The Cuckoo's Nest

Monday, October 31, 2005

'Our' ABC

There's a teaser-trailer for tomorrow night's ep. of Foreign Correspondent, which taglines a story on Fiji as follows:

It's friendly, it has no enemies, no oil or other resources to plunder...

Gee, I wonder what the subtext of that is. And listening to Fran Kelly on RN Breakfast this morning, she seemed slightly sceptical of the Indian terror expert she was interviewing, when he suggested that Al Qaeda was behind the Delhi bombings. Fran's voice cracked with incredulity: "But why India?" You could practically hear her thinking "Why India? They didn't invade Iraq." She hastened to explain that "the motives of terror are never simple". Funny, when a bus is blown up in London, everyone knows it's because of Iraq. When an Islamist bomb goes off in India, the motives are suddenly, er, complex.

Just caught 'Question Time' on TV (yeah, I know, get a life). John Howard gave a very handsome, generous, completely non-political speech of tribute to Kim Beazley on the occasion of his 25th year in Parliament (Wilson Tuckey shares the same achievement). Jenny Macklin then got up to reply and almost immediately trashed the convention of these occasions, turning her scripted tribute to Kim into a screechy attack on the forthcoming IR legislation (one that, incidentally, must have had Kim writhing in embarrassment, as she laid on the fawning to a thickness that would have made Kim's North Korean namesake uncomfortable). The honourable gentlemen on the Speaker's right made known their displeasure at this graceless and petty abuse of the convention. To his credit, Beazley then got up and made a handsome and graceful speech of thanks to the PM for his good wishes.

The question here in Australia, as elsewhere, is whether to teach Intelligent Design in schools. It depends what you mean by 'teaching', or rather, by 'not teaching'. I have a feeling that many of the teachers who oppose ID in the classroom actually mean suppressing any mention whatever of ID, lest the young minds get polluted by religious fundamentalism. I would find it hard to imagine any responsible teacher today, in a class on evolution, not raising the subject of ID. Surely the goal is to raise a generation of kids who are capable of refuting this hypothesis, and how do you do this without investigating it?

A few hunches:

1. The most vocal opponents of teaching ID are probably teachers who themselves could not give a coherent account of evolution, and of the gaps in evolutionary theory. In other words, they'll be people for whom evolution is every bit as much an article of fundamental, unexamined faith as any of the rantings of a Texas snake-waver.

2. They will be teachers who, if they teach climate change, present the theory of anthropogenic climate change as absolute, unquestionable gospel, and who, similarly, would never dream of admitting a sceptical examination of it in their classrooms.

For the record, I don't like the ID hypothesis. I certainly don't have enough science to be able to refute it myself, but I feel that, at a deep level, it is basically anti-rational. Why not call on God to explain the various puzzles of quantum physics. You don't know how that particle suddenly blipped from point A to point B? Well, God must have done it.

Saturday, October 29, 2005

As a fan of classic British spy fiction (John Buchan, Erskine Childers, Geoffrey Household), I had long wanted to read the ‘Ashenden’ stories of Somerset Maugham. These proved surprisingly hard to get hold of: I had imagined that, due to his great popularity during his lifetime, secondhand books throughout the English-speaking world would have shelves groaning with Maugham’s works. In fact, I had to do some serious Internet searching to find volume 3 of the Penguin collected Maugham short stories, in which the Ashenden stories are gathered.

Maugham was recruited by British Intelligence during the first World War, and the Ashenden stories are closely autobiographical. Probably the most notable feature of these stories is how little actual espionage Ashenden actually performs. There are seven stories, and he only carries out any spying in four of them. 'Miss King' is essentially an anecdote of international hotel life; ‘His Excellency’ is an ‘as told to’ story with no dependence on Ashenden’s status as a secret agent; and ‘Sanatorium’ is an episode from Ashenden's civilian life, as he recovers from tuberculosis in a remote Scottish sanatorium.

