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. If any people share collective guilt for a 2,000-year-old crime, Romans, as Pilate’s heirs, are the real Christ-killers. Pius XII, who blamed all Jews for Jesus' execution, was born, raised, and educated in Rome.
Generational guilt was the philosophy used by Christianity to justify two millennia of persecuting Jews because their distant ancestors voted to free the bandit Barabbas instead of a gentle, proto-socialist Jeshua ben Joseph, Jesus’ name in Hebrew, “ben” meaning “son of.”
If Hitler had been a Bible scholar and an antiquarian, the people of Rome, not the descendants of King David, would have filled cattle cars bound for the killing fields of Eastern Europe.
Sources:
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994.
Butler, Alban. Lives of the Saints (1883). Kila, MT: Kessinger, 2008 reissue.
Erikson, Erik. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1958.
Sanello, Frank. Why Marie Antoinette Never Said "Let Them Eat Cake" or Why (Almost) Everything You Thought You Knew About the Past Never Happened. Los Angeles: in-press, 2010.
Ed Miliband's speech to the Fabians: full transcript
Posted by the New Statesman - 16 January 2011 09:10
"The only way we rebuild the case for politics is from the ground up."
We've just witnessed our first by-election of the Parliament in Oldham East and Saddleworth.
It was an unusual by-election not only because - I am proud to say - Labour won, but also because of the behaviour of our opponents and the great churning of votes between the parties.
David Cameron became the first prime minister in recent years to campaign in a by-election.
And definitely the first party leader that I can remember to not know the name of his own party's candidate.
Then we saw Nick Clegg vowing to have more public rows with Mr Cameron just to remind people that the Liberal Democrats still have a separate identity.
That is an unusual, probably unhealthy, way to conduct any relationship let alone one in a government that is having such a profound impact on people's lives.
I suspect it is a symptom of a having coalition based on political convenience rather than values.
But, as I said, it was also unusual because we saw significant transfers of votes from the Liberal Democrats to Labour. From the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats. And from Conservatives to Labour.
Above all, what the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election shows us is that people are deeply uneasy about where this Conservative-led government is taking the country.
However our party would be deluding itself if we thought that meant that the next election would fall into our lap.
The next election will be as much about us as about them -- and our ability to change and become the voice and standard-bearer of Britain's progressive majority once again. And that's what I want to talk about today.
Because I believe that from the very founding of the Labour party as the Labour Representation Committee through to the great reforming Labour governments of the second half of the twentieth century and the early years of this, Labour has succeeded when it has seen itself not as a narrow party of sectional interest, but when through a sense of mission, passion and optimism for the future it has become the voice and vehicle for progressive change.
We need to be honest over 13 years in government we forfeited the right in too many people's minds to be the natural standard bearers for this progressive majority in Britain.
I want to talk today about the reasons why that happened and about the three ways we need to change and change profoundly if we are to put it right.
The first is to understand why our economy has stopped working for people - and how we can again offer a new economic model for Labour and for Britain. In particular, understanding that simply redistributing taxpayers' money through the welfare state, important though that is, is inadequate and will not build the more just, more sustainable economy.
The second is to recognise the way our managerialism took us away from the instincts and values of the broad progressive majority in Britain.
That our communities came to see us as the people who put markets and commerce before the common good.
And many citizens came to see us also as the people who did not understand that the state could be intrusive as well as empowering.
We must respond to this by breathing new life into our sense of ideological purpose, drawing on what is enduringly good in the Labour tradition, and reaching outside it too.
And third we must accept that in how we do our politics we came to be not leaders of a broad, open progressive majority built on a coalition of values, but into a political force that was far less than that.
We must respond by putting democratic renewal and a willingness to reach out to others beyond our party at the heart of the way we do our politics.
Understanding that Labour must change the way it works and that no one party can claim to have a monopoly of wisdom in today's politics. That Labour must earn its leadership of Britain's progressive majority - it is not ours by right.
The context
Before turning to my argument, let me set the context.
It's two years since I opened the Fabian New Year Conference of 2009.
I remarked then that the Tories had never been more on the ideological defensive in my political lifetime.
The financial crash had demolished the Conservative fallacy that markets always know best and David Cameron was busy discovering that there was such a thing as society.
Two years later, we are clearly in a very different place.
David Cameron didn't win the general election last May. But he did end up as Prime Minister and he hasn't let the absence of a mandate stop him from embarking on the most ideologically dangerous assault on our public services in a generation.
These changes will re-shape Britain in as profound a way as Mrs Thatcher re-shaped Britain in the 1980s. I'm sure I speak for everyone here when I say that everywhere I go I see an assault on many of the things I value - from Sure Start to the way in which the trebling of student debt will kick the ladder of opportunity away from a generation of our young people.
