The story behind the song #2: Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

 

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

 

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

These 90 words are arguably the most chilling in any song ever recorded. Strange Fruit, a song about a lynching in 1930s America, reached a modest #16 on the U.S. Billboard Charts in 1939. At the time Roosevelt was in power and America was still in the throes of the Great Depression. This was the same year as Over the Rainbow, Moonlight Serenade and Begin the Beguine. Today I want to look at this incredible song and the fascinating story behind it. It wasn’t written for her and has been covered by artists as varied as Nina Simone, Sting, Robert Wyatt, UB40, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Tori Amos, but the song really belongs to one woman – Billie Holiday. As they say on The X Factor, she really owned that song.

This is such a graphic song, painting a picture of bucolic simplicity. This image, however, is shattered by the bulging eyes and twisted mouth. The tree, normally a symbol of life, here bears a terrible fruit. When she sang it you could see the black body hanging from the Southern tree, its blood feeding the roots. This is indeed a bitter crop. At one performance Holiday was asked what a pastoral scene was:

“It means when the crackers are killing the niggers. It means when they take a little nigger like you and snatch off his nuts and shove them down his goddam throat. That’s what it means. That’s what they do. That’s a goddamn pastoral scene.”

One of the most surprising aspects of this song is that it was not written by an African-American, but by a white Jewish schoolteacher with communist leanings from New York, Abel Meeropol, who taught in the Bronx, wrote thousands of songs poems libretti, plays, scripts, but he will undoubtedly be remembered for this song. His pen name, Lewis Allan, was in memory of two stillborn sons.

In 1937 Meeropol saw this shocking photograph of a lynching in a magazine:

The photo, which was taken on August 7, 1930, captures the double lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana in 1930. Lynchings were meant to be a public spectacle. This was a brutal form of social control; the bodies would be left hanging as a warning to others. By the time of the Marion incident, lynching was less prevalent than it had been at the turn of the century. But there were still five or six a year, and they were still very present in black consciousness. Despite attempts to outlaw it, no legislation was ever passed – it was always filibustered away by southern congressman.

Shipp and Smith had been arrested the night before, and charged with robbing and murdering a white factory worker, Claude Deeter, and raping his white girlfriend, Mary Ball. A large crowd, armed with sledgehammers, broke into the jail, beat the two men and then hanged them. Police officers among the posse cooperated in the lynching. A third person, 16-year-old James Cameron was luckier, narrowly escaping Shipp and Smith’s fate thanks to an unidentified member of the mob who announced that he had nothing to do with the rape or murder. Cameron later stated in interviews that Shipp and Smith were, in fact, guilty of shooting and killing Deeter, but Mary Ball later testified that she had not been raped.

The photo had been taken by the photographer Lawrence Beitler. Meeropol said that it had haunted him for days. The revulsion it provoked led him to write the poem, which was published in 1937 in a union magazine, The New York Teacher. He later set the poem music and it became quite a popular protest song in the New York area.

We need to put Strange Fruit in its musical context. There was before the song, and indeed after it, a tradition of white audiences enjoying forms of black music that had been filtered to appeal more to mainstream tastes. Swing, the most popular musical genre of the 1930s had its origins in African-American jazz and composers like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin liked to incorporate elements of the “black sound” into their work. We can see this later on with The Stones, The Beatles and Eric Clapton who made artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf Chuck Berry and Screaming Jay Hawkins “safe” for white audiences.

But in Strange Fruit Meeropol chose to send an uncompromising message. This was a militant, angry song. There had been songs that had alluded to racism. The Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess, or the Fats Waller song Black and Blue come to mind. However, none were so in-your-face as Strange Fruit.

Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father, Clarence Holiday never married her mother, Sadie Fagan, and he would eventually abandon the family altogether. Holiday grew up in grinding poverty. At the age of ten, she was raped by a neighbour, and ended up at The House of the Good Shepherd, a facility for wayward black girls.  She began working at the age of twelve, scrubbing the floors of a local brothel. It was here that she heard the music of Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith. At the age of 14 she was jailed for prostitution. Holiday vowed not to back to this way of life and sought work in local nightclubs as a dancer or a singer. She soon discovered that her melancholy singing style could bring customers to tears. Despite the power of her voice to move an audience Holiday’s chaotic lifestyle meant that she was unable to hold down a job and she moved from one nightclub to another. Holiday was no stranger to racism. She was singing with Artie Shaw’s band at the swanky Lincoln Hotel in New York. Given that the hotel was named after the president who emancipated the slaves, it is ironic that owner of the hotel objected to Billie sitting at the bar or mixing with customers, and demanded that a  she only use the tradesmen’s entrance and the freight elevator.

In 1939 Holiday left the group and began to perform regularly at Café Society, a haven for liberal intellectuals, college students, music aficionados, and the political left in general. The club, which was located in a basement in Greenwich Village, was owned by Barney Josephson and had been inaugurated in December 1938. The main room held about 220 people. Josephson wanted an American version of the political cabarets he had seen in Europe. Cafe Society was the first nightclub in a white neighbourhood to welcome customers of all races.  Even the legendary Cotton Club in Harlem, where Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Lena Horne and Cab Calloway all performed, was a segregated place. Occasionally a black celebrity would be admitted but even then they would generally be given the worst tables. Josephson, by contrast, had a clear vision:

“I wanted a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front. There wasn’t, so far as I know, a place like it in New York or in the whole country.”

It was a transgressive place. Josephson wanted to showcase African American talent. But he also wanted to satirise café society; black customers were given the best seats, while the waiters greeted patrons while dressed in rags. Their advertising slogan was: “Café Society: the wrong place for Right people.”

Josephson heard the song and suggested that Holiday sing it. Given the nature of the lyrics Holiday was a bit reticent about performing it in public, but she finally agreed to do it. It was January 1939. It would be the song that she would close her set with. From the very first time that she sang it she established a ritual. As she prepared to sing the finale, service in the club stopped completely – the waiters stopped bringing drinks to the tables and the cash registers fell silent. The room went black except for a single spotlight trained on the singer. When she was done, Holiday would walk off the stage without giving an encore. How could you top that song? In Lady Sings the Blues, her autobiography, Holiday later recalled the audience’s stunned reaction the first time: “There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began clapping nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping.“

Holiday’s record company, Columbia, refused to record the song, fearing a racist backlash. Eventually she managed to record it with Commodore and it became her biggest selling record. It got little exposure on the airwaves, so the #16 position is really an achievement. The song was denounced by Time Magazine as “a prime piece of musical propaganda” for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).

