The Indignation of a Liberal

Paul Krugman, who never fails to be introduced on talk-shows as 'the Nobel prize-winning economist', wrote in his blog for the New York Times on Wednesday about Obama's warning to the House not to force through the Senate's health care bill and went on to express his exasperation with Obama's leadership:

'I have to say, I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.'

Now I'm usually a big Paul Krugman fan. He's got decent Liberal credentials, he's a very clever fellow, and undoubtedly a brilliant economist, and his reading of the causes and solutions of the recent global financial panic are largely the same as mine. But what the hell is he doing, thinking of 'giving up' on Obama after his first year in office?

Clearly he's disillusioned, as many progressives are, with Obama's perceived failure to deliver the kind of sweeping reforms they thought he campaigned on. They expected him to have Gitmo closed by now, to have the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, to have smashed the banks, and solved the unemployment and foreclosure crisis. But there are several reasons why this is totally unreasonable.

Firstly, Obama never promised many of these things. He did promise to close Gitmo, and, yes, he hasn't managed that yet. The problem of releasing detainees has proved more difficult than he anticipated. But he has already had a review conducted, with recommendations to transfer most detainees to the United States, there to await trial or release, and only to keep 47 still in Cuba. Of course, this is still disappointing, but remember that some of these people, whether we like it or not, are very dangerous, and releasing them would be very hazardous. Some cannot be tried because evidence gathered against them was gained through coercion or espionage. Obama opposed their detention and the war which caused them to be detained, but now we are where we are and he can't just turn them loose with impunity.

On health reform, a political goal that has eluded presidents for over 60 years, he has faced some of the most implacable partisan opposition ever encountered in the House and Senate, and even huge splits within his own party. Conservative Democrats have made the inclusion of a Public Option impossible, and what Obama understands and his detractors don't is that no amount of bullying by the White House could have improved its chances. Quite the opposite. Lyndon Johnson's approach to getting Medicare through Congress is often cited as an example Obama should have followed, but whereas Johnson faced internal dissent from Southern Democrats, it was easier for him to generate bi-partisan consensus around the core parts of a bill. We cannot underestimate the partisan hostility that the current Republican caucus has towards all things Obama. Just look at the blanket hold one senator has taken out over Obama's nominees to federal offices to see how implacable and spiteful this resistance is.

The depth of conservative hatred for Obama specifically, not just for progressive reform, has made it essentially impossible to create bi-partisan support for even the most modest proposals, despite Obama's best efforts to allow room for compromise. Liberals now attack him for having been naive enough to believe that the Republicans would ever support a bill. But what sort of criticism is that? What's their alternative? Use Reconciliation and force the Public Option through? At the risk of destroying the party in the mid-terms, destroying the prospects for any Republican support of his future legislative agenda, and opening the way for Republican presidents to use the same tactics for tax breaks for the rich? Not really compelling, or original, is it?

The current Senate rule, which allows a filibuster to be used with just 40 votes, giving the minority veto power, is ridiculous and needs to be changed. A simple majority in the Senate should be able to pass most legislation, unless the bill affects the running/constitution of the chamber itself.

Obama is pragmatic. He's not an idealist, and this should be clear from his vote on the warrantless wiretapping bill introduced by President Bush shortly before he left office. Where he believes that vital national security interests are at risk, he will support measures that most Liberals, myself included, find unpalatable. But we should not, therefore, have unrealistic expectations of him. Nor should we believe that we are ever likely to see a President who can deliver, even if he wanted to, such a progressive agenda. Jeb Bartlett is an absurd studio fantasy. America would never elect him, and if they did, by some miracle, he would get so clobbered in the polls and in Congress that his term would be effectively pointless. He wouldn't be able to get anything done. Quite apart from the fact that he would only represent, ideologically, a minority of the population. The MSNBC-watching slice. It may be fair to campaign with those supporters in mind, but you cannot govern solely on behalf of those who voted for you.

Obama's approach to the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq is further proof of this careful pragmatism. Of course he wants to bring the troops home as soon as possible, and in fact he never wanted them to go to Iraq in the first place, but he is not so rash as to withdraw them before the local government and armed forces can manage their own security, a policy that would be disastrous for those countries and the regions, if not for the United States itself.

He has been stung, apparently, by his low approval ratings, into attacking the banks, everyone's favourite hate figures. And they do make a very presentable target, but even these new regulations will have to get approval from Congress and could be radically watered down by the time they are implemented.

The point is, if liberals want Obama to get anything done, they need to have more realistic expectations of him and get behind his programme. Democrats need to have political discipline if they are ever to overcome Republican resistance. It is too easy for the GOP at the moment, and I bet they can't believe how quickly their fortunes have turned around since last January. Dems need to make it a lot harder for them to obstruct the President, conduct their bargaining in camera, and show a united front wherever possible, not grandstand for their own local advantage or for the sake of their inflated egos.

Obama is prepared, it seems, to sacrifice a second term for the sake of real reform. The question is, are his colleagues in the party as selfless, and as determined? Krugman et.al, you need to cut the man some slack or before you know it Mike Huckabee will be in the White House abolishing Civil Rights, making gun ownership mandatory and firing nuclear missiles at Iran.

Will Self: Sebald Lecture 2010

Will Self gave the 2010 Sebald Lecture, an annual talk on the subject of literature in translation (or a connected theme) organised by the British Centre for Literary Translation, and sponsored by us. He chose to talk about W.G.Sebald's writing, and in particular the question of whether or not there could ever be a literature by or about the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and if so, what purpose it might serve - 'Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners: W G Sebald and the Holocaust'

W.G. Sebald, or 'Max', to his friends, was a German academic and writer who left his native country in the 1960s to come to Britain, where he lived, and did most of his writing, over the next thirty five years. He's considered by many writers, and especially by many translators, to be one of the most significant and brilliant authors of the last twenty-five years. He's not as well known or widely-recognised as he should be, but his work, especially 'Austerlitz', 'The Rings of Saturn', 'The Emigrants', and 'A Natural History of Destruction' are among the foremost literary works about twentieth century history, power, and genocide I've read.

I've been to several of these Sebald lectures already, and they are mostly too obscure and specialised, or too vague and repetitive to be really interesting, so it was a pleasant surprise when Will Self delivered, in the course of an uninterrupted hour, one of the most brilliant and tightly-argued theses I've heard for a long time. Combining a forensic close reading of Sebald's work, his sources and analogues, with a wide ranging investigation of the literature of the holocaust, theories of time and metaphysics, it was a fascinating and original insight into these questions. It made me want to read the books all over again, and pay much closer attention to them.

The first time I read 'The Rings of Saturn' I felt that curious, hidden weight that is present in all of Sebald's writing, the languid sentences and the tone I took to be sentimental, elegaic, but I really missed its significance. It wasn't until I read the passages in 'Austerlitz' about the concentration camp at Theresienstadt that I began to understand what Max was really writing about. Self's theory, that Max disdained what he called 'action writing' - that is, the direct description of events in the Holocaust - because no description could ever convey their nature, and because, as Adorno famously noted, the possibility exists that a kind of pleasure could be derived from literary writing about these unspeakable events - 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric'- seemed very convincing. I began to see that Sebald's method was to write about the Holocaust without describing it directly. Its shadow hangs over every word, but it is never directly confronted. Instead he pursues apparently diversionary tangents: architectural styles, the Belgian exploitation of the Congo, Roger Casement, the Norfolk coastline, and so on...

A lot of the detail of the argument probably passed me by - it's difficult to get a grip on such subtle thoughts when you only hear them once, and can't read them over. Fortunately, the text is now available on the TLS website - http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7003221.ece .

It was obviously a very personal topic for Self, who recounted stories about his own parents arguing about the Holocaust at home. His mother accusing his father, a conscientious objector ('Conshie' - my grandfather calls them, with a disgusted curl of his lip) of cowardice, of appeasement, and his father's terrible, racking guilt and regret about his decision to avoid joining the army. Sebald accused his own parents of collaboration with the Nazis. His father fought in Silesia, and it was when the young Max discovered details of his father's war record, and contrasted his own, carefree childhood in rural Bavaria with the persecution of the Jews that was going on all around him that he felt the stain of an irreparable guilt most strongly.

Self went on to argue, or so I thought, that Max's conception of historical time was not synoptic, not diachronic, but that the act of writing and recording history, much like the observation of an experiment in physics, actually distorted the thing being observed, and so we have to remain constantly aware of the distorting lens of history and historiography. No amount of cultural archaeology can reconstruct the 'lived experience' of history, so we must be careful in the way that we record what happened, and why it happened.

That question, 'why?' the epistemological question, he returned to throughout the lecture, and by the end seemed to argue that Max's writing betrayed a view of atrocity as a feature of the human condition, that genocide is inescapable somehow, and that it is constantly being carried out somewhere, by someone. For me, this seemed like an abrogation, at the end, or a hypothesis that simply raised further questions: why then, why there, why against the Jews? In other words, the question for me shifted and became one of what circumstances cause that feature of human nature, or that part of the human condition to surface, to flourish? Perhaps that very human instinct to understand, to over-determine, to classify, is what Max resisted. Will Self called his writing a 'great literature of atonement', and perhaps it is an atonement not just for the Holocaust itself but for the whole scope of human cruelty and brutality, enacted through colonialism, genocide, mass exterminations of animal populations, destruction of the environment, Allied war crimes, etc, etc...

Or perhaps I've just completely misunderstood the lecture, but it'll be interesting to read it again and see if I can follow it better in print. Whatever conclusions I draw from it, I do think it's a brilliant piece of sustained critical reading and a highly original and thorough piece of research, and if nothing else I'm sure it will make you want to read Sebald's books, for the first time if you haven't before, and all over again if you have.