The combination of this assault on our institutions, the global economic crisis and the formation of the Conservative-led government has marked a period of change which occurs only once in a generation.
There have been two other moments in my lifetime when economic upheaval has been followed by a dramatic break in the established pattern of British politics.
The first was the IMF crisis in 1976 and the Winter of Discontent two years later, followed by the defeat of the Callaghan government, the formation of the SDP and eighteen years of Conservative government.
The second was Britain's ejection from the Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday, the emergence of New Labour and the election of the first three-term Labour government in our history.
In both cases a fundamental shift in the character and direction of our national politics proved to be enduring.
Facing up to defeat
On these two occasions a governing party lost power on the expectation of a quick return to office, and it ended up in the wilderness for a generation.
In both cases that was because they didn't learn the right lessons about the changing economic circumstances, about what their values meant for their time, and the way they did their politics.
We cannot afford to sit back and wait for this Conservative-led government to fail. That is why we must seize this moment to understand these lessons and to change if we are to ensure that this is a one-term government.
This government is making costly mistakes and will continue to do so. But it is the changes we make to ourselves that will decide whether we avoid the fate that has befallen parties in the past.
That is why "one more heave" just won't do.
A party that slumps below 30% of the popular vote has a responsibility to face up to the scale of its loss.
Understanding why we lost touch means learning to see ourselves as the British people see us.
We began learning that lesson after 1983, but it took us far too long. I am determined that we will not make the same mistake again.
Of course I am proud of the achievements of our last Labour government. The truth is that for a lot of people those achievements are clearer, now that they are under threat from this government.
But let's not mislead ourselves - aspects of our record in government are also the reason we are now in opposition.
Parties don't suffer defeats like the one we suffered last May because of an accumulation of small errors.
They do so by making serious mistakes, and that's why I have said what I have said on issues like Iraq, failing to properly regulate the banks, ignoring concerns about economic security and not doing enough to deliver on the promise of a new politics.
We have to show that we have learnt lessons if the British people are to trust us again.
The progressive majority
So that is the scale of the challenge we face.
But if the result of the election showed why we need to change, it also revealed something important about the nature of British politics from which we ought to draw encouragement.
Most people cast their votes for parties that talked about the need to make Britain fairer and more equal, that warned against the dangers of cutting the deficit too early and urged a deepening of democratic reform.
It's easy to forget today, but that brief bout of Cleggmania was animated by this progressive hunger for change.
So there is a progressive majority in Britain. It's just that we failed to attract enough of it to Labour's cause to return a viable progressive government.
We will rebuild ourselves as a broad movement by understanding where the centre-ground of British politics truly lies.
I want us to become the voice and hope of those who feel squeezed by an economic system that promised to liberate them.
I want us to articulate the frustration of people who are fed up with bankers taking vast public subsidies and then rewarding themselves for failure while the rest of the country struggles.
I want us to be the party that answers the call for a fairer sharing of the nation's wealth, strong and responsive public services and a different kind of politics.
Over the coming months, I will be talking in greater detail about how we approach the economic challenges, the challenges of renewing our values and the challenge of renewing our politics.
Today I want to set out the direction of that journey.
Economic crisis
So let me start with the first change we need - on the economy.
The financial crisis shook the world economy, but more specifically it exposed some of the flawed assumptions on which the economic policies of Britain have been based under successive governments.
The last election saw a majority crying out for a party and a government which had learned the lessons of the crisis and could offer Britain a new economic future. But we must accept that we failed to win the argument that it was Labour that could offer people a better economy working in their interests.
If we are again to offer a vision of hope and change to the majority in Britain it is essential that we learn the right lessons of the crisis. This is the argument that will define this decade and beyond.
The implication of much of what the Conservative-led government say is that it was high levels of public borrowing that caused the crisis. That is just not true.
In fact, it was the crisis that caused high levels of public borrowing.
The deficit rose from manageable levels of around 2% of national income to above 10% because of the global financial crisis.
And when the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are trying to propagate this myth about the past we must not let them get away with it.
The reason is not simply because of desire for truth about the past but because they are using it to shape our future.
They want to tell people that the only lesson to learn from the crisis is that as long as we simply cut back spending far and fast enough, we will contain the deficit and reach the sunny uplands of economic prosperity.
But just as we need to counter their myth about the past, we need to acknowledge what we got wrong. Along with other national governments, we didn't get banking regulation right.
And our economy was too vulnerable to the crisis because we were too reliant on financial services.
These are two important lessons of the crisis. But there is a deeper issue about why the crisis happened and what it teaches us about the economy we need to create.
