HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE

A Hostage Situation

On Monday morning a couple of police officers turned up at St Peter’s House, and rather apologetically explained that they had received a report that hostages were being held in the building, and asked whether they might take a look around.  Between us, the PDT girls and I unlocked as many doors as we could and they wandered around. I warned them that a self-help group session was in progress downstairs in the Hall, but said they could just open the door and peep in. Perhaps the trauma of having uniformed police officers peering in at their meeting was responsible for the fact that when the group left they hadn’t put the furniture back to normal, they hadn’t turned the water boiler off, and they hadn’t locked the front door! And the police wandered off without saying goodbye, which was a bit strange. I realised afterwards that I wasn’t clear whether it was supposed that we were holding some innocent citizen hostage, or whether we were meant to be the victims. Either way, they didn’t seem to have treated it with great seriousness, as they said the report had been made several days earlier (which since a Sunday had intervened made it hard to see how someone could be incarcerated) but I suppose they were doing their duty. Afterwards we speculated as to which particular mischief-maker might have invented this story, but didn’t reach any conclusion.

Irish Eyes

It was fun to go along to the Maida Hill Irish Festival on Sunday, even if the first person I saw was one of my own congregation who is no more Irish than I am. Lots of people were very friendly (albeit that some of that friendliness was lubricated by Guinness) but one lady harangued me at some length. At first she asked me what I believed in, and then told me what she believed in, to which I generally assented, but then she started berating me about the animals, and how we were doing nothing for the animals. I nodded sympathetically, not feeling that a discussion about priorities in a world full of war, starvation and terror would get us very far, but then she told me that she took direct action by feeding the pigeons! “Because they’re starving,” she said. At that point I made my excuses and left, or rather she told me to get up because her friend wanted to sit back down where I was, and I slipped away, but really! No they’re not! Urban pigeons do not starve. The urban pigeon, properly the feral rock dove, is an extremely resilient creature. When we were driving over the Himalayas, from Manali to Leh, a few years ago, I had been looking forward to the opportunity to see scarce wildlife, and fair enough we saw the bharal, or blue sheep, and we saw marmots (“Is rat,” said our driver, unimpressed), but hardly any interesting birds. And when we got to the highest part of the road, where there were only the tiniest sprigs of vegetation among the scree and rocks, what did we find, but rock doves! In the most barren landscape they were still scratching a living where there appeared to be nothing to eat. Hence, I don’t think Maida Hill presents too much of a challenge for them.

Canalside Living

A few weeks back I was looked in the eye by a heron as I rode my bike, which came as a bit of a shock. Fair enough, he was on the grass beside the canal, just along from the Harrow Road bridge, but on this occasion he was the wrong side of the path, nowhere near the water at all. I suspect he may have been attracted by the pile of food waste which some café-owner (I presume) puts out beside the path to feed the birds. Well, I say feed the birds, but the other day there was a pile of meat there (in midsummer, very nice) which I suspect may have been dumped to avoid inspection. Magpies, crows and gulls will have enjoyed the meat, but not so much the ducks and geese, while foxes and rats will have been delighted. This particular spot regularly smells like a Kathmandu rubbish dump, which makes a change from the smell of weed, but isn’t especially attractive.

Paranoid Style

Back in the last century, when I did my degree, I did a paper on American history, and was introduced to the work of Richard Hofstadter, who had died ridiculously young not so many years earlier. Hofstadter was a person of great wisdom (and scholarship) and I’ve just been reading his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. He wrote this originally in 1963, and published a revised version in 1965, taking account of Barry Goldwater’s Republican candidacy; it is reprinted in a 2008 paperback collection of essays named after it. Hofstadter’s argument is that there is a consistent strain in American politics, going back to the 1790s, of outbursts of extreme right-wing politics that share a “paranoid” style. The McCarthyite and Goldwater episodes were then the most recent, but his analysis fits the Trump phenomenon almost exactly. One fascinating point he makes is that these outbursts are largely about what he calls “status politics” rather than “interest politics”, where “interest politics” are the normal pursuit of your own (or your class’s) material or economic interest. “Status politics” meanwhile, are about moral outlooks, or identity, or culture being under threat; critics misunderstood the notion of status and objected that the poor whites who supported Goldwater enjoyed no status to lose, but the point is that they thought the Republic had enshrined their values (which perhaps gave them some psychological status) but was now disowning them. This means that just using the normal arguments about the economy doesn’t work for those people. It seems to me that this not only fits Trump very closely, but also fits the Brexit phenomenon in UK, which is perhaps an indication that for the first time mass immigration really is having an impact on our society, because people are beginning to behave like Americans, whose immigrant nature was, for Hofstadter, at the heart of the political behaviour he analysed. The big difference is that Brexit won, whereas Hofstadter was confident that the paranoid style would only ever appeal to a minority in the US. It remains to be seen whether we shall see Trump go the way of Goldwater, or whether paranoia has now edged over into the majority. Either way, read the essay!