What about the two protagonists of our story? By the 1950s Holiday’s voice had deteriorated tremendously due to years of abuse and she continued even faster down her destructive path of drugs, abusive relationships, and alcohol. In 1959, Holiday collapsed and was hospitalized; while on her deathbed, she was arrested once again for possession of narcotics. She died on July 17, 1959, of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 44. Meeropol left the teaching profession in 1945 and went to Hollywood his other claim to fame is the adoption of the orphaned children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the married couple of American communists executed after being found guilty of espionage against the United States in 1953.

The song now has iconic status. Holiday’s version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978. It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. Time magazine had a change of heart and named it the song of the century in 1999. It was, in the words of jazz writer Leonard Feather, “the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism.” Less than two decades later America would be immersed in a civil rights war. Strange Fruit had been one of the opening salvoes. In October 1939, Samuel Grafton, writing in The New York Post described Strange Fruit thus: “If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its ‘Marseillaise’.” I don’t think Grafton was right; this was a political song but not a rousing hymn. Many protest songs are little more than propaganda, but “Strange Fruit” proved they could be art.

 I’ll finish with the impressions of the actress Billie Allen Henderson of a performance of the song at New York’s Birdland in 1952:

“I was standing there with my date when she started singing this song. I was trying to be sophisticated and all of a sudden something stabs me in the solar plexus and I was gasping for air. It was so deeply felt. I understood it. I could smell the burning flesh; I felt it. She was . . . unrelenting is a good word for it. Some didn’t know how to react.     They weren’t quite sure. Nobody stirred. It was startling, and I’ll never forget it. I thought, ‘That’s what art can do.’”

The house I live in

The House I Live In was a ten-minute short film written by Albert Maltz, produced by Frank Ross and Mervyn LeRoy, and starring Frank Sinatra. Made to oppose anti-Semitism and racial prejudice at the end of World War II, it received an Honorary Academy Award and a special Golden Globe award in 1946.

Under his pen name, Lewis Allan, Abel Meeropol co-wrote, with Earl Robinson, the song  The House I Live In. Meeropol did not want to idealise America, but to show its potential. Unfortunately in the film short, the song was censored and the lyrics “The house I live in, my neighbors white and black…” were excised, enraging Meeropol.

Boadwalk Empire : an extract

Here is an extract from the prologue of Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times And Corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson:

Luxury hotels weren’t something she knew about firsthand. Until now, she had never been inside the Ritz Carlton. The closest she’d come to the grand hotel was when walking on the Boardwalk. But here she was in the anteroom of a large suite of rooms, seated in a chair that nearly swallowed her. She was frightened, but there was no turning back. She sat there trembling, folding and refolding her frayed scarf.

As a housewife and summertime laundress in a boardinghouse, she felt out of place and her nervousness showed. Flushed and perspiring, she noticed that her dress and sweater needed mending and she grew more self-conscious. It was all she could do to keep from panicking and running out. But she couldn’t leave. Louis Kessel had told her Mr. Johnson would see her in a moment and she had to wait. To leave now would be embarrassing and, worse still, might offend Mr. Johnson. If it weren’t winter, and if there weren’t so many unpaid bills, she never would have worked up the courage to come in the first place. But she had no choice; her husband had been a fool and she was desperate for her family. Louis Kessel appeared a second time and motioned to her. She followed him, not knowing what to expect.

As she walked into Mr. Johnson’s sitting room, he took her hand and greeted her warmly. It was several years since she met him at her father’s wake, but Johnson remembered her and called her by her first name. He was dressed in a fancy robe and slippers and asked what was troubling her. In an instant her anxiety vanished.

In a rapid series of sentences she recounted how her husband lost his entire paycheck the night before at one of the local gambling rooms. He was a baker’s helper, and during the winter months his $37 each week was the family’s only income. She went on and on about all the bills and how the grocer wouldn’t give her any more credit. Johnson listened intently and, when she was finished, reached into his pocket and handed her a $100 bill. Overwhelmed with joy, she thanked him repeatedly until he insisted she stop. Louis Kessel motioned, telling her there was a car waiting to drive her home. As she left, Johnson promised that her husband would be barred from every crap game and card room in town. He told her to come back any time she had a problem.

Enoch “Nucky” Johnson personifies pre-casino Atlantic City as no one else can. Understanding his reign provides the perspective needed to make sense of today’s resort. Johnson’s power reached its peak, as did his town’s popularity, during Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933. When it came to illegal booze, there was probably no place in the country as wide open as Nucky’s town. It was almost as if word of the Volstead Act never reached Atlantic City. During Prohibition, Nucky was both a power broker in the Republican Party and a force in organized crime. He rubbed elbows with presidents and Mafia thugs. But to Atlantic City’s residents, Johnson was hardly a thug. He was their hero, epitomizing the qualities that had made his town successful.

Originally conceived as a beach village by a doctor hoping to develop a health resort for the wealthy, Atlantic City quickly became a glitzy, raucous vacation spot for the working class. It was a place where visitors came knowing the rules at home didn’t apply. Atlantic City flourished because it gave its guests what they wanted—a naughty good time at an affordable price.

The case for the defence

“A criminal defence attorney has to be as proud of his enemies as of his friends.”

The quote above is by the American defence lawyer Alan Dershowitz. He was once asked in an interview what he would have done if he had been asked to defend the infamous Nazi Dr. Mengele. Dershowitz, who is himself a Jew, replied that he would have represented him, got him acquitted, and then strangled him outside the courtroom.

Alan Morton Dershowitz, who was born in 1938, is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. A distinguished academic, he has spent most of his career at Harvard Law School, where in 1967, at the tender age of 28, he became the youngest full professor of law in its illustrious history. He is in the American context a political liberal. However, he has courted controversy with his proposal that judges issue torture warrants, and his impassioned defence of Israel, a subject guaranteed to raise the hackles of the left.

