'Nother Solent

The Handmaid's Tale - full of holes?

Richard Aubrey writes:

I don't agree with your take on the book.

Unless I missed something, there were at least half-a-dozen major howlers. For example, the protagonist was young enough to be fertile, but predated the regime, while the regime had been going on for many, many years. She had been the wife of a professor but was constantly puzzled by the pidgeon Latin for not letting the bastards grind you down.The regime spent huge numbers of young men in a useless war, while being barely able to get any kids born. How come they didn't run out? Nobody ever said what the men of the past did when this regime began making its programs known. You know. The brothers, husbands, fathers, and sons of women.

And I asked some teachers why they taught it. They said it was to caution kids about the dangers of a theocracy. I asked why they didn't talk about reality instead of fiction. They weren't at all sure the Tale was fiction, but in any event they had never thought about speaking of the Taliban, and its awful brethren. In fact, in my opinion, the only reason for promoting the book was the cover it gave for denigrating Christianity.

I confess that all the plot howlers Mr Aubrey describes had completely passed me by when I read the book. It normally takes me several readings to spot such things. When I next read it I shall have to see if the enveloping sense of claustrophobia that struck me as so plausible when I first read it still seems as impressive. To give the book a fair trial I shall have to wait a little until my wish to jeer at the author has died down; but she wouldn't be the first author to be outclassed by her own work. On the issue of religion, I didn't see the religion described as being more than residually Christian - certainly Jesus scarcely featured in it - but even if Christianity is the religion portrayed, it is legitimate SF to speculate about a Christian theocracy. Hey, I happily speculate about telepathy and time-travel.

I just don't take telepathy and time-travel as plausible explanations for real world events.

Malta's election is in practice another referendum on the EU. Oh-oh, now it's me saying, "vote until you get it right!" My defence is that one can't very well hold off general elections.

ALLIED MILITARY CONTROL:

LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT

PLÜNDERER WERDEN ERSCHOSSEN

LES VOLEURS SERONT FUSILLES

The sign is found all over occupied Germany. Nothing could show more clearly how shaky allied "control" of Germany really is, as our correspondent reports (readers may note that his comments may have been censored and/or altered by the notorious information minister of this blog):

Europe's slide into violent anarchy will trigger a humanitarian disaster if Allied troops are unable to fill the power vacuum and reassert order quickly, UN and other aid officials warned yesterday.

The warning came as looting in Berlin spread from government buildings to hospitals, embassies and private businesses, and the growing lawlessness in the capital prevented the few remaining aid workers there from delivering badly needed medical supplies and water to hospitals.

Adding to the sense of chaos, a Nazi-diehard "werewolf" blew himself up on the Mühlenstrasse, where it runs along the river Spree, killing one Russian soldier and severely injuring his French, British and US counterparts who were manning a checkpoint.

A wave of lawlessness across the country illustrated the potential for the unravelling situation to turn a successful military campaign into postwar disaster in a matter of days as a result of the total collapse of government services.

Elsewhere in Europe the grim headlines continue to flood in, making a mockery of claims that the Western Allies have come to "bring democracy." (Please note again the possiblility of news manipulation from the notorious blog spin doctors):

Rome: Fascist buildings are set ablaze; fears mount as looters run amok

Paris: City captured by Partisan forces; banks and shops ransacked by mob

Jugoslavia: Russians take control of oilfields; anarchy as Chetnik troops begin pull-out

Vienna: Looters shot dead by British forces

O.K., I'll stop messing about now, particularly as my analogy breaks down in Eastern Europe where Soviet claims to be bringing democracy really were a mockery. What I really want to say is that looting is nothing new. One relevant parallel for a totalitarian regime losing (in this case temporarily) control of its capital is the Moscow panic of October 15th - 18th 1941. My regular correspondent A.R.C. writes

"A British diplomat stationed there (comically determined to remain anonymous in the wartime-published book in which I read this; he has the author describe him as "with one blue eye and one brown and six fingers on his left hand") describes "panic and looting... chaos" and speaks of "widespread rumours that Jews were being beaten up in subways".

