How would Obama govern?

In a recent article headed Obama - is America ready for this dangerous left-winger? Gerard Baker, the United States editor of The Times, makes a powerful and coherent case against Barack Obama as a future president of the United States.

Baker sums up his attack by suggesting that Obama is one of those left-wingers who believe that America should be governed more like France, with an administration combining high taxes, much greater restriction of the free market, and "vehemently protectionist" economic policies.

I am an admirer of Baker, and read his articles, particularly on American subjects, avidly. The following is not intended as a refutation but as an alternative interpretation of the Obama phenomenon.

Though I do not accept Baker’s somewhat morose conclusions, at the same time I do not believe Obama would be moderate or “centrist” in the usual sense. Rather, I believe that his particular form of radicalism simply does not conform to the older nostrums of the left so accurately described by Baker. Nor do I believe that Obama’s radicalism is original (it has precedents in — amongst others — Reagan and Clinton, and runs parallel to certain policy features of Blair, Cameron and Clegg in this country).

The heart of this radicalism is that it accepts that the free market is the great creator of wealth, and to a considerable extent the best distributor of wealth. There are numerous examples of Obama advocating the free market in his book The Audacity of Hope, ground which I have already covered in my earlier posting Can Obama Think? The broader aim of this new radicalism is not to create a high-tax, restrictive, state-oriented economy like France, but rather to adapt or “rig” those powerful market forces to achieve left-wing or liberal outcomes.

The original models, explicit or implicit, for this new radicalism are the classical liberals such as Gladstone, Cobden and Bright. Gladstone, the towering intellect of 19th century politics, combined left wing views (a genuine concern for the less well off, anti-imperialism, Irish home rule) with an appreciation of the virtues of the free market which would make Ronald Reagan seem like a communist. This connection between liberal social ideals and a free market economy was not an historical anomaly, but one which is based in the clearest logic. The fact is that the free market, far from being conservative in nature, is radical and dynamic, and in practice suits those who seek radical change far better than those who seek to preserve the status quo.

How did the free market become associated with the right, with a conservative agenda? A rupture between radicalism and the free market occurred at the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of the Labour Party, which combined left wing radical or social ideas with a strongly statist, centralist economic policy. This contradiction between social and economic policy has haunted British politics for the last hundred years.

In the US, the liberal left took a similarly strongly interventionist turn in economic policy with Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Since those times, in a kind of inverse reflection of this rupture between social and economic policy on the left, the centre right has combined a conservative social stance with a somewhat lukewarm and patchy advocacy of the free market. Many classical liberals, unable to countenance the authoritarian aspect of the Labour party in Britain, or a centrist, interventionist Democratic party in the United States, strayed to the right. Despite the influx of proponents of laissez faire into the centre-right parties, significant sections of the right have always been suspicious of the revolutionary aspects of the market. This suspicion of the free market is entirely logical for a genuine and committed conservative, and this in turn leads me to my next point.

I suggest that Gerard Barker, and other distinguished centre right commentators, should become used to the fact of a major realignment of politics which has been taking place slowly and inexorably over the last two decades in particular. Baker thinks that a left wing politician must automatically be opposed to the free market. It is a belief which was reasonably accurate until the latter part of the twentieth century, but it no longer sits well with the facts. To give only two examples, how can this view be reconciled with a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who not only presided over an era of high economic prosperity for America, but one in which the books were relatively balanced? Baker’s more traditional distinctions between left and right must also attempt to come to terms with another major anomaly, a right wing Republican President, in the form of George Bush, who has overseen a massive increase in state spending, a huge bloating of the federal debt, and who has taken the American economy to the edge of recession.

In terms of the new radicalism, however, both these major developments are not only compatible but predictable. As in Gladstone’s day, radicals are reverting once more to stronger advocacy of the free market — though their interpretations of the free market are different from traditional right-wing notions of laissez-faire. At the same time, in America at least, the right wing is returning to its older patterns, in which a somewhat authoritarian moral view of the world, and a commitment to the preservation of the status quo, take precedence over the workings of the free market.

In social terms at least, the centre right is somewhat different in Britain, where David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, advocates a more liberal social agenda, greater tolerance towards minorities and a strongly “green” agenda (“Vote blue, go green” as the Conservative jingle merrily proclaims). It could be argued that Cameron’s combination of liberal social ideas with a small state and a thriving free market places him closer to the classical liberal tradition than traditional Tory policies.

To summarise, then, I submit that an astute younger generation of liberal leaning politicians accepts the predominance of the free market, and instead of attempting to provide a large countervailing state, seeks to work with the grain of the free market to achieve its liberal social objectives. I believe there is plenty of evidence that Obama belongs to this latter group.

If Obama wins the election, let us see to which pattern he conforms. Unlike Mr Baker, I do not fear “this dangerous leftwinger” or believe he will generate an America in the image of France. I suspect instead he is far more likely to follow Bill Clinton in harnessing the free market for a liberal agenda and will place a greater emphasis on balancing the budget than the present Republican incumbent.

Nor, on another contentious issue, do I think that he is bound to bring back the troops from Iraq at the earliest date. His clear opposition to starting the Iraq war gives him moral credit in the eyes of many, but will not prevent him from behaving responsibly and pragmatically in pursuing American foreign policy. And Mr Baker should not forget the extraordinary shift in the foreign perception of America which would result from having a black president. To give only one example, Africa remains an economic basket-case. If anyone can shame and compel the corrupt elites of African politicians into behaving more responsibly and democratically, it will be an American president whose father was a Kenyan of the Luo tribe.

Should Obama become president, be prepared for a radical ride, certainly - including a variety of initiatives to harness market forces for liberal ends and a significantly different emphasis in foreign policy. But, unlike Mr Baker, I personally won’t be worrying too much about America becoming France 2.

Free the movie industry - abolish exclusivity clauses

In the wake of the recent screenwriters' strike, I should like to propose a relatively simple piece of legislation which I tentatively submit could have the most benign effect on the quality and variety of films available to the public.

But first, let us consider some background. I became aware of what I consider to be a deep problem in the film industry in 1994, when I sold the rights of my screenplay The Rationalist, based on my novel of the same name, to a large and powerful American studio. More than twelve years later it is no closer to being made, and the chances that it will ever be made are minimal.