Curiously, Max was never given as much acclaim or popularity in Germany as he was in England, and Self attributed this partly to our approbation for his guilt and shame about the Holocaust - the 'Good German' syndrome - and partly to the oddly complete assimilation Sebald seems to have made to England in his writing, his style, his love of typically English objects, characters, mannerisms, things like the Teas Maid, bicycle clips, tweed. When I asked a German woman after the lecture what she thought about this she just said, 'well, he was an English writer'. Interesting.

So that was pretty much that. And I felt vageuly proud because I've always maintained that Will Self was a brilliant writer and thinker, and defended him when people have accused him of pretentiousness, or flippancy, and I think this lecture was proof that I was right. Maybe.

Satan to Pat Robertson (via the Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher.

The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake.

Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.

You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

The Game's Afoot

So now we have the prospect of 4 months of non-stop campaigning and fighting between the parties in the run up to a general election, most likely held on May 6th.

Just as the Conservatives started to crank up the campaign with their 'We can't go on like this' posters, the giant, gleaming pudge of David Cameron suddenly appearing all over the place on 30-foot wide placards, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, in one of the most spectacularly misjudged coup-attempts ever staged (including the Munich Beer Hall putsch of 1932) managed to wound Gordon Brown again without killing him. He now resembles the black knight from Monty Python's 'Holy Grail' who has had all of his limbs cut off but still refuses to die.

Martin Kettle wrote some useful analysis of the thing in the Guardian, and John Harris wrote an acute but weirdly romantic piece about the need for new progressive ideas and blood on the Left, but as usual the only real insight came from Andrew Rawnsley, whose voice and hairstyle I found off-putting initially but is becoming one of the better and more reliable political commentators. Michael White was gurning absurdly in the Sky studio and at one point summed up his analysis with the epithet: 'Life is a disappointment'. He is more and more like Alf Garnett, in appearance if not in ideology.

Iain Dale and Conservative Home were mainly having fun with the story, as were Will Straw and Eric Pickles. And why wouldn't they? Guido, who has an impressive ability to break rumours and tidbits before anyone else, mainly spent the day attacking Nick Robinson for his dismissal of the rumours of a plot on The Daily Politics (followed a few minutes later by a hasty U-turn), and his sideswipe at bloggers. Robinson was pretty hopeless in fact while things were breaking, but gave a useful summary of the affair by evening.

Alastair Campbell deferred to John Prescott, but you could tell by the tone of the former Communcations Director's blog that he was apoplectic about the whole thing. There's a special note of forced disinterestedness that comes into Alastair's writing when he's really angry about something. It's amazing actually how easy it is to detect. Also, he doesn't understand about websites. His is called 'the official website' and bears his signature. Complete no-nos for seasoned bloggers/web-users. There is almost nothing so off-putting online as someone who regards themselves as special or privileged. The whole ethos is different. Everyone is anonymous, more or less, and everyone's more equal (or at least you should pretend they are, if you want to be popular).

Prescott himself, quite the Web 2.0 bandwagon-jumper, has tried to reinvent himself as a new media campaigner. And to be fair, he doesn't do a bad job. He's got the hang of Twitter, and the use of cheeky emoticons. His video content is crap, but it's not the end of the world. At least it has an immediacy that's quite endearing. It doesn't do his man-of-the-people image too much harm and subtly washes away at the two-jags, two-shags, two-bogs lampoon that was so firmly implanted after the expenses scandal.

John Rentoul in the Independent (does it still exist?) had a good list of PLP members who had publicly admitted disaffection with the PM, reflecting a lot of networking and good old spadework, but not much else.

Anyway, the plot was almost over before it had begun, with a deafening silence from cabinet members supposedly ready to abandon Brown. When they did make statements they, predictably, lined up behind the PM, although some endorsements were very mealy-mouthed indeed. One never felt (even from the outside) there would be enough support in the party for a coup, and the timing of this attempt was disastrous.

It would have been very difficult indeed for any member of the cabinet to come out openly against Brown now, especially after Mandelson seemed to have made peace with him over the election strategy (for the time being). Going into the election, it was always possible for loyalists to accuse plotters of damaging the party, overlooking the wishes of ordinary party members, and indulging in all kinds of high rhetoric about the selfishness of ex-ministers trying to tell current members of the government what to do.

So, where does all this leave us? According to YouGov, the Tories are 9 points clear at the moment, enough for an outright majority, albeit a slim one, and that doesn't take into account the damage caused yesterday (a more recent poll has the Tories 12 points ahead). Of course it is far far too early to tell how this might affect the election, but it can't be good news for Brown unless the fallout from this botched coup makes it more difficult for other plotters to mount a serious challenge further down the line. If I were David Miliband now, for instance, would I risk resigning in the run up to the election, for the sake of a few marginals, or would I wait until Gordon has been thoroughly crushed by the opposition, do as little campaigning on his behalf as possible, and then accept the leadership when it is offered by a desperate and grateful party that has suffered a humiliation at the hands of the Tories? I know what I'd do. Yes, Gordon might survive until the election, but now he's certainly holed below the waterline and can't keep going afterwards, surely, unless something impossible happens.

Forgive me a little diversion. Many people in this country now like to describe themselves as 'libertarians' - because what they think this means is that they are philosophically liberal and anti-authoritarian, and because they believe that markets should be de-regulated etc... They imagine that a libertarian today is what a liberal, in the mould of John Stuart Mill or a Locke, would have been in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth centuries. But I don't think that's right at all. In any case, it ignores more recent writing on Liberty by thinkers such as Berlin and Rawls, which I think has tended to advance the notion of political liberty and freedom in line with developments in sociology and the development of our democracies. Rawls and Berlin acknowledged their own debts to their great precursors, but they made significant contributions which serve to deepen our understanding of what political liberty means.

Perhaps most importantly, they recognise the fact that liberty cannot truly exist without justice, and that justice itself relies on a certain element of fairness - what Rawls describes in his 'Theory of Justice'. The implications of these arguments for liberals are profound because they demonstrate that, in order to hold true to the principles first laid out by John Locke and John Stuart Mill and others, one must also seek to guarantee fairness in society. In other words, it is not enough to remove restrictions from peoples' actions and simply let society and the economy run themselves. Why not? Because, to put it in its simplest terms, if everyone is free to do what they want, some people's abuse of that freedom will prevent others from doing what they want.

Or, to take another example, if you have a given (limited) quantity of something, and you allow everyone to exploit it as much as they want, you will soon see that a small number of people with greater capability/strength/etc... will take the vast majority of it for themselves, leaving others with less than their share. So, freedom (positive freedom) is not really freedom at all because it ends up meaning that only a few are able to do what they want, while the rest cannot. Hence your typical neo-liberal capitalist society in which there are wide inequalities in wealth, access, representation, education, power and opportunity. These inequalities would be greatly exacerbated by some of the measures that true libertarians call for, such as flat taxes, abolition of the welfare state, wholescale reductions in public spending, the rollback of the state (this has other political consequences, as I've described before).

To be true to the ideas of Mill and Locke, then, in our developed societies, one has to incorporate an understanding of the role of justice and fairness in producing liberty and public goods. Many of those who describe themselves as libertarians, are, when push comes to shove, actually liberals, in the mode of Jack Kennedy, or FDR. They aren't libertarians at all. Quite often people don't like the term 'liberal' (in the UK) because they feel it has been tainted by a strain of authoritarian European social democracy/socialism that they despise (probably rightly). The ideal liberal is neither so entranced by the mythical philosophical link between the free market and personal choice, nor so bedazzled by the Gramscian/Marxist ideas of alienation and the detrimental effects of consumer capitalism on social justice that he is either a proponent of radical deregulation of markets and slashing of public spending, or a petty bureaucrat who believes the state should centralise as much as possible to ensure 'equality of opportunity'.

A liberal is, after all, one who wants to find balance between Berlin's positive and negative liberties, a balance that denies as little personal freedom as possible while also ensuring that as many people as possible are given as wide a range of options and opportunities as possible, whatever their background. That is a fine balance, but it is a liberal balance, not a libertarian one. And those who identify themselves as libertarians deserve to be challenged on their interpretation of justice as fairness, to prove that they are not just adopting a fashionable moniker.

Now back to the main thread a minute. There's something different about a party that's about to assume power, and about a young government with a large majority. There's a massive air of confidence, of expectancy, about them, and something odd happens in the national mood as well. It's as if the party and the culture start to reflect each other somehow. Or at least mirror each other. In 1997, there did seem to be a rare convergence between the rhetoric and self-presentation of new Labour, and the projected national self-image, served up to us on tv and in the media. It felt as though the party had either created, or at least successfully responded to, the zietgeist (god, what an awful word). That's not to imply for a second that the Labour party wasn't a totally shallow invention of PR and empty soundbites - it was. But all of that stuff did actually feel as if it caught the mood of the country.

And in 2001 there was a masterful (but also terrifying and terrifyingly cheesy) ad for Labour in the run up to the election which showed a nondescript couple going to the polls, smiling and waving agreeably at everyone they passed on the way to the polling booth. It was nauseating, but it was also a work of genius, because the implication of the message was that it was socially unacceptable to vote for anyone other than Labour. It actually made direct use of the cloying social pressure to fit in, to be normal, that influences so many of our subliminal decisions and gives us so many of our cues. It tapped directly into our anxieties about deviating from that social standard which is arbitrarily imposed but almost impossible to break. And it worked.