"Kravchenko, who was stationed on the outskirts, writes that, "As alarm grew, police repressions were intensified. It was a vicious circle that made the final outbreak of panic and looting - so carefully concealed from the outside world - inevitable." When he went to Moscow on the 16th, "... rioting and looting had begun. Stores and warehouses were being emptied by frenzied mobs." When he returned to the Bolshovo where his unit was posted, "...I found a disorderly mob milling through our buildings. The looting had begun shortly after my departure and had been under way for hours. Local inhabitants had been rapidly reinforced by peasants from nearby villages. ... the locust swarm devoured ... everything that was not tied down. ... the snow all round was trampled and strewn with discarded articles." Kravchenko also describes rumours of wild orgies, ("hundreds of people behaved as if the end of the world had come") and adds that while some rumours were themselves symptoms of the panic, "That some of the reports at least were true I learned subsequently in great detail. At Sovnarkom headquarters" (where he was posted later in the war) "...high officials rounded up the youger women empoyees for a drunken debauch that went on for hours".

Kravchenko's full description of the Moscow panic makes Baghdad look tame (noting that Muscovites had a lot more to panic about).

He also reminded me of another exampleof the reason why 'looters will be shot' notices are common military equipment. In the American Civil War, outbreaks occured on the Union side during both Lee's invasions of the North and on the confederate side in Nashville at the war's start and in Richmond at its end. On April 2 1865 Grant's forces began a general advance and broke through Lee's lines at Petersburg. The Confederate Capital, Richmond, was evacuated and fires and looting broke out.The next day, Union troops entered Richmond. I don't know whether the looting - much of it blamed on the newly-free blacks - stopped immediately, but by April 4 Richmond was considered safe enough for President Lincoln to make a tour of the place, where he was mobbed by ecstatic blacks. He entered the Confederate White House and sat at the desk of Jefferson Davis for a few moments with "a serious, dreamy expression."

It is always dangerous to push an analogy too far, and extremely unfair to put Jefferson Davis in the same slot as Saddam Hussein, but I cannot resist noting that the Civil War finally came to an end on April 9th, a date our generation will also have cause to remember.

Cuba. Not quite so cuddly.

Several of the hijackers of that ferry have been executed. That's executed as in dead. It may come as something of a surprise to our intelligentsia that the United States is not the only American nation willing to use capital punishment.

Having used force and the threat of murder to take over the ferry the hijackers were certainly criminals who deserved prison. But they didn't actually kill anybody, and in the end they surrendered peacefully. I predict that when the next in this spate of hijackings occurs the gunmen will reckon they have little to lose by fighting to the death.

Returning to an earlier post on the subject of Cuba, the NUJ still haven't said a word about the Cuban journalists given prison sentences of between twenty and twenty-seven years. The International Federation of Journalists has done better.

Sahhaf. Not quite so funny.

I've enjoyed his manic denials of reality as much as anybody, but it's worth remembering that being a shill for a mass-murderer is not a nice way to earn your living. In this widely-linked article Eason Jordan of CNN writes:

Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences."

Read the article to see just how severe the consequences of annoying Saddam could be: Sahhaf was threatening murder. In the ex-Information Minister's defence it seems clear that even those close to the the top of the structure of repression lived in fear; perhaps all the greater because they were under Saddam's eye.

Brian's Education Blog comments in detail on the surprising success of British children in international reading tests, reported in the story a few posts down. He thinks credit is due the parents. This is undoubtedly true, but it's not just them. I think Brian does not realise the extent to which "Look and Say" is very much on the retreat even in schools. At the moment I think that the State orthodox system of how to teach reading is a fairly good system; it has been pretty good for the last five years or so.

It's like living under a good Roman emperor. Fine for now, but what'll the next one be like?

Trouble at t'Mirror. I do reckon it be summat to do with young Master Pilger going mad, like.

Mucho good stuff

from two new members of the Biased BBC team, Kerry Buttram and Niall Kilmartin.

Interesting and surprising

news: English schoolchildren among the world's best readers. The article also suggests that watching TV is good for reading skills, up to a point.

David Janes

writes:

"My apologies for the the shotgun-blast nature of this e-mail but I'm just
pissed off enough tonight to send it anyway:
Link."

I'm not usually a fan of scatter-gun emails either. But I'll forgive him. His post tells the tale of one new Canadian who "despite the weight of the reality he lives in, [believes] that the Americans are exactly the same as a the Nazis" and of another, now deceased, who believed differently.

Happiness is...

burning your money because it has Saddam's picture on it. Scroll down Michael Totten's collection of photographs from Iraq. (Via Tim Blair.)

I hope

Saddam's doubles kept their razors handy.

Saddam didn't fall alone writes Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid.

