Duas coisas são infinitas: o universo e a estupidez humana. Mas, em relação ao universo, ainda não tenho a certeza absoluta.
(Einstein)
But the tune ends too soon for us all (Ian Anderson)
Jantar em 16 de Julho, no Restaurante Fraga. Filipe Melo, António Pires, José Machado, Luis Miranda, Carlos Barroso, Mário Guerra, Luis Costa, Carlos Amorim, João, João Pires, eu, José Azevedo e Alfredo Duarte.
There is an immense bounty of bunk about the wisdom of age available to all of us who require it from time to time, but, as the pitiless Mark Twain put it in his autobiography, “It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.”
On Thursday night, it was Joe Biden’s turn. But, unlike the rest of us, he went to pieces on CNN, in front of tens of millions of his compatriots. At some level, Biden’s supporters were hoping that he would defy the realities of time, the better to puncture the vanities and malevolence of his felonious opponent. And so there was a distinct cruelty to it all, the spectacle of a man of eighty-one, struggling terribly with memory, syntax, nerves, and fragility, his visage slack with the dawning sense that his mind was letting him down and that, as a result, he was letting the country down. It must be said, with fellow-feeling, but it must be said: This was an event that, if unremedied, could bring the country closer to another Trump Presidency and with it a diminishment of liberal democracy.
The question is: What will Joe Biden do about it?
We have long known that Biden, no matter what issue you might take with one policy or another, is no longer a fluid or effective communicator of those policies. Asked about his decline, the Biden communications team and his understandably protective surrogates and advisers would deliver responses to journalists that sounded an awful lot like what we all, sooner or later, tell acquaintances when asked about aging parents: they have good days and bad days. Accurate, perhaps, but discreet and stinting in the details. In Biden’s case, there certainly were times where he could pull off a decent interview or an even better State of the Union. If he worked a shorter day, well, that was forgivable; if he stumbled up the stairs or shuffled from the limo to the plane, a little neuropathy in the feet was nothing compared to F.D.R. in a wheelchair. The prospect of Donald Trump’s return permitted, or demanded, a measure of cognitive dissonance. And wasn’t Trump’s own rhetorical insanity even worse? To say nothing of thirty-four felony convictions, a set of dangerous policy goals, and an undeniably authoritarian personality?
But watching Thursday’s debate, observing Biden wander into senselessness onstage, was an agonizing experience, and it is bound to obliterate forever all those vague and qualified descriptions from White House insiders about good days and bad days. You watched it, and, on the most basic human level, you could only feel pity for the man and, more, fear for the country.
In the aftermath, Jill Biden, who had led her husband off the stage, dismissed the night as an aberration, as did Barack Obama, and a cluster of loyalists. He’d had a “bad debate.” He was sure to get better, grow more agile. Such loyalty can be excused, at least momentarily. They did what they felt they had to do to fend off an immediate implosion of Biden’s campaign, a potentially irreversible cratering of his poll numbers, an evaporation of his fund-raising, and the looming threat of Trump Redux.
But meanwhile the tide is roaring at Biden’s feet. He is increasingly unsteady. It is not just the political class or the commentariat who were unnerved by the debate. Most people with eyes to see were unnerved. At this point, for the Bidens to insist on defying biology, to think that a decent performance at one rally or speech can offset the indelible images of Thursday night, is folly.
Biden has rightly asserted that the voters regard this election not only as a debate about global affairs, the environment, civil rights, women’s rights, and other matters of policy but as a referendum on democracy itself. For him to remain the Democratic candidate, the central actor in that referendum, would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment. It is entirely possible that the debate will not much change the polls; it is entirely possible that Biden could have a much stronger debate in September; it is not impossible to imagine that Trump will find a way to lose. But, at this point, should Biden engage the country in that level of jeopardy? To step aside and unleash the admittedly complicated process of locating and nominating a more robust and promising ticket seems the more rational course and would be an act of patriotism. To refuse to do so, to go on contending that his good days are more plentiful than the bad, to ignore the inevitability of time and aging, doesn’t merely risk his legacy—it risks the election and, most important, puts in peril the very issues and principles that Biden has framed as central to his Presidency and essential to the future.
Trump went into the debate with one distinct advantage. No matter how cynical and deceitful he might be, no one expected anything else. His qualities are well known. In contrast, Biden’s voters and potential voters might disagree with him on particular issues—on immigration, on the Middle East, you name it—but they are, at minimum, adamant that he not be a figure of concealment or cynicism. To stay in the race would be pure vanity, uncharacteristic of someone whom most have come to view as decent and devoted to public service. To stay in the race, at this post-debate point, would also suggest that it is impossible to imagine a more vital ticket. In fact, Gretchen Whitmer, Raphael Warnock, Josh Shapiro, and Wes Moore are just a few of the office-holders in the Party who could energize Democrats and independents, inspire more younger voters, and beat Trump.