Freer markets combined with 'light touch' regulation were sold to middle Britain on the basis that they would guarantee economic freedom, rising living standards and a fair reward for the hard working majority.
For the best of reasons, New Labour signed up to this vision precisely because it spoke to the hopes of aspirational voters.
Our period in office was marked by notable successes: record levels of employment, a decade of continuous growth until 2008, low inflation, low interest rates and the minimum wage.
What is more we used the proceeds of growth to both rebuild public services and tackle poverty.
Whereas before 1997, relative poverty had trebled and the public realm had crumbled, we comprehensively changed the direction in which our country was headed.
But economic growth and productivity masked a hidden truth: that life in the middle was getting harder not easier.
Real wages in the middle may have been rising but they weren't keeping pace with the rest of the economy.
And they were wildly outstripped by the gains made by those at the top.
And though Labour did a lot to offset this with tax credits and other forms of public support, we found ourselves swimming against stronger economic currents.
The "squeezed middle", a phrase some people might have thought I would never use again, is not a marketing concept but a reality of life for millions of people as the result of the economy we have.
It speaks to families working hard for long hours, stretching a limited family budget and who found the only way to increase their living standards was to increase their personal debt.
The lesson we must draw is that there is a connection between the inequality of a system that distributes wealth unfairly and the economic imbalances of a country that became too reliant on personal debt and financial services.
Put these parts of the argument together -- about regulation, about the need for a broader industrial base and about inequality - and I come to this conclusion: we can't build economic efficiency or social justice simply in the way we have tried before.
It won't be enough to rely on a deregulated market economy providing the tax revenues for redistribution.
New Labour's critical insight in the 1990s and 2000s was that we needed to be stewards of a successful market economy to make possible social justice through redistribution. The critical insight of Labour in my generation is that both wealth creation and social justice need to be built into the way our economy works.
That's why I think the living wage, for example, is such a powerful idea.
Because I know that tax credits for all the good they do have their limits.
If we can build an economy with more living wage jobs - and well paying jobs - we embed social justice at the heart of the way the market economy is run rather than having to make it an optional extra.
This is important for us not just because it is necessary to create social justice but because it reflects the fiscal climate we will face in the coming decade.
Why was the last Labour government too slow in the language that we used, after the financial crisis had created a big deficit, to acknowledge what our own plans implied, that there would eventually have to be cuts? Part of the answer is that we hadn't shown other ways of delivering social justice.
So the first part of the way we must change is to show we can build a fair economy, with wealth creation and social justice for all at its heart.
Our values
The second part of our challenge is to understand how over 13 years of government we came to seem detached and remote from the instincts and values of families across Britain - families who share our values but saw a party that was out of touch with their daily struggle.
For all our achievements, I know what our biggest problem was - it afflicts all governments.
We became too technocratic and managerial.
But more than that, we sometimes lost sight of people as individuals, and of the importance of communities.
In our use of state power, too often we didn't take people with us. That is why over time people railed against the target culture, the managerialism of public service reform and overbearing government.
At the same time, we seemed in thrall to a vision of the market that seemed to place too little importance on the values, institutions and relationships that people cherish the most.
We turned a blind eye to the impact of out of town retail developments and post office branch closures on our high streets. We knew all about the benefits of a flexible and mobile labour force, but we didn't think enough about its impact on weakening social bonds and squeezing time with our families.
So people began to see a government which looked remote from they cared about. They could see a government doing things they either agreed with or disagreed with, but not a political movement that spoke to their values.
To change, we will look critically at our traditions and why they have led us to become remote.
Among the many strands of the British Labour tradition, two have proved particularly influential.
The first was the idea of socialism as a kind of missionary work to be undertaken on behalf of the people.
I'm sorry to give the Fabians a hard time, but this view is most obviously associated with the early Fabians around Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
The alternative strand, represented by the co-operative movement and the early trade unions, saw Labour as a grassroots, democratic movement to enable people to lead the most fulfilling lives.
As we seek the right traditions to draw on as a political party in the 21st century, it is so important that we understand the appropriate role of each tradition.
The Webb Fabian tradition was born of an era where the challenge of the Left was meeting people's basic needs for health, housing, education and relief of poverty.
That need will always remain.
But people rightly expect more out of their lives than simply meeting basic needs.
The New Labour tradition which embraced dynamic markets is also important for our future and creating wealth.
But people don't just care about the bottom line, there is so much more to life.
So the bureaucratic state and the overbearing market will never meet our real ambition as a party, that each citizen can be liberated to have the real freedom to shape their own lives.
To do that, we need to draw on that other tradition based on mutualism, localism and the common bonds of solidarity that captures the essence of our party at its best.