The news shocked the people of Cairo, where the fundamentalists, nationalists, leftists and the deceived headed numerous campaigns to declare their preparedness to defend Saddam’s Iraq.

But by yesterday morning, the TV stations — including that advocated the campaign to defend Saddam and his regime — didn’t succeed in hiding the images of the happy people celebrating in the capital.

That’s why yesterdays’ images, in which the people of Baghdad tore down their dictator’s pictures and pissed on them, overthrew the biggest lie in the contemporary history of the Arabic world.

The main Arab news editorial was more what you'd expect, but I take the appearance of Al-Rashid's article as another breeze in the fresh wind blowing through the Arab world.

British launch a gun amnesty in Basra. Oh lor, talk about exporting the worst aspects of our culture. Now they'll have to launch another one every six months for the indefinite future. Perhaps Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf can be re-instated in something close to his old job to make regular proclamations that the latest glorious gun amnesty is going to really, finally solve the problem just as splendidly as the last five did, and in fact an amnesty a day keeps the looters away. He can then resolutely ignore the gun-toting perp nicking his microphone.

I think I might get one of those "Hands off Iraq" posters after all. End colonialism and paternalism! Stop trying to force our cultural norms onto other countries!

The Iraqis are, it seems, quite heavily armed. This disproves the assertion that tyranny is impossible to impose on an armed population. So much the worse for over-ambitious assertions. To quote Glenn Reynolds, "Certainly some tyrannies have arisen in nations where press freedom existed--Weimar Germany, for example. Yet we do not generally require proof of efficacy where other Constitutional rights are concerned, so it seems a bit unfair to demand it solely in the case of the Second Amendment."

Personally, I think there is ample proof of efficacy for both freedom of speech and the right to bear arms - just not 100% efficacy. When the subject came up in the Libertarian Alliance Forum this is what I said (edited to hide my spelling errors and other embarrassments) in response to an earlier post:

1) Guns are useful against criminal fellow citizens, agreed.

2) Guns are of little use against a tyrannical government, agreed. (I think there were quite a lot of hunters in the former Soviet Union, which didn't stop the regime lasting 70 years) This is because of the obvious disparity of power - a whole state apparatus against one person with a pistol.

3) But that does not mean they are of NO use. They do have a use of last resort. The knowledge that the civilian population has them makes genocide harder. Evil as he is, I do not believe that Saddam Hussein wants genocide (well, not of his own subjects anyway; he might want or pretend to want extermination of the Jews) but I will use him as an example since he is in the news. It is notable that where Saddam Hussein has killed whole towns he had to resort to poison gas from the air. That was a very visible strategy and no doubt cowed the towns nearby, as it was intended to. But what if he had wanted to kill ALL the Kurds rather than kill some and terrify others - wouldn't he have killed them in by shooting them, a type of massacre that can go undetected for decades and isn't very newsworthy even when known about? [I cited the Congo in a later post as an example of this.] Perhaps one of the things stopping him was an armed population.

An armed population makes arrests harder; I hope that quite a few of Saddam's intended victims have gained the few seconds necessary to make their escape by using a pistol to slow down the cops.

Of course having an armed population has costs as well as benefits. I have in mind the escalation of violent quarrels and feuds, particularly in a tribal culture. And it is no panacea. In many of the evils a society may face it is pretty well irrelevant. However even in Saddam's Iraq I think it helps.

Well, it ain't Saddam's Iraq any more but I still think it helps.

UPDATE: David Carr also spotted the story.

Montres toi Chirac!!

I was intrigued by this posting by "kurukuru" from Le Monde's forum.

Show yourself, Chirac!

The most deadly conflict that humanity has known since the Second World War is taking place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at this moment, today!

3 MILLION DEAD IN 2 YEARS!

Africa is in the French sphere of influence.

Well Chirac shows us TA politics - the effectiveness of TA diplomacy [I don't know what "TA" refers to - NS.]

Convene the Security Council, send Hans Blix, give us beautiful speeches on peace. We'll see if it works.

Down there there are thousands of "little-kiddies-gonna-die."

If you are worth anything, stop this carnage for us.
Show us that you aren't just a fairground juggler.

Stir yourself, Villepin!

You've sweet-talked us with your "multipolar world" - and proved by your deeds that you are nothing but a sweet talker!!!!

You have a golden chance my boy to prove the merit of your positions, the virtue of your attitude... MOVE YOURSELF!

