Hadn’t heard about this campaign video which casts Hillary and Bill as Tony and Carmela. Quite funny. Bill is actually more wooden than Hilary, strange to say.  Johnny Sack [pictured] is cast as ‘the members only’ guy – which probably won’t mean much to you unless you’ve read one of the forensic analyses of the last scene….
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Geoffrey Beattie writing about Blair’s book from a psychologist’s perspective in today’s Independent on Sunday.
Interesting.

Blair became a master at masking his true emotional state, hiding his terror with that masking smile. Psychologists have spent many years distinguishing genuine smiles from masking smiles. Masking smiles are asymmetric on the face and fade abruptly as they leave the face, exposing the real emotion underneath. Gordon Brown often tried to cover his negative emotion with a masking smile, but every time the smile fell off his face you could read his true emotions of impatience and irritation clearly. Blair’s great art was masking his fear and terror with a smile that seemed all too genuine.

But his mastery of body language does not stop there. He comments that he and Princess Diana “were both, in our ways, manipulative people, perceiving quickly the emotions of others and able instinctively to play with them”. Throughout the book, he describes how he uses his understanding of body language to his advantage. He writes, “A great belief of mine is that when you are negotiating with someone, the first thing is to set the atmosphere at ease; signify a little glimmer of human feeling; exchange a few pleasantries; and above all start by saying something utterly uncontroversial with which disagreement is impossible. Get the other person’s head nodding. It’s that nod which establishes rapport, and which is an early, tiny sign that all is not lost. I might say: ‘I know you feel strongly about this.’ Well, of course they do; that’s why there’s a dispute; and there would be a nod.”

This is quite clever psychology, because it actually does work and Blair has it to a T, except, it turns out, when he tried it on Breandan MacCionnaith, the leader of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Association, briefly famous during the stand-off at Drumcree. In Blair’s description, MacCionnaith was “completely and totally nodless”. “If I said to him, ‘I know you feel strongly about this,’ he would say, ‘I don’t feel more strongly about this than anything else’.” Blair had met his match; his body-language ploys were being thrown back in his face.

Dealing with fear, masking it and its emergence as a principal driver, is one of the dominant psychological themes of the book. Because Blair has high emotional intelligence and a perceptive eye for his own non-verbal performances (it is almost as if he is his own audience much of the time, standing back and admiring his own polished performance in the way that some narcissists do), he can master the use of non-verbal signals in negotiation. Equally, it makes him strongly critical of people who lack such skills, like Gordon Brown, whom he describes as having “no instinct at the human, gut level” and “emotional intelligence, zero”.

There is something else I find very telling in the book: Blair’s memories of childhood. I was particularly struck by his description of an event that happened in the playground when he was about 10 years old. He says that it was in this very situation that he first learned about courage and fear. He says that he can recall “the exact moment” when he got into a fight with a bully outside the gates of the Chorister School, Durham. This event would seem to be what psychologists call “a flashbulb memory”. A flashbulb memory is a vivid and detailed memory that does not fade with time, unlike all other memories. It is full of clear images etched for all time on to the brain. These are hardwired memories, designed for human survival and shaped by evolution. These are the kinds of enduring and stable memories that you might have if you had ever been in a near-fatal car accident or escaped a bomb blast in Afghanistan, for example. Blair has a flashbulb memory from childhood. He remembers all of the events, exactly where it took place and what was said in great detail. He writes: “Silly, isn’t it, to recall that tiny moment of character development after all these years.”

Flashbulb memories are triggered by two of the most primitive parts of the human brain, the reticular formation, which responds to surprise, and the amygdala, which responds to strong emotionality. The extraordinary thing about Tony Blair’s flashbulb memory is that nothing much actually happened. So when the bully came upon the young Blair unexpectedly, “I turned on him and told him I would hit him if he didn’t stop. He could tell I meant it, because I did and my eyes would have shown it – so he stopped.” So in this flashbulb memory all that really happened was that the bully was stopped dead in his tracks. Nobody got badly beaten; no one was kicked and stamped upon; few punches, if any, were thrown. Blair’s understanding of the situation is that it taught him something about courage, but from a psychology point of view it tells you more about the intense fear that the young Blair must have felt at that moment, plus the fact that he was surprised at his own actions in standing up to the bully. He didn’t have to fight back physically, but he found a way of dealing with his own fear.