The belief in those common bonds means we should also be defenders of the things that people value and which are threatened - sometimes by market, sometimes by government.
When we say we care about the closure of a Sure Start, it isn't just about the supply of a service to individual families. Sure Start is a place where community is built, as families get to know each other and form friendships.
The same is true of local libraries.
The same is true of ways of life which are deeply ingrained in our country and which we should understand.
Just before Christmas, I went with Jon Cruddas to Billingsgate fish market and met a porter there who told me that the best day of his life was when he got his porter's badge and that there has not been a day since when he has not woken up feeling proud to be doing the job he does.
That is why politicians should not shrug and walk away when they hear that traditional ways of life are under threat. We should seek to defend ways of life which give people self-respect.
And a Britain of respect and decency demands obligations from all of us. What offends me most about the outrages in the banks is the sense that some of the bankers apparently feel little obligation to the society and country in which they are located.
It isn't enough to say this is what the market will pay me - societies are built on deeper social obligation.
I care about the success of our financial services industry - about the jobs it creates.
But today when we you see some of our leading bankers constantly threatening to leave the country, trying to hold the country to ransom and thinking only of themselves, it makes me angry.
And that is why it makes me so angry that this government is refusing to act.
To be at heart of the progressive mainstream, we also need to draw on values that may not have always been central to our party. One of our tasks is to learn the lessons of the green movement and put sustainability at the heart of what we do. Another is to draw on the traditions of liberty.
Progressive politics is not just about meeting economic and social needs.
Those are only ever a means to human flourishing and freedom.
Part of that is about upholding the liberty of the person.
Nobody should pretend there aren't important and difficult choices to be made about how to uphold security and protect liberty. But we didn't take the need to uphold liberty seriously enough.
In recent months, we have shown with our willingness to support the reduction of 28 day detention to 14 days, we are determined to take liberty seriously as part of our governing philosophy.
The way we do politics
So we must renew our approach to the economy, and renew our values.
But thirdly, we also have to reform our approach to politics.
Not since the era of the rotten borough has our political system faced such a grave crisis of legitimacy as the one it now faces.
From declining turnout and shrinking electoral rolls to anger over expenses and broken promises on tuition fees, people have lost trust in politics and its ability to offer solutions to the problems they face.
That crisis is a matter of national urgency. It's a crisis of unreformed institutions, broken promises, remote political parties and a knee-jerk adversarial political culture.
Part of the problem has been the failure of all parties to honour repeated promises to usher in a new politics.
Of course that involves reforming our political institutions. Our own credibility was undermined by our failure to honour a manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on voting reform and the stalling of democratic reform of the House of Lords.
We will take every opportunity to reform the way our political system works. That is the reason I will be campaigning in favour of the Alternative Vote in the referendum. I will keep my promise.
But this audience knows that very few people on the doorstop ask about the Alternative Vote or reform of the House of Lords. They think the reason politics is discredited is because politicians always break their promises.
The reality is that that the broken promises of this government do not just damage their own reputations, but that of all politicians. That is why we have to be careful not to over-promise, either in terms of language or in terms of policy.
But that is just part of the story of how we renew our politics.
Think back to our early days as a political party.
Of course, we fought elections but we did a lot more than that.
We were part of the fabric of community life through our wider movement: not just the trade unions, but the co-operative movement.
Nostalgia for times past is not an answer to the challenges of the future.
But the challenge to us all is to be a genuine movement for change appropriate to our time up and down the country.
That is why as part of our party reform, we want to learn the lessons of organisations like London Citizens to become a genuine community organising movement.
The only way we rebuild the case for politics is from the ground up.
The campaign for the local library, the local zebra crossing, the improvement of a school, must be our campaign.
And not just campaigns for the state to do things, but campaigns that achieve things themselves.
There is one other thing we need to change in our politics.
No party has a monopoly of wisdom or virtue, and it is foolish to pretend that they do.
The decision of the Liberal Democrats to join a Conservative-led government was a tragic mistake, and I hope they come to see that in time.
Forgive me if I decline to join those who are gloating at the expense of the Liberal Democrats.
Because their mistake means they are part of a government attempting to shift politics to the Right.
I am certainly pleased that many Liberal Democrats now see Labour as the main progressive hope in British politics.
Thousands of them have joined us since the election.
I want them to find a welcome home in our party - not just making up the numbers, but contributing actively to the strengthening of our values and the renewal of our policies.
But equally there are many Liberal Democrats who have decided to stay and fight for the progressive soul of their party. Most of them do not want to see their progressive tradition sacrificed for personal ambition.
I respect their choice too and I understand how painful it must be to watch what is happening to their party.
