Sing along with Richard Nixon

How sad that political campaigns don't have theme tunes now. I imagine that David Cameron's would be the Eton Boating Song, while Nick Clegg's would be 'So Ronery'…

Here's Richard Nixon's 1972 song. He resigned two years later after it emerged that despite the sunny optimism of the song, he was simultaneously authorising his minions to burgle the Democratic Party's headquarters and committing numerous other breaches of the Constitution.

Manichaean…

As told by Alex Ross in The New Yorker this month, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was believed to be a Communist by the secret services - leading to spies trying to analyze his music for subversive material.

How very reductive. Like most artistic people of the time, Bernstein was of the left (it was, after all, the period of McCarthy and then Nixon) but the idea that musical notes are politically charged is exactly what the Soviets thought in the very depths of their most Philistine period, the Proletkult (late 1920s-1930s). It's just such a facile argument and shows how plain dumb our superiors were, whichever side they were on. Also, artists just aren't that bright. They have their peculiar skills and are usually happy to side with whoever will let them exercise their talents. Rarely has a composer had the intellectual ability to discuss the dialectic, let alone encode it into his or her music (which doesn't stop people endlessly analyzing Shostakovich's music for anti-Stalinist attitudes).

Bernstein was on Hoover's 'Security Index', a list of 12,000 Americans he thought were so dangerous that they should be arrested in the event of a Soviet invasion. Because fat conductors are always the shock troops of the occupation. I'd love to get a copy of it.

On a more enlightened level, I'd recommend Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders' excellent book on the US secret service's attempts to control the worlds of literature, art and music.

Here's alleged Communist Bernstein conducting alleged anti-Communist Shostakovich's allegedly anti-Communist 5th symphony. Oooh, feel the confusing subversion. After that, the Latvian State Choir singing the Mass that the FBI thought was Communist (like all Catholic masses written by Jewish composers are secretly communist).

Hailing Frequencies Open

I guess, as a man with a blog, that my attendance at Star Trek last night was somehow predestined. Despite being a bit rushed, and depending heavily on Oedipal themes (wit elements of The O. C. and 'bromance'), I loved it. There were plenty of in-jokes without excluding new viewers, the plot was suitably familiar but still well done, the action and effects were impeccable. I've long dreamed of a decent space opera on the big screen (some Iain M Banks? M John Harrison?), and this is the closest I've seen for a while.

I also particularly liked Hikaru Sulu, who volunteers for a mission demanding personal combat skills. Once on board, he confesses that his skill is fencing (though his fight showed little grasp of the discipline, partly because a good fencing bout is over in seconds without any blade contact, while a film fight demands clashing, to-and-fro etc.).

However, I received a considerable degree of ridicule, even from fellow nerds, for professing my preference for Star Trek over Star Wars. I certainly wouldn't want to defend Deep Space Nine or The Next Generation and haven't seen Enterprise, but the original series, some of the films and perhaps Voyager and all the themes tackled are so much more grown up and culturally significant than Star Wars.

Partly this is because Star Trek was a TV series, though it didn't last long. It could respond to current affairs that much more quickly than a film series, and it appeared in a tense moment in history. Through the two series of the TV show, you can detect themes of international relations (hence the presence of Sulu, a recent enemy for Americans and Chekhov - a current one), race (Uhura - black space secretary who gets kissed by Kirk) and war. Star Trek dealt with Vietnam while the war was going on - moving on from being reluctantly in favour to eventually strongly against. Sometimes the franchise has been plain wrong, at other times embarrassing - TNG was horribly touchy-feely bollocks, and sometimes interestingly countercultural (capitalists look very old-fashioned in Deep Space Nine), but it's never claimed that anything is simple and clearcut.

Which brings me to Star Wars. Appearing in the late seventies, you'd be forgiven for thinking that plucky rebels fighting a crushing, technologically superior Empire led by a corrupted leader was a parody for Vietnam with the Rebel Alliance being the North Vietnamese and the Empire being the US, lead by disgraced Nixon and the other presidents.

But no: it's an attempt to kick the Vietnam Syndrome by recasting the Americans as leaders of a disparate band of freedom fighters, looking back to the only time this was even vaguely true, the American War of Independence. There's something in the American psyche that clings on to this despite all the evidence piling up that it is an Empire in the mould of (but even more powerful than) the British and Roman versions. Having had their bottoms kicked by the peasants in Vietman, Spielberg appropriates the Vietnamese narrative to help the losing side feel better about itself.

In doing so, the universe is reduced to the moral equivalent of an old-fashioned Western of children's parable. Nobody ponders their actions, nobody possesses shades of grey - they're Good or Bad, give or take the odd deathbed repentance (which itself is desperately hackneyed). Say what you like about Star Trek's hokey liberal idealism, characters face difficult choices, often fail, and have to come to terms with the ramifications of their actions. This film lives up to those ideals (and has genuinely good jokes)

Given the choice between America as Star Wars and America as Star Trek, I say Beam Me Up.

Nixon: we were right

According to today's Guardian, Richard Nixon really was a lying, paranoid, devious bastard,as revealed on the tapes. In particular, he had it in for the press and for academia:

the professors are the enemy, the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times.

He's right - or should be. I've had the joy of working with a bunch of ageing radical for the past ten years, though there are always some rotten Tory apples in there. It's time for a purge…