As well as his teaching and research, Dershowitz takes on a limited number of high-profile cases in his role as an appellate criminal defence lawyer. As he is paid by HarvardLawSchool, he does not depend on his income as a lawyer. This means that he has the luxury of picking and choosing the clients he is going to defend. You may not have heard of Dershowitz, but I am sure you will be familiar with some of his clients:

Claus von Bülow

Jim Bakker

Mike Tyson

O.J. Simpson

Bill Clinton

Patty Hearst

WikiLeaks

I should add that Dershowitz does not just represent celebrities; he takes half of his cases on a pro bono (free) basis. He has been dubbed the “winningest defence lawyer in history.” In his career Dershowitz has won more than 100 cases. He has an impressive strike rate for a part-time advocate who specialises in criminal appeals, which are notoriously difficult to win. In total Dershowitz has represented 36 people charged with homicide, 30 of whom were acquitted.” He does concede that most of them were probably guilty, but he can not know be sure which ones. For Dershowitz the system of justice is only as good as it is toward the worst person. He is quite open about representing guilty defendants – that is reality of being a defence lawyer. We might like to console ourselves with the Perry Mason image of the heroic defender. In the famous series Mason’s clients were always hapless victims of frame-ups, and the fearless lawyer was always able to unmask the real culprit at the end of the episode. Alas, this is pure fiction. Dershowitz argues that any defence lawyer who tells you that most of his clients are not guilty is either bullshitting or deliberately choosing only to represent a few innocent defendants. Dershowitz intentionally shies away from this. Whether the defendant is guilty, or his personal opinion about them, is irrelevant.  He is a gadfly who likes nothing better than representing guilty and contemptible defendants, whose prospects of winning appear minimal – this is one of the key obligations of being a defence lawyer. He likes to integrate his teaching and lawyering, and the challenging cases that he likes to take provide material for classroom discussion. What he ultimately strives for are those cases and that set a legal precedent.

What are the responsibilities of defence lawyer? I will be focussing mainly on the United States because their legal culture is so familiar to us through books and films. But much of what I’m going to say applies to many other legal systems. I could have looked at the rich English tradition of common law, or the alternative favoured in Spain and France – the inquisitorial system.

It is not the function of a defence lawyer to decide if his client is guilty or not. They must instead determine if the laws were followed in relation to the charges against their client. The fundamental duty of a criminal defence lawyer is to vigorously defend their client within the bounds of the law. This is the principle of zealous representation. The duty of a defence lawyer is not to do justice, but to defend their client. Their role is not analogous with that of the prosecutor whose role is not to prosecute, but to do justice. To effectively represent their clients defence lawyers must have a good grasp of the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment protects against unlawful searches and seizures, while the Fifth Amendment governs the right to remain silent so you do not incriminate yourself. In the United States this is known as a Miranda warning, and it usually goes something like this:

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.

In Britain it was tweaked a bit a few years ago:

You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.

If there are no constitutional violations, the work of a criminal defence lawyer might be more about negotiation, arranging a deal or plea bargain that permits their client to admit guilt to a lesser offense or that results in a lower sentence than if the accused has pleaded guilty.

The most famous obligation of a lawyer is that of confidentiality. To be admitted to the bar a lawyer must vow to “maintain inviolate the confidences of a client.“  Even if a client confesses to committing a serious crime, their lawyer cannot divulge this information to anyone. The rationale is that by assuring confidentiality the privilege encourages clients to make “full and frank” disclosures to their lawyers, enabling the latter to provide frank advice and more effective representation. A lawyer who violates this confidentiality may be reprimanded or even disbarred for life.

This is the theory. In practice it must be very hard to represent some types of criminal. I can’t imagine how I would feel if I got a paedophile off on a technicality or I had to cross-examine the victim of abuse. The recent case of Frances Andrade is a cautionary one. Andrade, a 48-year-old professional violinist killed herself on January 24^th this year, three days after she had given evidence at the trial of choirmaster Michael Brewer, who was found guilty of five counts of indecent assault. The abuse took place when Andrade was a teenager. Could her suicide have been prevented? The case raises questions about the role of Kate Blackwell QC, the defence barrister who cross-examined her. After the trial Andrade texted a friend to say she felt like she had been “raped all over again” after appearing in the witness box at Manchester crown court. Blackwell had accused her of lying and being a fantasist. Does she bear some responsibility for Andrade’s death?

Technicalities are not trivial and the defence should be allowed to rigorously challenge evidence that could send someone to prison for many years. I found it a little unsettling when, after the recent Jimmy Saville case, the police were saying that victims “will be believed.” I always take issue with some feminists. When it comes to rape they seem to want to forget the rule of William Blackstone: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.

Defence lawyers may be seen by some as ethical scumbags, but I don’t see it that way. We should only incarcerate people when there is overwhelming evidence to justify it. What emotions do they feel when their guilty clients go free? They know that the constitutional prohibition against “double jeopardy” means that their clients will go unpunished. But that is their job and it is one for which we should be grateful to them.

Taxes, death and queuing

An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one. George Mikes

It’s civilised to queue; it’s glorious to be polite. Chinese slogan in campaign to eradicate queue-jumping in Beijing during the Olympics

 ________

Queues occupy a special place in my life. I met my wife in a queue at the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas (the Official Language School) in Madrid. I had just arrived in the Spanish capital from England and I wanted to know if there was a club where I could meet the locals, while my wife was there because they had spelt her name wrong on a certificate. I suppose that it is hardly surprising that we should meet in a queue, as it is claimed that we spend around four years of our lives waiting in line. This does seem a lot, but think about the following incomplete list:

traffic lights, traffic jams and tailbacks

doctors’ surgeries

supermarket checkouts

passport control

paperwork for the government

lifts

call centres

theme parks

The English have a reputation for being master queuers. According to Joe Moran, in his look at everyday life Queuing for Beginners, the orderly queue began in the early nineteenth century, a “product of more urbanised industrialised societies which bought masses of people together in one place.” The queue is a spontaneous organic formation in the great English liberal tradition: it is self-regulating, and based on tacit understandings between people. The queue draws on British traditions of decency, fair play and democracy.

Queues also bring to mind central planning and socialism. In a radio broadcast in 1950 Winston Churchill coined the term Queuetopia to caricature Britain under the Labour government. In the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc the interminable queues were the butt of many a joke:

I want to join the waiting list for a car. How long is it?