The particular story of why it should have slipped into obscurity and virtually disappeared need not concern us here. What I propose to address instead is the extraordinary fact that the vast majority of literary properties whose film rights are bought by studios or production companies are never made into films. It is difficult to obtain precise data, but, according to various accounts, including the best sources of industry insiders, only 10% of all literary properties whose rights are bought by producers or studios are ever filmed. In other words, for every contracted book or screenplay which is filmed, there are nine contracted books or screenplays which languish unmade.

From the perspective of producers and studios, there are good commercial reasons why this situation should have arisen. Purchasing screen rights is relatively inexpensive compared with putting the film into production. Making a film requires a significant and often major investment. Only those screenplays which the producer believes will justify this heavy investment should be made. The remainder (in fact the large majority) will lie on the shelf unused.

This is more than merely another variation of the age-old theme of flowers blushing unseen, however. The point is that these contracts, because they are almost invariably based on the purchase of exclusive rights, are actively preventing other film versions being made of the properties under contract. The exclusive rights generally act in perpetuity or, more accurately, until the author has died and his work is out of copyright. Thus the strange fact is that the chief impact of most film contracts is that they do not help to make a film, but actually block the vast majority of contracted film properties from ever being made.

On closer examination, there are two sides to the average film contract. The first (which I support) occurs when the owner of a literary property negotiates permission to a second party (a producer or studio, say) to make a film based on the property in question. The second, darker side, is that almost inevitably there will be incorporated in that contract a number of clauses aimed at preventing any other party from making a film based on the same material. I believe that these two aspects should be separated, treated entirely differently, and that for the benefit of the entire film industry the incorporation of exclusivity should become, if not illegal, then non-enforceable.

To some extent this argument runs counter to my own deepest beliefs. As both a liberal and an advocate of the free market, I believe people should be free to make any contract they like, and to dispose of any rights they possess in any manner they choose. For this reason I would not advocate that the proposed legislation should act retrospectively to nullify the exclusivity clauses in any existing contract. But I do believe that a change in the law which made it clear that, in future, the exclusivity clauses in a film contract would no longer be enforceable in a court of law, would have a profound and almost wholly benign effect on the industry.

Most importantly, it would open up that vast future store of unmade films which would otherwise be kept in the dark through exclusivity contracts. Unlocking this huge store of prohibited material would give a new lease of life to the industry.

There are, I admit, good counter-arguments to my proposal, which should be considered here. Traditionalists will say that the market supplies its own release mechanisms. For example, films which producers or studios do not make are sometimes put in “turnaround” — the rights are offered to other studios or producers. This, it might be proposed, is a natural method of releasing the property from the grip of a particular production party, which does not wish to make the film, to another party which does. It is a reasonable argument, in theory at least. The problem is that there is no guarantee that the party to whom the producer sells the exclusive rights will make the film either. There are numerous examples of exclusive film rights which have passed from one studio to another over and over again without a film being made. In practice, the occasional “turnaround” does not alter the fact that nine out of ten film properties which are contracted and bound by the usual exclusivity clauses are never made.

The deeper question is, should producers and studios be allowed to deal in contracts which effectively prevent other versions of the film from being made? Isn’t this a clear example of restraint of trade? It would be much better, I would argue, if producers were able to negotiate and purchase the right to make films — the positive rights, if you like — but not the negative rights, the rights to prevent others from contracting with the owner of those rights to make films from the same material.

Do these exclusivity contracts actually benefit the producer or studio? I for one do not believe so. The current chief problem which I submit the proposed new legislation should resolve, to the benefit of all parties, is that existing film contracts are based on the contractual forms of an earlier era, when the main outlet for movies consisted predominantly of a relatively static and finite number of cinemas. During that era, in order to protect the rights to show films in a highly delimited number of outlets, the tradition was to base film rights on exclusivity.
However, it could be argued that more recent developments in visual media render this traditional view redundant. In our era the emergence of new digital TV stations, satellite television, the internet, DVDs and other developments has led to a massive expansion of types of media and world viewer base for movies. Together these developments mean that the international market is potentially infinite.

This in turn means there is no pressing commercial need to protect through exclusivity. In a rapidly expanding media market of almost infinite extent, it doesn’t matter how many variations of a particular film may have been made, the only significant limit to commercial and critical success of a movie is the quality of the work and its capacity to entertain.

Traditionalists will argue that a fundamental shift in the way film contracts are treated in law will have unpredictable and potentially detrimental consequences. They will suggest that the principle has not been tested, and that alone is sufficient reason to view the proposed legislation with suspicion. The market is not passive, they will continue, and it may react in unexpected ways in order to counter such legislation.

I believe these doubts can be set aside, and genuine critics reassured. The chief elements of the system which I advocate already exist in the case of material which is out of copyright — I am thinking in particular of material in which the author died more than seventy years ago. Here there is no exclusivity, and the results are truly liberating. In this second market — the market in properties out of copyright — we can observe the powerful benefits of the system I am proposing.

Take the case of Jane Austen. When a producer or studio makes a new movie version of Pride and Prejudice, say, there is little or no fear of the existence of earlier adaptations. If the new version is effective, and entertains an audience, it is on a level playing field with all the other movies in the world. This means that fine narratives such as Pride and Prejudice can be constantly reinterpreted, viewed afresh, and that a huge variety of adaptations are possible. We — in particular the international audience for movies — are all immeasurably enriched by the freedom to make variations of her work. Whatever our view of her original books, we are far more likely to find something which we would like to see — from more classical versions which attempt to be true to the original such as the much-loved BBC series with Colin Firth as Darcy, to the celebrated 1940 MGM movie starring Greer Garson, to more free-wheeling or wide-ranging adaptations such as the successful series of films based on Bridget Jones’s Diary — which overtly utilises Austen’s central plot, even to the extent of calling its male hero Darcy.

While we are on the subject, consider too the rich variety of screen interpretations of another Austen classic, Emma, ranging from various film and TV versions to the entertaining and well-reviewed teenage movie Clueless, in which the original story of a beautiful but somewhat arrogant match-maker has been entertainingly transformed into a modern coming-of-age parable.

If Austen were a contemporary writer whose works were subject to standard exclusivity contracts, little if any of this array of rich offerings would be available to entertain the film-watching public. Instead, if we were lucky (remember that 90% of film properties under contract are never made) we would perhaps have a single screen version of one of her works, which (since she published only six full novels in her life) would be a very poor return on a great body of literature. This single film, “protected” from alternative versions by the usual exclusivity clauses, might or might not be any good. And that would be that.