So much—perhaps too much—now depends on one man, his family, and his very small inner circle coming to a painful and selfless conclusion. And yet Joe Biden always wanted to be thought of as human, vulnerable, someone like you and me. All of us are like him in at least one way. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it. There is no shame in growing old. There is honor in recognizing the hard demands of the moment. ♦
Football pundits are supposed to be experts. More often than not, though, they are just a motley collection of former footballers stealing a living. The coverage of Euro 2024 has proven just that.
If it’s not mumbling Rio Ferdinand tripping over his words, it’s dreary Alan Shearer with the repeated ‘England need more quality’ soundbite – or the proselytising Gary Lineker who appears to think that anyone who disagrees with him may be part of some conspiracy.
Daft punditry is nothing new
Then there’s Micah Richards, the class clown who can’t let anyone else speak for five seconds without butting in. He is a regular on the BBC, Sky Sports, CBS, Sky’s football panel show A League of Their Ownand Lineker’s podcast The Rest is Football. But why?
The commentary teams at Euro 2024 have been dire too. ITV’s best commentator, Clive Tyldesley, has been pushed aside in favour of stat-obsessed Sam Matterface and his double act partner Lee Dixon. How many times did Matterface and the BBC’s commentator, Guy Mowbray, tell us that Lamine Yamal was just 17 and 16 up until the final (always adding ‘years of age’ afterwards as if to clarify what they meant)?
The reserve teams for the BBC included Danny Murphy as a co-commentator, albeit on lesser matches, even though he sounds like he’s describing a state funeral, and he’s often alongside the insufferable Jonathan Pearce who feels the need to keep telling us he’s been around a long time.
There were bright sparks. ITV had, in my opinion, the best commentary team of the lot: relegated to non-England games in Seb Hutchinson and Andros Townsend who follows the advice of perhaps the greatest sports commentator of them all, Richie Benaud, who once said: ‘Never insult the viewer by telling them what they can already see.’ Compare this to Matterface who really did say, after Slovakia took the lead against the Three Lions: ‘England will have to come from behind if they want to win this game.’
Townsend had the advantage of currently playing the game so offered none of the ‘back in my day’ banter of Dixon, Shearer and the monotonous Martin Keown. And though it offends some old-school chauvinists, the inclusion of former Lioness Jill Scott, who has actually won the Euros with England, was a breath of fresh air as a foil to ITV’s Gary Neville, Roy Keane and Ian Wright.
Ally McCoist, who seems to polarise opinion, at least offered insight and I would like to see TV use Radio Five Live pundit, Nedum Onuoha, who may not be a familiar name to many but is a wise and considered voice of reason.
The difference between insight and soundbite comes to the fore when current managers are included in the line-up. While Lineker, Shearer and Richards were playing to the gallery after England’s draw with Denmark, the Danish manager of Brentford, Thomas Frank, was offering calm, considered opinion, even daring to suggest that, actually, the Danes played quite well.
On ITV, the panel reacted by including another current Premier League manager, Ange Postecoglou of Spurs, who has dropped his previous habit of looking at the floor and constantly coughing. Instead, he offered some level-headed judgment of Southgate’s tactics. It should be remembered that Shearer, Keane and Neville have all had a go at managing football teams and been hopeless.
The final itself began with the panels lauding Gareth Southgate for making key substitutions. It ended with them criticisng him for not playing the subs from the beginning. Poor Gareth just can’t win. Well, he can win, just not in finals it seems but his calm dignity throughout is in stark contrast to the hyperventilating critics in the TV studios.
Daft punditry is nothing new. Those of a certain vintage can recall the likes of Mick Channon, Derek Dougan and Malcolm Allison in checked jackets and kipper ties competing for soundbites. Even the beloved Brian Clough described Poland’s goalkeeper, Jan Tomaszewski, as ‘a clown’ before he went on to make a string of saves against England at Wembley that saw the home side fail to qualify for the 1974 World Cup and cost Sir Alf his job. Plus ca change.
It was only a matter of time before America’s student protests spread to the UK. In Oxford, tents have been pitched on grass that, in ordinary times, no student is allowed to walk on. The ground outside King’s College in Cambridge looks like Glastonbury, complete with an ‘emergency toilet’ tent. Similar camps can be found at UCL, Manchester University and more. There have been no clashes with police, but that may yet come. In Leeds, for example, pro-Palestinian students tried to storm a university building, leading to bloody clashes with security guards.