Ten years from today exactly

Morning or evening?

Why does it matter?

A plumber is due in the morning.

_____

How will the problem of queues in shops be solved when we reach full Communism?

There will be nothing left to queue for.

_____

In the capitalist West it is Disney that is the acknowledged expert in queues and how to manage them. “The Happiest Place on Earth” is not my idea of fun. Why would I want to spend my holiday waiting in queues? But there is no doubt that Disney, which owns and licenses 14 theme parks around the world, has got it down to a fine art. In the rest of this post I am going to look at the psychological aspects of queuing and the solutions that companies such as Disney have found for them.

There is a significant subjective element to the experience of queuing. Research has shown that we overestimate how long they’ve waited in a queue by around 36%. Occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time. This principle is behind the placement of mirrors near lifts. At Houston airport passengers were frequently complaining about the long waits at baggage reclaim. The airport increased the number of baggage handlers and the average wait fell to just eight minutes, but the complaints did not abate. It was taking passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage reclaim and seven more minutes to actually pick up their bags. So nearly 90% of their time, was spent standing around waiting for their bags. By moving the arrival gates away from the main terminal and sending the luggage to the furthest carousel, passengers were made to walk six minutes to get their bags. Complaints fell to almost zero.

“In-line” entertainment is a popular option at amusement parks. And in an experiment at Walt Disney World they’ve decided to eliminate the queue completely on their Dumbo the Flying Elephant ride. Visitors will be given pagers and invited into an interactive waiting area where they’ll pass the time until they are buzzed back to the ride. In a busy restaurant, the typical substitute for a waiting customer is a bar. At an outdoor attraction with long queues, a good substitute might be a marquee selling merchandise or food. Not only do these activities make the wait more tolerable for the customer, they are also an opportunity to generate additional revenue.

The length of a queue should coincide with the value of the product or service for which we’re waiting. The more valuable it is, the longer we will be willing to wait for it. We are more concerned with how long a line is than how fast it’s moving. Given a choice between a slow-moving short queue and a fast-moving long one, we will often opt for the former, even if the waits are identical. In a theme park you probably don’t want your visitors to see the whole of the queue, so you try to hide it.

Uncertainty makes waiting more stressful, while information such as expected wait times and explanations for delays reduces this uncertainty. All else being equal, people who wait less than they anticipated leave happier than those who wait longer than expected. This is why Disney systematically overestimates waiting times for their rides, so that its customers will end up pleasantly surprised when they get on their chosen ride ahead of schedule.

A number of inventions have improved the queuing experience. A very mundane piece of technology, the metal pole with a rounded base and a strip of retractable webbed tape at the top, has become essential for more civilised queuing. Then we have those machines, first developed in Sweden, that assign a number to when you arrive. And the fast-food chain Wendy’s are said to have been the inventors of the serpentine line. This channels all the customers into one big snaking queue. On reaching the head of the queue, you are directed to the next available register, teller, etc. The serpentine line may not always faster be faster than multiple queues. But what it does offer is the guarantee that you will never see someone who arrives after you getting served before you.

Fairness, or lack thereof, is the biggest influence on our feelings about queues. We are most familiar with first come first served. However I am not sure this is universal. How people queue in different countries will have to be the subject of another post.

Unfairness can cause queuers to get angry and we hear a lot about queue rage and the violence it engenders. I read about one case at a supermarket in Milwaukee where a woman was so annoyed that the person in front of her had too many items in the express lane that she followed her out to her car, and chopped off half her nose with a hunting knife. But in reality people’s reactions to queue jumping can be surprisingly restrained.

The social psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose experiments have featured in this blog before, had his assistants travel around New York to 129 different queues in betting shops, railway stations etc. and barge into queues. They followed this protocol:

1. Enter queue at between the third and fourth person.

2. Say in a neutral tone: “Excuse me; I’d like to get in here.”

3. Step into line and face forward.

4. Only leave the queue when someone admonished them or after 1 minute, whichever was sooner.

On only 10% of occasions were queue-jumpers physically ejected from the queue. And half the times nothing at all happened, – no verbal rebukes, hostile gestures or even dirty looks. I do find this hard to believe. However, Milgram’s findings were replicated in another study by social anthropologist Kate Fox. In her book Watching The English Fox argued that it was easier to jump a queue in England, where the queue has an almost sacred status, than in other countries where queue-jumping is just a minor misdemeanour. She put it down to the fact that other social norms come into play. The desire not to make a scene meant that the queue jumper was generally not confronted by the people in the line.

Waiting in queues can be frustrating and boring; the nagging feeling that we are queuing our life away invades us. To adapt that famous Ben Franklin quote – there are only three things in life that are sure – taxes, death and queuing. And in the UK you can’t avoid queuing even when you die, as it can take two or three weeks before you are buried or cremated. So the next time you’re in a queue or spot a queue-jumper you could engage in a bit of amateur psychology. We’ll never eliminate queuing altogether, so I recommend a stoic attitude.

Do we have a linguistic DNA?

Here is your starter for ten:

Which is the best definition of the term forensic?

A. pertaining to crime

B. pertaining to death

C. pertaining to medicine

D. pertaining to the law

If you chose D, give yourself a pat on the back. I put this question in because I feel that the word forensic is subject to a great deal of misunderstanding. For me the correct definition is “belonging to, used in, or suitable to courts of judicature”. It comes from the Latin forēnsis, meaning “of or before the forum”. In Roman times, criminal charges were heard before a group of citizens in the forum. Both the accused and the accuser would give speeches based on their sides of the story. So forensic is an adjective meaning court or legal. However now there is now a second meaning: “relating to or dealing with the application of scientific knowledge to legal problems”. It has now become so closely associated with the scientific field that many dictionaries include this meaning that equates the word “forensics” with “forensic science”. Call me a pedant, but I think the first definition should be sufficient. A forensic pathologist is one who works in the legal system. You can have forensic anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, linguists, accountants, nurses and engineers. What they have in common is that they all work in the legal system.