In the case of work which is out of copyright, the absence of exclusivity has an extraordinary liberating effect on the range of interpretation which a strong narrative offers. Because of this, it is not perhaps surprising that the most successful Hollywood screenwriter in history, judged by the number of movies made of his work, is not some modern master of screenwriting such as William Goldman, but a certain William Shakespeare, who was born more than 400 years ago.

The great narrative virtues and vivid characterisation of Shakespeare’s works do not need my advocacy. But there can surely be no doubt that the number and variety of interpretations of his oeuvre which are now available have been immeasurably enlarged by the fact that his work has not been subject to the dark, inhibiting arts of legal contracts based on exclusivity. Instead we can enjoy, in the case of a single play such as Romeo and Juliet, offerings which range from a classic MGM version starring Moira Shearer and Leslie Howard, to more recent variations from talented directors such as Franco Zefirelli and Baz Luhrmann, not to speak of freer interpretations which include one of the greatest musicals of all time, namely West Side Story. Here again is an object lesson that the absence of exclusivity liberates an author’s work for the cinematic arts.

The example of Shakespeare should also teach us, once and for all, that the great medium of cinema is not a finite market, and that the presence of one film does not limit the success of another variation on the same theme. Cinema is not a zero-sum game, in other words, in which one film displaces another, but an expanding sum game.

At the risk of labouring this point, take two classic movies based on the same Shakespearean play. Laurence Olivier’s great Henry V, produced in Britain at the height of the German blitz during the Second World War, was also a paean to patriotism. When 28-year-old Kenneth Branagh’s version appeared in 1989, was its potential audience limited by the presence of the earlier film? On the contrary, the brash young pretender’s attempt to make an alternative to Olivier’s screen classic merely added zest to its reception. Did one film limit the audience of the other in any significant manner? The opposite, surely. Having thoroughly enjoyed Branagh’s darkly brutal and rain-sodden version, I cannot have been the only one to go back and admire afresh Olivier’s wartime film. In hindsight both works are widely regarded as superb contributions to cinema in their own right. They do not displace but, rather, burnish one another, as certain sporting events are burnished by great competing champions. Above all, they are a lasting monument to the values of not being satisfied with just one interpretation, however great it might be, but of allowing a thousand flowers to bloom.

The clear and obvious lessons to be drawn from a highly restrictive market dominated by exclusivity is that it is deeply impoverished relative to a free market in which exclusivity plays no part. I believe that if we legislate effectively, such legislation would represent the start of a benign revolution not only in cinema but in visual media in general. Furthermore the revolution (which I believe is now long overdue) would be an entirely logical response to the rapid expansion of visual media outlets and audiences over the last several decades. In the 21st century, the main obstacle in bringing quality entertainment to as wide an audience as possible is that despite an unprecedented expansion of media, the range of content remains highly limited.

Almost everyone would benefit from such legislation. Writers and owners of literary properties would know that selling the film rights to one production party would not represent their last chance of making a viable film; they would retain the right to negotiate and licence rights to other parties. Directors, too, would not live in fear of capricious critical opinion which likes to state that since their movie version is the only version, it must be true to the spirit of the book. On the contrary, by working in an environment where other variations are possible, directors would feel they have much greater latitude to make their own individual cinematic interpretations – in other words, not to act as the guardian of the literary work, but to make simply the best film that they can. For the rest of us, the mass of general moviegoers, we could be assured that – as in the case of Shakespeare and Austen – both more films and a wider variety would be made for our entertainment using the finest modern narratives.

The only people who perhaps would suffer are those studios and producers who might continue to attempt to prevent others from negotiating rights to make films on the properties they have contracted. But perhaps, knowing that their exclusivity clauses would be likely to be overturned in a court of law, that would be poetic justice.

In the 21st century, it is surely difficult to contradict the argument that the world of the exclusivity clause is a false world, based on outdated fears and deeply flawed premises about the market. It assumes that the outlet for movies is small, fixed, finite, whereas in practice it is enormous, constantly expanding, effectively infinite. It assumes that by preventing other films from being made, it protects its own material. In practice, it merely confines the great majority of that material to darkness. It assumes that one film on a given subject satisfies the market, whereas in practice a good film on any subject whets the public appetite for an author’s work and increases interest in the subject matter.

In addition, the presence of one film on a particular subject is more often than not a fine marketing platform for another film on the same subject. The example of Austen and Shakespeare, whose cinema presence has flourished mightily in the absence of exclusivity contracts, demonstrates that even in the case of multiple versions of a single work, the public demand for effective and entertaining variations is effectively without limit. And that is the heart and burden of my essay. When we abolish the shadowy world of exclusivity clauses, we abolish an entire false world.

No grand subsidies, no national or state or regional interventions would be needed to generate this benign revolution, merely a simple and precise piece of legislation which would allow exclusivity to be challenged and overthrown in the courts on the grounds that the practice is greatly detrimental to the free development of the cinematic arts.

There are other examples in history of clear and well-judged interventions in markets whose benefits have been profound and unambiguous. To mention only one, the Plimsoll line, ensuring that ships were not dangerously overloaded, has had clear and almost wholly benign effects. Far from inhibiting the market by making ships safer at sea, the effect of the Plimsoll line was not only to save countless lives but to significantly increase international marine trade.

Make exclusivity agreements in movies unenforceable in law and eliminate the practice entirely from future movie contracts. Let the quality and entertainment value of a movie be the chief criteria of success. Set the movie industry free.

Can Obama think?

In my last post, Can Obama write?, I noted that Jonathan Raban has recently suggested that Barack Obama is unusual among modern politicians in encouraging debate, and being open-minded and pragmatic about political solutions. According to Raban, Obama promises an administration which is genuinely participatory, built from the base up. While I am inclined to agree with this analysis, I believe it is only one of several possible perspectives on this remarkable new political force, and not necessarily the most percipient or revealing one. At the risk of provoking my readers, I’m going to suggest an alternative means of considering Obama’s position and potential importance in the political world. I would submit that my analysis depends upon a set of assumptions which are in turn based on an attempt to understand much of the political development of the last one hundred and fifty years in both British and American politics.

This analysis begins by proposing that the late Victorian era, in which Gladstone, Cobden and Bright were dominant figures, was a golden age for Britain relative to the rest of the world — an age of industrial power and associated political influence which Britain would never again equal. British politics were unusually healthy because such dominant political figures and thinkers combined “left wing” social progressive attitudes (Gladstone’s particular interest in bettering the poor, his anti-imperialism, and his support of Irish home rule were examples of such progressive views) with a free market economic philosophy of great perceptiveness and rigour.