From the Sorbonne to Sydney University, the movement has gone global. Its ostensible cause is hardly ignoble. It’s possible to be appalled both by the 7 October attacks and the tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths. It would be inhumane not to share the widespread horror at what is happening in Gaza. And anti-war rallies have, of course, long been part of the student experience, a hallmark of a free society. (I should know: as an undergraduate, I travelled to London to march against the Iraq war.) But the sight of some of the most privileged young people in the West calling for ‘global intifada’ and, in some cases, explicitly expressing their solidarity with Hamas indicates how easily these protests have been instrumentalised for more extreme causes.
A protest camp at Kings College, Cambridge University, 7 May 2024 (Getty Images)
The recent escalation started when Minouche Shafik, the politically savvy president of Columbia University in New York, sought to make clear that anti-Semitism has no place on campus. She’s an economics professor whose CV includes important stints in government, running the UK’s Department for International Development as a permanent secretary and serving as a crossbencher in the House of Lords.
When called to give evidence to Congress at the end of April, she didn’t want to repeat the mistake of her colleagues at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who had so egregiously failed to take a firm line on anti-Semitism a few months earlier that they found themselves out of a job. She vowed to enforce her university’s rules with a firm hand. But students determined to challenge her authority responded by erecting tents on Columbia’s campus. When Baroness Shafik delivered on the vow she had made to Congress by calling in the NYPD to clear the encampment, she set off an even bigger protest movement. Copycat encampments quickly spread to around 50 American universities and beyond.
For the most part, protestors pitch tents in common spaces on campus, limiting themselves to chanting slogans meant to shock and provoke. At many universities they’ve also occupied administrative buildings or prevented classmates from moving around campus or going to the library. In response, a growing number of American university presidents have called in the police: more than 2,000 protestors – many of whom turned out to be outside agitatorswith no university connection – have been arrested.
When students rebelled in the 1960s they embraced plenty of dumb and dangerous causes, from Fidel Castro to the Cultural Revolution. But their anger proved long-lasting in part because so many had skin in the game. They chafed at open censorship on college campuses and the strict restrictions on their sex lives. Most importantly, many had good reason to fear being conscripted into fighting America’s disastrous war in Vietnam.
Today, students are once again horrified by a bloody conflict in a faraway land. This hurt goes especially deep for students who have links to the region, though most protestors lack such a personal connection. Unlike in 1968, none of them have to fear being conscripted into taking part in the conflict. And it is the scions of the white middle-class who seem especially prone to the most radical and nihilistic forms of oppositional politics. Key organisations supporting the protests, such as Students for Justice in Palestine, explicitly celebrated Hamas’s terror attack in the days following 7 October.
There’s another contrast between 1968 and today. Back then, the establishment the students were targeting felt a responsibility to uphold order and defend tradition. Nowadays, many professors and administrators see themselves as the natural inheritors of the student movement. Many leading universities describe the events of 1968 with a mix of pride and nostalgia, and actively market themselves as great places for political activism. A New York University website targeting prospective students, for example, features a three-part series about how they can learn ‘what progressive change is like in action’. Many universities offer scholarships explicitly targeted at activists and admit students in recognition of their high-school activism. Once students arrive on campus, they find that a majority of staff locate themselves far to the left of the average citizen.
This helps explain some absurdist moments we’re seeing. Protestors who had occupied a key administrative building at Columbia held a press conference demanding that administrators deliver food and drink to them. When a surprised journalist asked why the university should have such an obligation towards people engaged in blatantly illegal activity, she insisted they had a moral right to ‘basic humanitarian aid’. We saw similar developments at British universities, with student unions giving out free drink vouchers, and protestors demanding the institutions against whom they are ostensibly rebelling keep them warm and comfortable.
NYPD officers break into a Columbia University building where pro-Palestinian students barricaded themselves, 30 April 2024 (Getty Images)
Protestors who have occupied university buildings and yet expected administrators to deliver dinner to them may have fallen prey to delusion; but if so, it’s one that their universities have proactively nurtured. At Oxford, for example, nearly 200 dons expressed their solidarity with the encampment, describing it as ‘a public-facing global education project’. When powerful constituencies within the university celebrate students for breaking its rules, it’s hardly surprising that students might feel betrayed when they suffer punishment or face arrest.
Every parent knows that the best way to enforce rules on their children is to be clear and consistent: children need to know exactly what they are and aren’t allowed to do. And when they break the rules, consequences should follow.
Universities have in recent years increasingly acted in loco parentis, treating students as children who need to be cajoled, indulged and most often of all mollified. (That mollification explains how the student editors of the Columbia Law Review can earnestly urge the school to cancel exams because the police’s ‘violence’ in clearing their encampment left them ‘irrevocably shaken’.) But especially when it comes to free speech, the rules universities have set are deeply inconsistent and the consequences for breaking them erratic.