For thirteen seasons the Las Vegas Crime Scene Investigators have been using their state-of-the art gadgets to solve grisly murders in under forty minutes. Such is the influence of the series that we have the CSI effect – juries unwilling to convict because they are unimpressed by the forensic evidence presented by the prosecution. Today I am going to be looking at a different aspect – forensics and language. I will begin with a branch of forensic linguistics known as forensic phonetics. I became especially interested in this subject after listening to a programme about it on the BBC.

What do forensic phoneticians do? We can glean an awful lot of information about a speaker from their voice. Obviously it’s usually possible to tell very quickly whether a speaker is male or female by listening to the overall pitch of the voice. Combining phonetic and sociolinguistic analysis of a voice can aid in establishing information about the speaker lives, their age, and other information about their background. Phoneticians can make speech visible on a computer screen, measuring its component parts – the duration of sounds, how long they are, their frequency, intensity, loudness and pitch. They can also decipher the content of difficult recordings. This can be useful when you have bad quality sources or unusual pronunciation patterns. Finally we have speaker identification. This could be by a witness. They may be asked to identify the voice in a voice parade or line-up. Alternatively, a professional may use a comparative phonetic analysis to try to establish if a suspect is the person talking on a criminal recording. The Holy Grail in this field would be some kind of automated system to recognise voices, but this is still a long way off.

Now I want to look at a practical example. Wearside Jack was the nickname given to John Samuel Humble, who pretended to be the Yorkshire Ripper in a number of hoax communications in 1978-79. As well as sending three letters taunting the authorities for their inability to catch him, Humble also did an audio-message spoken in a Wearside accent:

I’m Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you George, but Lord! You are no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started. I reckon your boys are letting you down, George. They can’t be much good, can they?

As a consequence the investigation shifted away from the Leeds/Bradford area. Thus Peter Sutcliffe, the real killer, was able to get away with murder until he was finally apprehended in January 1981. The phoneticians situated the accent in the Castletown area of Sunderland. In an exercise in futility, 40,000 potential suspects were investigated and the police used billboards, full page ads in local and national newspapers and ‘Dial-the-Ripper’ hotlines to try to get their man. This campaign alone would cost one million pounds. This was not the police’s finest hour. It also shows a danger of this type of evidence. It is fine to use it as one line of enquiry, but you shouldn’t use to exclude any other possibility. In fact, the phoneticians did their job well. In 2005 the long arm of the law finally caught up with Humble. One of the envelopes he had used was traced to him through DNA, and in 2006 he was sentenced to eight years for perverting the course of justice. When he was arrested, Humble was living in the Ford Estate suburb of Sunderland and he told the police he had gone to school in the Castletown area.

Forensic phonetics is, as I have already mentioned, part of forensic linguistics. This is the study, analysis and measurement of language in the context of crime, judicial procedure, or legal disputes. The term first appeared in 1968 when Jan Svartvik, a Swedish professor of linguistics, used it in an analysis of statements by Timothy John Evans, the man wrongly executed for the Rillington Place murders. Svartvik was able to show that the confession statement of Evans was probably not authentic. The part of the statement where Evans confessed to the murders was clearly different from the rest of the transcript.

What do forensic linguists do?

The forensic linguist may be called upon to analyse a very wide variety of documents including:

• anonymous letters

• hate mail

• mobile phone texts in missing person’s cases

• online communications

• ransom demands

• suicide notes – are they genuine?

• verballing – claims by defendants that their statements were altered or even invented by police officers

• wills

A key concept for much of what they do is the linguistic fingerprint. The idea is that each human being uses language differently, and that this difference between people involves a collection of unconscious predilections which makes each speaker or writer unique. Every individual uses languages differently and this difference can be identified just like a fingerprint. What they analyse are the function words – which vs. that, but vs. nevertheless etc. These are the words we tend to think about the least, but with enough text to play with and by studying the frequency and distribution of these words we can know if the writing conforms to samples that we know were written by the author.

The practice of analysing documents for authenticity or to identify the author is not new. In 1439 Lorenzo Valla, the Italian humanist, was able to prove that the Donation of Constantine, a Roman imperial decree by which the emperor Constantine I supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope, was a forgery. He did it by comparing the Latin with that used in authentic 4th Century documents. His conclusion was that it had probably been composed in the 8th century.

Let’s look at some more recent cases. In a famous case in 1982 Robert Eagleson, a professor of English at Sydney University was called in to examine a suicide note. The particular note was said to have been written by Janice Pollett, who had disappeared from her home. As well as examining the farewell note, Eagleson also had access to specimen letters by both Mr. and Mrs. Pollett. After looking at the grammar, spelling and punctuation Eagleson’s conclusion was that the letter had been written by the husband. Mervyn Pollett would later confess to the crime.

Forensic linguistics is also being used on more modern methods of communication. According to Wikipedia, on June 30, 2010, Paul Ceglia filed a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg claiming 84% ownership of Facebook and seeking financial compensation. What is interesting about this case is the use of emails. Ceglia described email exchanges with Zuckerberg, between July 2003 and July 2004 in which the two discussed the Facebook project, including ways to generate income from it. Zuckerberg’s legal team hired the linguist Gerald McMenamin, emeritus professor of linguistics at California State University, Fresno. He studied the e-mails, and found 11 different style markers, across punctuation, spelling and grammar, and concluded that Zuckerberg could not have been the author.

On October 26, 2012, federal agents arrested Ceglia and charged him with fabricating evidence in relation to his suit against Zuckerberg. Ceglia was charged with one count of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. In the two pages Ceglia produced for his lawsuit there were a number of inconsistencies such as differences in margins, spacing and columns. When the investigators searched Harvard’s email servers they could find no evidence of the messages Ceglia had mentioned in his lawsuit. And when they looked at his hard drive they found that Ceglia had falsified existing records to bolster his claim. I find this evidence more conclusive than that of the linguist. I agree with the comments by Ben Zimmer in the New York Times:

Many linguists, however, would challenge the notion that the “fingerprint,” a supposedly unique identifier, can be metaphorically applied to writing. Surely we all have our own written quirks and mannerisms — I tend to overuse em-dashes, for instance. But there is just too much internal variability in any person’s body of writing to imagine that we could take just a bit of it — a handful of e-mails — and recognize some sort of linguistic DNA. That is all the more true when it comes to digital genres like text messages, instant messages and tweets, full of unusual spellings and innovative abbreviations, and often sensitive to the type of device we’re using.