Of the spy stories, ‘The Hairless Mexican’ has Ashenden as escort and paymaster to the man who carries out the real work of retrieving a secret document, and ‘Giulia Lazzari’ casts Ashenden in the role of chaperone to a woman who is used as bait to lure an anti-imperial agitator across a territorial border so he can be arrested and sent back to England for execution. In ‘The Traitor’, Ashenden performs a similar function, sent to tempt a foreign agent to travel to England, where he can be arrested and executed. In this story, Ashenden is particularly ineffectual, and he realizes that in fact his masters were counting on his inability to alter events, as part of their plan.

It is only in “Mr. Harrington’s Washing” that Ashenden really carries out any kind of espionage, and even then, it is more a matter of covert diplomacy than intelligence. Again, it is notable that Ashenden fails in his mission, though this is understandable, given the scale of events that he is attempting to influence. This story is particularly closely based on Maugham’s own experience: not many English writers can include on their curriculum vitae that their government sent them to Russia in order to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution. Maugham emphasizes in his memoir The Summing Up that he was selected for this mission only for want of someone better suited, and that he considered himself completely unqualified. However, he also allows himself the belief that, if he had been sent six months earlier, he could well have succeeded. The story itself is a somewhat contrived character study of an American businessman, sent into Russia on the eve of the Revolution to conclude a deal, with no real understanding of the momentous events unfolding around him, right up to the point where they fatally engulf him.

One can credit Maugham with several original contributions to the spy genre. He is probably the first writer to emphasize the mundane, bureaucratic nature of spy work. Ashenden, when he does any spying at all, is mostly occupied with paying field agents, coding messages and relaying reports which, he suspects, are not even read. Maugham also introduces an element of moral ambiguity and alienation: Ashenden's victims are often seemingly-harmless or even admirable people, who simply happen to be working for the wrong side. Unlike Buchan’s fiercely patriotic heroes, Ashenden is a fairly dispassionate player in ‘the great game’. While he almost never expresses an opinion about the rights and wrongs of his work, Maugham, in his authorial voice, plays up the tragic contrast between the great national interests at stake, and the small, ordinary lives that have to destroyed in their defence. The spy is engaged in a shadow-play, rarely acting against a direct and personal enemy, but rather at second-hand, against another who is similarly removed from the real origin of his actions.

One of the stories involves the death of a completely innocent bystander who has been mistaken for an enemy agent: Ashenden regrets this, but more as a strategic mistake than a moral wrong. Another has him destroying the lives of a fairly ineffective husband-and-wife pair of foreign agents, who are otherwise a devoted loving couple. In 'Giulia Lazzari', the man Ashenden must trap into captivity and death is an agitator against British rule in India, who, as Maugham makes clear, is in every respect an admirable human being. The notion of the spy as a kind of existential Everyman could well have its origins in Ashenden.

"Worst week in Bush's presidency". That's what all the good-looking, well-groomed people who come onto my TV at 6.00, 6.30, and 7.00 tell me. A bad week, to be sure, but didn't this "worst week" start with something else? Something to do with a.....constitution? In a country... beginnning with I...help me out here, people!

Friday, October 28, 2005

I had to wonder whether I'd woken up in the right country. SBS had the Iranian 'Anti-Zionism' conference as its lead item, and there wasn't a 'but' in sight. This morning, ABC Radio National was running hard with the final report of the UN Oil-for-food scam, though, predictably, they concentrate on the involvement of the Australian Wheat Board.

Australian coverage of the Iranian calls to obliterate Israel tended to take a line that this was somehow a startling new development. Not really, in a country whose 'parliament' regularly erupts into chants of 'Death to America, death to Israel'. On Radio National this morning, one piece led into this with a bit of audio background - the one bit of Farsi I understand, the chant of 'Down, down America'. Funnily, this was being used to illustrate a piece on 'Death to Israel'. Well, who the hell speaks Farsi, anyway?

I also have to be careful, because I'm usually shaving while listening to Radio National, and I nearly cut myself this morning when Teddy Kennedy came on, apropos the Harriet Miers withdrawal. The mere sound of this man's voice makes me break out laughing, especially when, as today, he is calling for Bush to select a new High Court justice more in the "mainstream". Ah yes, the Democrat 'mainstream' (I'll refrain from any body-of-water jokes here).