When you stray from principle when times are calm you have nothing to fall back on in times of crisis
Universities claim to follow two sets of rules concerning free speech. To ensure academic freedom, students and faculty members are supposedly entitled to engage in controversial speech, even if many consider it offensive. Especially in the US, which has a more absolutist culture of free speech, this has traditionally extended to positions, such as a denial of the Holocaust, that would in some European countries be illegal.
The second set of rules is meant to uphold public order on campus, making it possible for students with widely divergent views to get along. No student has a right to stop their classmates from attending the lecture of a controversial visiting speaker, to occupy the president’s office or to destroy the university’s property as part of a protest. The tradition of free speech has never included a right to exercise the heckler’s veto.
The problem is that universities on both sides of the pond have failed to honour or enforce these rules. In particular, they’ve become far too restrictive when it comes to controversial speech – and far too lax when it comes to punishing blatant rule-breaking.
MIT disinvited a speaker who was going to give a talk about climate change because he opposed affirmative action. Harvard allowed one of its departments to hound out a lecturer because she publicly professed her belief in the existence of biological sex. NYU now prints a phone number on its student IDs that encourages community members to call a bias response team in case they overhear a ‘microaggression’.
The double standards which have resulted from this are evident. For example, a Columbia student went on a daft rant a few years ago, talking drunkenly about why ‘white people are the best thing that ever happened to the world’. He was immediately condemned by the university and even banned from parts of the campus. And yet, five years later, the university tolerates hundreds of students chanting slogans that glorify and even call for violence, such as ‘globalise the intifada’.
At the same time, many universities have signalled to their students that they will never seriously discipline them for shouting down classes, occupying campus buildings or tearing down statues of controversial historical figures. Calling the police on protestors has, at many universities, become altogether taboo even when they clearly violate the law. And so the past decades have seen a steady rise in disruptive forms of protest on campus.
Events by visiting speakers couldn’t go ahead due to the threat – or the reality – of violence. Some university presidents accepted that students would lay siege to their offices for weeks or months on end. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, tent encampments popped up, and stayed put for weeks, on multiple campuses. In Britain, students have similarly felt emboldened to break the most basic rules set by universities. At the beginning of March, for example, a group calling itself Palestine Action proudly shared a video of one of its members spraying red paint and slashing a painting of Lord Balfour at Trinity College, Cambridge.
As the situation grew ever more volatile – and, in some places, violent – university presidents attempted to restore order through negotiation, the threat of expulsion and finally the police. For the most part, long-standing university rules, and even the principles of free speech, entitled them to take these actions; but since they had for so long established the norm that students can break rules and occupy university buildings at will, many pro-Palestinian protestors understandably perceived this as heavy-handed and hypocritical.
Police face pro-Palestinian students after destroying part of their encampment barricade at the University of California, Los Angeles, 2 May 2024 (Getty Images)
One of the many problems with straying from principle when times are calm is that you have nothing to fall back on in times of crisis. Since 7 October, universities have achieved the seemingly impossible: giving both Jewish and pro-Palestinian students reason to feel that they have been treated unfairly. Over the past months, Jewish students understandably felt abandoned because they alone had to endure hate speech targeted at their group without administrative intervention. Now, pro-Palestinian protestors feel unfairly targeted because, in a breach of recent precedent, their encampments have, in some instances, been broken up by the police.
To avoid similar omnishambles in the future, universities should publicly commit themselves to upholding both free speech and public order. But it’s probably too late for principle to save them from their current troubles. For now, they’re condemned to look like hypocrites whatever they do – because, due to the failures of the past few years, they are.
With the Israeli military advancing in Rafah, the protests may grow in size and become more unruly in the coming days and weeks. And yet, it seems unlikely they will last forever. That’s partially because university leaders have grown surprisingly willing to call upon the police to end illegal encampments. But it’s mostly because, in a few weeks, the academic year will end at many universities – and most student activists don’t want to cancel the exciting trips they have planned or to forgo prestigious summer internships.
This year will most likely not turn into a rerun of 1968. But, at least in the US, there may turn out to be one important parallel. At the end of that tumultuous year, Richard Nixon, promising to put an end to the disorder in the country, beat Hubert Humphrey in the presidential elections. At the end of this year, Donald Trump, taking a page out of Nixon’s playbook, may just succeed in repeating the same feat.
(LBC) - Old people, practical views, sensible and prudent perspectives, logical conclusions.
There are still some doubts in some week ("intelectual") consciences. Repeat after me: Israel is one of the most developed societies among the western countries. The MOST (unique?) developed where it stands!
Europeans, learn with what we do with our enemies, and forget the fairy tales (At 1h03' it's delicious!).