We do not doubt that they hold sincere views and we will co-operate, where we can in Parliament and outside, with those that want to fight the direction of this government.
It is our duty to work with progressives everywhere.
Conclusion
So this is the way we need to seize the mantle of progressive politics and shape the economic, ideological and political landscape of the future.
Building a fair economy.
Rooting our values in traditions and ideas that go beyond the bureaucratic state and the overbearing market.
And a different kind of politics.
The prize is not simply a Labour government but more than that.
It is about a political movement that in every community up and down this country can shape the politics of the future.
Make our values and our ideas the commonsense of our age.
And shape a country and a world based on our ideals.
"The only way we rebuild the case for politics is from the ground up."
We've just witnessed our first by-election of the Parliament in Oldham East and Saddleworth.
It was an unusual by-election not only because - I am proud to say - Labour won, but also because of the behaviour of our opponents and the great churning of votes between the parties.
David Cameron became the first prime minister in recent years to campaign in a by-election.
And definitely the first party leader that I can remember to not know the name of his own party's candidate.
Then we saw Nick Clegg vowing to have more public rows with Mr Cameron just to remind people that the Liberal Democrats still have a separate identity.
That is an unusual, probably unhealthy, way to conduct any relationship let alone one in a government that is having such a profound impact on people's lives.
I suspect it is a symptom of a having coalition based on political convenience rather than values.
But, as I said, it was also unusual because we saw significant transfers of votes from the Liberal Democrats to Labour. From the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats. And from Conservatives to Labour.
Above all, what the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election shows us is that people are deeply uneasy about where this Conservative-led government is taking the country.
However our party would be deluding itself if we thought that meant that the next election would fall into our lap.
The next election will be as much about us as about them -- and our ability to change and become the voice and standard-bearer of Britain's progressive majority once again. And that's what I want to talk about today.
Because I believe that from the very founding of the Labour party as the Labour Representation Committee through to the great reforming Labour governments of the second half of the twentieth century and the early years of this, Labour has succeeded when it has seen itself not as a narrow party of sectional interest, but when through a sense of mission, passion and optimism for the future it has become the voice and vehicle for progressive change.
We need to be honest over 13 years in government we forfeited the right in too many people's minds to be the natural standard bearers for this progressive majority in Britain.
I want to talk today about the reasons why that happened and about the three ways we need to change and change profoundly if we are to put it right.
The first is to understand why our economy has stopped working for people - and how we can again offer a new economic model for Labour and for Britain. In particular, understanding that simply redistributing taxpayers' money through the welfare state, important though that is, is inadequate and will not build the more just, more sustainable economy.
The second is to recognise the way our managerialism took us away from the instincts and values of the broad progressive majority in Britain.
That our communities came to see us as the people who put markets and commerce before the common good.
And many citizens came to see us also as the people who did not understand that the state could be intrusive as well as empowering.
We must respond to this by breathing new life into our sense of ideological purpose, drawing on what is enduringly good in the Labour tradition, and reaching outside it too.
And third we must accept that in how we do our politics we came to be not leaders of a broad, open progressive majority built on a coalition of values, but into a political force that was far less than that.
We must respond by putting democratic renewal and a willingness to reach out to others beyond our party at the heart of the way we do our politics.
Understanding that Labour must change the way it works and that no one party can claim to have a monopoly of wisdom in today's politics. That Labour must earn its leadership of Britain's progressive majority - it is not ours by right.
The context
Before turning to my argument, let me set the context.
It's two years since I opened the Fabian New Year Conference of 2009.
I remarked then that the Tories had never been more on the ideological defensive in my political lifetime.
The financial crash had demolished the Conservative fallacy that markets always know best and David Cameron was busy discovering that there was such a thing as society.
Two years later, we are clearly in a very different place.
David Cameron didn't win the general election last May. But he did end up as Prime Minister and he hasn't let the absence of a mandate stop him from embarking on the most ideologically dangerous assault on our public services in a generation.
These changes will re-shape Britain in as profound a way as Mrs Thatcher re-shaped Britain in the 1980s. I'm sure I speak for everyone here when I say that everywhere I go I see an assault on many of the things I value - from Sure Start to the way in which the trebling of student debt will kick the ladder of opportunity away from a generation of our young people.
The combination of this assault on our institutions, the global economic crisis and the formation of the Conservative-led government has marked a period of change which occurs only once in a generation.
There have been two other moments in my lifetime when economic upheaval has been followed by a dramatic break in the established pattern of British politics.
The first was the IMF crisis in 1976 and the Winter of Discontent two years later, followed by the defeat of the Callaghan government, the formation of the SDP and eighteen years of Conservative government.
The second was Britain's ejection from the Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday, the emergence of New Labour and the election of the first three-term Labour government in our history.
