The Village Beneath

My formative experience of reading was a book called "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton. Read widely in American high schools as part of the English syllabus, it's a coming of age story about a boy in Tulsa, Oklahoma caught up in the struggles between Greasers and Socs (poor kids and rich ones) in the 1960s.

Maybe it was cause I was only 11, but the picture of the South in America that the book put across is one that has stayed with me, etched deep. The best bit is where two of the characters are reading Gone with the Wind while hiding from the police in an abandoned church. Johnny, who is a shy kid from a broken home, compares one of his rougher friends to the characters in Gone with the Wind because he sees them as "gallant", like the characters in the classic tale who ride away bravely into the sunset in the sure knowledge they are going to die. 

Another facet of that moment is captured perfectly about a page later when the main character reads a poem by Robert Frost:
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf's a flower,
But only so an hour,
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay

I guess it's something of a fascination I have with the South. Out of it seemed to come so many of the ideas of intolerance I learned to hate while becoming politically aware. But in that romantic vision, depicted in The Outsiders, sits an idea of gallantry and heroism, at the same time of innocence and idealism, that carried me away.

Maybe it's because the South I was reading about was very much like the Bermuda I was living in at the time.  I've always been fascinated by the idea, perhaps the ideal, of good manners, gallantry and heroism in the midst of adversity. And maybe that quality can also be a symbol of innocence (as opposed to cynicism), the "gold" that Robert Frost was on about.

The trouble is that some of those who embody the South in the world's eyes today, people like George W. Bush, represent the thing that is least gallant. That crusading impulse bespeaks naivety, but it's not innocent. Rather it's the most brutal form of arrogance to make believe that you alone have the answer to all of the world's ills, whether you call it Liberal Democracy like Fukuyama did, Christianity, Capitalism or Marxism. And it's the way of the schoolyard bully to act, to actually cause suffering, on the back of an impulse of arrogance.

I believe that being gallant is in our own human nature. We like to help people because we know how we would feel if we were in their situation. 

But it's realism to recognise when you can't help, when jumping in may actually prolong the suffering. That's where starry-eyed idealists like Tony Blair failed. They wanted to help people, but were too arrogant, too drunk on their world-mending "truth", to admit that they couldn't control the aftermath of their actions. 

So came the the millenarian movements of Middle Ages, so went Nazism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. So came the the crusading (and violent) Jacobins of the French Revolution, so go the Neo-liberals and Neo-conservatives of today.

Gallantry exists in the best moments of the Democratic Party this century. Lyndon Johnson was a contradiction. The Great Society, for all the pomposity in its name, simply aimed to help people, not implement a vision in the aim of changing the world. In contrast, his Vietnam escalation epitomised American crusading idealism and led to much more suffering in the end than Giap's armies could ever have inflicted on the people of Indochina. 

I reckon people like Jimmy Carter captured the highest instincts of the Democratic Party too. Amongst other things, Carter will be remembered for his humility, walking down the road to the White House after his inauguration when he could have just got into a limousine. 

And that, I think, is what Obama stands for too. For disavowing the old goal of remaking the world in America's image, for realising simply that you can use your great wealth and power to help those in need, both at home and abroad. 

Another president to display some of that clarity of thinking was Nixon. Along with Kissinger, he acted with a realism that understood nations and humans for what they are. Of course, his realism was outdone by his obsessive survival instinct. The paranoia which destroyed him was partly the result of suffering in his childhood.  And suffering begets suffering, especially when it's combined with a preponderance of power.

I believe the human instinct of gallantry is the basic quality that people have been trying to get to through the centuries, taking many roundabout routes. The great theories, myths and plans of economics or religion, Socialism and yes, Liberalism, have kept on getting in the way.

Not only this, but man has been mesmerised into committing heinous acts of terror and mass murder in the name of this idealism. It is John Gray's central and most devastating thesis that misplaced faith in the human ability to remake the world brings about death. "The most powerful western traditions have been those looked to alter the very nature of human life - a project that has always been given to violence". Hence Robespierre. Hence Richard Perle. 

It was in repeatedly thinking that we had found the answer, that we had finally found the "truth", that we kept on denying our human reality. That reality lies not in some grand theory or sermon, but in the makeup of ourselves, in our DNA.
 
We should just call the desire to help other people what it is; a human, no, an animal instinct.

As realistic as Nixon was, he wasn't humble. And power can distance us from humility, from the daily realisation that we're all human, and we all suffer. That's why too much power concentrated in too few people isn't a good thing. It can lead people feel like supermen or superwomen, and because of this they're more likely to treat others as if they're worth less. Also, human individuals are simply too flawed to be able to run the lives of millions of others from the inside of a bulletproof cocoon.

In a realistic view, one in which people will act on their instincts to survive and, simultaneously, act to look after each other, the best thing the person with a sense of right and wrong can do is try to ease the suffering that exists in the world today.

It's honest. It's realistic. It allows for the fact that we humans aren't that much different from the animals we look down on. We can all suffer. We can all be gallant.

Out of innate sense, come the basic and best instincts of our political parties, those of equality and solidarity, of patriotism and national pride, of conserving what we have and taking a far-reaching view, not in an ambitious, crusading sense, but in terms of our natural resources and what we need, collectively as a species, to survive on this planet.

The basis of our behaviour isn't reason. It's our emotions. In particular, it's their ability to frame the way in which we see the world. These human emotions spring from our animal existence.

A realistic vew of the world can lead to optimism or cycnicism, the latter of which is scepticism run wild. I think scepticism is healthy. But I don't believe humanity's worst instincts represent our destiny as a species. There is still too much good in the world.