What it showed was a ruthless, a tyrannical, cultivation of that sort of common denominator ethic, that 'We Are Normal' feeling, that is such a powerful herder of instincts. I'm amazed that it wasn't more widely used, or more frequently exploited. But it is a difficult thing to pull off in fact, because you have to have some credibility to do it, with the people it's aimed at, and you have to be able to make them feel that kind of class awkwardness that makes them even more paranoid about standing out. The kind of thing that makes middle class girls from St Pauls sound as though they grew up dealing crack in Peckham. It would be very tricky indeed for David Cameron and chums, no matter how convincing their performances on Desert Island discs, to play the same trick.

What's telling for me is that, at the moment, neither party has that sense of being really in tune with the majority. The new Labour coalition has well and truly disintegrated, but you don't get the feeling that the Tories have been able to re-shape the electorate into a large coalition of their own. Perhaps they have and it just hasn't yet started to filter through. There are the first signs - in the way people deploy Cameroonian or even Osbornian rhetoric when talking about Public Sector spending or government debt, or the whole Green thing, which does seem to be an area where the Tories have had real succes in identifying themselves as the party of fashionable ecological reform.

Anyway, that's more than enough of that. The next few months promises to be quite exciting, if like me you are interested in these things.

I have had a cracking week at work. I have been on it. God knows why, but for some reason I'm more alert, more confident and just generally more effective than I have been for ages. Long may it continue. Apart from one small bureaucratic nonsense I've basically sorted out the Literature sector single-handed for the next year. And that was while most people were skiving off at home and whinging about the snow. Slackers. If I carry on like this I'll be able to retire in a few months and move on to saving the planet. Don't hold your breath.

Malcolm Tucker shall rise again

Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor from Armando Ianucci's The Thick of It (BBC2), is the best character on television. I was a late-comer to the show, only picking it up half-way through the second series, after the whole Chris Langham controversy. But as soon as I started watching it I realised it was a work of utter genius. I couldn't believe I hadn't been following it from the start. The two hour-long specials, 'Rise of the Nutters', and 'Spinners and Losers', especially the latter, are paragons of political satire. I have always adored 'Yes Minister', to which 'The Thick of It' clearly owes much of its inspiration, but this is a truly grown-up, twenty-first century take on Westminster and the Media. It has eclipsed even its illustrious predecessor and brought us the definitive comedy of governmental manners for a generation.

And at the heart of it all is the gloriously sweary, the magnificently malignant, the brilliantly cynical master of the dark arts, Malcolm Tucker, played with riveting glee by Peter Capaldi. Tucker is the Prime Minister's all-powerful henchman and Director of Communications, a figure based very obviously on Alastair Campbell, but endowed with an even more bullying, even more grotesque, armoury of insults and put-downs. He stalks the halls of number 10 and DoSAC (Department of Social Affairs and Communities?), making pathetic ministers cower and blub as he manipulates every story, spins every interview, to save the Government's face. Author of such unforgettable lines as:

'I'd love to stop and chat to you, but I'd rather have type 2 diabetes...'

'He's as useful as a marzipan dildo...'

'How much fucking shit is there on the menu, and what fucking flavour is it?'

Crises come and go, and cabinet members rise and fall, but Malcolm rises above it all, plots his way through every political thicket, and somehow emerges triumphant, even when it seems his many enemies are finally about to get him. At least, that was until this Saturday, episode 7 of series three, when, horror of horrors, Malcolm finally got sacked. It was a shock that came completely out of the blue. Yes, his former rival and fellow spin-meister, the hysterically odious Steve Fleming, had been brought back, and yes, Steve had been getting uncomfortably cosy with Julius Nicholson, now Lord Nicholson, the pompous and useless twat whom Malcolm used to routinely humiliate, but there was never any signal that Malcolm could be got rid of, that his power base was insecure.

And then it happened. In an absolutely unforgettable scene, a preening Steve approaches Malcolm in the corridor: 'Malcolm, could we have a little chat?' Something is clearly wrong, but it hasn't dawned on Malcolm yet. He can't even allow himself to think what is coming. His face freezes. Steve sits heavily on the corner of his desk, and sighs a sigh of pure pleasure, prolonging the moment of ecstasy. 'Malcolm, the Prime Minister respects you, enormously....' And then it comes, the letter already drafted for Malcolm to sign, the press already reporting his departure. Malcolm, for once, completely thrown, violent, angry, refusing to go quietly.

'Don't you fucking touch that tie. That's Paul Smith, you twat.'

And then, at last, he sweeps down the corridor in his long coat to greet the assembled reporters. But before he does, before he opens the door, he shouts back at Fleming and Nicholson: 'You will see me again...' and To Be Continued appears on the blank screen. I can't wait until the next episode. I can't wait a week. I cant wait for Malcolm's revenge. Because he will have his revenge, and it will be sweet, and it will be absolutely fucking terrible. Steve Fleming is going to get what's coming to him. Malcolm Tucker is going to rise again and if that means taking down the whole fucking government to do it, then that's what he'll do. Tune in. It will be unmissable.

Countries ending in -an

Girls whose lips don't quite fit their faces. They are just a bit too wide, so they move restlessly around, fidgeting, never still. They are almost cartoonishly erotic. Scarlett Johansson is a good example. Watch her lips shyly trying to find a place to hide.

The last fortnight has been all about Central Asia. First of all I went to see a film called Tulpan, set on the steppes of Kazakhstan, a story about family life in a remote farming community. Sounds boring, but was actually really amazing, very funny and incredibly beautiful. Most of the action took place around the family's yurt, and this tiny dwelling lost in the enormous vista of the plain made for some spectacular images.

Then I went to a party the following night and bumped into an old acquaintance from University (fuck, that seems like a million years ago now) who spent a year in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan. He was telling me how tough it was trying to get anybody there to trust, let alone cooperate with an NGO. After thousands of years of being told what to do by so many occupiers and exploiters, it's little wonder the Kyrgyz are suspicious of outsiders, and they have every right to be. Life there is incredibly hard. The gold teeth you see are actually made of iron, painted to look more attractive, they slowly poison the mouth and smell rotten.

I, not knowing anything about the place, but recklessly assuming it was like its neighbours Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, thought it was just another big flat country with lots of farmers and nothing else. But Mike quickly corrected me, and told me about the cities, the work he;d been doing out there and his plans to go back after completing an MBA so he could offer better advice to other charities and aid agencies. He seemed to have that undeniable (by which I mean implacable) American resolve to do good, and do it seriously, that is quite awe-inspiring but also somehow unsettling. But then I often find people who are well organised and have plans unsettling.

Then I got an invitation from, of all people, Jemima, who has returned from Afghanistan, is pregnant, and is now running a small arts business under the aegis of the Turquoise Mountain foundation. I hadn't even spoken to her in three years, and felt guilty, and obviously keen to see her, so I went along to their charity sale at 22, Portsea place. It was a strange experience all round. The place was a private house, decked floor to ceiling in old paintings and drawings that were collected in the first half of the century by some good old boy from West 2.

Around the house were several little stalls with jewellery, carpets, calligraphy and traditional Afghan jackets and dresses for sale. I managed to speak to Jemima for all of about three minutes and just about get out of her a few details about her experience in Kabul before she had to go off and usher some posh old fruits around the Chapans. I wandered around the upstairs and thought about buying a calligraphed Hafez poem in the shape of a peacock, then thought better of it. It was total nonsense and the translation was probably dire.

I managed to cadge a mince pie and a glass of mulled wine (December the 3rd for Christ's sake) and a bit more chat with Jemima about the exhibitions she'd been curating, and about her soon-to-be baby. Then I started to panic because I thought I couldn't possibly just leave without buying anything, and all the bloody clothes and carpets were hundreds of quids worth. I bought a raffle ticket, not to look like a cheap skate, but that clearly wasn't enough, especially as there were only a few other punters there, and they were clearly not short of a bob or two.

There's a certain type of old English couple who come from a very well bred set. He likes to wear a woollen pullover, usually in a dark blue or fawn, over a slightly crumpled check shirt. And he's always sporting a pair of his favourite cords or possibly moleskines, either in yellow or puce. His hair is long and combed resolutely over (he thinks somewhat rakishly). She wears a trim jacket, with a round neck, silver or grey or possibly cerulean, and a long skirt or trousers. She's always heavily encrusted in jewellery, but only the less glittery, everyday kind and has a small and deadly clutch bag. The desired effect is of a pair of hard-working but smart, well-scrubbed-up farmers. But nothing could be farther from the truth, and when they open their mouths of course the game is up. Not that they really want anyone who knows to mistake them for farmers, only the poor confused bourgeoisie, who invariably are taken in.

I scoured the place for anything to buy, but in the end the only item within my price range was the calligraphic peacock. As I bought it, the voice in my head was saying, quite audibly: 'You do not want this. You do not like it. It's a ridiculous waste of money. You are only buying it to impress Jemima, whom you know, definitively, can never have any sexual interest in you, never did have, and is now beyond unavailable. Stop this madness now, put your credit card away and save your money.' But despite my the faultless logic of my interior monologue, I bought the damn thing anyway. I simply couldn't leave empty-handed. The artist smiled oleaginously at me, I hoped not guessing at my predicament, as I congratulated myself on my purchase in a tone of exaggerated self-confidence.

I left feeling queasy, stupid and alone. I think the whole Turquoise Mountain thing is pretty dodgy, and I can't say I really have a lot of time for its founder, Rory Stewart, and the very idea of restoring the cultural centre of Kabul while IEDs and shells are going off all around and the Talban is re-occupying large swathes of the country seems bizarrely romantic to me at best, at worst perhaps even patronisingly unengaged. So I found the experience pretty bizarre, compounded by the fact that I only went really to see Jemima, after not keeping in touch with her for three years, only to find out she's pregnant, getting married, and in a totally different place from when I ineptly tried to tell her she was beautiful. What was I thinking?