It began after pint of beer on a Friday evening and a grudging realisation that, well, getting a little bit more active would be no bad thing. Before I knew it, I’d talked myself into doing a 60-mile cycle through the Essex countryside the following Sunday morning – part of an organised cycle race, charmingly called the Tour de Tendring.
Setting off from Harwich in a borrowed Lycra two-piece cycling outfit – looking like a human love handle mated with a mobility scooter – I set off at 8.30 a.m., pedalling into the unknown. What would give up first, my knees, the gears on my rusty old, steel-framed Dawes Galaxy or my spirits?
What followed was unpleasant: by mile 18 I was deep into buyer’s remorse. By the time I reached Clacton, the half way point, I felt like an immolated extra in the Boschian depiction of hell – you know, one of the chaps at the back with the skewer buried especially deep you know where. My feet were numb, my legs wet jelly, my neck and wrists ached from the cycling posture and repeated potholes – and I was almost sobbing every time I saw a faint incline. To the rescue came a pouch of sugary gel which tasted like thick undiluted orange squash and was so positively delicious that it would have made John Torode tear up with joy.
Three Garibaldi biscuits and two litres of water later I was back in the saddle. Here’s the rather astonishing news: I went the distance – 56 miles, as it turned out. What’s more, while I was out there pedalling through Essex’s sweet uneventful countryside, I saw the light: I sampled the true joy of being a mamil, one of those despised middle-aged men in Lycra.
Yes, undoubtedly, Lycra on a man of a certain age is to fashion what brutalist buildings are to architecture: an abomination. But just like brutalism you discover it’s far better to be inside looking out. At least you aren’t obliged see it. :)
And Lycra works so who cares what it looks like? Once you’ve been married for more than ten years that kind of thing ceases to matter. Plus, the thick-nappy-style pad insert in the shorts really does save your backside a lot of unnecessary agony (dare to spend four hours in the saddle without one, if you don’t believe me).
Oh, what a joy it is to be a mamil. First, to cycle through countryside is to really see it, because you’re going slowly enough to take it all in. At ten to 15mph you get it: the landscape, the hills – oh yes, even Essex has actual hills, unfortunately – the cow parsley and the first red poppies in the hedgerows, the whisper of leaves of the trees, the hot fields of crops, the silhouettes of squashed hedgehogs.
And you actually hear the birdsong – nature’s sweet soundtrack, which you never do when you’re burning along in an Audi A4 estate with Taylor Swift thrashing out over the growl of the two-litre diesel engine. Then there’s a truly champion quantity of decent, blokeish chat – hours of it, usually gear-related. Men of a certain age start to open up as they pedal. There’s something almost spiritual about men engaged in collective hard work.
This is what it means to be one of those huddles of cyclists, typically consisting of anything from two to six riders, that you normally see holding up the traffic on a Saturday morning. They’re the irritating people who – if you’re like me when I’m not on a bike – you usually end up having to accelerate past ever so slightly dangerously on a country road in order to make an urgent appointment at Waitrose or cubs. On the bike, it’s worth it for the camaraderie.
That said, on my first outing I managed to find one lonely cyclist who was in worse shape then me: and let me tell you, what sheer, peerless mastery it was to creak past him, the rasp of my bike chain masking the heaviness of my breathing on an evil, never-ending hill to a place called Beaumont-cum-Moze. (I’m never going there again unless it’s in a car). In that moment, when nothing but sheer shame kept my numb feet pumping the pedals, I was Lance Armstrong.
Against such triumphs, of course, is the constant stream of infinitely slimmer and better-attired uber-mamils; toned cyclists who doubtlessly do peaks in the Pyrenees when they’re not cruising Essex, who sweep past you, apparently effortlessly, on whirring carbon fibre road-bikes wishing you a cheery ‘good morning’ as they go. They’re not fooling anyone with that.
For mamils like me, though, it’s not about winning – it’s about making the distance. And, anyway, the physical exertion hurts so much that people overtaking you is the least of it. This points to the most important reason why being a mamil is a joy. The fact is that long-distance cycling is what some folk call Type 2 fun. That’s the sort of activity that’s actually miserable to endure when you’re doing it but enjoyable in retrospect – as opposed to the first type, like having a pint, which is fun while you’re doing it.
You can take it from me, cycling 60 miles through the Essex countryside having done zero training on a 15-year old Dawes Galaxy with only six working gears is the definition of fun only in retrospect. But Type 2 fun is far better than Type 2 diabetes – which could well be where I’ll be heading if I don’t change my ways.