And if you come to the conclusion that preventative war has some virtues, we'll forgive you changing your tune.

Incidentally there is a poster from that forum called SBJBC who regularly posts credited excerpts from blogs, sometimes translated into French. Recognize this one?

Le Pillage de Bagdad s'est arrete soudainement aujourd'hui, quand la plus importante famille mafieuse de l'Irak a disparu de la ville.

Des milliers d'habitants de la ville sont entres dans les batiments du gouvernement, pour essayer de recuperer une petite portion de ce qui leur avait ete vole durant ces 24 dernieres annees.

"J'ai pris un gros vase du bureau de Uday. Ca ne pourra jamais remplacer les membres de ma familles que saddam m'a enleve, mais tous ces trucs appartiennent au peuple iraquien, et cela nous avait ete vole sans nous demander notre permission", expliquait une iraquienne .

The essence of the regime.

Rageh Omaar of the BBC said that today was, "Iraqis ending what many of them described to me as 'The cruelty and sadism of the last 25 years.'" That ties in with something A.R.C. wrote to me:

Now that Saddam's regime is soon to end, I find myself thinking about what its essence will be revealed to be, once we start taking testimony, unearthing mass graves, etc.

The essential law of Hitler's land was, "Thou shalt kill." Hitler lied often but his lies were devoted to enabling or defending his murders. He regarded his lies as a general regards his deception plan; once the true attack is obvious to the enemy, the deception does not matter any more.

By contrast, the law of Stalin's land was, "Thou shalt bear false witness." Stalin murdered often (more often than Hitler, partly because he ruled longer) but, whereas the Nazi regime was punctilious in ensuring its chosen victims died and relatively casual about its lies, the Soviets went to extreme and bizarre lengths to maintain their lies and were relatively casual about whether a given accused was shot, died of overwork in the camps or survived.

Saddam kills often but, since he does not rule a mass population, much less than either Hitler or Stalin. His regime lies incessantly but much less skillfully or consistently than Stalin's, and indeed, less skillfully than Hitler's. That Saddam pulled the UN's chain for 12 years is a comment on the UN, not on his propaganda skills. That his removal provoked a world-wide political crisis is shameful, because it is also ridiculous.

I offer the conjecture that the essence of Saddam's regime will prove to be cruelty. Inept as a liar and killer, he was nevertheless competent at putting his people in great fear. Both Hitler and Stalin came from revolutionary parties that were not averse to commiting crimes. Saddam by contrast came from a strictly criminal group who became politicians. Is this a partial explanation of the difference?

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!

For Margaret Atwood

: Lots of flowers.

(Refers to this post.)

The floodgates of anarchy.

I've just posted some thoughts on the delirious scenes in Baghdad over at Samizdata.

A Cuban journalist has been sentenced to 27 years in jail

according to the New York Times. His "crime" appears to have been that he rode around Havana on a battered old bicycle covering the news independently. Other dissidents have received sentences almost as savage: 25 years for a man who sought democratic reforms. 20 years for an economist who invited an American diplomat to her home. 20 years for a poet and journalist who suffers from phlebitis and other illnesses.

I sincerely - and reasonably - hope that the regime that imposed these sentences will not last 27 months, yet alone 27 years.

ADDED LATER: When I hear the word "Cuba" I always think of the advertisements for the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and favourable articles about Cuba that I always used to see in The Teacher magazine, organ of the National Union of Teachers. It spurred me to see if the old love affair between Papa Castro and the British Trades Unions still burned.

Ah, the old spark burns yet. The TUC links to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign as just another human rights organisation, placing it between Anti-Slavery International and the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. The National Union of Journalists is spared this embarrassment, but I notice that although they are sufficiently quick off the mark to make reference to the journalists killed today in the Palestine Hotel, Baghdad, they say nothing about the life sentence imposed on their fellow-journalist in Cuba for doing his job. Perhaps their press release condemning this sentence is in the works and will appear tomorrow, but I doubt it.

When are the unions going to wake up?

Incidentally, look hard at that NUJ article. One wonders whether the extravagance of the charges it flings is meant seriously, in which case they have picked a funny place to launch a criminal prosecution, or is merely melodrama for the groundlings:

"It seems certain that the media are being targeted," said NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear. "There must be thorough and independent investigations of all these incidents, and those responsible brought to book.