To such figures, the free market as a concept was the creation of brilliant Scottish Enlightenment radicals, and in their view certain variations of the free market provided a far better means both of creating and distributing wealth than could be achieved through major state intervention. Gladstone not only opposed high levels of income tax but opposed income tax in principle, as an unfair burden on the honest labours of men. He favoured purchase taxes instead as a fairer means of accruing state revenue. During his time as Chancellor, he managed to cut income tax by more than half, proceeding by various stages from 10p in the pound to 4p in the pound, though to his great regret he never managed to eliminate it entirely.

The association of radical views with free market methods is far from arbitrary. Philosophically, libertarian social views emphasising the predominance of the individual conscience were (and still are) highly consistent with the economic notion that the individual should be allowed to spend what he earns as he wishes.

The burgeoning of the Labour party in the early twentieth century — combining socially progressive views with a centralist and authoritarian economic platform — resulted in a major rupture between social and economic policy. In large part as the result of Labour’s rise, the Liberal party lost power. For the best part of a hundred years until the present era, British politics consisted of a Labour party who were socially liberal but economically authoritarian, and a Conservative party who were conservative in social policy, but favoured a broadly libertarian or free market economic policy. Both the right and the left, according to this view, suffered from deep internal contradictions between social and economic policy.

There are signs that politics is being realigned once more in favour of the “classic liberal” conjunction between progressive social policy and free market methods. Tony Blair, for all his faults, perceived that the great weakness of the Labour party was its centralist, statist economic policies. His abolition of Clause 4 — and with it the injunction that the state should control the “commanding heights” of the economy — was a defining moment in the New Labour movement. The direct result was to free Labour of its authoritarian economic shackles and enable it to legislate for a modern world of expanding global markets.

The Conservative party is also evolving towards a greater consistency of social and economic policy, though its own history is to some extent the inverse of the Labour party. In the case of the Conservative party, Margaret Thatcher had applied free market principles during the 1980s, but the Conservative party was still held back from progressive social policy by a morally restrictive set of social assumptions. This morally authoritarian and prescriptive aspect of Tory policy (unfortunately and disastrously epitomised by John Major’s “Back to Basics”) combined with sexual scandals and political sleaze to render the Conservative vulnerable to New Labour. The result is that the Conservatives have been out of office for more than a decade. In large part, the Conservative leader David Cameron’s subsequent analysis has proved correct. His shift in favour of greater tolerance towards minorities and his introduction of a range of progressive green policies have not only helped to “decontaminate” the Conservatives but have helped to outflank Labour as a force for progress. In other words, by various reforms the Conservative party has aligned itself with a progressive libertarian outlook in social policy which is philosophically consistent with its underlying liberal or free market economic policy.

It could be argued that the two great American political parties until now have been similarly affected by a rupture or disjunction between social and economic policies. The Republican party, though a complex coalition of factions, has been characterised by a combination of social conservatism (epitomised for example by anti-abortion, anti-gay social views) with libertarian or free market economic policies. In an inverse mirror image, the Democratic party has combined relatively liberal social policies with a more statist and centralist economic policy characterised by a greater reliance on federal tax and spend.

Raban’s view that an Obama Presidency would represent a genuine reform of the old Democratic statist top-down administration in favour of a more pragmatic and open base-up administration is reasonable and plausible, and is a useful political model in discussing the differences between a potential Clinton and an Obama administration. But I should like to submit that there is another, perhaps more wide-ranging difference between the two — namely, that Obama represents a return to a philosophically consistent set of policies in which liberal, tolerant and inclusive social policies are aligned with free-market methods.

For those who doubt the free-market aspect of Obama’s policies, I would suggest his book The Audacity of Hope offers numerous examples. The chapter on “opportunity” is particularly interesting.

Calvin Coolidge once said that “the chief business of the American people is business,” and, indeed, it would be hard to find a country on earth that’s been more hospitable to the logic of the marketplace. Our Constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty. Our religious traditions celebrate the value of hard work and express the conviction that a virtuous life will result in material reward. Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models, and our mythology is steeped in stories of men on the make — the immigrant who comes to this country with nothing and strikes it big, the young man who heads West in search of his fortune.

Obama is unambiguous, too, about the overall benefits of the free market:

The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history. It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services — electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances — that are still unattainable for most of the world.

Obama not only accepts this pro-market history, he welcomes it and plans its extension and enhanced operation:

The bankruptcy of communism and socialism as alternative means of economic organisation has only reinforced this assumption. In our standard economic textbooks and in our modern political debates, laissez-faire is the default rule; anyone who would challenge it swims against the prevailing tide.

Obama’s central vision of the purpose of government is not to supplant the market with state appropriation and state redistribution, but to “open up opportunity, encourage competition, and make the market work better.”

Hamilton and Lincoln’s basic insight — that the resources and power of the national government can facilitate, rather than supplant, a vibrant free market — has continued to be one of the cornerstones of both Republican and Democrat policies at every stage of America’s development. The Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the interstate highway system, the Internet, the Human Genome Project — time and again, government investment has helped pave the way for an explosion of private economic activity.

Government intervention should aim to improve the workings with the market economy, not set itself in opposition.

… through the creation of a system of public schools and institutions of higher education, as well as programs like the GI bill that made a college education available to millions, government has helped provide individuals the tools to adapt and innovate in a climate of constant technological change.

As a liberal and progressive, Obama advocates a comprehensive range of “safety net” measures to help all those who are rendered vulnerable by the economy, but these too are designed to work with the grain of the free market, rather than provide some important countervailing force against the dark forces of capitalism.

Aside from making needed investments the market can’t or won’t make on its own, an active national government has also been indispensable in dealing with market failures — those recurring snags in any capitalist system that either inhibit the efficient workings of the market or result in harm to the public. Teddy Roosevelt recognised that monopoly power could restrict competition, and made “trust busting” a centrepiece of his administration. Woodrow Wilson instituted the Federal Reserve Bank, to manage the money supply and curb periodic panics in the financial markets. Federal and state governments established the first consumer laws — the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Meat Inspection Act — to protect Americans from harmful products.

It would be possible to continue almost ad infinitum to make the case that Obama is a strong advocate of the free market, with appropriate safety devices, but my purpose in this essay is to point to a larger pattern.

I submit that during the last thirty years or so, two great developments have overridden the usual left-right political definitions. The first is the increasing triumph and acceptance of tolerant liberalism (considered “left-wing” in the older political currency) as the foundation of social relations. Second, in the economic sphere, the triumph of the free market over state-ordered systems both in generating and distributing wealth has been widely accepted. Most astute democratic politicians who genuinely seek a popular electoral mandate align themselves in one form or another with both these definitive developments.

From this perspective, it is possible and plausible to portray Obama not as a unique and messianic figure offering a vast but vague sense of hope, but rather as a highly intelligent and astute pragmatist who has absorbed and internalised the most important lessons of contemporary social and political change. These lessons suggest that the politics of the future, particularly in established democracies, will consist of a combination of left wing liberal social attitudes combined with the calculated use of free market methods to achieve social objectives.

It could be argued that such a combination, far from being arbitrary or a result of random development, is not only philosophically consistent (both social liberalism and the free market are based upon high degrees of individual responsibility and personal freedom) but is also responsive to modern trends in favour of greater choice.

In Obama’s rise and rise, therefore, I submit we observe this combination in its clearest and most trenchant recent form. Not unlike Gladstone, he holds powerful and sincere progressive social views, but instead of seeking to impose radical solutions through the traditional heavy hand of state bureaucracy, he seeks to pursue those aims by carefully improving market workings where possible, “rigging” the market where necessary to generate the desired social result.

Can Obama think? I believe he can. If he triumphs over Clinton and (in due course) McCain to become President of the United States, his accession will not merely be a welcome change in personal style, but will also represent the assertion of the new and revived progressive political alignment over the old.

Finally, however, why should these somewhat abstract distinctions matter? There is one subject which increasingly arises during interviews with voters, and which some people believe should not be raised, largely because it is not constructive. (That’s too bad: we discuss what we like on this blog.) In America, certain major political figures — John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King — have been the victims of successful assassination attempts. Others, such as Ronald Reagan, have survived such attempts. It cannot be denied that a significant number of US voters have claimed during interviews that they are nervous of voting for Obama because of that underlying threat.

For what it is worth, I believe the chances of assassination increase somewhat if the political figure in question is regarded as messianic, polarising, and therefore appears threatening to some sectors of the population. Again, for what it is worth, I don’t believe Obama is any of those things. I agree with Raban that he is primarily a voice of reason and inclusivity. Rather than characterise him as unique, unprecedented, the harbinger of a new and wholly original political vision, I suspect he, and his popular image, are better served if he is portrayed as a leading figure in the wider political movement to marry liberal and left wing social views with a knowledgeable and fluent utilisation of the free market.

Unfortunately, it only takes one unbalanced person and a lapse in security to generate tragedy. But for the reasons above I don’t believe Obama is a likely object of assassination attempts, or at least not any more than any other popular democratic politician. Even if he does not become President in this particular election — he is, after all, still very young for a major political figure — the strong likelihood is that he will continue to advance and prosper, and in due course will make his profound mark on both American and world politics.

Can Obama write?

Barack Obama has been creating headlines in one of the most strongly contested American Presidential nomination races of all time. His personal charm, his optimistic speeches and often high-flown rhetoric have all combined to create an attractive public personage.

My own interest is to investigate, from a largely literary perspective, how well Obama can write. His two published poems, composed when he was nineteen, seem to me highly impressive — pungent, expressive, and lyrical. I should add that one of my particular interests or obsessions is that style should follow content. Accordingly, I am not looking for the showy phrase or the crowd-appealing flight of rhetoric. What interests me is the way that a subject is investigated, expressed, summarised.

My own rapid conclusion, after reading only a few pages of his book The Audacity of Hope was that he writes beautifully, economically, with few signs of that occasionally showy high rhetorical style which seems to characterise some of his barnstorming election speeches. No doubt this is intentional and expected — the function of the speeches before enthusiastic crowds is to attract attention, cement loyalty and raise support; the function of Obama’s book is to provide a more considered framework for what may otherwise seem a mere concatenation of opinions.

Obama is something of a political theologian. The usual breeding ground for politicians in democracies is the law. This is for good reason. The law is the base of human action and the protector of rights of the common man. Even Gandhi was a barrister.

Obama was voted president of the Harvard Law Review, the first black president in its 104-year history. He holds high formal qualifications for intelligent discussion of legal matters. But there are surely very few who can express complex matters of religion or individual belief with such sureness and lightness.

It is a truism that we Americans are a religious people. According to the most recent surveys, 95 percent of Americans believe in God, more than two-thirds belong to a church, 37 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people believe in angels than believe in evolution. Nor is religion confined to places of worship. Books proclaiming the end of days sell millions of copies, Christian music fills the Billboard charts, and new megachurches seem to spring up daily on the outskirts of every major metropolis, providing everything form day care to singles mixers to yoga and Pilates classes. Our President routinely remarks on how Christ changed his heart, and football players point to the heavens after every touchdown, as if God were calling plays from the celestial sidelines.

The passage flows beautifully, building to its climax in the last sentence, one which encapsulates, humorously and ironically, the meaning of the previous sections. It is vivid and clear. Written from the perspective of a purportedly religious man, it contains a refreshing element of self-awareness and self-criticism about the degree of religious overzealousness he observes in many of his fellow Americans. At the same time it is affectionate and respectful. To bring all these things together, with such apparent effortlessness and ease, is the mark of a first-rate writer.

This is a relatively light passage. Where Obama is particularly impressive is the massing of argument, using language precisely. He discusses the multi-enthnicity of modern American society:

In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America. As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.

Another example of this easy vividness occurs when Obama expresses the apparently optimistic view that racial prejudices, though they may remain below the surface, are nevertheless loosening:

I maintain, however, that in today’s America such prejudices are far more loosely held than they once were — and hence are subject to refutation. A black teenage boy walking down the street may elicit fear in a white couple, but if he turns out to be their son’s friend from school he may be invited over for dinner. A black man may have trouble catching a cab late at night, but if he is a capable software engineer Microsoft will have no qualms about hiring him.

One of the virtues of his style is that he brings clarity to difficult subject matter through the evocation of individual examples.

I cannot prove these assertions; surveys of racial attitudes are notoriously unreliable. And even if I’m right, it’s cold comfort to many minorities. After all, spending one’s days refuting stereotypes can be a wearying business. It’s the added weight that many minorities, especially African Americans, so often describe in their daily round — the feeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that as individuals we must prove ourselves anew every day, that we will rarely get the benefit of the doubt and will have little margin for error. Making a way through such a world requires the black child to fight off the additional hesitation that she may feel when she stands at the threshold of a mainly white classroom on the first day of school; it requires the Latina woman to fight off self-doubt as she prepares for a job interview at a mostly white company.

He is also able to write with a certain irony about the world seen from the perspective of privilege. As a US senator, Obama was allowed to travel by private jet. One of the most interesting passages occurs when he describes the seductions of private jet travel, the circumventing of all those trying times at airport arrival and departure — the crowds, the screaming children, the bureaucratic delays, the endless queuing, all supplanted by a private jet waiting for your arrival at an airport with the patience of a chauffeur-driven limousine. He evokes the sensual pleasure of being conveyed to one’s destination with luxurious ease and efficiency. The plane waiting for him is a Citation X, “a sleek, compact, shiny machine with wood panelling and leather seats that you could pull together to make a bed anytime you decided you wanted a nap”:

Then the plane took off, its Rolls-Royce engines gripping the air the way a well-made sports car grips the road. Shooting through the clouds, I turned on the small TV monitor in front of my seat. A map of the United States appeared, with the image of our plane tracking west, along with our speed, our altitude, our time to destination, and the temperature outside. At forty thousand feet, the plane levelled off, and I looked down at the curving horizon and the scattered clouds, the geography of the earth laid out before me — first the flat, checkerboard fields of western Illinois, then the python curves of the Mississippi, then more farmland and ranch land and eventually the jagged Rockies, still snow-peaked, until the sun went down and the orange sky narrowed to a thin red line that was finally consumed by night and stars and moon.

The prose functions as perfectly as the described plane, with a fine metaphor of “the python curves of the Mississippi” thrown in. We learn that the particular allowances which allow senators to travel by private jet are, however, in due course curtailed, and Obama realises with a strange relief that in certain respects he prefers to be mixed in with humanity, not least because his mind feeds most happily on the interaction with ordinary people, despite the fact at his next passage through an airport a child spills his orange juice copiously on the senator’s shoes.

But it is the abstractions of the constitution and law which most interest him, and which he obsessively attempts to interpret. He writes of the contributions that religious leaders have made to American democratic structures. He makes the profound point that the separation of church and state, the secularisation of the state, arose not only through the agency of intelligent Enlightenment intellectuals, but also through the fears of unorthodox or evangelical preachers that a state religion would persecute them and reduce their own freedom to propose their particular divergent form of faith. At the same time, Obama argues:

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of the church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Obama’s solution to the problem of the “conflict” between religious and scientific practice is not facile or simple, but it is carefully considered and clearly expressed.

For those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do, such rules of engagement may seem just one more example of the tyranny of the secular world over the sacred and eternal. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Almost by definition, faith and reason operate in different domains and involve different paths to discerning truth. Reason — and science — involves the accumulation of knowledge based on realties that we can all apprehend. Religion, by contrast, is based on truths that are not provable through ordinary human understanding — the “belief in things not seen.” When science teachers insist on keeping creationism or intelligent design out of their classrooms, they are not asserting that scientific knowledge is superior to religious insight. They are simply insisting that each path to knowledge involves different rules and that these rules are not interchangeable.

If we are inclined to think this is easy to formulate or express, I would argue that it clarifies a truth that has eluded Richard Dawkins, for example, who believes that religion and science are in direct conflict, and that it is the sacred duty of scientists to keep creationism or intelligent design from the classroom precisely on the grounds that the two systems are indeed in perpetual confrontation.

Obama himself is highly aware of the dangers posed by religious extremism:

Politics is hardly a science, and it too frequently depends on reason. But in a pluralistic democracy, the same distinctions apply. Politics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. Moreover, politics (unlike science) involves compromise, the art of the possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

I hope the reader will forgive me for interpolating a personal political credo. For what it is worth, I loathe the worship of individual politicians, and the last thing I would wish to do is to hold up Obama as an example of yet another messianic leader. Progress, to my mind at least, consists of the decentralisation of power, the binding of Leviathan, the extension of individual choice. I hate the messianic, not least the form of populist messianism exemplified by the Kennedys and the Clintons, in which particular groups (“women”, “blacks”, “Latinos, “gays”) are identified, courted, and promised a combination of revenge and restitution in return for granting the would-be saviour wider powers. It would be a fine thing if that type of deeply divisive, rabble-raising politics were set aside. Obama gives every impression of doing precisely that. If these few pages convey any message at all, I hope it is the one I received from reading the book — one of a sharply refined perception and a capacity for moral persuasion, a highly pragmatic application of abstract truths, and a genuine interest in extending the power of individuals over their own lives. If Obama breaks any mould, it is that terrible and ancient one in which politicians deliberately patronise certain sections of the populace in return for exercising a range of increasingly arbitrary powers over people’s lives.

After finishing this piece, I noticed in the Independent newspaper today (11 February 2008) a reference to an article by Jonathan Raban on Clinton/Obama, entitled We are fighting the wrong battles. I have several reasons for admiring Raban. I think he is a brilliant essayist and a fine novelist, and though he has taken up residence in Seattle, he comes from Lymington, my own home town (what higher praise can there be?), where his father was the vicar. Raban begins his piece by reporting on a bitter dinner-table quarrel he witnessed between an admirable woman and an intelligent and usually self-effacing African-American retired professor on the relative importance of voting for a female or a black presidential candidate. It is Raban’s thesis that these differences, so widely touted in the media as central to the Clinton/Obama rivalry, are in fact superficial and even irrelevant. Instead, the important distinctions between the two presidential hopefuls are ones of character. Raban ends his piece by emphasising the profound contrasts in political style, and in particular Obama’s love of debate, his capacity to be influenced by argument. Compared with the centralising, micro-managing Hillary Clinton:

In Obama one sees — as one never sees in Clinton — a catholic, open-minded intellect working in real time, and he seems admirably unashamed of his own uncertainty …  As a memoirist, he showed a remarkable capacity to comprehend imaginatively the lives of other people, in Africa and Indonesia as well as the US, and you can see that gift at work in his exchange with questioners. Obama offers the prospect of a first-among-equals administration, more flexible, more empiricist, more imaginative and less ideologically driven than any in recent history.

And, yes, Obama can write. His writing serves his evolving political views effectively and accurately. Long may he flourish.