And of course there's the small matter of Obama launching his new strategy for Afghanistan and committing an extra 30,000 troops, and NATO's pledge to send another 7000. MacChrystal's a smart guy, but time isn't on his side, and until the Americans give up their obssession with destroying the poppy crop, they'll never significantly reduce the Takiban's appeal to unemployed farmers. Obama can't afford to admit defeat, so perhaps this is a way of extricating himself anf the country without too much loss of face, but I have to say I'm pretty pessimistic about the long-range prospects for Afghanistan, and for the region. They need a miracle now, to avoid either a return to Warlordism or the resurgence of the beardy-men from Kandahar. Not a pleasant choice.

Arsenal got thumped twice in less than a week by Chelsea and then by Man City. Pretty depressing. The worst of it though was not the losses or the lost points, but the effect it's having o morale in the team. In the second half at Eastlands you could clearly see Fabregas and Arshavin's heads go down, as if they knew the game, and the title, and possibly any prospect of success, was already gone. God I hope Cesc doesn't leave in the summer. If Barca came calling, I couldn't blame him, but that would be a desperate loss to the club. Perhaps even the end of the Wenger era (not because I want him to go - as far as I"m concerned he's got a job for life) but surely the board and fans, not to mention the media, would put him under too much pressure if Fabregas left and this team, too, started to unravel.

It's hard to see how England could possibly have got a more favourable draw in the Group Stage of the World Cup. No disrespect to the other teams: USA, Algeria and Slovenia, but we surely have to be confident of progressing to the second round.

Portman's new film, 'Brothers' premiered in New York a fortnight ago. And it looks like a belter. It's been a little while since she made a film I really wanted to see (apart from going to see her), but this looks intelligent, grown-up and exciting. It took about ten seconds of the trailer to remind me of the complete power she has over me. I watched it four or five times, in a trance. The prospect of anyone else ever touching me like that moved further and further away.

The trouble with Roy

Has anybody else fallen back in love with Roy Keane, after his spectacular tirade against the Football Association of Ireland and the 'mentally weak' Irish players and supporters demanding a replay of the World-Cup playoff between France and Ireland? I used to hate Roy Keane with a passion, but you've got to love him for explaining in one-word syllables how football works: 'France are going to the World Cup. Get over it.' Life is unfair. Simple. And as he pointed out, oh so aptly, when Ireland won a very dubious penalty against Georgia during the qualifying campaign and it changed the whole game, there was no clamour to offer a replay to the poor Georgians.

There's only been a huge outcry about Thierry's handball because it was so obvious and because so many people saw it. And it's been prolonged because some self-flagellating Frenchmen, including Arsene Wenger, who should know better, have come out in favour of a replay, too. In case you don't remember, England got knocked out of the World Cup by the most blatant handball in history in 1986. There wasn't a replay then, and nor should there have been. Of course I would be swearing at the TV and screaming blue murder if that happened now, but I wouldn't expect a replay. FIFA, for once, were absolutely right. The referee's decision is final. Sometimes he gets it wrong. That is the game. Deal with it.

Roy, I could kiss you. You are absolutely bloody right. I can only imagine what Cloughie would have made of this hoo-ha, but I should think he would have said something very similar. Probably with extra sarcasm. 'Manchester United in Brazil? I hope they all get bloody Diarrheah'.

The sharper-eyed amongst you will have noticed that Harry Reid got his 60 votes, at least for the motion to allow the Health reform bill to proceed to debate on the Senate floor. It's hard to tell what that actually means for the bill itself, but at least the debate can go ahead. Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu, the two big Democratic hold-outs, finally came on side, and that may indicate that they're willing to play. God only knows what kind of pork the bill will need to be loaded with, or what kind of fanatically complicted trigger mechanism or thresholds the public option will need to contain to get their votes on the amended bill, but at least they're prepared to negotiate.

Joe Liebermann will most likely vote against any bill, and is doing his typical prick-tease act to the Democratic caucus. They should just ignore him, but figure they can't afford to, and he knows it. Which probably leave Reid with a heavily amended bill and possibly 58-59 votes, assuming he can keep liberals like Burrell onside, just short of the 60 he needs for a supermajority to avoid a filibuster. At this point it all gets really complicated, and will probably involve the proverbial 'smoke-filled' rooms (except of course they're now smokeless), and plenty of 'sausage-making' behind the scenes. Reid will threaten to withdraw committee status from Liebermann,

Liebermann will not care, so Reid may try to use the Reconciliation process, but even if he does this he'll need 60 votes, so what that would accomplish is unclear. As House Majority Leader he can require the filibustering senator to speak continuously from the floor to block a bill, and that could get very interesting, if not completely absurd.

All in all, it's a giant pile of wank. But having said that, the wider political pressure on the Senate to pass a bill is growing, and will soon become virtually unbearable. A few clever interventions from Pennsylvania Avenue, ratcheting up the stakes, could yet prove decisive. At the end of the day, you don't want to be cast as the one person preventing nearly 50 million Americans from getting affordable insurance. Even if your name is Jim DeMint. So basically, the signs are now pretty good for a Health bill before the end of the year, which would be absolutely amazing.

Of course the next question is, will it be worth it? That is, will the bill be sufficiently radical to make a difference to the US public debt and the widening gap between healthcare costs and salaries, and will it genuinely provide affordable coverage for almost every American? Only time will tell, but whatever happens, this would be an enormous step towards fixing the healthcare system that currently exists and is getting more cripplingly expensive by the day. Plus it would free Obama to start concentrating more on foreign affairs and boost his political capital at an important time before the mid-terms. There will be a backlash, inevitably, against Democrats in some parts of the country, but it will be bearable, and Dems will still control the House, if not the Senate.

Meanwhile, back in the USSR, a new poll put the Tories only 6 points ahead of Labour and gave a desperately needed shot in the arm to a government that has been struggling to put a foot right since the election that never was and the fucked up photo call in Iraq over a year ago. It's an outlier, and probbaly doesn't mean that much, but all of a sudden confident predictions of a swing that would give David Cameron a mandate and a large majority in the Commons look misplaced. We may be about to see, as other have pointed out, the first hung parliament for a long time. Nick Clegg has already ruled out, or appeared to rule out, a new Lib-Lab pact, which means that a Lib-Con coalition may be on the cards, and with the Liberals way out to the left of Labour, what the fuck will that look like?

Well, basically it will mean that almost nothing will get done for five years. There'll just be too much wrangling about taxes, spending cuts, regulation and so on, not to mention foreign policy, in which the parties could hardly be more diametrically opposed. Labour will dump Brown, and Miliband (D) will get the job and set about a new round of ruthless Blairite tabloid-courting. Cameron's emergency budget will only succeed in producing two years of modest growth, masking chronic underinvestment in the public sector, rising unemployment and a further decline in demand and productivity. After five years an exhausted Tory government will relinquish the reins again to Labour who will come in promising immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and more money for schools. Bish bash bosh. Nothing will really change.

Wiener Schnitzel

Hotel Wandl, Pietersplatz, Vienna. Friday, November 13th

So my colleague was invited to attend this conference on translation in Vienna, but she couldn't make it because she had to go to Oslo instead. But guess what? She suggested the organisers invite me instead because I know a bit about publishing and about translations, and I'm kind of her deputy for all things international and literary, so here I am in the city of curiously-shaped bread meeting a posse of European funders, academics, publishers and translators to discuss the newly-launched 'On Diversity' report, 2009.

The report has been written by Dr Rudiger Wischenbart and his colleagues from CulturalTransfers.org and is an attempt to show the patterns of translation of fiction across Europe and some of the mechanisms by which certain books are taken from one language o another and become bestsellers in several different languages and countries. It's a very impressive document, all the more so considering the lack of publicly-available data on book sales and translations across the continent. In many countries there simply aren't any reliable data sources or services, and in others publishers and booksellers tend to guard their figures so jealously that it's near impossible to find out what has sold and how many copies. Not to mention all the different types of statistics different countries keep on their book industries. Turning them into something coherent and useful is a mammoth task, so it's a really important piece of work.

I arrive in the city at about 19:00, local time, and just have time to check into the plush-looking Hotel Wandl before I'm supposed to go for dinner to meet my fellow speakers. Dr Wischenbart and his assistant, Sabina, have invited us all to a rather traditional Bierkeller on Gluckgasse, the Rienthaler, which does a mean Schnitzel. Around the table are the Doctor himself, Sabina, the other researcher, Jenni, who's pretty in a porcelain kind of way, Vera and Karel from the Centre for East European Book Projects in Amsterdam, Yana Genova, from the Next Page Foundation, Alexander, 'Sasha' , from Serbian booksellers Knijzara in Belgrade, an Italian publisher, and Carina from the Romanian Books Foundation. Quite an eclectic bunch, but they all seem to know each other like extended family and greet each other with long-lost enthusiasm.

I'm in a pretty buoyant mood for some reason, enjoying the fact that I'm an invited guest at some kind of uber-obscure translation conference, and impervious to the usual social anxieties, so quickly tell a few jokes and make friends with everyone. We mainly talk shop, though, and get into a premature discussion of why so few books are translated into English, and I give the whole spiel about the lack of curiosity that prevails in the major publishing houses in London, a line Rudiger seems to approve of.