The point about flashbulb memories, of course, is that, because of the way they have been encoded by the brain, they stay vivid for ever. And it just so happens that, because they are so accessible, we rate vivid memories, and events that are easy to visualise, as more common than events that are hard to visualise. As a consequence of this, perhaps threat generally was perceived as more prevalent in Tony Blair’s subsequent life – in the same way that those who have survived bad car crashes, and have the resulting flashbulb memory, view the roads as more dangerous places than those who have not had the same experiences. Perhaps, his firm response (that look), directly encoded in the brain, was from then on set as the natural associative response to any threat.

It would be fascinating to know if this bit of “character development” had not happened, and if this flashbulb memory had not been laid down, how Tony Blair would have dealt with all the other threats and bullies (he perceived) in the world along the way, and whether the world today would be a much more dangerous or a much safer place, as a consequence.

Noticed Tony Benn soaking up the sun outside the House of Commons. I u-turned and greeted him. He was friendly, relaxed – very pleasant. Not entirely sure about the soundness of all his ideological commitments, but a character he is, indubitably.

Tony Benn sits in the sun 2009

Even a Bullingdon baronet can struggle in the rarefied air above democracy

Much has been made of Rothschild’s private nature, and he seems to have an instinctive grasp of how to turn any weaker personality traits – perhaps even catagelophobia, the fear of being ridiculed – to his advantage, cultivating an air of quiet steel, rather in the way that Charles Saatchi or Kate Moss have long traded on the intriguing power of saying nothing at all.

Osborne has betrayed himself as the opposite – a blabbermouth who picked a fight with Mandelson on ground on which he was so compromised that a regional sales rep whose Vauxhall Astra glovebox contains a copy of The Art of War could tell you that defeat was inevitable. Even more staggering, for a chap who has known Rothschild since they were at prep school, was Osborne’s inability to realise that leaking details of conversations that took place while he was enjoying Rothschild’s hospitality would incense his host.

Corfugate is primarily a tale of club rules broken. Not literal clubs, in most cases – though Bilderberg Group meetings have been mentioned – but the deck-shoed networks of the super-powerful, who sweetly allow politicians the illusion of being allowed to run things, and even to start the odd war, so long as they think it will bring down the price of oil. Most of the politicians ever allowed within a sniff of this world learn its mores, just as Mandelson has. They are pathetically grateful to be asked to Rupert Murdoch’s annual retreats; they allow Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud to buy them £34,000-worth of private jet travel, as Cameron did on this same Greek trip; and they don’t do anything so vulgar as to mention in the register of members’ interests that they had a meeting with Mr Murdoch while they were there.

This is nothing new. John Campbell’s brilliant biography of Margaret Thatcher chronicles forensically the manner in which Thatcher treated Murdoch as a powerful Reagan-like friend and ally, given free access to her, and invited several times to spend Christmas at Chequers. And yet, she never once mentioned Murdoch in her memoirs.

Whatever goes on in the rarefied air above democracy will always be politicians’ dirty little secret. If it wasn’t such a dirty big one, that is. The only mystery is why we seem to restrict use of the word oligarch to Russians. Oleg Deripaska, the man Osborne allegedly solicitied for a donation, is described thusly, though not Mr Murdoch, or indeed Mr Freud. Let us end this reticence. What greater credit to our meritocracy, after all, than an erstwhile popstar press officer’s rise to princemaker?

Parliament climate change protesters threaten further disruption – Telegraph

A new coalition of groups known as the Climate Suffragettes, which includes stalwarts of middle England the Women’s Institute as well as more extreme environmental movements Climate Rush and Plane Stupid, are calling for reform of environment policy, a halt to building more coal fired power stations and an end to airport expansion. 

Wearing Edwardian clothes and handing out cake, the protest started peacefully in Parliament Square with speeches from each group, however arrests were made when individuals attempted to recreate the “rush” on Parliament and get through police lines at St Stephen’s Entrance. It is understood one person was taken to hospital with an injured foot.

Johann Hari: It’s the policies that count and that means Londoners should vote for Ken Livingstone – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent

Ken Livingstone with his adenoidal, amphibian populism is the most successful left-wing politician in Europe today. Born into the white working class in the rubble of post-war London, he has helped steer the transformation of this city through an amazing flourishing of sexual freedom and immigration and faced down Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair on the way.

At a time when most politicians cower beneath a lightning-storm of opinion polls and focus groups, he pushes politics forward in quantum leaps on talking to the IRA, on gay equality, on the environment. Whenever he has the power to, he ploughs money into services like buses used by the poorest. If Londoners replace him tomorrow with the political love-child of Margaret Thatcher and Billy Bunter, we will have four long years to stop seeing the funny side.