Becky Holt, the most tattooed mum in Britain, and Rishi Sunak, Britain’s former prime minister (Shutterstock)
Rishi Sunak devoted part of the last day of his doomed premiership to meeting Becky Holt, Britain’s most tattooed mother, on ITV’s This Morning show. Ms Holt was clad in a bikini which revealed much of the 95 per cent of her body surface that is covered in tattoos. After the brief encounter, she told OK magazine that the PM had been ‘really, really polite’ and had merely inquired how much her tattoos had cost.
During the 20th century and earlier, British tattoos were largely confined to sailors who had acquired them in foreign ports. A discreet anchor or mermaid etched on to a matelot’s beefy forearm were about the only examples of the tattooists’ art to be seen on our streets. My father claimed that a well-known admiral had the tattoo of an entire fox hunt – hounds, horses and all – galloping majestically across his back and nether regions. Be that as it may, it is undoubtedly true that tattoos were an exotic and rarely seen addition to the rich tapestry of life in these islands, associated with Britain’s history as a leading maritime power. But then, as the 21st century dawned, that all changed.
Perforating the skin with pigments for decorative or other purposes is a very ancient art: the oldest known example of a tattooed person, the man known as Otzi, whose perfectly preserved body was found high in the Alps on the Austrian-Italian border in 1991, lived some 3,330 years ago in Neolithic times. Tattooing reached its zenith among the Pacific cultures of Polynesia, where the people used tattoos for military and religious purposes, as well as in marital rituals, and the tattoo achieved astonishing levels of elaborate beauty. In Europe, the practice acquired a rather more sinister reputation when the Nazi SS used tattoos to number their victims in the death camps of the Holocaust, and tattooed their own recruits with their blood groups.
I encountered tattoos up close and personal in 2016 when I took what was billed as an erotic holiday at an isolated villa camp in the mountains of Andalusia, where enforced nudity was the order of the day. The camp was run by a German couple, and the lady of the house had a rather lovely pattern of roses tattooed across her voluminous breasts in vibrant red and green colours that must have been painful to acquire. By then, mass tattooing had taken off in Britain in a big way. Tattoo parlours had opened in every town and city, and their satisfied customers were proudly parading the results, which are especially noticeable in summer, when tattoos on arms and legs can be seen sprouting everywhere.
This being Britain, the fashion for tattoos soon took on dimensions of class, and while modish middle-class ladies contented themselves with a discreet ankle tattoo, working class heroes like David Beckham went public with every available inch of their body surface decorated with the tattooists’ art. Tattoos appeared in the most surprising places. I once had a close encounter with a woman who had her last lover’s birth sign tattooed in a very intimate spot. Such displays of fidelity can have embarrassing results: what happens when you have DAVE or DAWN prominently tattooed, and then your relationship with them founders?
Tattoos tend not to age well. As the years go by, skins wrinkle, tastes change, and even the boldest tattoos begin to blur and fade. Those who use their flesh as message boards can be left stranded in time. Apart from the more obvious dangers of dirty needles leading to infections or blood poisoning, tattoos are often offensive on purely aesthetic grounds. Brits have never been known as a particularly visually aware or adept people, but the sheer uglification of public spaces by tattoos is reaching intolerable levels. Those who prowl the streets with hideous inky splodges crawling up their thick necks are not a pretty sight. These are not the picturesquely decorated heroes of Moby Dick or jolly Jack Tars with tales of Tangiers and Trafalgar: they are making a visual statement of their own crass stupidity. Modern mass tattoos do have one useful purpose, however: they silently tell us that the wearer is a moron without putting us to the trouble of speaking to them to verify that fact.
An Anglo-Saxon coin depicting Coenwulf King of Merica (photo: Getty)
Sea-thieves messenger, deliver back in reply, tell your people this spiteful message, that here stands undaunted an Earl with his band of men who will defend our homeland, Aethelred’s country, the lord of my people and land. Fall shall you heathen in battle! To us it would be shameful that you with our coin to your ships should get away without a fight, now you thus far into our homeland have come. You shall not so easily carry off our treasure: with us must spear and blade first decide the terms, fierce conflict, is the tribute we will hand over.
Essex derives from ‘land of the East Saxons’, one of many geographic legacies of the two main Germanic tribes who arrived in Britain as Rome fell. Just to the north was the region which had once been the Kingdom of the East Angles, the other major grouping in the invasion of the fifth century (the poor Jutes, smaller in number, rather get overlooked).
Ethelred, the rather hapless ruler whose policy of paying off the invaders became an eternal lesson in bad policy, was the great-nephew of the first ruler to unite the people long referred to as ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and who by the time the poem was written had a sense of themselves as one people.
The Anglo-Saxons lost that great battle, with Byrhtnoth heroically slain, and the only original manuscript was destroyed in the Ashburnham House Fire of 1731, although a copy was found much later, so that most of the poem has been saved. His people famously suffered a far greater catastrophe the following century when defeat outside Hastings in Sussex (land of the south Saxons) led to foreign rule and the suppression of their language. Today, though, the Anglo-Saxons face a new humiliation at the hands of a force far more insidious than the Normans – North American academics.