I find forensic linguistics absolutely fascinating. There are some really smart people in the field. And I really think it holds a great deal of promise for the future. I am particularly interested in the use of computers and the quantitative approach. But we need cautious about its adoption; forensic linguists still have a long way to go to convince courts of the reliability and validity of their methodology. Language, both written and spoken is not like your DNA or fingerprint, both of which never vary. Therefore, while Forensic Linguistics has its place in the courtroom, it is usually a much more useful for the defence. It is easier to prove that a defendant couldn’t have written something than to demonstrate that nobody else could have been written it. This type of evidence should not be used as the sole piece of evidence for the prosecution. Now I wonder what a forensic linguist would make of my oeuvre…

The story behind the song #1: I Don’t Like Mondays

All the playing’s stopped in the playground now

She wants to play with her toys a while.

And school’s out early and soon we’ll be learning

And the lesson today is how to die.

And then the bullhorn crackles,

And the captain crackles,

With the problems and the hows and whys.

And he can see no reasons

‘Cause there are no reasons

What reason do you need to die?

The final verse of I Don’t Like Mondays

It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn’t an attempt to exploit tragedy. Bob Geldof talking about the song

 

___________

 

I’ve used I Don’t Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats countless times in class.  This type of song, with its horrifying backstory, always serves as an excellent springboard for further discussion. Curiously, though many of my students have heard it before, very rarely do they know what it is about. The most common interpretation is that it describes the frustration of going back to work after a long weekend. But even if you think you know the story well, there may well be a lot of details that you just weren’t aware of. So, here is my take on the Boomtown Rats’ magnum opus:

On January 29, 1979 in San Diego, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer positioned herself by a window in her living room and began randomly shooting at the children who were waiting outside Grover Cleveland Elementary School across the street. Her weapon, a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic .22 calibre rifle with a telescopic sight and 500 rounds of ammunition, had been a Christmas present from her father. Spencer claimed she had really wanted a radio, and she suspected that her father wanted her to kill herself. If that is so, it would seem a rather strange choice of weapon.

The shooting would claim the lives of Principal Burton Wragg and Mike Suchar, the Head Custodian. Eight students and a police officer were also injured. Wragg died trying to help the children, and Suchar was killed while trying to pull Wragg to safety. The fact that no children died was not due to a lack of intent on Spencer’s part, but to sheer luck. After firing thirty rounds, Spencer barricaded herself inside her home, where she would stay for almost seven hours before finally surrendering. During the siege she spoke to a reporter by telephone. When asked why she did it, she is alleged to have replied:

“I don’t like Mondays; this livens up the day.” She later declared that she did not recall making the remark.

Be that as it may, her alleged comment went around the world, and was the inspiration behind The Boomtown Rats 1979 song. I Don’t Like Mondays was a #1 hit in 32 different countries. However, it flopped in America, where Spencer’s parents unsuccessfully tried to have it banned. Whether the failure of the song, which only reached #73 in the US Billboard Hot 100, was due to the band being largely unknown in the U.S. or its controversial subject matter, is difficult to tell.

The Boomtown Rats’ lead singer Bob Geldof went on to organize Band Aid, Live Aid and Live 8. This charity work led to his being awarded a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II, in 1986. The KBE is the equivalent of knighthood given to people born outside of the Commonwealth realm. Although some media outlets continue to refer to him erroneously as “Sir Bob Geldof”, he should not be referred to using the title “Sir”.

Geldof’s efforts have not received universal acclaim. One critic is the English comedian, actor, radio and television presenter, singer, columnist, and author. Russell Brand, who made this joke while presenting the NME Awards in 2006:

“Really, it’s no surprise he’s (Geldof) such an expert on famine, he has after all been dining out on ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ for thirty years”. This put-down by Katy Perry’s ex may have been provoked by Geldof comparing him to a certain part of the female anatomy.

Anyway, back to the song. It’s been more than 35 years since the San Diego shootings, but gun politics remain among the most controversial issues the U.S.A. The clash between the individual right to bear arms and the responsibility of government to prevent gun crime has not been resolved. And the massacres keep coming. 15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years have taken place in the United States. Finland, which lies in second place, has two incidents. Of the 11 deadliest shootings in the US, five have happened since 2007 onward. And this doesn’t include the horrific events at Sandy Hook.

It was historian Richard Hofstadter who popularised the phrase gun culture to describe America’s love affair with the gun. American attitudes to guns are something else. Who can forget the scene in Bowling for Columbine in which Michael Moore is offered a free Weatherby Mark V Magnum rifle for opening a bank account? 1% of public schools have daily metal detector checks and 5% of public schools have random metal detector checks. We associate gun culture with right-wing Republicans, but support for guns is more widespread. The Pink Pistols are an example of this. The gay and lesbian gun rights organization’s motto is “Pick on someone your own calibre.”  This is the spiel from their website:

The Pink Pistols get together at least once a month at local firing ranges to practice shooting, and to acquaint people new to firearms with them. We will help you select a firearm, acquire a permit, and receive proper training in its safe and legal use for self-defense. The more people know that members of our community may be armed, the less likely they will be to single us out for attack.

Guns have also entered the popular lexicon. My favourite expression has to be going postal. This term, which was first coined in the early 80s, refers to the violent rage some people experience at their workplaces. The expression gained popular currency after a series of incidents from 1983 onwards in which United States Postal Service workers shot and killed managers, co-workers, police officers and members of the public in deadly acts of rage. In fact, the homicide rate per 100,000 workers at postal facilities is actually lower than at many other workplaces, but why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

The right to own a gun and defend oneself then is considered by many citizens, especially those in the West and South, as a central feature of American identity. This attitude has deep historical roots. In the nation’s frontier history guns played a vital role as the country expanded westward, enabling settlers to protect themselves from Native Americans, outlaws, animals and anything else that moved. Frontier citizens would often take on responsibility for self-protection. In the war of independence the idea that guns were necessary against foreign tyranny took hold

At the heart of the debate we have the Second Amendment. I have to say that it does sound pretty unambiguous to me:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.  

In District of Columbia v. Heller, a landmark 2008 case, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defence within the home and within federal enclaves.