Boris is famously likeable, but behind the Pimpernel charm, the old Tory devotion to furthering the cause of vested interests.

Interesting NY Times article via Scott Heiferman’s Notes. Hillary’s core constituency sounds remarkably like Hilter’s.

Hillary Clinton is a classic commodity provider. She caters to the less-educated, less-pretentious consumer. As Ron Brownstein of The National Journal pointed out on Wednesday, she won the non-college-educated voters by 22 points in California, 32 points in Massachusetts and 54 points in Arkansas. She offers voters no frills, just commodities: tax credits, federal subsidies and scholarships. She’s got good programs at good prices.

Barack Obama is an experience provider. He attracts the educated consumer. In the last Pew Research national survey, he led among people with college degrees by 22 points. Educated people get all emotional when they shop and vote. They want an uplifting experience so they can persuade themselves that they’re not engaging in a grubby self-interested transaction. They fall for all that zero-carbon footprint, locally grown, community-enhancing Third Place hype. They want cultural signifiers that enrich their lives with meaning.

Obama offers to defeat cynicism with hope. Apparently he’s going to turn politics into a form of sharing. Have you noticed that he’s actually carried into his rallies by a flock of cherubs while the heavens open up with the Hallelujah Chorus? I wonder how he does that.

QUESTION: But why would Democratic votes break down so starkly along educational lines?

DR. RETAIL: The consumer marketplace has been bifurcating for years! It’s happening because the educated and uneducated lead different sorts of lives. Educated people are not only growing richer than less-educated people, but their lifestyles are diverging as well. A generation ago, educated families and less-educated families looked the same, but now high school graduates divorce at twice the rate of college graduates. High school grads are much more likely to have kids out of wedlock. High school grads are much more likely to be obese. They’re much more likely to smoke and to die younger.

Their attitudes are different. High school grads are much less optimistic than college grads. They express less social trust. They feel less safe in public. They report having fewer friends and lower aspirations. The less educated speak the dialect of struggle; the more educated, the dialect of self-fulfillment.

Did you hear the message of Clinton’s speech Tuesday night? It’s a rotten world out there. Regular folks are getting the shaft. They need someone who’ll fight tougher, work harder and put loyalty over independence.

Then did you see the Hopemeister’s speech? His schtick makes sense if you’ve got a basic level of security in your life, if you’re looking up, not down. Meanwhile, Obama’s people are so taken with their messiah that soon they’ll be selling flowers at airports and arranging mass weddings. There’s a “Yes We Can” video floating around YouTube in which a bunch of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and the guy from the Black Eyed Peas are singing the words to an Obama speech in escalating states of righteousness and ecstasy. If that video doesn’t creep out normal working-class voters, then nothing will.

Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The best bet for the Democrats is obviously John Edwards, who polls better against all the likely Republican candidates than any of the other Democratic contenders–no doubt because he pulls in enough of the “independent” voters. (He’s also a real Southerner, and it has to be observed that the only Democrats to be elected President in the last forty years have been Southerners.) Hillary Clinton suffers from being a Clinton, as well as having one of the most unappealing public personae of a national politician in recent memory. Dick Cheney is creepier and scarier, to be sure, but “fake” is the only word that captures the impression Ms. Clinton makes every time she opens her mouth. 

Barack Obama’s public positions tend to be a bit embarrassing, but I am told by some of my future colleagues who know him that he is more liberal than he lets on, and that he is aiming, on purpose, for the “mushy middle” of the American polity.  Obama’s greatest liability should be obvious:  he’s not white, and since de jure apartheid only ended in American forty years ago or so, there must still be 20% of the electorate that is consciously or subconciously racist, or grew up in a racist household, and will be mobilized against the mere prospect of a non-white President.  (Some of those people would likely be voting Republican anyway, but certainly not all.)  And once the Republicans are done with Barack Osama gaffes and smears, they’ll lock up the racist (and racially uneasy) vote by calling attention to the Church to which Senator Obama belongs in Chicago.   (We’ll know soon enough whether these concerns about racism are well-founded, starting with the Iowa caucuses this week.  Polls, I suspect, are overstating Obama’s support, because of the well-known phenomenon that those responding do not want to to seem racist when answering questions.)   I am optimistic that Obama would be a more progressive President than Hillary Clinton (notwithstanding some of his mealy-mouthed rhetoric), but Edwards has taken the most genuinely progressive positions to date and is also surely more electable than either of them.

