Poor old Andrew

Mr Marr is rapidly declining mentally. Last week he uttered some rather confused and uninformed pearls of wisdom about blogging, this week he started a radio discussion of morality and politics by claiming that it was 'beyond issues of left and right'.

This is, of course, absolute balderdash. Both wings of politics have drawn on religious origins for their morality, then claimed that their ideological perspectives are moral. The soft left of the Labour Party claimed that it owed 'more to Methodism than to Marx', which was certainly true, while Blair allowed his neoliberal capitalist hodgepodge of ideas to be influenced by his belief in God (whom he occasionally seemed to confuse with voices in his head). (Incidentally, the Methodists and similar groups were great - they encouraged democracy inside and outside their chapels, trained thousands of workers as preachers and organised the working classes. Shame about the actual God bits).

The English Civil War, despite its unfortunate bouts of Catholic-massacring, was a leftwing religious event: God directly told the Parliamentarians that hereditary rule was evil. The result was a Republic which soon became an Iranian-style theocracy. If you read the Putney Debates, the Fifth Monarchists, the Ranters, the Diggers, the Levellers and most of the other groups during this time of astonishing ferment, you'll find God at the centre of their communist/socialist doctrines.

I'm from a different lefty perspective. For me, the abandonment of God is a moment of ethical and political liberation. In His place goes empathy towards your fellow humans, which to me means being very very very leftwing. As far as I can see, being rightwing is essentially denying empathy and promoting individualism: rightwingers are often religious in the classic Robinson Crusoe mould, in which self-help leads to God - from that flows selfishness and American politics.

Unfortunately, God isn't around to settle this one. The Old Testament God is clearly a Tory or New Labour interventionist - smiting, smiting, smiting. Always smiting the Palestinians and arming the Israelites - definitely a George Bush. The New Testament God is a bit different. Seems to be more about providing healthcare and being nice to everybody, though social services would have something to say about throwing His son out with the intention of having him crucified. A mixed report, one could say.

As for Marr - very poor indeed. He deserved this:

"Inadequate, pimpled and single"

Andrew Marr, lightweight writer and political journalist (he used to have a Telegraph column supposedly written by his hamster) doesn't think much of bloggers.

He calls blogging

the "spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night"

and suggests that

"Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all.

"A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people," he told the Cheltenham Literary Festival. "OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk".

which suggests he's missing the point rather. I hate to disagree with the great man, but most bloggers aren't trying to be reporters - they're more like comment-piece journalists, only without the expensive training (private school, Cambridge, BBC) and multibillion-pound resources of a news organisation. Bloggers tend to have jobs, and to be expert in a narrow field. I am indeed often angry and drunk (has he ever read the Daily Mail?), but that doesn't make my opinions about The Klaxons, Paul Uppal Tory Scum and The Hegemon less valid. Does it?

Perhaps he doesn't like the fact that it's easier to serve a super-injunction on his fellow Big Media, whereas bloggers - who may indeed be angry and nasty - are harder to silence (read the comments, though it's not something I care about one way or the other).

Oh, and Marr seems not to understand the differences between blogging, news/politics blogging (most of us want to talk about books, music and in Ewar's case, mediocre tennis starlets) and anonymously commenting on news websites. If you want real pointless angry stupidity, try the comments section on any George Monbiot piece - such as this one.

Nets full of books

Some excellent publications reach me today.

The new issue of the London Review of Books (it's not just book reviews, but it is from London).

Geoffrey Trease's Bows Against The Barons: a reprint (can't afford the original) of a 1934 Communist-ish version of the Robin Hood story. I intend to put it up with various aristocratic versions in one of my modules to trace the class tension in this legend.

Alfred Fairbank's A Book of Scripts - a stunning 1955 hardcover illustrated reprint of a book about handwriting and the evolution of scripts. Yes, I know nobody writes anything by hand anymore, but it's still interesting and beautiful. There are all sorts of interesting things about our ascent to literacy: did you know that we still have no firm idea about whether people ever read silently until the 18th century?