Accustomed to living in Europe all my life some of the arguments made by those who oppose gun control seem scandalous. Nevertheless, it is important to hear them. Whereas in Europe we believe that it is the exclusive role of the state to protect its citizens, in the United States the right to self-defence is considered fundamental. But the most shocking argument for me is the one about protecting themselves from their own government. This is not a universally accepted idea, but it does have many adherents. The idea is that if its own citizens are armed, then the government will think long and hard before trying to coerce the population – the government should feel afraid of its citizens.

I have to say that I am very sceptical about the success of gun control measures. Since 1990, Gallup has been polling Americans on gun control laws. In 1990 78% favoured introducing stricter controls. By 2010 this figure had fallen to just 44%. Guns are out there now and it will be difficult to go back. According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2009 there were an estimated 310 million firearms in the United States (not including weapons on military bases), of which 114 million were handguns, 110 million were rifles, and 86 million were shotguns. There may be ways of restricting some kind of firearms, or who has access to guns, but the NRA is very powerful and I would be amazed if any meaningful measures were brought in.

What happened to Spencer? She was tried as an adult, and pleaded guilty to two charges of murder and assault with a deadly weapon. She was given an indeterminate sentence of 25 years to life imprisonment. In 1993 Spencer became eligible for hearings to consider her suitability for parole. Since then four Board of Parole hearings have all produced the same outcome: Spencer is not fit to return to the community.

These hearings have seen her make a number of unsubstantiated claims. At the 1993 hearing Spencer said she had been a user of alcohol and drugs at the time of the crime, and that the tests showing she did not have drugs in her system when taken into custody must have been falsified. Eight years later she claimed that her had beat and sexually abused her. The parole board chairman said that, as she had not previously told any prison staff about the allegations, he doubted whether they were true. At her last hearing in 2009 parole board ruled Spencer would be denied parole, and that her case would not be considered again until 2019. She will be spending a lot of Mondays in prison before she is ever released.

Bringing up kids the New Guinea way – an alternative to helicopter parenting

I am currently reading Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Diamond is the author of the wonderful Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which sought to explain the huge differences in development among different world regions. His latest book concerns the possible lessons we can draw from analysing traditional societies. We need to remember that humans have lived in bands and tribes for almost all of our history. Diamond looks at areas such as war, justice, religion, language and physical exercise. Today I’m just going to look at chapter five, in which Diamond explains how they bring up children in traditional societies. These practices emerged over millennia with thousands of natural experiments, by societies all over the planet. Can we learn anything from them?

Diamond analyses infant care practises from a mammalian perspective. There are species in which the infant is in constant contact with the mother. In modern hunter-gatherer societies an infant is held almost constantly throughout the day, generally the mother. When the mother is walking, the infant is held in carrying devices. In milder climates, there is constant skin-to-skin contact between her and the infant. This has been the practice throughout almost all of human history. By traditional standards, many of our modern child-rearing practices are absurd. We moderns follow what Diamond calls the rabbit-antelope pattern. The mother or someone else will occasionally pick up and hold the infant in order to feed it or play with it, but the infant will generally spend a large portion of the day in a crib or playpen and at night they sleep alone, usually in a separate room from the parents. This is highly unusual – one cross-cultural survey of 90 traditional human societies could not find a single one in which mother and infant slept in separate rooms.

In relation to physical punishment there are huge variations. Diamond describes a mother who rubbed stinging nettle leaves into her eight-year old daughter’s face, causing the child to scream uncontrollably in agony. Other groups have a Spock-like permissiveness. How can one explain why some societies practise physical punishment of children, while others don’t? There does seem to be a broad trend: most hunter-gatherer bands do minimal physical punishment of young children, most farming societies do more punishment, with herders being especially likely to punish. The rise of agriculture led to greater gender and age inequality. Deference and respect became important. Therefore physical punishment became an important disciplinary tool.

What observers of traditional societies do notice is how self-confident and independent the kids are even at a young age. Diamond tells of Talu, a 10-year-old boy from New Guinea who volunteered to be a porter for him. As his parents were not around, Talu didn’t ask permission from them – he just went off with Diamond. When the parents came back, they would be told by one of the villagers that their son had gone off with some unknown white man for some unknown length of time. The boy had originally agreed to go off for seven days, but that week finally turned into a month. In New Guinea you assume that kids are independent, and are capable of making their own decisions. As a result of this they’re more autonomous, self-confident people. Diamond describes another band in which young children were allowed to do pretty much as they pleased. If a baby was playing next to a fire, adults did not intervene. Consequently, many adults had burn scars that they had acquired as infants.

A child’s individual autonomy may be a cherished ideal in hunter-gatherer bands, but in the West we seem to be gripped by paranoia. Stranger danger describes is embedded in our culture. We have all received these warnings from our parents:

“Don’t talk to strangers”

“Don’t tell anyone your name”

“Don’t eat sweets off strangers”

The problem is that most child abductions and harm are not due to strangers, but rather someone the child is familiar with or related to. By exaggerating the potential threat you spread fear and mistrust. In the USA 50 children are murdered in what could be described as classic stranger abductions. This is in a country with a population of 315 million.

Stranger danger has contributed to parents keeping children indoors, where they are on the Play Station, resulting in what Richard Louv has called nature deficit disorder. I have to say I’m not really a nature lover. A couple of Woody Allen quotes sum up my attitude:

“I am at two with nature.”

“I love nature, I just don’t want to get any of it on me.

While I don’t think we need any new psychological conditions, it is not a good idea to have kids cooped up all day. Apart from obesity, Louv believes that children who don’t get out will be more prone to anxiety, depression and attention-deficit problems.

It’s not just that though. We should want our kids to be street smart. Lenore Skenazy certainly believes this. If you don’t remember her, she was the mother who allowed her son Izzy, then nine years old, to take the New York subway alone. The reaction she provoked was extreme. Google “America’s worst mom” and the first hit you see is hers – some even accused her of child abuse. Skenazy believes that parents are being overprotective and has started her own blog “Free-Range Kids”. Skenazy is part of a backlash against helicopter parenting. The term, originally coined by Foster Cline and Jim Fay, refers to obsessive parents who like helicopters, hover overhead.

