The (shrinking) Guardian

Is it just me or has TheGuardian shrunk in size of late? I noticed that the latest Saturday edition of TheGuardian was slightly thinner than usual, it felt easier to grasp with one hand and after taking the supplements out and opening the main paper it seemed almost anorexic. Today’s paper was thinner than a normal weekday edition (although I don’t know whether Thursday editions tend to be smaller than say Friday’s). I’m not complaining, it is probably better to minimise the size of newspapers to save on the amount of paper produced and disposed of in just a single day. But perhaps it is due to the move from print newspaper readership towards internet news readership; a free and convenient alternative. As revolutionary as internet news is, let’s hope it doesn’t cause the departure of printed news media. For 90p a day, TheGuardian is still well worth the money (and thank God they changed the typeface).

This week Rosa has been flumping about with not a lot to do and getting paranoid about swine flu. Reading: Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own (still getting into it). Listening: Vaughan William’s Lark Ascending, Billy Bragg’s The Internationale and William Walton’s Façade (find on Spotify)

How plimsolls are outgrowing their fashion fad status

It’s a well accepted fact that fashion trends can come and go in a matter of months, between which is sandwiched the decline from ‘edgy and in’ to a star appearance on Trinny and Susannah’s fashion disaster show, where said outfit is diagnosed as a symptom of depression, a midlife crises, or loneliness (but never, funnily enough, someone who’s just stopped giving a shit about clothes). Cue an emotional catharsis and a brand new wardrobe- problem solved! Anyway, the point is fashion trends come and go, quickly. I’m pretty sure we all thought B*witched had all but massacred the double denim look before its revival this year dragged it out of the step mum’s wardrobe and into the mainstream.

But among these fashion cameos occasionally comes something that hangs on that little bit longer, going beyond a mere trend and becoming overtime a staple in the clothing norm. (I should say here that I’m not talking about fleeces, anoraks or “sensible walking shoes”, all of which have been a mainstream clothing item for some time, but only ever trendy to the over 60s and trainspotters). And more often than not these items are the ones that are at once both faintly ridiculous, but just sort of make sense.

A case in point is the skinny jeans. Ridiculous? Certainly; jeans so tight they make the wearer’s kneecaps visible from twenty meters away is no strong selling point. And yet, since their renaissance 3 or 4 years ago, they show no sign of disappearing. Every shop on the high street will stock a pair, giving them a new-found stability next to denim heavyweights such as the Boot Cut, the Straight Fit, and the blue-pair-of-jeans-that-don’t-have-a-fit-or-cut-or-whatever-because-I-just-want-a-blue-pair-of-jeans-that-fit fit. The reason for this is that somehow, skinny jeans just work. Their skimming on material is an economic model that simply can’t fail, and if you’ve got legs so skinny you look malnourished, you’re really just making the best out of a bad situation.

But if skinny jeans were the last item of clothing to scrape its way into the mainstream and stay there, the next entrant must surely be the plimsoll. If you’re not convinced that wearing shoes previously seen on the feet of 6 year old kids in a PE lesson is ridiculous, there are more reasons still. Firstly, wearing canvas shoes in a country that rains every other day, and then the day inbetween that, isn’t a prime example of forward thinking. Any appearance of mud, grass or just about anything that isn’t a clean pavement is the footwear equivalent of falling through a hedge backwards, and to top it off the adolescent plimsoll wearer gets through more in a year than throughout their entire primary school career, despite the very probable absence of gym classes and annual sports days. And yet the plimsoll too, since its reappearance a few years ago, is now the footwear of choice among pretty much the entire fashion conscious population, long outstaying flash in the pan status. Why? Well, maybe because a lot of people have just got fed up with paying £65 for a trainer that cost 10p to make and doesn’t do a much better job, just for a label that no one’s going to look at anyway. Which just sort of makes sense.