Sharon O'Dair's Class, Critics and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars. Why did Shakespeare become the property of the toffs?

John Le Carré's new one, Our Kind of Traitor. His Cold War spy novels worked on the basis that you couldn't trust your side or their's, and that morality, loyalty, patriotism and ideology were all mutable and untrustworthy - the end of the Cold War didn't kill this stuff off - he's become more relevant (and even more passionate).

Finally, and mostly to drive my office colleagues out of the room, Stockhausen's Mantra. Does anyone else think he looks like Andrew Marr?

Marrvellous!

Andrew Marr's been an idiot recently, picking up nasty blog chatter about Gordon Brown's health.

He made up for it with a decent, hard-hitting interview with David Cameron, which revealed him as a shallow, twisting little bullshitter. I particularly liked this exchange, towards the end:

'…all the way through the crucial years, you were calling for less regulation. You were calling for government to stand aside. You said that too often regulation is the first resort. In terms of bad calls, that was about as bad as it gets, wasn't it?'

DC: 'I don't accept that…'

Marr: 'I've got all the quotes here, and they're pretty strong. The message from the City is that we should have less regulation and the message from the centre-right is that people should stand aside and let business get on with it. Your deregulation taskforce said "Government even claims that all this regulation is necessary, they seem to believe that without it, banks will steal all your money!". Well they did!'.

DC: 'I think the point of what happened is that there was a huge amount of regulation taking place, but there was a complete lack of authority…'

Remember, voters, that Cameron is a Tory - he fundamentally believes that society shouldn't be regulated in any way - that the strong should succeed and the weak should be allowed to fail, that business is always right in whatever it wants to do and however it wants to do it. The banks have stolen our money, and he has no answer to that because he can't envisage a society without grasping, evil capitalism.

How blogging works, part 328.

You may have seen Andrew Marr ask the Prime Minister about his health (eyesight, depression) on the BBC this weekend. It was very strange: the story is the first one I know of which was entirely generated by bloggers.

Most of the time, bloggers claim that they generate news. They're wrong. They might hype stories up, but their sources are usually the standard media, especially with big sources. How do I know this? Because I co-wrote an academic paper on the subject. Read it here.

This story's different. It's untrue, as far as we can tell. As this Guardian story explains it, a blogger heard from a civil servant that Brown isn't allowed to eat cheese, salami, various other foods and red wine. He decided that this was stuff he was banned from consuming when he was on anti-depressants in the 1980s. Cue 'Brown depressed story'. Then a bigger site picked it up, as did all the conservative sites out to get Brown. Once enough sites were howling about it, it leaked into the mainstream media.

This is obviously a failure of journalistic standards, but also a beautiful demonstration of the shortcomings of blogging: a weird opinion is amplified by partisan interests during a period in which an individual is already fair game. Instead of ascertaining facts, opinion and speculation are accepted and even encouraged because it's arresting - it's the Fox News approach.

My two cents: if Brown is banned from eating these things, it's because he's in his late 50s and prone to getting a bit porky. I shouldn't be eating these things either.

Another day, another present

This morning, Ben (with stunning generosity), has sent Jane's Addiction's Ritual de lo Habitual. I think I see what he's up to with this, the Pantera and the Faith No More. He thinks I listen solely to fey, twee indiepop and need TOUGHENING UP!

Actually though, I loved this album when I was a young man and in my prime, so I'm very happy to have it again. This morning I started with the Sufjan Stevens cover of 'O Holy Night' from the sometimes overblown Songs for Christmas, then the Salvation Army Choir's rendition, then straight into Fucking Hostile (Pantera) and now I'm listening to Stockhausen, so it's an eclectic day already. I've dealt with a lost and confused student and done another 60 lengths in the pool, so I've sort of achieved things.

How are you getting on with The Culture, Cheese and Pineapple? My choice is coming up soon, and it's a humdinger.

Andrew Marr and Karlheinz Stockhausen - separated at birth? Marr does sort of conduct while interviewing, with his crazy long arms.