Joel's Memoirs

Culture Wars: I don’t speak French, but my football is OK

Travelling is never easy, thats the fun of it. When you don’t speak French and you are driving thousands of miles through Francophone West Africa in a fairly banged-out right-hand drive Ford Fiesta, the challenges that face you multiply. Luckily for myself and any other linguistically inept summer travellers, football is the universal language of the moment, there to get you a bit further along the journey with a quick succession of match-long friends.

Whilst yelling ‘Le Coupe Du Monde’ with a bit of cheer works as a great way to disarm even the toughest-looking of foreign officials, the best ice-breaker in the World Cup traveller’s arsenal is the cycle of naming teams or players in a slightly foreign accent untill both you and the local you are talking to come to an agreement about who exactly you will base your conversation on, and then exchanging sponteneous, barely informed judgements upon them through a combination of grunting and thumb-led indicators. The high number of World Cup players in the English Leagues also works as a great invitation to any local with ‘small, small English’ to engage the English traveller into a more lengthy conversation about our football – this is a great way to make a local friend of any age if they have the English.

These conversations may not help you get particularly ‘up close and personal’ with the native psyche, but they do serve as an easy mode for cultural comparison: a group of locals and a television is a potential learning curve for many a curious nomad. Some locals might have invited you into their homes to watch the next game or you may have heard the blare of vuvuzelas from a shop-owner’s set and decide to join them and often many of their only semi-employed friends huddled round a tiny set. It often feels as if the World Cup Song is a rallying cry of invitation to warm the heart of a weary nomad wherever he is. (It is also pretty unavoidable playing in nearly every TV or radio advert – and ringing as many African’s ringtone.)

Just as some travellers have used the world cup as an invitation to explore Africa itself, I think it is safe to say that every traveller all over the world, from any competing nation, and all those not, have reaped the benefits of using the World Cup as a tool in their travels. Whatever you think of globalisation, this ‘pro’ of making a global citizen is without flaw; it’s just a shame that it doesn’t happen every time I decide to go abroad.

Published on Thursday 8th July 2010 (here). Part of Geoff Kidder’s World Cup Blog 2010.

London – West Africa Summer Blog

I will be driving into the Sahara proud throughout June and July and will be blogging about the experience at http://thelionkingliveshere.tumblr.com/

Culture Wars: Counting the subaltern generation?

The strategy, it appears, is to politicise young people by giving them the ‘opportunities’ and ‘skills’ to help them speak. A workshop led by Professor Stephen Coleman of the University of Leeds was focused on moving participants’ understanding of politics beyond shallow opinions of it as an external process, towards politics as a form of internal expression about the world they want to live in – to help young people ‘find their voice’. Meanwhile, in a section called ‘Words Count’ a talented mix of rappers and poets expressed their disillusionment with current politics and attempted to validate their personal lifestyles and identities.

This personalised ‘politics’, however, is not worthy of the name. The repetitive celebration of individuated youthful expression resulted in an apolitical event whereby ‘young people’ spoke, but had very little interesting to say. As two participants, Billy Shields and Kieran Jordan noted, ‘90% of the weekend seems to have nothing to do with politics’. Like standing on the shore and shouting into the sea, young people – much to their own surprise – expressed their opinions, although directed at no-one in particular and met with no reply, no discussion, no challenge and no debate. In Professor Coleman’s observation, ‘“Counted?” is not participatory in terms of the public sphere of politics’. And I am inclined to agree with him. In effect, this is Politics 101 without engagement – a pretty pointless exercise.

Whilst the oldies moan that us young’uns don’t do politics anymore, I find myself moaning that the only thing on offer for those who at least want to try is patronising congratulations for ‘having a go’. If events like ‘Counted?’ continue to pass for youthful politics, that subaltern voice will stay subaltern, turned off and uninspired; As was displayed in their performances, their contributions will remain atomised and self-involved.

Whilst ‘Counted?’ hopes to be giving young people the opportunities and skills to contribute to our political system, if their contributions are not met with fierce challenge from the outset, how can they possibly be equipped to grow up robust in the face of problems that face them in the future?

There is a lot to be done to put some life back into politics. This is the task those coming to the political system have to deal with: the only way to do it is to learn by doing, not by practising doing or feeling able to do, but by actually doing. It is high time that we start considering political education as more than just public speaking classes. After all, there is only the fate of humanity at stake.

More information about the weekend’s events is available on the website.  The documentary film Counted, which accompanies the project is playing in London’s County Hall Debating Chamber until 22 May 2010.

Published on 20th April 2010 (here).

openDemocracy: Don’t sleep through the dawn of a new era in politics

Today, it is all too easy to call yourself a ‘politically engaged person’ and to walk around without a care for the fact that a general election is on its way with no sense of a contradiction. The televised cross-party debates are set – not that anyone is looking forward to watching them – and the papers are publishing daily pre-electoral polls – not that anyone is at all inspired by any of the three horses in the race.

It appears evident that the coming UK election lacks the excitement or intensity of last year’s stateside whirlwind. Without even the pretence of a British Obama it is tempting to write off mainstream politics as irrelevant, and take a ‘none of the above’ position; this would achieve nothing beyond feeding a pervasive anti-political cynicism.

For those of us who believe that both politics and ideas matter there appear to be few alternative channels for our democratic energies without naively voting purely for the sake of it. But it is exactly because we have no simple outlet to voice our frustrations that finding new ways of intervening in public discussion is paramount. The fact is: this election, more than any since 1997, is a crucially important turning-point which will see the biggest influx of new MPs in living memory. 2010 will change the game and bring ‘a new breed’ to power; for this reason cynically rejecting the election as a meaningless charade will just not do.

Whilst the highest hopes of some is for a hung parliament – to keep the Tories out or to at least dethrone New Labour – in effect, this is a call in support of slow stagnation. It is time for an outlook revitalised by prospect of progress and democracy’s capacity to bring about social change; look at the coming ballot papers as an opportunity for voters to make history, rather than just observe it.

To this ends, the Institute of Ideas will be holding a Pre-Election Summit - The Battle for Politics – on 20th March in the hope that we can move the discussion away from cynicism of events on the political stage and into finding new ideas that we can support. We would love you to join us.

Published on 11th March 2010 (here). Creative Commons License (see original publication for details)

Reading Heresy about Tehran

Having spent most of the past year in Israel, overblown doom-mongering about Iran’s military capabilities seem to pass so frequently I have mostly given up on trying to correct people who let their paranoid delusions hold their rational faculties prisoner in this instance. This is why I was pleasantly surprised to see Ehud Barak’s heresy in the Israeli press:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak was quoted on Thursday as saying he does not view Iran as a threat to Israel’s existence, a view that would seem to depart from Israeli statements of the recent past …“Iran does not constitute an existential threat against Israel.”

I am reminded of an article in Prospect just as valid as the day it was written:

Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran’s warships, despite the fact that most are over 30 years old; of combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and brigades that are so only in name. There are awed descriptions of the Pasdaran revolutionary guards, inevitably described as “elite,” who do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war, but who have actually fought only one—against Iraq, which they lost. As for Iran’s claim to have defeated Israel by Hizbullah proxy in last year’s affray, the publicity was excellent but the substance went the other way, with roughly 25 per cent of the best-trained men dead, which explains the tomb-like silence and immobility of the once rumbustious Hizbullah ever since the ceasefire.

Defense Minister Barak’s moments of sanity should be an example to all . To quote a President, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”.