I’m with Brian Leiter in liking Edwards, but just don’t know enough about Barack Obama to make a judgement. The impact of racism on poll ratings is interesting, but I don’t think there was any great discrepancy in the Iowa result, just the New Hampshire one.

Re. Hillary, no kidding. There is something unappealing about Hillary – and it’s something to do with her mask not  fitting her too well – a bit like Gordon Brown. ‘I’ve found my voice’. Good line, in that it addresses her biggest challenge, but likely not true.

It will an interesting journey.

Technorati Tags: edwards, clinton, obama, election, democrats, primaries, presidential

Poor old Martin Amis – he takes a real beating in this Guardian article written by the impressive Ronan Bennett.

Shame on us | News | Guardian Unlimited Books

Interesting in the context of the earlier post in which Hitchens defends Amis against the attacks of the even more recalcitrant Mark Steyn.

Amis has been sloppy – Bennett’s dismantling of the distinction he makes between Islam and Islamism is convincing. A stand out stylist, it wouldn’t appear that he’s a first rate historian or commentator. Of course, the desire to lash out in response to attack is understandable, but it’s not the civilised way – and Amis is all too quick to differentiate between ‘our’ civilised ways and ‘their’ uncivilised ones.

Bennett wrote the screenplay to the very good THE HAMBURG CELL – the best fictional account of the 9/11 plot I’ve seen.
There’s more discussion – with BookNinja – with a link to a Guardian response from Hitchens.

More comment, this time from the DJ Taylor in The Guardian.

Where do you stand in the new culture wars? – Sarah Baxter, Times Online

A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between “the left and revolutionary Islam” at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America’s “earth-devouring ambitions” were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a “truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union”.

Che’s daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. “My father never mentioned God,” she said, to the consternation of the audience. “He never met God.” During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. “By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence,” the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the “supreme guide” of Guevara, was also a man of God. “The Soviet Union is gone,” he affirmed. “The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words.”

Don’t say you haven’t been warned, comrade, when you flirt with “revolutionary Islam” as if it were a mild form of liberation theology. But it is time, too, for Che to lose his secular halo. If he were still living, the chances are he would be another dictator like Castro, who has ruled Cuba with an iron fist for half a century but gets a pass from liberals because he provides a modest health service.

There used to be a clear dividing line between conservatives and liberals. It defined the culture wars of the late 20th century, which pitted reactionary fuddy-duddies against tolerant, enlightened types, who believed in equal rights for women, minorities and gays. That fault line is becoming as dated as the flower power of the 1960s.

By the time Terry Eagleton, a Marxist professor of literature – how quaint and old-fashioned that sounds – is laying into Martin Amis, the Mr Cool of British fiction, for remarks on Islam that supposedly make the son as racist as his father, Kingsley, “an antisemitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals”, it is obvious we are into a wholly different culture war, between phoney and real progressives.

Wasn’t one of Amis fils’s main complaints about Islamic militants that they were “antisemites, psychotic misogynists and homophobes”? Confused? You are not the only one.

My own test for spotting a phoney liberal is as follows. If you think Bush is a fascist and Castro is a progressive, you are not a democrat. If you think cultural traditions can trump women’s rights, you are not a feminist. And if you think antisemitic rants are simply an expression of frustration with American and Israeli policy, you have learnt nothing from history.

It is no longer possible to tell at a glance which side people are on. My husband, a photographer, has long hair and wears T-shirts and cargo pants. We live in stuffy Washington, where almost everybody wears a suit and tie but secretly longs to be artistic and hip. On the school run, nice lawyers confide to him that they hate George Bush, despise the Iraq war and are not as reactionary as they look. They are completely thrown if he tells them he dislikes Islamo-fascism more than Bush, is glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein, supports Nato against the Taliban and thinks the Iranian mullahs should never be trusted with a nuclear bomb. He considers himself an antifascist who believes in the secular values of the Enlightenment and human rights. There is nothing radical about being tolerant of the intolerant, he says.

On the other side of the looking glass, jeans-clad leftists are horrified that one of their own could possibly have anything in common with the dreaded neocons. Christopher Hitchens is a rock star among atheists, most of whom oppose the Iraq war. Last weekend, he travelled to Wisconsin to receive an award from the Freedom from Religion conference for his book God Is Not Great.

