Postcard from the Circus
So forgive me if every now and again I enter a room from some current affairs sabbatical and like a classic wide-shouldered, scenery chewing George C Scott performance, slam my fists upon the desk and with eyes screwed shut like a constipated Peanuts character scream, “I demand to know what is going on!” It is entirely my own fault that on occasion I will not catch the news for a few days, be it due to becoming engrossed in my own writing, something I’m reading or even an exceptionally fine new ale that deserves two or three days of my attention. It was because of a fine case of Burgundy that I woke one morning to find out that not only was I wearing an unidentifiable pair of shoes but that two days earlier the south of Asia had been submerged in water in what became known as the Boxing Day Tsunami. How can you possibly avoid news of a significant portion of the world being destroyed? you may reasonably ask. Well, I am known for going AWOL from time to time and I’m sure I’m not the only person to miss the news for a few days. (At times a White House Press Conference can make me wonder if they even have CNN tuned in to the black and white portable in the corner of the Oval Office). Some stories will pass me by as I am busy elsewhere, which often can serve the benefit of getting the whole story with a beginning, a middle and an end in something resembling the tale that history will tell. That means that I get the advantage of viewing news without the drama, without the bias that self-righteousness can imbue (which will unfortunately deny me a career with the Daily Mail), and thus can be an endless quarry for fiction.
But for all of that, and for all the use that facts can be for fiction, I, as a rule, catch in-depth news stories throughout the day via the radio and so am just as wrapped up in the drama as the next Mail drone. And so you can understand my confusion (from where I believe I started out way back at the top of the page) when I discovered that an international political merry-go-round of unfathomable scale had been occurring without anybody making that big a deal of it. And the irony of the result of this merry-go-round is far too profound for my humble brain to compute without grasping a bottle of scotch in a sweaty Moroccan bar as I shy away from anyone that may look like a Westerner. It happened as I watched the 2006 World Cup Semi Final between Italy and Germany in Dortmund when, during a stoppage for an injury, the camera focussed on a the VIP box to show the Premier’s of both Italy and Germany, Romano Prodi and Angela Merkle, in conversation. My first thought was whether the Polish MOD was shuffling nervously in their seats to see the leader’s of these two nations looking so cosy next to each other, but then something else occurred to me that had far more levels to it than a cheap jingoistic joke. Italy and Germany; two nations whose history is engorged with the epochs of Fascism, defined still, to an extent, by the foreign policies of their fascist forefathers, now have perhaps the two most left-wing leaders outside of Latin America. And this became quickly more profound to me as I considered how that Britain and the United States have at their respective helms two megaliths of Right Wing idealism blundering their way across the world waving flags of democracy and Crusading Philanthropinism while simultaneously showing nothing but contempt for all foreigners. And so, I say again, “I demand to know what is going on!” I want to know how positions have changed since the Second World War, and more importantly I want to know if we are to suffer the same drubbing that both Germany and Italy received from the victors in 1946 before learning our lesson?
The problem I have with this, as a non-political thinker, is that it automatically makes me wonder that, should my work survive me, where will I stand for generations to come? Am I to be remembered as a literary product of a right wing country, the sprightly British Robin to the America’s horribly condescending Batman. Or could I etch out for myself a legacy like Hess, Mann or Koestler – remembered for my brave opposition as the gleaming portcullis teeth of Blair takes yet another chunk out of the vulnerable. And George C Scott could play me in a movie of my life that is banned from all British cineplexes but plays to rave reviews in the isolated socialist haven of the Italio-Prussian Empire. I don’t know what I’m on about now, I must admit, but if I was Doris Lessing I may have the beginnings of a new novel.