In both cases a fundamental shift in the character and direction of our national politics proved to be enduring.
Facing up to defeat
On these two occasions a governing party lost power on the expectation of a quick return to office, and it ended up in the wilderness for a generation.
In both cases that was because they didn't learn the right lessons about the changing economic circumstances, about what their values meant for their time, and the way they did their politics.
We cannot afford to sit back and wait for this Conservative-led government to fail. That is why we must seize this moment to understand these lessons and to change if we are to ensure that this is a one-term government.
This government is making costly mistakes and will continue to do so. But it is the changes we make to ourselves that will decide whether we avoid the fate that has befallen parties in the past.
That is why "one more heave" just won't do.
A party that slumps below 30% of the popular vote has a responsibility to face up to the scale of its loss.
Understanding why we lost touch means learning to see ourselves as the British people see us.
We began learning that lesson after 1983, but it took us far too long. I am determined that we will not make the same mistake again.
Of course I am proud of the achievements of our last Labour government. The truth is that for a lot of people those achievements are clearer, now that they are under threat from this government.
But let's not mislead ourselves - aspects of our record in government are also the reason we are now in opposition.
Parties don't suffer defeats like the one we suffered last May because of an accumulation of small errors.
They do so by making serious mistakes, and that's why I have said what I have said on issues like Iraq, failing to properly regulate the banks, ignoring concerns about economic security and not doing enough to deliver on the promise of a new politics.
We have to show that we have learnt lessons if the British people are to trust us again.
The progressive majority
So that is the scale of the challenge we face.
But if the result of the election showed why we need to change, it also revealed something important about the nature of British politics from which we ought to draw encouragement.
Most people cast their votes for parties that talked about the need to make Britain fairer and more equal, that warned against the dangers of cutting the deficit too early and urged a deepening of democratic reform.
It's easy to forget today, but that brief bout of Cleggmania was animated by this progressive hunger for change.
So there is a progressive majority in Britain. It's just that we failed to attract enough of it to Labour's cause to return a viable progressive government.
We will rebuild ourselves as a broad movement by understanding where the centre-ground of British politics truly lies.
I want us to become the voice and hope of those who feel squeezed by an economic system that promised to liberate them.
I want us to articulate the frustration of people who are fed up with bankers taking vast public subsidies and then rewarding themselves for failure while the rest of the country struggles.
I want us to be the party that answers the call for a fairer sharing of the nation's wealth, strong and responsive public services and a different kind of politics.
Over the coming months, I will be talking in greater detail about how we approach the economic challenges, the challenges of renewing our values and the challenge of renewing our politics.
Today I want to set out the direction of that journey.
Economic crisis
So let me start with the first change we need - on the economy.
The financial crisis shook the world economy, but more specifically it exposed some of the flawed assumptions on which the economic policies of Britain have been based under successive governments.
The last election saw a majority crying out for a party and a government which had learned the lessons of the crisis and could offer Britain a new economic future. But we must accept that we failed to win the argument that it was Labour that could offer people a better economy working in their interests.
If we are again to offer a vision of hope and change to the majority in Britain it is essential that we learn the right lessons of the crisis. This is the argument that will define this decade and beyond.
The implication of much of what the Conservative-led government say is that it was high levels of public borrowing that caused the crisis. That is just not true.
In fact, it was the crisis that caused high levels of public borrowing.
The deficit rose from manageable levels of around 2% of national income to above 10% because of the global financial crisis.
And when the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are trying to propagate this myth about the past we must not let them get away with it.
The reason is not simply because of desire for truth about the past but because they are using it to shape our future.
They want to tell people that the only lesson to learn from the crisis is that as long as we simply cut back spending far and fast enough, we will contain the deficit and reach the sunny uplands of economic prosperity.
But just as we need to counter their myth about the past, we need to acknowledge what we got wrong. Along with other national governments, we didn't get banking regulation right.
And our economy was too vulnerable to the crisis because we were too reliant on financial services.
These are two important lessons of the crisis. But there is a deeper issue about why the crisis happened and what it teaches us about the economy we need to create.
Freer markets combined with 'light touch' regulation were sold to middle Britain on the basis that they would guarantee economic freedom, rising living standards and a fair reward for the hard working majority.
For the best of reasons, New Labour signed up to this vision precisely because it spoke to the hopes of aspirational voters.
Our period in office was marked by notable successes: record levels of employment, a decade of continuous growth until 2008, low inflation, low interest rates and the minimum wage.
What is more we used the proceeds of growth to both rebuild public services and tackle poverty.
Whereas before 1997, relative poverty had trebled and the public realm had crumbled, we comprehensively changed the direction in which our country was headed.