The panel goes well, especially after Miha introduces me as 'my xenophobic colleague...' his attempt at a joke, to which I respond 'thanks for that introduction...' raising a few smiles. And after I've gone on about the demise of the net book agreement and its consequences and everyone has nodded in agreement, we move on to what the next stage of the research should be and how it should work. I get my key message across, which is what we in England are doing about it, the 'Global Translation Initiative' etc... and there seems to be widespread approval.

Carina from the Romanian Book Institute was also there at the conference. I'd met her very briefly before at the London Book Fair, but she didn't remember, or if she did she wasn't letting on. I found myself strangely drawn to her, her seriousness, even her obssession, with her work, her hardcore smoking habit and her nasal intonation, which was somehow inveterate and sweet at the same time. She seemed like a mixture between a partisan saboteur and a shy little girl, and part of me really wanted to take her home. I found myself involuntarily scanning her ring finger, and then thinking to myself, 'what the fuck are you doing? You only met her a few hours ago. She'll think you're psychotic'.

After a while the fascination subsided and I thought that it was probably just because I was travelling on business in the middle of Europe and felt more than usually alone.

Tomorrow, Sabina, whose sister lives in Hackney, has offered to take me round the city and introduce me to some of her friends, which will make the whole thing a lot more pleasant. There's nothing as boring as being stuck in a city where you know nobody trying to kill several hours before a flight.

I wander around the centre of town for a bit, looking for somewhere to chow down, without much luck, and start to feel very tired and lose my appetite. Amazingly enough, just as I'm about to give up and go to a cafe, I stumble upon an Iranian restaurant which has Zereshk Polo on the menu. Zereshk Polo is probably the most beautiful dish in the world. Chicken, perfectly cooked in a rich vegetable sauce until it melts it's so soft on a bed of rice with hundreds of tiny barberries. The combination is perfect. The berries just pierce the smooth creamy taste of the chicken and add a piquancy that gives the whole thing an extra dimension. It really is wonderful if done right. If you've never had it, find your nearest Persian and go there.

Afterwards I continued my stroll through the windy streets of the city, past window after plate glass window full of chic fashions, high quality tailoring and leather accessories. Row after row of high heels in every colour and every material. A retifist's paradise. Of course, there is no more perfect or fascinating form in geometry or nature than the instep and sole of a beautiful woman's foot, and the shoe mirrors that shape precisely. So it's hardly surprising that I found myself gazing distractedly at the displays of immaculate patent and silk heels from Weitzman and Kurt Geiger, even more distractedly than the girls who adore these glamorous trinkets.

The Big Vote: Part 1

So, Waxman and Rangel's healthcare reform bill (The Affordable Healthcare for America Act HR.3962) passed the House 220-215, with 1 Republican voting in favour, and 39 Democrats voting against the bill. It was always likely to be a very tight vote, but the margin was even smaller than I'd expected, and certainly narrower than I'd hoped, even after the Stupak amendment on federal funding for abortions was added at the last minute following an agreement with Nancy Pelosi.

Now, the HELP committee bill, introduced by Max Baucus, merged with the bill introduced by Chris Dodd, will get a vote in the senate, and this is expected to be an even tougher fight, with Olympia Snowe holding out for a 'trigger' mechanism before she supports the public option, and senators like Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham causing havoc by claiming that the bill is 'DOA' Dead on Arrival. It's going to be a formidable challenge for Harry Reid to line up the 60 votes he needs to avoid a filibuster, but he seems strangely confident at the moment, and so does the White House. Maybe they're just putting a brave face on it, or trying to call the Republicans' bluff - 'go ahead and filibuster us, Motherfuckers, and see how popular you are...'

If the Senate does pass the merged bill, the House and Senate versions will also have to be merged, in a Conference Committee, before the legislation goes back to both chambers for a final vote. Only then can it be signed by Obama and come into effect. So there's still a huge distance to go, still a mountain to climb, but even so, the House vote was a huge triumph for Obama and the White House. They've demonstrated an amazing tactical nous and strategic vision to get healthcare reform this far, further than any administration for the last 60 years, further than many thought possible.

I turned on C-Span late in the 'debate' just as John Boehner was explaining why the bill would endanger Seniors, drastically cut medicare, and massively increase the deficit. In other words, giving out a pack of lies on behalf of his insurance industry PAC buddies. Go on, go and check out his campaign contributors. It's a really impressive list- http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/pacs.php?cycle=2010&cid=N00003675&type=I. Fortunately, after he left the podium, it was free for John Dingell. Jr, who has introduced health reform in every session of Congress since he was first elected, to put the record straight again, which he duly did with great equanimity and concision.

There were then votes on the Stupak amendment, which passed, as expected, and on Boehner's substitute bill, which included virtually no reform to speak of, and was simply a way of channelling mre money to the HMOs. It failed, as expected.

Finally the real vote came, and as the totals in each column crept gradually upwards you could see that it was going to be fucking close, all the way to the end. Considering that as many as 60 percent of the public support reform, it seems amazing that it's so contrversial in the House, but politicians are politicians, and they need those campaign funds from somewhere. Ain't no little old ladies gonna keep them boys in fine suits and private planes. But it did pass, and that's what counts. The only question now is whether Harry Reid has got his numbers right and he hasn't jeopardised he bill by going for a strong public option, too.

If he hasn't, and if a decent bill gets through the Senate, then 50 milion Americans are going to have access to affordable healthcare. The queues of desperate people waiting in line outside football stadia in the middle of the night to be seen by a Remote Area Medical volunteer doctor or dentist won't have to drive from hundreds of miles and wait years just to get their teeth looked at or get a pair of glasses. No more children will have to die because their dental abscesses go untreated for so long that the infection spreads to their brains (don't believe me - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/27/AR2007022702116.html). Nobody will be denied treatment for cancer because they have a pre-existing condition like acne. Isn't it time for the richest country in the world to provide affordable healthcare to all of its people?

I'm from England, so what do I know? After all, Daniel Hannan, no less, that friend of Fox News, and scourge of Gordon Brown, pointed out that the NHS was a 60-year mistake. Well as far as I'm concerned Daniel Hannan can go and throw himself on the mercy of the Glenn Becks and Sean Hannitys of the world, because if I were the Director of Public Posecutions I would charge him with Treason. It's far from perfect, but at least it is an acknowledgement that everybody has a right to a high standard of medical care, regardless of their circumstances. To me that seems an eminently civilised idea, not to mention the bare minimum a state should provide its citizens. I love America, and that's why I find it intolerable that they don't enjoy the guarantee of affordable healthcare that we have long taken for granted - so long, it seems, that people like Mr Hannan can criticise our system with short-sighted impunity.

I don't wish, as some do, to attack America for its perceived indifference to the suffering of some of its poorest and most vulnerable people. I could never doubt the philanthropic and charitable disposition of most Americans (which often outshines our own) towards their neighbours and their communities, but that is all the more reason to hope that they will soon have the healthcare system they deserve. Sunday's vote brought that hope one step closer to becoming a reality.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

In case you haven't noticed - that is, if you've been living on Mars for the past two weeks - today marks the release of a new videogame from Activision called 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2' or MW2 for short. It's expected to be the highest grossing game of all time, and to overtake (by many miles) the record opening weekend revenue for any film. MW2 is a follow up to the massively popular and successful 'Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare' (which, in itself, was the sequel to three previous Call of Duty titles), and had its own celebrity-packed premiere last night in Piccadilly Circus. In the world of video games, and in cultural terms (yes, you snobs) this is an epochal event.

MW2 is a First Person Shooter (FPS - basically you get the eye view of a guy with a gun) in which you can play either as a US marine or a member of the SAS. And, to all intents and purposes, the object of the game is to run around killing as many bad guys as you can. That is what first-person shooters do - what they say on the tin. The excitement comes from seeing if you can stay alive long enough to kill them before they kill you. The genre began with a game called Escape from Castle Wolfenstein, in which you had to fight your way out of a secret Nazi installation, killing SS as you went, through the Doom and Duke Nukem franchises, growing increasingly sophisticated in terms of graphics, sound design and level planning, until today, playing a game like MW2 on the X-Box 360 or the Playstation 3, you could be forgiven for thinking you are actually there, running through the ruined cityscape, dodging grenades and taking out snipers with a blast from your AR-15. It's so immersive it makes a trip to the cinema feel like gawping at a zoetrope.

The game has already been decried by the usual reactionary critics, like Keith Vaz MP, who called for it to be banned because of one particular level in which, as an undercover CIA operative, you are forced to accompany a terrorist leader on a killing-spree in an airport departure lounge. But the comments of Vaz and his ilk are only likely to do one thing - heighten interest in the game. Activision must be paying him commission. From my point of view, of course there's something horribly uncomfortable about a game in which you can machine gun tourists, especially after the Mumbai attacks earlier this year, but I think the game tells us two important things:

One, it's fantasy. We've not been able to get this through our heads as a society ever since literature, films, and games have been with us, and we probably never will, but mentally normal people are able to distinguish between a book, or a film, or a picture, or a game, and real life. Otherwise those works of art and imagination would not have any meaning. They would cease to exist as creative artefacts and they would not be enjoyable because they would offer no escape from the real world. I could play MW2 for months, and I would still never want to kill anybody.

No game, and no book, and no film, could make me more prepared to kill anybody or hurt anybody because they are fantasies, where there are no consequences, where no real harm is inflicted, where the violence is tidy and unaffecting. Whereas in reality causing pain is all too disturbing and horrific. Virtually everybody instinctively undertsands this, and always will understand it. There are some people, psychologically damaged people, who may find it more difficult to distinguish, or who may even become more disposed to commit violenec through exposure to violent games and films, etc... but it's important to understand that even in these cases, it is not the film or the game or the book that makes these people commit acts of violence.