Barack Obama's early poems

Like many of us, I've been fascinated by the rise and rise of Barack Obama. I wanted to find out whether there was more than a personable young politician who (according to many in the media) had a facility for speaking a brand of hopeful-sounding rhetoric. The figure I watched on television seemed to have further dimensions: a peculiar grace, a sense of being easy in his skin, a degree of diffidence which occasionally borders on superiority or arrogance, an exceptional directness and honesty - in other words, a much larger and more complex figure than the standard press descriptions. Since the beginning of the elections and caucuses for the Democratic nomination, I've been suggesting to anyone foolish enough to listen to me that he would overtake Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination, even though at the time he was trailing her by more than twenty points.

I also predicted that McCain would win the Republican nomination. But if the two end up fighting for the Presidency, I have absolutely no idea who will win. I suspect it will be an extraordinary contest. Both are independent figures capable of appealing to non-aligned voters and what is sometimes called the centre ground.

Over the next couple of weeks I intend to post two more items on Barack Obama, the first, on his literary ability, will be called CAN OBAMA WRITE? and the second, considering his political ideas, CAN OBAMA THINK?

Here, meanwhile, are two poems published when Obama was nineteen.  In my opinion both are highly promising, but Pop is by far the more powerful and complex. Obama's father, a Kenyan, left when Obama was two years old, and Obama had little further contact with his absent father while a child (though it seems he re-established contact later with both his father and his father's family). Meanwhile Obama's mother re-married, this time to an Indonesian. For a number of years Obama lived in Indonesia with his mother and step-father. When both the political environment (the tyrant Suharto had come to power) and the domestic environment began to deteriorate (it seems Obama's stepfather, out of fear, refused to even discuss the political situation) Obama was sent to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. His mother joined them after a year. 

Obama's relations with father-figures are therefore complex, to say the least. He lacked the presence of a biological father, and his relations with his Indonesian stepfather appear to have been limited, if not minimal. In his book The Audacity of Hope he admits that he experienced a strong sense of adolescent rebelliousness and his relations with his maternal grandfather were strained. In certain respects the poem Pop seems to reflect a child's complex yearning for a father figure. Given the youth of the writer, it seems to me a remarkable achievement.

POP

Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
I stare hard at his face, a stare
That deflects off his brow;
I'm sure he's unaware of his
Dark, watery eyes, that
Glance in different directions,
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,
Fail to pass.
I listen, nod,
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,
Beige T-shirt, yelling,
Yelling in his ears, that hang
With heavy lobes, but he's still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He's so unhappy, to which he replies . . .
But I don't care anymore, cause
He took too damn long, and from
Under my seat, I pull out the
Mirror I've been saving; I'm laughing,
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face
To mine, as he grows small,
A spot in my brain, something
That may be squeezed out, like a
Watermelon seed between
Two fingers.
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his shorts that I've got on mine, and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shink*, my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; 'cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop's black-framed glasses
And know he's laughing too.

* ("Shink" may be a typo, but the poem is reproduced as published.)


UNDERGROUND

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

The Gherkin - Foster's masterpiece

For several years I have been working on a poem which began as a relatively short piece on the Gherkin, Norman Foster's iconic architectural design. But it slowly began to expand into a longer and more ambitious work on London, with the Gherkin as a talismanic centrepiece.

One of things that fascinates me is how quickly, silently and completely the Gherkin has become accepted as a loved and definitive London landmark. It was officially opened in 2004, but it seems to have been there far longer. One explanation which occurred to me as soon as I began to think about it was that the unique shape of the building seems to find its place so easily because it is a hybrid between the two dominant shapes of London's skyline - the dome of St Paul's cathedral and the standard oblong skyscraper. If you instruct a computer design programme to begin with the dome of St Paul, and then "elongate" it upwards towards the height of a skyscraper, you would arrive at a shape very like the Gherkin.

Not long afterwards I saw Foster being interviewed on television about the Gherkin, and the interviewer, a well-known architectural critic, made exactly this point - that the building was in part at least a witty intermediate shape between St Paul's and a skyscraper. Foster evinced genuine surprise. He said the thought had not occurred to him until then - though he admitted that he quite liked the idea once he had heard it! The chief reasons for the Gherkin's shape, Foster continued, were ergonomic and environmental. Its curved and rounded form had much more to do with creating benign wind effects in the relatively confined space in which it was situated, and with regulating the building's internal temperature in an energy-efficient manner.

Whether or not the fact that the shape wittily and slyly reflects the shape of St Paul's played any conscious or unconscious part in its design process, I still suspect that is one of the chief reasons why it sits so gracefully on the London skyline, almost as though it has always existed there. Personally, I don't much care how Foster arrived at its shape; the fact is that he did. In an environment in which much modern architecture - particularly where the design is so bold and unusual - is treated with suspicion, if not hostility, the Gherkin is one of the most universally admired and loved modern buildings in the world, and every time I see it I am grateful for it.

Meanwhile, I hope the poem entertains you.

GHERKIN - a poem about London

I

Strange tower, half-way between
the dome of St Paul’s
and a right-angled skyscraper.

Take a computer programme
and extend a dome upwards until it achieves
the same ratio of height to width
as a standard city tower block:

Foster’s quiet masterpiece, like a mushroom
organically grown from London’s hidden psyche
calmly asserts itself —
City’s dome, icon of wit.

The master affects never to have considered
the shape from anything other
than a private aesthetic
and the classic necessities
of function. He was aware
of the strange effects of winds
hitting flat surfaces
deflecting upwards and downwards
gusts descending
like a williwaw
to the pavement below
knocking old ladies off their pegs
overturning dustbins
whipping paper and debris
through desolate spaces.

He wanted, he says
to avoid the strange urban blasts
that howl down from angular shapes.
And so he configured a building
rounded in cross-section
where the air flow was even and peaceful
pinching the base a little
so spaces would not concentrate
where pedestrians walked.

The building was environmental
in another sense too:
computer-controlled windows
opening and closing
gently rotating with the sun
like the leaves and petals of flowers
causing air to circulate naturally
through an interior
of green gardens

with only a faint whirring and clicking
like a thousand camera shutters.


II

In the great fire of London
a crouching, medieval city was destroyed
in a fireball of narrow wooden streets
the conflagration lasting three days and three nights.
And although Wren, that genius —
Royalist and Catholic —
attempted to impose an aristocratic order
a geometric grid of streets
and vast triumphal avenues
what rose instead
came from the heart of the usurping merchant class
a city in which form followed function.

London, she breeds
iridescent visions —
Chaucer and Donne and Milton.