”The Geneva Conventions require combatants to protect the lives of civilians, yet here we have American forces taking aim at them. These are war crimes.

"The Americans say they have the most precise weaponry in history. Not all of these attacks can be accidents."

What a worldview.

"Waiting for Saladin."

While it is true that Irfan Husain, writing in Pakistan's Dawn magazine, clearly holds Saddam Hussein in scorn, he cannot bring himself to take any pleasure in the overwhelming nature of Western military superiority over his co-religionists. This lack of enthusiasm does not stop him making some hardheaded observations:

"If it is established that we [Pakistan] helped North Korea develop its nuclear capability, there will be hell to pay once Iraq is out of the way."

Indeed. I don't know if Pakistan did help North Korea get nukes or not. I do know that is salutary that the rulers of any country that did should be afraid.

However the lines that really caught my attention in Husain's essay looked to the future not the past:

"One problem is that attaining technological parity implies a major shift in thought processes, allocation of resources and the system of governance. All this takes much effort and political will.

"It is much easier to just sit back and wait for the second Saladin. "

I very much hope that in years to come Irfan Husain will indeed see the Muslim world achieve the changes in thought processes, allocation of resources and system of governance he desires. I hope that Western technological superiority does indeed dissipate.

No, I haven't turned into a self-hating Westerner. At present we should maintain our technological superiority as our ancestors would have maintained their city walls. Outside those walls vast swathes of the Islamic world are, to be frank, in the grip of barbarism. But there's no honour to us in superiority per se: if our margin of superiority dissipates because the Islamic world is catching up - and, like Husain, I don't believe that that they can catch up without becoming more objective, more orderly and more free - then we are better off, not worse. Saladin and Richard certainly knew about truce and parley in one era of technological equivalence between their two civilisations. Perhaps their distant descendants might know actual peace in another.

Nuns in orange jumpsuits make sign of cross in own blood on missile silo. Really.

How many Congolese dead?

Around 1,000, according to this report from Voice of America. How silently they went. The world said nothing, distracted by more public wars. Perhaps the lack of interest is inevitable given that the conflict does not seem to relate to any causes or ideologies familiar to us, yet it worries me that murder on this scale goes almost unnoticed.

How many Iraqi dead?

In this TCS article, "Don't count on it", Iain Murray concludes that while the Iraq Body Count site run by Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda (advised by the famous - or notorious - Afghan body-counter Marc Herold) might be of some use in providing a maximum figure, the minimum figures it provides are useless. Partly this is because of over-reliance on dodgy sources, and partly because they hold that "the responsibility for consequences is assigned to the party initiating the conflict. Thus, if someone injures or kills someone else while acting in response to an attack on themselves, the responsibility for the consequences is applied to the initial attacker." In other words, they are going to blame the allies for pretty well all civilian deaths in the war. The results are predictable. On April 2, for instance, their minimum figure for Iraqis killed was higher than the estimate provided by the Iraqi government itself.

I do have one criticism. The database and Iain Murray's article are both quite clearly counting only people who have been killed, and make no estimate of injuries: it would have been better, therefore, to avoid the term "casualties" which in military parlance means "killed or injured", although I concede that most people these days use the term only to refer to deaths.

The war is moving fast.

I have no time to blog about it today. These guys, for all their faults, have the stories - including that of the hideous friendly-fire incident that killed 18 Kurds, among them John Simpson's translator.

I scarcely dare jump straight from that "scene from hell" as Simpson called it, to the very funny scenes running on ITV live right now. A minute ago I caught a gorgeous videophone shot of two US soldiers lying down in the gardens of one of Saddam's palaces. The live voiceover said that they "seemed to be having a snooze." No way. They were - or are - posing like mad, as are another two sitting on loungers surrounded by flowers, having a little chat and admiring the view.

Jaques Delors, of all people

, is saying that Chirac is leading France down a diplomatic cul-de-sac and frankly admits that European monetary union is "not working".

More on the loopy paranoia

of our elite about GWB's religion over on Biased BBC if you are interested...

UPDATE: ...And if the link works. It didn't when I checked it a minute ago. Please try the general link on the sidebar.

PS: You wouldn't think it from what I say below, but The Handmaid's Tale is actually a magnificent novel, from the opening scenes where every tiny detail ('blankets so old that they actually had "US Army" stamped on them') flutters down into place to set the scene of repression and despair, right along to the ambiguous concluding remarks made by a patronizing historian writing from the safety of a time yet further in the future. Don't let my bad mood or the author's silly one put you off reading it.