Two, the killing of innocent people is wrong and shocking. It may seem absurd that a game like MW2, which is premised upon high-intensity lethal combat, should contain some form of moral lesson, but the airport sequence is clearly designed to upset and revile the gamer, and to encourage him or her to pursue the objective of stopping the terrorist/ultra-nationalists with even greater determination. Of course, that is not to say that some players won't just see the level as an excuse to spray more bullets around randomly and take out a few helpless civvies, but the game's designers have surely included this part of the game to fire up some kind of righteous anger inside the player's conscience so that they are even more stoked for the levels ahead.

The pleasure of games like this is very simple. It's about adrenaline. It's a rush. The art of the game designer is to make your pulse race and make you want to take out the baddies and feel in danger, on the edge of your seat, the whole time. That's what makes the game absorbing. It activates a very basic adrenal response to danger which floods your cerebral cortex and keeps you hooked. The completion of a mission or reaching safety is accompanied by a release of endorphins (success/reward). The airport level adds to the adrenal response by heightening your sense of danger (your cover could be blown at any time) and at the same time by compounding your indignation at the callous actions of the enemy (making you want to 'win' even more).

What is in many ways so surpising about MW2 and other games of its kind (considered from an ideological standpoint) is just how conservative and doctrinaire they are. There is clearly a profound desire to complete some kind of perceived moral mission among the young gamers of the world. They like the division of the world into good and bad elements, the stultifyingly black and white narrative of global terrorism and even unreconstructed Communist radicalism. They don't want to be jihadis, or anarchists or subversives and bring down the real power, they want to do as they're told, go and kill 'the other' on behalf of their own comfortable, imperial nations. In a very important sense, they don't question this.

Game developers, especially those who create FPS scenarios, are tapping into a very powerful set of narratives about the fundamentally tribal nature of our communities and the unserved need to create a moral polarity between ourselves and those who attack us. It's easy to assume that gamers don't really care who's doing the killing and who's being killed, and often they do like to play on the other side, but the most popular games, by far, are still those in which the ostensible objectives of the game are still backed up by some simplistic moral underpinning. You want to fight for the SAS because you can identify with them, with British forces, and you can't identify so easily with the Taliban, or FARC, or Hezbollah.

Perhaps it's not so surprising. But it does render these games extremely one-dimensional, no matter how good the simulated environment is. What if you were able to create your own rebel movement, based on whatever set of grievances or political allegiances you liked, and topple the governments of Europe and America? Now that, my friends, that would be a game.

Anyway, because I have a Mac, and no copy of Windows 7 to run in Boot Camp, I'll have to wait until the heat death of the sun before Aspyr or someone ports this beauty over so I can join in the bloodletting. But it'll be worth it, just to see the look on that back-packer's face when I come hurdling over the check-in desk with an M-203 pointed right at him.

20 Years on

Monday, Nov 9th

I visited Berlin for the first, and so far the only, time in March 1990. My uncle was stationed in the Kladow army base in what was still then the British sector (South West) of the city. The Wall had only just started to come down, and in many places it was still standing in long, graffitied sections. In Potsdamer Platz and in front of the Brandenburger Tor opportunisitic hawkers were selling model Trabants and pebble-sized bits of wall on plastic stands to the gullible tourists from the US. If you drove a couple of miles in either direction you could pick up whole sections, still intact, fence posts, guard stations, checkpoints. The Russians had already sold their guns, their tanks, their uniforms and everything else they could lay their hands on. By the time the crossings opened, the Red Army in Berlin was reduced to a shadow of its former self. If the order had come from Moscow to invade the West, they would have had to commandeer cars and tractors from the citizens of the DDR. They had nothing left.

It was a strange experience being there in those days. I didn't really understand the significance of what was happening. I was only nine, and I didn't know much about the USSR, communism, or Eastern Europe. The furthest I'd been was France, and part of me just assumed that you could travel everywhere in the world, and that everywhere, apart from the third world, was pretty much alike, that it was basically a series of consumer democracies where you could buy what you liked and the standard of living was similar. I had a vague notion of the Second World, and that Russia (as I still thought of it) was a fairly grey and regimented society. I knew a lot about the Second World War, but next to nothing about post-1945 politics.

So East Berlin was a shock. It was the clothes, and the buildings, and the food, that got me. It's always the clothes and the food and the buidlings that make the strongest initial impression, but in East Berlin they were so drab, so poor, so old, that I knew something strange was going on. Nobody had adjusted to the sudden re-unification of the city (they had only had a few months to get used to the changes, so little wonder) and prices in East Berlin still stayed at Communist levels. You could go round museums for 50 Pfennings, or go to the opera for a couple of Marks, and we did. There was something glorious and otherworldly about it - as if it was a short holiday from ordinary history. I was underwhelmed by the Pergamon altar, supposedly one of the Wonders of the World, but mighty impressed by the Ishtar gate. I didn't even know its full significance then. When I look back on it I can hardly believe that I've walked through it, under the blue clay tiles, still dazzling with their winged lions, the ancient gate of Babylon.

In the Altes Museum I was teased by a group of three French boys, who had that particularly silly but sexually precocious humour that only French teenagers do. One of them put his arm on my shoulder while another touched the nipples of some Roman statue and giggled. I felt upset, but they were only joking. Later we visited the Reichstag, where the bullet holes were still visible on its scarred grey surface, Unter den Linden, Ka de We, the giant department store with, I seem to remember, a whole department full of sausages, Potsdam and Sans Souci with its unforgettable tiered fountains. All around Charlottenberg were the great iron street lamps where Hitler had had deserters hung in the final days of the Battle for Berlin. Over the city hovered the slender TV tower, with the cruciform shadow bouncing from its dome.

The city was not even starting yet to come to terms with its past, to attempt to move forward, it was just breathing a long sigh of relief, after the separation, enjoying a sacred moment of peace, by itself, after the trauma of destruction and division that had lasted so many decades, that had felt as if it would go on for ever.

We drove from Stafford, using a map my uncle had marked up with Post-its and scribbled instructions, crossed at Dover on the ferry and drove from Zeebrugge through Belgium and Holland to the Ruhr, joined the Autobahn and stayed a night in Dortmund West, where my Dad tried to bribe the three of us kids to eat an olive before supper in the restaurant of the empty Novotel. My brother and sister tasted the green fleshy fruit, and promptly spat out what they'd eaten, while I refused to be tempted.

The drive across Germany was enormous, and took us a whole day, despite the lack of a speed limit. By the time we came to the exit for the city, it was starting to get dark, and in those days before satnav, and with very little street lighting, we soon found ourselves lost in the East, rattling over cobbled streets, passing by grey apartment blocks, catching sight of bewildered old women in our headlights, sweeping their front yards in the gloomy evening. It was only with the help of a compass that I'd cleverly stowed that we could tell which direction we were moving in. We passed right by the Brandenburg Gate, and took a scenic tour of the city centre illuminated in a pale green glow, as we made our way gradually West.

How could a child have understood what those scenes meant, those pictures of jubilant Berliners pouring through the checkpoints, standing on top of the wall, hammering at it, chipping it to smithereens? How could I even know what was happening across Eastern Europe, across the Soviet Empire, that the whole edifice was crumbling? I didn't even know what Communism was. I just thought that East Berlin looked shabby. I knew what the Cold War was, thanks mainly to Frederick Forsyth, and that the KGB was a terrifying and dangerous organisation and that they would kill British and American spies in Moscow or in the Kamchatka, but I had no idea what it was about, all of this tension, this repression. It made no sense to me.

Berlin was beautiful, though; incredibly beautiful. Its fragility, its woundedness, made it beautiful. Even I couldn't avoid that. The bizarre architectural mixture of the ultra-precise and ultra-modern with the neo-classical ruins and battered Nineteenth-century splendour. The huge cleared areas that seemed to mask some terrible scar or absence. The Wall itself, the most potent of symbols. The horrible concrete pen that cut one group of people off from another, sealed them in a little enclave. The Death Strip. Ideology made real.

And now, after twenty years, even though the wounds have not healed, and even though re-unification has been fraught with all kinds of troubles and resentments, and even though the past still lies there, buried like an unexploded bomb still to be defused, Berlin thrives again. It lives again. It's probably the coolest city in Europe apart from London. It certainly reminds me most of London, of Shoreditch and Dalston in particular, but also in a funny way of Westminser and Piccadilly, of the South Bank and South Kensington and Kew. It has London's mixture of the creative and counter-cultural bleeding edge with the nobility and grandeur of an ancient capital.

I watched the BBC's archived news bulletin today from the night of the 9th of November 1989, and I cried, because this time I did understand what was going on, and I understood the history of it, the power of it. And the happiness of all those people, freed from the oppression of the state, going to see friends and relatives for the first time in a quarter of a century, going to be reunited with their families, their sadness and their excitement and their dancing and tears and cries for joy were overwhelming.

Quick catch-up

Some brief thoughts:

- On the Royal Mail strikes - totally ridiculous. It's like being back in 1979. What do they think they're doing? And there's something sadly inevitable about the accompaniment of nationwide strikes to the end of a Labour government. I usually have some sympathy for public sector workers in industrial disputes, but this is just suicidal.

- Afghanistan - everyone is now focussing on MacChrsytal's new strategy. And missing the point: this is classic counter-insurgency. The real problems are political, social and economic. Sort out the corruption, let farmers grow poppies and buy their crop, and divide the rural population from the Taliban. Oh yeah, and get India and Pakistan talking to reduce their differences and clear out the ISI. Simple.