Prophesying Jerusalem
William Blake in his revolutionary bonnet rouge
perceived light through branches
observed the systole and diastole of social order
celestial creatures in trees
sustaining his reverie.


III

Angel, unfold into the air;
take the form of summer light
over Ackroyd’s sickly, pullulating life
Sinclair’s detailed and subversive mythology
Eliot’s eructation of unhealthy souls
into the torpid air. Leave us behind
that London of the urban imagination —
Whistler’s Chelsea, dark rooms with prostitutes
and a painter’s leering interest
in Jack the Ripper —
pulling horrors from the river
under the searchlights of the police boats
the body flashing in black light:

London of Mosley’s Blackshirts
confronted by the anger of East End Jews and radicals
in the Battle of Cable Street.

Mosley himself, a former Labour Minister
handsome, articulate, plausible
advocated a government which would bypass
bureaucracy and Parliament
ally itself with youth
promising to strike a clean pose
facing only the future:

an early Cool Britannia.


IV

After the German bombers had gone
London was nothing more
than a smoking ruin
around St Paul’s
miraculously preserved dome.

Who could foresee, six decades later
after the IRA’s fertiliser bomb
destroyed the Baltic Exchange —
violence seeding new life —
those unlikely partners
commerce and urban ambition:

Swiss Reinsurance
and an eccentric London mayor
who worshipped foreign tyrants
and South American caudillos
from Cuba or Venezuela
with a fig leaf of Marxism
over their private parts.

Add into the mixture
the necessities of enclosing office space
and there arises over the city
in a position which can be seen from
Deptford and Southwark —
Shakespeare’s bailiwick
that place of rough watermen
lewd women, bear-baiting and brothels —
a sublime and graceful shape.

City of invisible earnings
paper fortunes, electronic transfers
commerce inextinguishable;
when consumed by flame
it rose again, twice —
not by royal edict or government fiat
but by Adam Smith’s invisible hand:
not as in Hausman’s Paris, with a rigorous grid
but street by street, through property developers
with names like Bond or Frith
whose greatest contribution
to visual and aesthetic order
was to prescribe a certain style of building
on the land they owned.

So from its beginnings the city created itself
sui generis, independent of the state —
layered life, refuge of unusual souls
city of immigrants, dissident intellectuals —
Chaucer the Controller of Customs
continental visitors, Voltaire, De Tocqueville
refugees and critics of Nazi rule —
Popper, Hayek, Gombrich, Pevsner, amongst others —

city of irrefragable freedoms
of innumerable races and cultures
standing silently teeming
above country or nationality
coolly tolerant, reflecting that movement
from Magna Carta onwards
that dispersion of power away from the state:

nobles above the king
merchants above nobles
universal suffrage for men
and women.


V

“‘Ere, get out of the way, you Berkshire Hunt.”

Richardson the gangster, put away in clink
was criticised in The Times for his habit
of extracting people’s teeth and nails
without their permission.
Studying for a sociology degree
while in prison he wrote
an angry response to the letters page
complaining that reports about him were inaccurate
not least since (he vociferously argued)
those whose teeth and nails
he had so casually removed
were not “members of the general public”
as had been so grievously alleged
but were instead — in his own words —
“bona fide criminals”.

City of anonymous adulterers
Mistresses, toyboys
Promiscuous interracialism

city of independent womanhood
minorities, eccentrics

& those most severely disciplined
by internal visions —
poets, writers, artists

creatures of night.

In Soho clubs and drinking holes
Francis Bacon liked to assert
“I am not one of those poufs who uses makeup”
though he liked being whipped by rent boys
between his forays
at the canvas. In other places

a quiet Mecca of pleasure-seekers
worships the little gods
in clubs where the heaving mass
of figures sways in concert
under strobe lights.


VI

If function leads form
here it sits
reflecting with perfect equanimity
the two predominant shapes of London’s skyline
equidistant between them, yet uniquely its own;
an ironic sculpture, elegantly achieved.

To those of us who are older
used to sixties concrete, urine-stained stairwells
the detritus of a modernist movement
united in patronising the common man
affecting to despise the market
(which is merely the common man writ large)
determined to inflict a brutalism
of bunker-like buildings
and soulless tower blocks
on the undifferentiated mass

here it stands — a stone’s throw
from the polished metal vertebrae
service systems and flying extrusions
of the Lloyds building —

shimmering under variable cloud.

We wonder at its purity
like a single thought:

its strange and subtle shadow
over London’s boroughs.


VII

Industrious bees swarm against the blue horizon
spiderworks and gantries
with the strange detachment
that accompanies wealth
an engine of the global economy

claiming to be an antidote at least
to Britain’s insular attitudes:

“fog in the channel; continent isolated”:
a counterweight to continental repressions
and bloody revolutions.

Roaring boys and girls on the stock market floors
on finding that union of heaven and earth
dark multitudes of angels and demons
cloud shadows over plains
travelling in curved glass
swaying

yielding youth to acquisition

delivered by bus
or underground
to who knows what terminus.


VIII

It requires, said Camus, a rare vocation
to be a sensualist
searching for just that solitude
that we seek in cities.

In a brief effulgence of sunlight
on a walkway by the Thames
warm bodies of women push infants in prams
observed by punks
in tattooed indifference

witnessed in turn by a London Eye —
that elegant, self-financing public project —
whose most salient feature
is that it was not created
by a politician or a bureaucrat.

On the steppes and red deserts, hooded figures
gather like locusts, ready to swarm.
Cities fall beneath their advance —
Constantinople, Rome, the gates of Vienna —
driven on by Mongol generals
or the written word
of flesh-hating prophets, yet

promises of death
and unlikely resurrection
appear no more substantial here
than images in an Imax cinema.

Instead, let us fight fire with fire;
if London’s heart
were eaten out again
by the hellfire of fundamentalists —
eyes, brains, sweetbreads, marrow bones —
they shall rest uneasy
in the certain knowledge
it shall become their own Golgotha

corrupting them with tolerance
as the City itself rises again.


IX

Here it stands
at 30 St Mary Axe
like the borough’s response
to the hierarchical
grandiloquent structure of St Paul’s —
that monument to classicism
religious conservatism, royal absolutism.

The Gherkin’s gentle reproof
is neither too high nor too low
not as tall as the National Westminster tower
(which shines appropriately gold at dusk)

standing slightly off centre
yet still dominant

cheerful, calm, ambivalent
above a silent ferment
of subversive energy
in our liberal
implacable
international city.