“In my acceptance speech I upbraided the audience by saying I could easily have got the impression that they thought the only threat to our society came from the Christian Coalition and possibly the odd Israeli settler,” he says. “You would not have known from anything on sale, any T-shirt, any peaked cap, any book or pamphlet, that there was such a thing as Islamic fundamentalism.”

They didn’t like it. “I got the usual lame and bleating replies that, to the extent that if there was such a thing, it’s been created by us,” Hitchens says. One of the most indulgent forms of western narcissism is that everything is “all about me” – or, in this case, the West. Myopic liberals find it impossible to believe that radical Islam may have a dynamic of its own that threatens their values. “You cannot stand for multiculturalism if you represent a group that wants to kill all the Jews and Hindus. Shouldn’t that be obvious?” Hitchens asks. “Martin [Amis] was saying, ‘Look, there’s a real problem here’, and good for him.

“The name of the problem is religion, and there is only one religion that threatens us with this kind of thing . . . There is a reason people look askance at a mosque in their neighbourhood, and they are not mad or cruel or stupid or selfish or bigoted to worry about it.”

Nick Cohen, whose book What’s Left? has just been published in paperback, identifies progressives as antitotalitarian internationalists who subscribe to “some kind of universal values”, as he puts it.

“The left are like old-style Tory imperialists, who believe rights are all very well for western Europe but not for Johnny Foreigner, and that the liberation of women is essentially for white-skinned women, not brown-skinned women,” Cohen says.

A case in point is the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalia-born author of Infidel, who has received an astounding lack of support from liberals and the left. An article in Newsweek described her as a “bomb-thrower”, when it is Hirsi Ali who faces death threats from real bomb-throwers merely for speaking her mind and has had to rush back to the Netherlands because its government will no longer pay for her bodyguards while she is abroad.

Natasha Walter, reviewing her book in The Guardian, wrote blithely: “What sticks in the throats of many of her readers is not her feminism, but her antiIslamism” – as if the two could be separated. It was Hirsi Ali’s culture that led her to be genitally mutilated as a girl, and it was her Muslim former co-religionists who murdered her friend Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker. Why should she remain quiet?

Irshad Manji, the Canadian Muslim feminist, is about to become director of the new Moral Courage Project at New York University. “It’s about developing leaders who speak truth to power within their own community,” she says. “Ultimately it is about defeating self-censorship.

“Human beings are born equal but cultures are not,” she believes. “They are human-made and for the most part man-made. There is nothing sacred about cultures and nothing blasphemous about reforming them.”

When Amis said something a little more forceful along those lines at the Cheltenham literary festival, he set off a new firestorm. “Some societies are just more evolved than others,” he said. Then last week on Channel 4 News, he said: “I feel morally superior to Islamists.”

Note that he is not saying he feels morally superior to Islam – but to Islamists. Is it wrong to make such a judgment, when there is nothing immutable about culture and society?

Manji says: “I absolutely defend his right to believe that certain civilisations are superior to others,” but adds the important rider: “In contemporary times he may be right, but in the past Islam gave birth to the Renaissance.”

To my mind, Manji is a “moderate” Muslim, in that she still describes herself as a person of faith, but to many of her Islamic brethren, she is off the scale. Liberals have been too quick to accept as moderates Muslims who are nothing of the kind – except in comparison with the suicide bombers and theologians of Al-Qaeda.

“It’s not a waste of time to search for the moderate Muslim, because there is a civil war within Islam between people who do and don’t want to live under sharia,” says Hitchens, “but there are a lot of counterfeits who are being seized on in our cultural cringe moment.”

The chief cringers, he might have added, are the phoney liberals. The new culture war looks set to run and run.

Yet another commentator pointing out what strange bedfellows anti ‘war in Iraq’ liberals and Islamic fundamentalists make. It’s pretty self evident that this kind of respectful relativism can be ridiculous. Hitchens, though, isn’t immune to inconsistency; a one time apologist for Republican dumbness, his ‘positions’ require close scrutiny – for all their rhetorical artistry.

• Afghanistan: ok.
• Nation building in Iraq without a decent plan premised on a dodgy dossier, sans UN backing: a neo-con fantasy.

Listening to the news on Radio 4 this evening, it was reported that the US has spent $1.6 trillion on fighting its campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, a cost of something like $20k per household.
Bush may hang tough for the duration of his term, but as soon as his successor gets his (or her) feet under the table at the Oval office, it’s going to be ‘go fetch me the exit strategy handbook on the double’.