- Expenses - any MP who squeaks about having to pay back money should be chucked out in shame. Just get rid of them. They're a disgrace to this country. For once I find myself agreeing with the noisome Kelvin MacKenzie. Perhaps I should take that back? No, he's right this time. Jacqui Smith. Oh Jacqui. What a ridiculous mess. And Legg should have covered flipping and mortgages as well. Of course he should.

- Health Reform - 5 bills marked up and reported out of committee, four of which contain some form of Public Option, which is a red herring anyway. Olympia Snowe might get her way over a trigger mechanism that kicks in if premiums and deductibles don't fall. That wold do for me. The Blue Dogs are showing signs of caving in. Obama's going to swing it, people. Fucking amazing.

- #Balloonboy - Twitter at its worst. A ridiculous hoax that grew out of all proportion. And the internet in microcosm. It can be brilliant, and it can also be totally frivolous and a complete waste of time. And that's what I like about it. It's comical and absurd and just occasionally absolutely blindingly useful and fantastic.

- The Thick of It - a new series of Armando Ianucci's brilliant satire is coming on tv next week. Can't wait for more of Malcolm Tucker's swear-tastic spinmeister: 'I'd love to stay and chat with you... but I'd rather have type-2 diabetes...', 'he's as useful as a marzipan dildo...' and other such pearls of wisdom.

Laters

Leading from the front

I'm going to make a resolution: never to be cynical when one of my colleagues is trying to tell me something or present something to me - at least until I know what they're saying and that I ought to be cynical about it. In other words never to turn up to a meeting or training session and just be negative or defensive from the start.

I didn't realise quite how depressing it is to try to lead something in a big organisation, to try to change attitudes and cultures and take people with you. I'm only just starting to appreciate the scale of the challenge and the amount of work this involves. Lots of people just don't want to know about the Digital and the new economy, no matter how interesting you try to make it or how much you try to accommodate their interests. They just start out thinking it's going to be crap, and guess what? it is crap.

And I've been there, hundreds of times, sitting at the back of the room, doodling in my notebook, taking the piss, or subtly undermining the trainer or the message. But I never realised how fucking annoying and depressing that is until now, when I've been trying to get people excited about the fact that the world has changed, and is changing, exponentially before our eyes and they just want to bitch about it and talk about all the problems and the difficulties and the things that can't be done.

You wouldn't think it would be so hard to get people interested when anybody can now publish anything, or broadcast anything, to the whole world, when it has never been so possible to ask fundamental questions about the nature of communications, culture, art and society as now. But fuck me if it isn't like pissing in the wind. You just get a load of glum 'why do we have to be here?' faces and questions which reflect a feeling of ingrained scepticism and a sense of being deeply threatened by change. Not to mention a complete failure to engage imaginatively with the presentation or the possibilities that digital technology presents.

Mind you, it's just the same talking to lots of publishers, agents and writers. They just don't care about the fact that more people than ever before could write and publish books or read and discuss books, or that the book itself could be something completely different from what it is now. And in that sense, as artists, they are completely moribund. I used to feel sympathetic towards people who would lose their jobs or their businesses because of the onset of the digital world. Now I just think they're idiots. The writing has been on the wall so long it feels as if Moses brought it down from the mountain. Even I've cottoned on to it. A technological wave is about to cash over their heads and wash them away, and I won't be sorry to see them go.

Not that it is really going to be like that - it'll never be that drastic, of course. But it's just the horrifying scale of the opportunities they are missing that upsets me. There are so many things that people with a bit of gumption and imagination could do, that would have such profound benefits for the arts, that to see people dismissing the whole thing as a passing fad, a bubble of stupid hype, is pretty soul-destroying, especially when you're the one trying to turn the whole tanker around (and a couple of others, to be fair). By the time the message gets through it will be too late, I'm sure, and a whole new generation of people who've grown up with this stuff will already be charging ahead. The stick-in-the-muds will be totally irrelevant. Why am I even bothering?

John Harris has an interesting piece from the Tory conference in the Grauniad today, explaining how intellectually stimulating and alive the debate was, and what a contrast it was with Labour and the Lib Dems' conferences which were mournful and amateurish respectively. He's hoping for an intellectual revival on the Left. I'm not holding my breath. The sad thing about the Conservative Party is that it is full of incredibly bright people, with huge brains and brilliant analytical skills, eloquent speakers and attractive and subtle thinkers, but they are all wedded to an ideology that blinds them to the need for an active and supportive government in many areas of public life.

When David Cameron criticizes the new rules on supervision of young people and CRB checks, I have to agree with him - it's a nonsense - and when he attacks unnecessary bureaucracy in the registration of immigrants and work permits, I agree with him, but when he applies exactly the same approach, apparently without stopping to think, to areas like the management of the Health Service or Education I can't help feeling he's driven more by an instinctive sense of the need to tear down quangos wherever he finds them than any real knowledge of what would improve both systems. And the same is true of public spending. Of course the debt needs to be brought under control, but the really important thing is to drive up tax receipts, and that requires a sharp return to growth, which cannot be achieved in the face of immediate and heavy public sector job losses.

So it's all a bit confusing really. I hate Labour's appalling slide into authoritarianism, I don't trust the Conservatives to escape the destiny of their own political DNA, the Liberals are even more anaemic than they were under Ming Campbell and Charles Kennedy (hard to believe, but true), and the Greens, well, fuck, they're the Greens. So there's really noone to vote for. If I lived in Luton I'd vote for Jeremy, but that's personal, rather than political. I know he's a good thing, whichever party he represents. The same can't be said for too many prospective MPs, sadly.

I no longer believe in abstention. I used to be (ha ha) apolitical, or so I thought, a long time ago. Jack talked that nonsense out of me. It's too important not to care. But I've got a long way to go before next May. So come and get me, boys. I guess I'm a floating voter. And I am open to bribes. Maybe I'll get focus-grouped on Newsnight. Fuck. That would be totally absurd: 'Yeah, well, I'm an anarcho-syndicalist really, no, come to think of it I'm more of a Trotskyist crossed with a late Nineteenth-Century Whig... '

If you're going to the North Country, fair...

Leeds, West Yorkshire, 20:45

Soldiers in the classroom, every child made to wear a tie in school, Churchill back on the curriculum. Welcome to England in 2010. It's Back to the Future all over again. Michael 'milquetoast' Gove, Shadow Schools Secretary, and a 'one-man think-tank' according to party colleagues, unveiled his vision for Education reform today at the Tory Conference in Manchester. He blames the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Education quangos and liberal teachers and education thinkers for what he calls 'decades of failure' in the schools system in Britain. And he wants to turn the clock back, right back. I'm only surprised he didn't announce a return to blackboards, inkwells and chalk.

Of course, I'm being unfair, the real meat in his proposals come in the form of opening up the Academy system so that private groups can set up and run their own not-for-profit schools. It's not a bad idea on the face of it - unleash some energy and innovation by letting people take control, decentralise, use the wisdom of the crowd. But will it work? and more importantly, how will it work? Well, for one, the Swedish boffin who invented the system and deployed it in his own country, thinks it will fail unless the schools are allowed to turn a profit. I'm certainly no expert on schools, and I have no idea what will happen. But all it really proves is how very New Labourish the new Conservative party really is.

Had a certain Tony Blair still been in charge, by now he would surely have introduced a similar policy. It was he, afterall, who introduced city academies, to much naysaying from the opposition and education groups. And he himself admitted latterly that he should have increased the pace of reform, and its scale. That is basically what the Conservatives are doing. Their fiscal policies, which attracted praise for their honesty and courage this week, are remarkably similar to Labour's own plans - they would just be implemented sooner, and involve marginally larger cuts. Both parties are battling, as every commentator has observed, to show who is prepared to curb public spending quickest. It doesn't feel like an auspicious time to be working for a quango, and Gove's promise to 'cut them to the bone' was enough to send a shiver down my spine.

But then, it would hardly be any different if, by some unforeseen combination of extraordinary happenings, Labour is returned to power. They'll do the same, just more gradually. Of course, they don't really have a lot of choice, and the speed of the reduction in the deficit is an important, not a trivial matter. But it's still important to recognise that public debt is not as important as investment and unemployment. The return to higher revenues has to be the government's highest priority, not just cutting a little bit of overspending here and there. I just hope that, when they're running the red pen over those AME figures they don't even spot the line for Culture, Media and Sport, which is so miniscule it hardly counts anyway.

I'm in Leeds for a digital technology workshop for our staff, a workshop that I devised and pushed through with HR's money. Unfortunately I didn't have any idea how much trains to Leeds cost, so I got a rude shock at the ticket machine when I had to pay over a hundred pounds for an off-peak return. I'm not even sure if my boss will sign off my expenses form, and to be honest I wouldn't blame him - I should have booked well in advance. But on the other hand, it's a big hit to take just to do my job. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the train got stuck for 70 minutes, yes 70 minutes, just outside Kings Cross because the one in front broke down. We had to reverse back to the station and take a different track. Jesus. So, hungry, cold and tired, and with a pitiful trickle of bandwidth on the train, I found myself a hundred miles north of civilisation, two hundred quid lighter of pocket, and looking forward to a tough day tomorrow.

I suppose I should be thankful I've still got a job. I probably won't by this time next year.

Conference season

In the meantime, domestic politics here in the UK has suddenly started to heat up again, and for once it's quite interesting. The Tories, approximately 16-20 points ahead in the polls, feel as though they are marching to certain victory, especially since the Sun decided to endorse the party this week. Reportedly after David Cameron (a la Blair in 1997) visited Rupert Murdoch and supped aboard his private yacht. George Pascoe-Watson, interviewed on Newsnight, said that The Sun had finally run out of patience with the Government and had given plenty of warnings over the last five years (over Afghanistan, Europe, immigration, etc...) that they had failed to heed. Now, he said, it was time to switch allegiance to the Tories, who, he claimed, could deliver better for the country.