In the end Johnny in The Outsiders dies after runing into a fire in the church to save some schoolchildren, not because of any ideology or any belief system, but out of his own animal instincts, his own understanding of suffering, his desire to be gallant. . .

The best combination for me is a healthy balance of realism and humility, of relativism and understanding. I think that these can lead to a basic form of optimism. As human as we are, our better instincts sometimes do prevail. How to get to that point? I'll tell you when I know.

Just been browsing the internet in my usual search for footage of speeches and coverage of elections during the 80s and 90s. I'm trying to find "defining moments" in political stories. We know who won, but I like looking at the nuances of how they won, and conversely, how the other guy screwed up.

Because of its personality clashes and grand scale, American politics provides a vast wealth of these moments.

This first one actually sends a chill down my spine when I see it.

Zell Miller of Georgia, the democratic governor of Georgia, made history when he went on stage at the Democrat Convention in 1992 and made a stinging attack on the Bush presidency. Miller's speech was electrical overload. It captured the moment, and the mood.

"Listen to this voice. It's a voice flavoured by the blue ridge. A voice straight out of a remote valley hidden by the peaks and hollers of the Appalachian mountains.  A voice that's been described as more barbed-wire than honeysuckle. That this kind of voice could travel here from a forgotten corner of Appalachia, is a testament to the grace of god and the greatness of the Democratic Party."

It summed up how Bush had lost touch with the conservative base of his party. It exemplified the shrewdness of Bill Clinton and his political team and their sure-footed appeal to the centre.

"This week we are gathered here to nominate a man from a remote rural corner of Arkansas, to be President of the United States of America. That is powerful proof that the American dream still lives, at least it lives in the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton is the only candidate for president who really feels our pain, shares our hopes and will work his heart out to fulfill our dreams."

A conservative southerner "born during the worst of the depression on a cold winter's day, in the draughty bedroom of a rented house", Miller has become something of a rarity in the Democratic Party. He has massive disagreements with its leaders and, when he was senator, voted against them at practically every occasion. Despite this, he says he will be a Democrat until the day he dies.

This is exactly the kind of politician I like. Gutsy, authentic, principled, fiery and sort of honourable. 
 
Clinton went on to carry Georgia by a margin of 0.59% and he won elsewhere in the south in Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia. At the time they thought it was a redrawing of the political map for good. Early on on election night, Dan Rather was more or less calling the election for Clinton the basis that he had won these southern states. 

Then those states went solidly republican in 2000 and 2004.

Can Obama win in these places? Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says they will compete in all these places. In difficult economic circumstances especially, Obama needs to be someone who "feels the pain". He simply can't risk seeming out of touch but actually I believe that this description applies less convincingly to him than it does to John McCain. 

It was here, in the deep south, that Clinton really mopped up in 1992. I believe Obama could do the same now but there is a lot of work to be done.

Walking past the place I spent my childhood in the other day, I did a double take. At first I didn't recognise it and thought I must have been looking at the wrong house. The house itself hadn't changed. What had changed was the colour. It was now a bluey-grey. Still pastel and faded, so it blended in with the rest of the houses on the street. I stopped for a minute to collect my thoughts.

I spent my first eight years in the house, which is in Chalcot Crescent, just near the foot of Primrose Hill. My mum took me and my sister away from it in 1988 to Bermuda.

When we left, it had only been about two years since we had painted the house ourselves. As a family, we had had wide-ranging discussions about what colour we wanted. Originally, when we had moved in in in 1980, it was a deep chocolate brown. I guess my family wanted something more optimistic and warm. I remember the long, boring trips to shops to look at paint catalogues. I remember touring round the neighbourhood and finding the colour we wanted on another house not far away on Regent's Park Road.

Suffolk Pink was the name of the new colour. When the house had finally been painted, around 1986, it symbolised another big change that was happening in my life. I had been moved to a local prep school called the Hall, in Belsize Park, where they had pink blazers and pink and grey socks. I still have the picture of me standing on the steps of our newly painted house, in the brand new pink blazer and hat that I never wore again, ready for the first day of a new term. 

In recent years, I walked past the house and, seeing its pink exterior, took comfort. For all the new experiences being had in it, it still seemed like the place we grew up in. Now the house has passed into new hands, and the new colour exemplifies the new owners taking almost emotional responsibility for it. It's poignant and interesting how difficult we sometimes find sharing the same spaces.

It is the one great paradoxes of the earth. We, men and animals, share the same planet and have to make do on the same resources, yet have such a plurality of experience and memories that are frequently difficult to share. Men, unlike animals, haven't quite got used to that idea yet, and I don't really believe they ever will.

In the end, I'm glad there is someone in that house who cares enough to want to paint it a new colour and impose their unique personality on it. Still, as I walk past I'll always see it, in my mind's eye at least, as just having been painted with a fresh coat of Suffolk Pink.

This area is so full of history and treasures lurking "beneath the surface" so to speak. It's 84 years and a day since the old South Kentish Town Tube Station was closed due to power failure from strike action. 

South Kentish Town Tube was open for just under 16 years (1907 to 1924).

You can glimpse the platforms in the dark as you pass from Camden Town to Kentish Town on the High Barnet branch of the Northern Line.

It was used as bomb shelter during the blitz. Now, it's used as an ingress for service personnel and an emergency exit for passengers.

It would be great to go on a tour of the old station and explore the 84-year-old station and imagine what it was like back in the halcyon days of Edward VII. 

As it is, I'll just have to imagine it, as I struggle for a fleeting glimpse of the darkened corridors through the tube window.