Just as the once vanquished Vikings returned in force during Ethelred’s time, sensing weakness, so the assault on the Anglo-Saxons has begun again, with Cambridge last week renaming its Anglo-Saxon England journal ‘Early Medieval England and its Neighbours’. Dominic Sandbrook, for one, was not impressed.
As Samuel Rubinstein writes in the Critic: ‘Since its foundation in 1972, the journal Anglo-Saxon England, published by Cambridge University Press, has been the most prestigious in the field… The rebrand, its ironically Anglocentric name notwithstanding, promises a “broader approach” and “interdisciplinary scope” alongside the “same high quality” as Anglo-Saxon England. Few who are familiar with the journal in its former guise would accept the implication that Anglo-Saxon England was ever lacking in “breadth” or “interdisciplinarity” (whatever this actually means).’
The battle began in 2019 when Canadian academic Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm, two years earlier elected vice president of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS), where she called herself a ‘woman of colour and Anglo-Saxonist’ in her victory speech, resigned her position on account of its supposedly racist name.
That year, sensing the approaching longships, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, ‘in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms “Anglo-Saxon”’. The society concluded that the name ‘has sometimes been used outside the field to describe those holding repugnant and racist views, and has contributed to a lack of diversity among those working on early-medieval England and its intellectual and literary culture.’
Dr Rambaran-Olm later declared that the field of Anglo-Saxon studies is one of ‘inherent whiteness’, and wrote in the Smithsonian magazine that: ‘The Anglo-Saxon myth perpetuates a false idea of what it means to be “native” to Britain.’
‘The conditions in which the term is encountered, and how it is perceived, are very different in the USA from elsewhere. In the UK the period has been carefully presented and discussed in popular and successful documentaries and exhibitions over many years.
The term “Anglo-Saxon” is historically authentic in the sense that from the 8th century it was used externally to refer to a dominant population in southern Britain. Its earliest uses, therefore, embody exactly the significant issues we can expect any general ethnic or national label to represent.’
Tom Holland, one of the signatories, wrote: ‘The term “Anglo-Saxon” is inextricably bound up with the claim by Alfred to rule as “rex Angul-Saxonum”, his use of Bede to back-project a shared Anglian-Saxon identity and the emergence of England. Scholars of medieval history must be free to use it.’
The Danegeld, however, had already been handed over, and as Rubinstein notes, Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm ‘retreated from academic life in an “act of resistance”, as she grandly called it on her blog. She now appears to spend most of her time knitting — a hobby inspired, she says, by Audre Lorde’s claim that “selfcare is an act of political warfare” — and tweeting… about Hamas.’
Rambaran-Olm claimed that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is an ‘ahistorical’ term because ‘The people in early England or Englelonde did not call themselves Anglo-Saxons.’ This idea is obviously popular enough that BBC Bitesize have repeated it, even though it’s not true; the earliest usage dates back as far as Paul the Deacon, writing in Latin in the eighth century and using it to distinguish them from the old Saxons on the continent.
Alfred the Great styled himself Angulsaxonum rex, and his grandson Athelstan, the first king of England, rex Angulsexna, as well as ‘emperor of the Northumbrians, governor of the pagans, and defender of the Britons’ (his nephew King Edgar had the even grander sounding title ‘Autocrat of All Albion and its Environs’).
What is bizarre, as Rubinstein pointed out, is that ‘if I were the sort of person to get irked by such things, as apparently Rambaran-Olm does, “England” would trouble me far more than “Anglo-Saxon”. The word “England” dates from the early eleventh century, in use for a generation that could have witnessed Hastings. To speak of “the Anglo-Saxons” for the period between the fifth and eleventh centuries is less “ahistorical” than it is to speak of “England”.’
Indeed, even had they not referred to themselves as Anglo-Saxons, it would still be a useful and meaningful term to describe a culture chiefly comprising the Angles and Saxons, and to distinguish it from the seismic cultural change that occurred after 1066. Several historical periods are commonly referred to by names that would have mystified the people who lived through it.
One of the more amusing justifications for referring to this period as ‘early medieval’ is that they didn’t call themselves Anglo-Saxon. Yet they certainly didn’t call themselves ‘early medieval’, medieval being a 19th century term that has its roots in the Renaissance invention of a ‘middle ages’.