Of course, what's really going on is that Murdoch smells the writing on the wall for Labour and he wants to be seen to back winners. Of course it helps that Cameron and Osbourne have assiduously courted him and Jeremy Hunt has implicitly supported James Murdoch's criticisms of the way the BBC is run. But really Rupert just wants to catch the mood of the country and sell more news. Neither party would ever seriously consider policies which infringed on his business interests, and both would welcome his patronage with open arms, so the choice for Rupert is not really significant. Apart from anything he lives in America, where he's content to visit the Fox studio and tell his viewers that Obama could be dangerous for the country - read 'bad for business'.

Anyway, there was a lot of pantomime shredding of the Sun at the Labour conference, none of which means anything. The Sun's backing might end up being worth one or possibly two percentage points, but newspaper endorsements rarely have a significant impact on voting patterns or intentions. The fact is that Labour is stuck because they've been in for three terms and people want change. They don't really care about the shape of change, they just want to give the other bunch a go. David Cameron is more charismatic than Gordon Brown, but people aren't that stupid or that fickle. It's Brown's unopposed election - the source of his power - that has made him so unpopular, not the fact that he's partially-sighted or a dull speaker.

What he also lacks, perhaps most crucially, is a sense of the importance of political gesture, and the inability to coin popular policies and frame the debate in terms of these initiatives, rather than allowing the momentum to be taken by the opposition. Blair could never fail to come up with something headline-grabbing when he needed it. Brown can hardly manage it in a major policy address. Somehow, the Prime Minister and the cabinet have managed to let the focus shift from their role in staving off a depression and the rescue of the banks to the inflation of public spending and the need to slash public sector jobs/Departmental Expenditure Limits.

Yes, public spending is unhealthily large, but that is principally because of one thing - the banking crisis and the decision to nationalise (effectively) some of Britain's biggest commercial lenders. It isn't the public sector that's to blame for our current woes at all, it is the very apogee, the apex, of private industry. They're the ones who fucked up our finances and made us push our debt through the roof. If you want to blame someone, blame Lehmans and RBS and HBOS and HSBC. Oh yeah, and the FSA and the Bank of England and the Treasury who were all asleep at the watch, but don't blame investment in the NHS, schools, and the other spending departments. In case you're interested in these things, Public Debt as a percentage of GDP was 49.8% in 1997, and fell to 44.2% in 2007. By the end of 2008 Debt had risen to 52% of GDP. I wonder why? Oh yes, because in December we spent all that money on the banks.

So while the execrable Taxpayers Alliance and other right-wing pressure groups call for a slash-and-burn approach to government spending (notice they didn't protest handing over billions of public money to private investors), and tell us how bloated and inefficient the public sector is, they forget to mention that public spending was under control (though it still needed to be trimmed long-term) until a bunch of hyper-greedy bosses and shareholders done us up like a kipper and then came crying to HMG. It's called socialism for the rich, and they can get away with it because we cannot afford to let the banks fail and because there is an enduring myth that the private sector in all areas and at all times provides greater efficiency and better value than the public sector. And I just don't even know where to begin with that one.

It's all a bit depressing.

On the plus side, though, watching Lord Mandelson's emergence as the real power behind the throne and the supreme showman on the political stage has been very enjoyable. I can't really admire him, but you have to enjoy his supremely oleaginous performances in interviews and at the Conference. His speech: 'If I can come back, we can come back...' was pure theatre, in fact it was almost Vaudevillean. He so clearly loves every minute he spends in the limelight, basks in it. And that enjoyment is strangely infectious. But he's not just slimy. He's actually a very very powerful communicator and he has a very strong grasp of strategy.

Of course what lets him down and has let him down in the past is his judgement on certain questions of public perception, a kind of disdain for the public's wish to see that their politicians are bit like them and that they are above reproach in everything they do. There has to be the pretence of humility, the appearance of a relatively normal lifestyle, to aspire to the very top. And perhaps he'll never have that, but then he'd be much more boring, and actually much less honest, if he did.

It does feel now though as if he's absorbed all the lessons of his earlier career and somehow he's won out over all his doubters. He's still there, after all, after Blair and Campbell and the others are long gone. It's the delicious sense of self-satisfaction that emanates from him, the sneyd superiority he does better than anyone else, that makes him such a joy to watch. And apparently he actually has been a very competent minister. He certainly saved Gordon's bacon pretty much single-handed and now he really is the one, you suspect, who runs the show. Amazing when you consider the hostility he faced among Labour activists and MPs through much of the 90s.

Well, it may not last very long, but Mandy's moment in the media spotlight is certainly providing some very, very good television. And who knows, he might still be able to narrow the gap enough to snatch victory away from the Tories. I'm not sure I really care, either way - except for very narrow selfish reasons (I imagine the Tories will probably abolish as many quangos - read NDPBs as they can in the first hundred days), but the whole thing will be a lot more colourless without Peter Mandelson.



Poetry recommendations (not that you care): 'The Autumn Born in Autumn', selected poems by Matthew Mead, Anvil. 'Selected Poems', Aldo Vianello, Anvil. 'How To Build a City', Tom Chivers, Salt

Oh, and if you didn't happen to catch Brian Blessed's performance on 'Have I Got News For You' a few weeks ago, you missed one of the funniest things that has ever happened on TV. Fortunately some kind soul has put it on Youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1gwVIhJ8II The man is a total genius. He puts on one of the most amazing displays of comic energy, timing, theatrical performance and showmanship I've ever seen. I don't usually like this kind of acting, but he does it so brilliantly, with such bravado and incredible use of slapstick humour you just can't help falling for it. Hislop and Merton just fall about laughing, not to mention Alan Duncan, who can hardly stop giggling. Utterly utterly brilliant. He should be on every week.

The Healthcare Fight

Folks, all you need to know about the healthcare battle in the US is that Barack is so far ahead of the curve on this it's scary. I was starting to get depressed in August. I was starting to worry that the Senate was going to sink this thing, that the President and his advisers had misread the situation, that they'd caved in too far on the Public Option and that their naive attempts at bipartisanship would simply allow the Republicans to split the reformist coalition with their delaying tactics and their inevitable last minute blow-off. But I shouldn't have lost my faith. This guy is good. Boy, is he good.

The basic plan - set out some broad principles and let Congress write the damn bill (or several competing versions of the bill) - is a masterstroke because it manages to appease the inflated egos in Congress without staking too much on specific details that can then be thrown out. It gives the Republicans room to make havoc without derailing the three main points in the final legislation (i.e. universal or nearly universal coverage, no rescission or withdrawal of coverage for pre-existing conditions, and competition to drive down the cost of premiums in the long term).

Frankly, if Obama gets even two-thirds of this through in the bill, it will be a triumph. A triumph of political calculation, tactical thinking and good old-fashioned campaigning. Health reform eluded Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, and even Ted Kennedy didn't manage to get it done.

Critics on the left and the right have attacked the President for perceived weaknesses, or inaction, or for compromising too much. But through it all he has remained calm and astute and followed a well conceived strategy for getting the main elements into a bill that will pass Congress. He's used subtle pressure where necessary, and let his critics hang themselves by exposing them when they've gone too far in their attacks. He knows that the public trusts him more than they do the legislators, so he can still bully them when necessary. But, just as impressive as his power has been his restraint, his refusal to get too involved in the squabbling, even when progressives have threatened to withdraw support. He's called their bluff.

The obstacles facing him when he began this campaign were monumental. Even though the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress it was clear that Republicans would probably not support any attempt at reform because they simply saw healthcare as an opportunity to defeat the President and damage the rest of his term. And senate rules work against the majority by providing for a filibuster that requires a supermajority to overcome. This naked political opportunism is beneath the GOP, but sadly they are not the party they once were, the party of Lincoln, or even the party of Coolidge or Nixon. Today's GOP is a shallow parody of its former self.

If you want to read more about this, I recommend Nate Silver's analysis at fivethirtyeight.com or the sardonic but acute commentary from electoral-vote.com which updates every few days on the most recent developments. And for those who are disappointed with Obama's administration so far, they should remember what he's trying to undo: eight years of cataclysmic failure of leadership culminating in the worst economic crash since the Depression, two foreign wars costing trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, a nuclear-armed Iran and one of the most inauspicious political alignments in the Middle East for years, climate change that is already verging on the disastrous, the virtual implosion of Pakistan, an aggressive Russia, and a radicalised and hostile opposition that is simply trying to defeat him at every turn instead of trying to pass legislation that's in the interests of the country or the world.

Considering what he's up against, he's done an absolutely blinding job so far, and just the scale of his ambition and his determination is impressive, let alone his tactical political and rhetorical skills. So for God's sake get off his back you morons and help the guy try to save the planet before it's too fucking late. I've stopped reading the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, which I had enjoyed during the election, because they've both lost any sense of proportion or perspective. Even the NYRB, one of my favourite publications, is threatening to get down on BO, and it's not that he doesn't need constructive and progressive voices on the left to keep his agenda on track, but Guys, seriously, have you learned nothing from previous Democratic administrations? Politics is the art of compromise - that's what the President gets, and you, apparently, don't.

If you can't present a united front to fight the Republicans and the conservatives, how do you ever expect to hold it together long enough to get reform done? It's no wonder they feel bullish again. They can smell blood because us liberals are having hissy fits over the finer points of a bill that still might not see the light of day - not if they have anything to do with it. So get over yourselves and start kicking some Elephant butt.