The Twiterati.

Fiona Maddocks has written a book on Hildegard of Bingen, has been known as a critic of ballet and literature for two decades and is or was editor of BBC Music magazine. Margaret Atwood has been writing poetry, short fiction and novels since the year of my birth, The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace and Cat's Eye being among her most recent, as well as her best known work, the unforgettable The Handmaid's Tale.

These women are not stupid.

These women are twits.

The former was interviewing the latter in Thursday's Evening Standard. Here's the result, calling itself "A twist in the tale." The twist comes in the mental contortions Maddocks has to perform to get from George W Bush's inoffensive Evangelical beliefs to this:

"The question all readers of The Handmaid's Tale want to ask its Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, is: "How did you know?" Her 1986 best seller, set in a futuristic totalitarian regime called the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, has chilling prescience: Christian fundamentalists have seized control and imposed repressive laws, brainwashing women and depriving them of all the rights they have spent the past 1,000 years securing - education, property, freedom to give birth when and via whom they choose. "

(Emphasis mine.) I don't know why poor old Dubya does hold off from imprisoning all the women and depriving them of their names so that the top men's personal concubines are called "ofdonald", "ofjohn" and "ofdubya", according to the system described in the book. That's obviously what he wants, as proven by the fact that he sometimes goes to breakfast prayer meetings, and it's not like he gets any credit for restraint.

Atwood cannot be held responsible for the excesses of her interviewer, though. Her excesses were all her own. Instead of laughing in embarrassment at Maddocks' absurd pronouncements and gently reminding her that science fiction is, you know, fiction, Atwood solemnly responds:

"Only in America did people ask, in utter seriousness, 'How long have we got?' They realised that they were closest of all to the real thing, especially compared to Europe, which is now so much more secular a place than the States."

Give me a break. No, say the two Furies, we will not give you a break. There is loads more yet to come.

"Nor does Atwood flinch from repeating her warnings to anyone who will listen. A piece on Napoleon, published in the US and UK weeks before the bombing of Iraq, analysed his two biggest mistakes. "One was going into Spain and believing the Spaniards would welcome him with flowers in the streets when, instead, there was guerrilla uprising. The second was invading Russia when he did not have to, getting to Moscow and thinking he'd won. But then the Russians turned round and burned Moscow. The Iraqis have not filled the streets with flowers ..."

I read the article she refers to when it came out and thought about contesting on this blog her claim that it was the Spanish guerillas who ejected Napoleon from the Peninsula. Their struggle was indeed epic, but it's a bit of a joke to leave out the actual decisive factor in liberating Spain from Napoleon Bonaparte, namely Wellington and his army. However I can see why, given the anti-war policies she supports, she might prefer not to dwell on a British army that freed an oppressed people from a tyrant in cooperation with local freedom fighters.

Anyway, I never posted anything on it then because apathy won out, as it still does. I've suddenly run out of steam. Let me leave you with the sixth picture in this set of nine from the BBC. The streets are not strewn, but it does show one little Iraqi flower, just for Margaret Atwood to be going on with.

All these vandals should be strung up, that's what I say.

An artist recently wrapped Rodin's "The Kiss" in string to demonstrate the claustrophobic nature of relationships. Then another artist came along with a scissors and demonstrated the victory of love over all bonds, or classical art over modern, or possibly Manchester United over Liverpool.

Now I am a defender of property rights so I can say that the scissors artist was A Bad Thing and deserves the prosecution for criminal damage that is coming his way. I may have to repress the odd giggle while saying it, but that's my business. That giggle may become an outright guffaw, however, if the art community as a whole try to come out with the same line (line - string - geddit?), seeing as they are normally so keen to épater le bourgeoisie and their cursed repressive system of pettifogging law.

From the point of view of modern art, is not Mr Snippy far better than Ms Stringy as a standard bearer for the avant-garde? Not for him the compromises of seeking permission - hah! - to mess around with the work of an earlier artist, or, yet worse, of cravenly applying for a grant. No, serene in his authenticity as an activist and an artist, he approaches the earlier work without servile reverence. He comes, he snips, he scores!

Missing.

The Globe and Mail reports that 29 European tourists have disappeared in Algeria recently. Were it not for the war this would be a big story. It ought to be a big story. (Link via Instapundit.)