The Power of Nightmares

If I was Director General of the BBC I would commission Adam Curtis to take over Panorama. Adam Curtis is a much underrated documentary maker; he is objective and truth-finding. Not only do his documentaries entertain (thanks to his marvellous voice and discerning use of archive footage) but provoke very engaging philosophical and political concepts which may not be as intellectually stimulating as political journals on issues of globalisation and terrorism but like Chomsky, Pilger and Klein engage with issues on a comprehensive level aimed not at political elitists but absolutely everyone. I feel so strongly about the points he puts across that I believe these documentaries should be shown to teenagers in PSHE or Citizenship; whilst it is important to learn about elections and voting and the mendacity of politics, it is absolutely crucial to grow up understanding what sort of world we live in and what pushes people to act as they do on an individual, societal and global level.

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear was first shown on BBC2 in 2004 and links the rise of Islamic fundamentalism with the rise of Neo-Conservatism. Part one (Baby It's Cold Outside) begins in 1949 and traces these two ideologies to the same origin. An Egyptian civil servant who lived in the US called Sayyid Qutb found the selfish and consumerism driven US society despicable and rejected its liberal ideology based on this. At the same time, an American intellectual called Leo Strauss mentored a group of students in Chicago and promoted his theory that liberalism caused self-determination which was corroding society; individual freedom was a bogus notion and what was needed was elaborate ideals that would unite the nation and save society from selfish individualism. The documentary then traces Qutb's plight in Egypt against the US backed secularist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and his influence on Ayman al-Zawahiri who orchestrated the assassination of pro-Western Egyptian leader Anwar Al Sadat. In the US it shows the liberal consensus from JFK all the way through to Nixon's presidency being deconstructed by Gerald Ford's regime and even more so by Reagan's administration, which was dominated by neo-conservatives pushing Straussian ideas with the backing of the evangelical Christian Right. This undid all the diplomatic work of Nixon's presidency which, with help from Henry Kissinger engaged with Brezhnev and led to non-proliferation treaties and the so-called period of détente.

The Straussian emphasis on the negative aspects of self-determination is somewhat related to Adam Curtis' brilliant 2007 documentary The Trap – What Happened to our Dream of Freedom which shatters the myth that humans are gaining individual freedom and spreading it worldwide. In this Curtis analyses the omnipresence of psychology and psychoanalysis in relation to political decisions; the concept of human nature as inherently selfish leading to diplomatic frostiness and the attempt to increase self-determination resulting in a disparity between social classes. Curtis argues that in reality, we are not as free as political leaders like us to think; we are tightly controlled by social norms for the sake of security, the threat of the unknown which links with The Power of Nightmares and the way a lack of evidence is used to scare us into submission rather than show us that the enemy does not exist in that form.

Adam Curtis traces the change in emphasis in political philosophy. After the Second World War, politicians aimed to convey ideological positioning and sweeping ideas and policies on how to improve society. At the end of the Cold War, the so-called "triumph of liberalism" (which most scholars and indeed Curtis view as a myth) relegated politicians to managerial roles; instead of providing inspiring leadership, they merely managed the bureaucratic networks. Lacking a sweeping vision or scheme, politicians were no longer able to encourage belief amongst the populace and politics and society lacked an ideology, an outlook, something to believe in. If you were not fighting anything, you were not fighting for anything; and if you were not fighting for anything then you did not believe in anything. And so terror became the new enemy - a phantom enemy, with an 'evil' mastermind controlling vast networks of terror. The anti-terrorism laws have made no progress in preventing Islamic terrorism or Al-Qaeda plots, instead they have been used against peaceful protesters and dissidents. Where terrorists have been thwarted it has been mainly IRA terrorists – the notion of Al-Qaeda as an omnipotent danger is a fantasy, as Adam Curtis finds.

The documentary is available online here and I urge everyone to watch it.

Vote Match

This clever application asks a series of questions and then matches the closest party to your attitudes on Europe and EU issues.

My results show that either it is not very accurate at all or I am in the wrong political party.

Green Party 63/78

Liberal Democrats 56/78

Labour Party 46/78