If this all seems like a bizarre way to justify the overt politicisation of history, it is the inevitable result of the extreme imbalance that has developed in academia, one that has made the discipline far more moralising (and boring). Last year it was reported that ‘Cambridge is teaching students that Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group as part of efforts to undermine “myths of nationalism”. Its teaching aims to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism” by explaining that the Anglo-Saxons were not a distinct ethnic group, according to information from the department.’ The department explained that ‘several of the elements discussed above have been expanded to make ASNC teaching more anti-racist.’
Deliberately making a history course ‘more anti-racist’ is not scholarship, it’s activism. Of course, history is there to be used and abused, and always has been; as Rubinstein notes, ‘Rambaran-Olm’s article in History Workshop criticises those English Protestant Anglo-Saxonists in the sixteenth century who allowed political and theological concerns to interfere with their academic endeavours. Then, without any hint of irony, she states that “scholarly work, even historical studies, are never separate from current social and political realities”.’
The Anglo-Saxons came to have huge historical importance to many Englishmen in part because of the Reformation, which both drove a new nationalism and also led to the rediscovery of many old works, including Asser’s biography of Alfred, due to the ransacking of the monasteries.
Anglo-Saxonism was tied up both with internal political battles within England, and its long early modern conflict with France. The Normans stood as perfect representatives of both an autocratic and faintly foreign upper class, and England’s chief enemy.
Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers, identified his band of radicals as inheritors of Saxon freedom, and in The New Law of Righteousness argued that: ‘Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressour, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake’. This was activism, too, promoting a mythical idea of Anglo-Saxon freedom which wasn’t remotely accurate – it was the Normans, after all, who abolished slavery in England.
American revolutionaries such as Thomas Jefferson would see themselves as descendants and political successors of the Anglo-Saxons, both in a political and racial sense. Jefferson was a keen student of the period and proposed that one side of the seal of the United States feature Hengest and Horsa, ‘the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honour of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.’ Thomas Paine warned that Americans under the British would be ‘ourselves suffering like the wretched Britons under the oppression of the Conqueror’.
As the United States came to become globally dominant, often working in tandem with its now junior partner and former mother country, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ came to be used as a term for the English-speaking nations, in particular by those who saw them as sharing common interests (such as Charles de Gaulle). Today it is still used by begrudging friends and enemies alike, including a Russian regime which has an outsized idea of Britain’s influence (one that sadly doesn’t reflect reality).
Of course, in America the term also came to be used in a different sense, to distinguish those of British and north-west European descent from more recent arrivals from south and east Europe, as well as other groups – and the modern unease on that side of the Atlantic stems from the country’s racial politics. Once ruled by racial narcissists like Jefferson, it is now dominated by a reactive feeling of racial masochism. But this co-exists with a sense of arrogance born of moral certainty, and progressivism in the world’s powerful nation has a sense of global mission that cares nothing for the rest of the world.
One American scholar argued against the use of this ‘clumsy’ term because ‘as a wealth of scholarship has shown, its cultural baggage – strong traditional association with white supremacy, past and present means that we today have an ethical decision… a majority of people, worldwide, associate the term with the idea of a “white race”. So I wouldn’t call myself an “Anglo-Saxonist” because white people isn’t what I study. I specialise in the oral and written culture, especially religious, of people who spoke Old English (Old Norse, Middle Welsh, Old Irish, Latin, etc). There were a lot of white people back then, but not all – I won’t erase the diversity that was there.’
Fine – if American progressives have an issue with their country’s English and European heritage, that’s sad, but that’s America’s problem to deal with. I’m not sure we should really care what the majority of people worldwide think of the term Anglo-Saxon, and neither should we be weighed down with other people’s baggage. To do so would be to accept colonisation.
Of course that cultural colonisation is long established, to the extent that Britain has adopted American ways of looking at our past, pushing a multicultural brand of pseudo-history which is comically untrue.
This is driven not just by American cultural dominance but by the most powerful force in the world – racial narcissism. People want the prestige of their group raised, and the thought leaders of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world are happy to encourage them. The main reason that I don’t see the woke revolution turning back is because, as Louise Perry argued, the basic drive behind woke progressivism isn’t anything as complex and interesting as Marxist dialectics or even a mutated form of Christian piety, but ethnic narcissism. No serious academic really thinks that a ‘racialised’ term prevents people from studying a culture with which they have no ancestral connection, something which has been disproved by countless scholars down the ages. To accept that would be to normalise ethnic narcissism in a field inspired by a sense of universal curiosity.
Yet because ethnic narcissism and pride is a zero-sum game, such prestige-raising can only be done at the expense of others, so the groups not allowed to indulge in this competition are degraded, to such a point that we placidly allow the very name of our ancestors to be erased.The only thing that can push back against such a powerful moralising force is courage, and there doesn’t seem to be much around. What would Byrhtnoth have thought?
This article first appeared in Ed West’s Wrong Side of History Substack.