But economic growth and productivity masked a hidden truth: that life in the middle was getting harder not easier.
Real wages in the middle may have been rising but they weren't keeping pace with the rest of the economy.
And they were wildly outstripped by the gains made by those at the top.
And though Labour did a lot to offset this with tax credits and other forms of public support, we found ourselves swimming against stronger economic currents.
The "squeezed middle", a phrase some people might have thought I would never use again, is not a marketing concept but a reality of life for millions of people as the result of the economy we have.
It speaks to families working hard for long hours, stretching a limited family budget and who found the only way to increase their living standards was to increase their personal debt.
The lesson we must draw is that there is a connection between the inequality of a system that distributes wealth unfairly and the economic imbalances of a country that became too reliant on personal debt and financial services.
Put these parts of the argument together -- about regulation, about the need for a broader industrial base and about inequality - and I come to this conclusion: we can't build economic efficiency or social justice simply in the way we have tried before.
It won't be enough to rely on a deregulated market economy providing the tax revenues for redistribution.
New Labour's critical insight in the 1990s and 2000s was that we needed to be stewards of a successful market economy to make possible social justice through redistribution. The critical insight of Labour in my generation is that both wealth creation and social justice need to be built into the way our economy works.
That's why I think the living wage, for example, is such a powerful idea.
Because I know that tax credits for all the good they do have their limits.
If we can build an economy with more living wage jobs - and well paying jobs - we embed social justice at the heart of the way the market economy is run rather than having to make it an optional extra.
This is important for us not just because it is necessary to create social justice but because it reflects the fiscal climate we will face in the coming decade.
Why was the last Labour government too slow in the language that we used, after the financial crisis had created a big deficit, to acknowledge what our own plans implied, that there would eventually have to be cuts? Part of the answer is that we hadn't shown other ways of delivering social justice.
So the first part of the way we must change is to show we can build a fair economy, with wealth creation and social justice for all at its heart.
Our values
The second part of our challenge is to understand how over 13 years of government we came to seem detached and remote from the instincts and values of families across Britain - families who share our values but saw a party that was out of touch with their daily struggle.
For all our achievements, I know what our biggest problem was - it afflicts all governments.
We became too technocratic and managerial.
But more than that, we sometimes lost sight of people as individuals, and of the importance of communities.
In our use of state power, too often we didn't take people with us. That is why over time people railed against the target culture, the managerialism of public service reform and overbearing government.
At the same time, we seemed in thrall to a vision of the market that seemed to place too little importance on the values, institutions and relationships that people cherish the most.
We turned a blind eye to the impact of out of town retail developments and post office branch closures on our high streets. We knew all about the benefits of a flexible and mobile labour force, but we didn't think enough about its impact on weakening social bonds and squeezing time with our families.
So people began to see a government which looked remote from they cared about. They could see a government doing things they either agreed with or disagreed with, but not a political movement that spoke to their values.
To change, we will look critically at our traditions and why they have led us to become remote.
Among the many strands of the British Labour tradition, two have proved particularly influential.
The first was the idea of socialism as a kind of missionary work to be undertaken on behalf of the people.
I'm sorry to give the Fabians a hard time, but this view is most obviously associated with the early Fabians around Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
The alternative strand, represented by the co-operative movement and the early trade unions, saw Labour as a grassroots, democratic movement to enable people to lead the most fulfilling lives.
As we seek the right traditions to draw on as a political party in the 21st century, it is so important that we understand the appropriate role of each tradition.
The Webb Fabian tradition was born of an era where the challenge of the Left was meeting people's basic needs for health, housing, education and relief of poverty.
That need will always remain.
But people rightly expect more out of their lives than simply meeting basic needs.
The New Labour tradition which embraced dynamic markets is also important for our future and creating wealth.
But people don't just care about the bottom line, there is so much more to life.
So the bureaucratic state and the overbearing market will never meet our real ambition as a party, that each citizen can be liberated to have the real freedom to shape their own lives.
To do that, we need to draw on that other tradition based on mutualism, localism and the common bonds of solidarity that captures the essence of our party at its best.
The belief in those common bonds means we should also be defenders of the things that people value and which are threatened - sometimes by market, sometimes by government.
When we say we care about the closure of a Sure Start, it isn't just about the supply of a service to individual families. Sure Start is a place where community is built, as families get to know each other and form friendships.
The same is true of local libraries.
The same is true of ways of life which are deeply ingrained in our country and which we should understand.
Just before Christmas, I went with Jon Cruddas to Billingsgate fish market and met a porter there who told me that the best day of his life was when he got his porter's badge and that there has not been a day since when he has not woken up feeling proud to be doing the job he does.
That is why politicians should not shrug and walk away when they hear that traditional ways of life are under threat. We should seek to defend ways of life which give people self-respect.
And a Britain of respect and decency demands obligations from all of us. What offends me most about the outrages in the banks is the sense that some of the bankers apparently feel little obligation to the society and country in which they are located.
It isn't enough to say this is what the market will pay me - societies are built on deeper social obligation.
I care about the success of our financial services industry - about the jobs it creates.
But today when we you see some of our leading bankers constantly threatening to leave the country, trying to hold the country to ransom and thinking only of themselves, it makes me angry.
And that is why it makes me so angry that this government is refusing to act.
To be at heart of the progressive mainstream, we also need to draw on values that may not have always been central to our party. One of our tasks is to learn the lessons of the green movement and put sustainability at the heart of what we do. Another is to draw on the traditions of liberty.
Progressive politics is not just about meeting economic and social needs.
Those are only ever a means to human flourishing and freedom.
Part of that is about upholding the liberty of the person.
Nobody should pretend there aren't important and difficult choices to be made about how to uphold security and protect liberty. But we didn't take the need to uphold liberty seriously enough.
In recent months, we have shown with our willingness to support the reduction of 28 day detention to 14 days, we are determined to take liberty seriously as part of our governing philosophy.
The way we do politics
So we must renew our approach to the economy, and renew our values.
But thirdly, we also have to reform our approach to politics.
Not since the era of the rotten borough has our political system faced such a grave crisis of legitimacy as the one it now faces.
From declining turnout and shrinking electoral rolls to anger over expenses and broken promises on tuition fees, people have lost trust in politics and its ability to offer solutions to the problems they face.
That crisis is a matter of national urgency. It's a crisis of unreformed institutions, broken promises, remote political parties and a knee-jerk adversarial political culture.
Part of the problem has been the failure of all parties to honour repeated promises to usher in a new politics.
Of course that involves reforming our political institutions. Our own credibility was undermined by our failure to honour a manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on voting reform and the stalling of democratic reform of the House of Lords.
We will take every opportunity to reform the way our political system works. That is the reason I will be campaigning in favour of the Alternative Vote in the referendum. I will keep my promise.
But this audience knows that very few people on the doorstop ask about the Alternative Vote or reform of the House of Lords. They think the reason politics is discredited is because politicians always break their promises.
The reality is that that the broken promises of this government do not just damage their own reputations, but that of all politicians. That is why we have to be careful not to over-promise, either in terms of language or in terms of policy.
But that is just part of the story of how we renew our politics.
Think back to our early days as a political party.
Of course, we fought elections but we did a lot more than that.
We were part of the fabric of community life through our wider movement: not just the trade unions, but the co-operative movement.
Nostalgia for times past is not an answer to the challenges of the future.
But the challenge to us all is to be a genuine movement for change appropriate to our time up and down the country.
That is why as part of our party reform, we want to learn the lessons of organisations like London Citizens to become a genuine community organising movement.
The only way we rebuild the case for politics is from the ground up.
The campaign for the local library, the local zebra crossing, the improvement of a school, must be our campaign.
And not just campaigns for the state to do things, but campaigns that achieve things themselves.
There is one other thing we need to change in our politics.
No party has a monopoly of wisdom or virtue, and it is foolish to pretend that they do.
The decision of the Liberal Democrats to join a Conservative-led government was a tragic mistake, and I hope they come to see that in time.
Forgive me if I decline to join those who are gloating at the expense of the Liberal Democrats.
Because their mistake means they are part of a government attempting to shift politics to the Right.
I am certainly pleased that many Liberal Democrats now see Labour as the main progressive hope in British politics.
Thousands of them have joined us since the election.
I want them to find a welcome home in our party - not just making up the numbers, but contributing actively to the strengthening of our values and the renewal of our policies.
But equally there are many Liberal Democrats who have decided to stay and fight for the progressive soul of their party. Most of them do not want to see their progressive tradition sacrificed for personal ambition.
I respect their choice too and I understand how painful it must be to watch what is happening to their party.
We do not doubt that they hold sincere views and we will co-operate, where we can in Parliament and outside, with those that want to fight the direction of this government.
It is our duty to work with progressives everywhere.
Conclusion
So this is the way we need to seize the mantle of progressive politics and shape the economic, ideological and political landscape of the future.
Building a fair economy.
Rooting our values in traditions and ideas that go beyond the bureaucratic state and the overbearing market.
And a different kind of politics.
The prize is not simply a Labour government but more than that.
It is about a political movement that in every community up and down this country can shape the politics of the future.
Make our values and our ideas the commonsense of our age.
And shape a country and a world based on our ideals.
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