We are not going to go back to bringing up our children like they do in New Guinea. Diamond is a sympathetic observer of traditional societies, but he doesn’t try to idealise them either. He also mentions the negative aspects; he doesn’t recommend that we return to the hunter-gatherer practices of selective infanticide, or letting infants play with knives or fire. Being a parent is intimidating. I sometimes think that by what we do, or fail to do, we may be creating a Nobel Prize winner or a serial killer. There is so much conflicting advice. We have Tiger moms who believe that children should be able to solve Fermat’s last theorem by the age of three and should be punished if they don’t get A’s in all their subjects. At the other end of the spectrum is economist Bryan Caplan who believes that we are fussing too much over our kids and that it is nature not nurture which determines how they turn out. I would continue but my kids’ knife throwing game seems to be getting out of hand.

What’s in a political name?

Once upon a time in America, there was a political party that believed in a strong central government, high taxes and bold public works projects. This party was popular on the college campuses of New England and was the overwhelming choice of African American voters. It was the Republican Party.

The Republicans got started as a counterweight to the other party: the party of low taxes and limited government, the party suspicious of Eastern elites, the party that thought Washington should butt out of the affairs of private property owners – the Democrats.  David Von Drehle writing in theWashington Post, July 2004

 ______

The premise of today’s article is how I would explain contemporary political labels to a visitor from Planet Zog. The quote above illustrates the difficulty of the enterprise. It is very easy to forget that Abraham Lincoln, the president who emancipated the slaves, was a Republican. It is hard to imagine Honest Abe on Fox News. Political labels are a minefield. If you look on Wikipedia’s list of political ideologies you are bombarded with names which aim to succinctly define the worldview of their adherents; Anarcho-capitalism, Hoxhaism, Paleoconservatism, Ordoliberalism, Minarchism, Melanesian socialism are just a few of the labels you can see. They certainly played havoc with my spell check.

In 1789 King Louis XVI of France was forced to convene a form of parliament for the first time in over a century. At this assembly, the more radical delegates took up seats to the left of the King, while their conservative counterparts sat on his right. Ever since then the labels left and right for socialists and conservatives have stuck.  One common complaint that you hear is that these one-dimensional categories are inadequate to deal with our complex modern political landscape. There are more sophisticated ways of defining yourself politically; politicalcompass.org has been around for a few years now. After you have answered 61 questions, you are placed on two separate and independent axes. The Economic or Left-Right) axis measures your opinion of how the economy should be organised. “Left” is defined as the view that the economy should be run by a cooperative collective agency, typically the state, but it could also be a network of communes. “Right” is defined as the view that the economy should be left to the devices of competing individuals and organizations. The Authoritarian-Libertarian axis measures your attitudes to personal freedom. “Libertarianism” is defined as the belief that personal freedom should be maximised, while “authoritarianism” gives more weight to authority and tradition. Here is a visual representation:

I did the test and came out as … a half-baked libertarian. I wasn’t completely happy with the wording of some questions, but anyway here is what I scored:

Economic Left/Right: 0.50

Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.95

This is how I compare to other leaders:

What I want to look at now is some of the contradictions and paradoxes present in these labels.

I want to argue that communism and fascism are in fact not so far apart. Mussolini was a radical socialist, before going on to become Il Duce. Nazi (I prefer to use the pejorative term and pronounce it “Naaazi” like Winston Chirchill), Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party) is a fascinating blend of left and right. If you look at ideologies as a circle, the extreme points of the circle do meet. Both communism and fascism share a disdain for economic freedom. Communism nationalized property explicitly. Market relations and the price mechanism were abolished. Fascism required that owners use their property in the “national interest”. The appearance of market relations may have remained, but extensive planning of all economic activities was going on. Fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, it effectively neutered the marketplace.

To begin with, the word liberal was based on the ideal of individual liberty. Classical liberals favoured laissez-faire economics, limited government and the rule of law. But somewhere in the transition to the twentieth century the word metamorphosed into a diametrically opposed meaning. Social liberalism gives the state an important role in such questions as unemployment, health care and education. This is the use of liberal in the United States, where the right employ it as a term of abuse. A few years ago The Economist had a piece calling for the word liberal to be reclaimed. The magazine argued that there ought to be a word and a indeed a political party to stand for:

 “… what liberalism used to mean. The idea, with its roots in English and Scottish political philosophy of the 18th century, speaks up for individual rights and freedoms, and challenges over-mighty government and other forms of power. In that sense, traditional English liberalism favoured small government—but, crucially, it viewed a government’s efforts to legislate religion and personal morality as sceptically as it regarded the attempt to regulate trade (the favoured economic intervention of the age). This, in our view, remains a very appealing, as well as internally consistent, kind of scepticism”

In the last three or four decades the term neo-liberal has become the favourite term for left-wingers. In the ironic words of The Economist neo-liberals are “market-worshipping, nihilistic sociopaths to a man. Many are said to believe that there is no such thing as society.” I always enjoy listening to Cayo Lara, the leader of the Spanish Communist Party (known as the United Left). He seems to be on a mission to see how many times he can use the word neo-liberal per minute. The Guardian’s resident unreconstructed Marxist, Seumus Milne, recently used this epithet to describe the EU. I really do struggle to see the EU as neo-liberal. I don’t think anyone could imagine Hayek or Friedman designing a monstrosity like the Common Agricultural Policy. If you look at one neo-liberal symbol, Margaret Thatcher, you will see that from 1979 to 1990 government spending was 40.88% of GDP on average. This is hardly a minimalist state. Under New Labour from1997 to 2010 the comparative figure was 41.29%. Thatcher may well have wanted to do more, but she was constrained by the system.

This is my mini-tour of political labels. We have seen that it is very difficult to even agree on basic terminology. And I haven’t even gone into such loaded words as democracy, freedom and progress. That will have to be in another post. But if there are any well-informed aliens out there, perhaps they can explain these labels to me.

The bastard child of Yes Minister.

I am a big fan of The Thick of It, a comedy that satirises the workings of the British Government. It has been described by Andrew Marr as the “angry, rampaging bastard child of Yes Minister.” The star of the show is undoubtedly Malcolm Tucker, a foul-mouthed Labour spin doctor. Here are a couple of videos of the man in action: