Morning After the Night Before - First Thoughts

I have got a few bullet points...for things to think about.

First, unequivocally good things, in no particular order.

1) Andy Wightman

2) No UKIP

3) SNP win

After that, everything gets a bit nuanced.

First, the SNP got 150 000 more votes, and fewer seats, losing their overall majority.  (six Greens means there IS a pro-Independence majority...just barely) This Yes majority could unequivocally have been MUCH bigger. One cannot, of course, blame the SNP for wishing to maximise their vote, and the Greens did okay in getting the idea of the SNP 1 and Green 2 model across...but maybe could have done better.

RISE didn't happen at all.  Neither did any of the other left parties.

Looking back, SNP absolute Majority in 2011 (and the consequent Indyref) is now clearly to be seen historically and arithmetically as a freak result, in that the SNP did WELL in the constituencies but not TOO well, which meant that, unlike this time, their massive list vote counted for enough to push them just over 65 seats.  They gained votes and lost seats, indicating that it is impossible for them to game the system except in the way they DID game it, which was pretty much at the expense of the Greens, and, incidentally,  the salvation of Labour, and the triumph of the Tories.

Like Labour, the SNP's instincts are territorial.  Independence is their baw.  And naebiddy else gets to play with it.  As an issue, however, and as an immediate prospect, as indicated in their manifesto, another referendum is definitely OFF the table.  

The effectiveness of the Tories in opposition will be, i think, a factor in the next few years, in cementing the No vote. in the Tories natural constituency which they are now on their way to recovering after the anomalies of the Thatcher/Major years. (The Tories having no representation in Scotland was demographically nonsensical...there IS a Scottish Middle Class which now dares again to speak its name.)  However, i don't see the Tories improving on this next time around...but i DO expect them to do much better than laboutrr did in terms of pure parliamentary gamesmanship.  They have adjusted much better to devolution than Labour have.  They have, ironically, achieved much of the local responsiveness that Murdo fraser asked for last time round.

The factors that might "materially" change the circumstances enough in Scotland to provoke another referendum are all, i think, external.  Everything depends on UK politics...which is ironic, because if you look at the Welsh and regional English results, there being any such thing as a United Kingdom any more is at least debatable in terms of the landscape of politics.  (For example, what has happened to Labour in Scotland has absolutely NOTHING to do with Jeremy Corbyn or Ken Livingstone).  On the other hand, it will take an acceleration the Balkanisation clearly under way in the rest of the UK (in London, Wales and the rest of England as at least three distinct polities) , which Brexit and a Tory victory in 2020 would accomplish, to affect the constitutional question

As for Labour, like Britain itself, they have lost an Empire and are yet to find a role.  There seems to be a split emerging between those who still dream, after all this time, that the last ten years haven't really happened and they can wake up one morning and everything will be fine again, to those wanting to take the party further to the left...which doesn't seem to have done anything for them this time, to those who want to take the party in a "new" Blairite direction...and eventually displace the SNP in the centre. One almost doesn't want to look.

Ironically, a feeling that this "hasn't really happened and we'll wake up back in Labourland" also afflicted a lot of SNP activists which i think accounts for a lot of the jitteriness over the last week or so...

Part of the Tory triumph, maybe, is that they have made the psychological journey towards coping with the new normal of ongoing devomax with the SNP in charge...much more completely than even have the SNP themselves.

As for the bigger, historical picture, if the 2011 result was anomalous, and independence really is off the table for the foreseeable future, both of which seem to be true this morning, then this result for me speaks of a wish for stability. We want to be boring.  We've made that collective decision.  For the SNP as a safe pair of hands, and for the Greens to prick their conscience once in a while, and the Tories to push them further towards competence as an end in itself, I guess I'm not unhappy this morning, though i'm a little disappointed for Zara Kitson.

I'm not massively entertained, however.

THAT photo

                                                   

In the same week as the Hillsborough Inquest finally delivered its verdict to an outpouring of solidarity and shared celebration – and of renewed vilification for the slimy sods of News International, Nicola Sturgeon poses for THAT picture...holding up a copy of the Sun, endorsing it as it endorses her...

Now, in the left-Indy- Yes voting corner of the local twitttersphere I inhabit, this has, of course , provoked some comment. “It's a fake” yell some...”she was tired”...say others...”it was a joke” say yet more, and then, most ludicrously of all...”It was an accident”

Please don't try to tell me there was no thinking behind it, or that the SNP electoral machine , especially that surrounding the First Minister, is anything other than professional! Now that really is stretching the envelope of credibility...Nicola Sturgeon poses for a photograph...by ACCIDENT!?!

Next you'll be saying that's not really Ruth Davidson on that tank because she has no taste for her self image on various eccentric forms of transport.

So, given that what we've just seen is a piece of old fashioned machine politics, that responding to the endorsement of the biggest selling paper in the country with a wee bit of endorsement of the product is just the expected quid pro quo, is just business as usual...what was the thinking behind it?

Oddly enough, listening to Nicola Sturgeon this morning on the Today programme, effortlessly batting around that old Welsh Harumpher she was talking to, there was a bit of a clue.

It's not about Independence she was telling him. Over and over. Loud and clear. “I know YOU and my political opponents think we're obsessed with nothing else” she seemed to say, “but the truth is that you're the ones who keep going on about it. This is about a programme of government, and, by the way, the top item on the list is education.”

Now, in 1997 Tony Blair talked a lot about education...

(BANG..there we go...that's the trouble with politics at the moment...you just mention somebody's name...Hitler, Tony Blair...and you find yourself in hot water)

...as part of the New Labour project for occupying the centre ground of British Politics. And, in UK terms, of course, New Labour was hugely successful. The problem was, that in endorsing, as Blair and Brown did, the Thatcherite “revision” of the post war settlement that held “Britain” together as a cohesive social unit, New Labour continued the fissuring of that project, the Break Up of Britain...and opened the door, in electoral politics in Scotland, to the SNP strategy of replacing the Labour party on the centre ground of a distinctly SCOTTISH politics that was different from the UK.

The trap for Labour was that to do what it took to win a UK election, it had to abandon it's base of support in the “regions”...and in THIS particular region, there was someone waiting to take their place, someone who would dress in the left wing clothes that they had shed in order to win seats in the South East of England.

Thing is...that story is over now. The replacement job is done. If there is one thing that this election definitely signifies, it is that we have come to the end of that particular old song.

This is the New Normal of Scottish politics, the new centre...with the SNP in the middle, the Tories on the right, and contested territory on the left...and fr a political party, the centre is EXACTLY where you want to be.  Ask Tony Blair.

What is going on is that the SNP no longer need to wear the clothes of the left, because, though it may offend the twitter sphere, they know that there are more votes in a Sun endorsement than there are votes to be lost to people who will probably vote Rise or Green or Labour on the list vote anyway. They know that the people of Scot;land are not nearly as left wing as the noisier folk among us would like to think. 

They know that Blair was right.  Elections are won in the centre.  But that was in the UK...then.  This is Scotland now.  And the centre is wherever Nicola says it is.

This election is about consolidating the centre ground.  Competence is the name of the game.  And independence, to the degree it is on the agenda at all, is in the gift of a UK electorate who may well vote for Brexit, and relect the Tories in 2020...and will come as an award for that competence, as what we used to call "the settled will" of the Scottish people. 

We'll see on Thursday night if they were right to make the choice. We'll see over the next few years if nemesis follows hubris the way it usually does. But please don't give me any nonsense about “that photo” being the equivalent of Ken Livingstone making an arse of himself over the weekend.

They know exactly what they're doing.

Normal Times Include the Future? Who would have thought?

We want to be taken care of. We want to be included. See all that “cradle to the grave” stuff that Tories so despise that we got from the the Labour Government in 1945-51? Can't get enough of it. That government was (at least in popular memory) the high water mark of Britishness in its short lived meaning of “everybody” - and a good part of the appeal of the SNP is as re-creators of that sense of “social security” that the British State has been abandoning by painful increments ever since their introduction.

(45 seems to be our magic number – just a thought.)

The SNP's baby boxes are a precise, welcome (and let me say quite brilliant) symbol of the emotional underpinning of Scottish political life as well as a bloody good borrowing from Scandinavia of which, I hope, there many more to come. They have sewn up this latest election to Holyrood even if it wasn't sewn up already. The SNP manifesto is much more ambitious than expected in terms especially of policy towards the young through education as well as childcare. (With the interesting and provocative proviso that the extra spending on tackling the social divide in education is to be entirely in the gift direct to schools of the Executive and bypassing district councils). Its headlines on a reform of the social security system, on land ownership and social ownership of climate change technology are all well votable for by the “coalition” of progressives who came together for the referendum campaign.

So who needs to even consider doing anything other than giving whole hearted electoral support to anyone else on the left? The Green Manifesto doesn't pretend to a programme for government...it's a direction of travel document. Rise seem to be failing to make any cultural mark that translates into electoral success. The rump of the Labour Party in Scotland will have to wait until this busy series of elections is over before they can even catch a breath. They may even decide to wake up and smell the coffee. 

Meanwhile the centre, where all political power resides, of Scottish politics as well as everywhere else's politics, is well and truly captured. And the centre, the consensus points and principles, of that politics, reflects in a more secure and believable way than it has in years, what remain the expressed priorities of the electorate. The Labour Party, who dominated our electoral decisions so very recently, have been replaced by an altogether shinier, more hopeful and as complete a hegemony.

Perhaps the same thing in us that demands “security” of our politicians also pre-disposes us, culturally, to the dominance of a protector. A protector in Westminster, to shield us from the Tories. And a protector in Holyrood  to...well...protect us from the Tories. Our politicians are our home and away shield bearers...and we've decided, in both cases, that the SNP are a better bet. And I think we're right about that. That was certainly why I voted for them in 2015, and why I'll be voting for them in my constituency in Glasgow. (Not that I think my MSP, Nicola Sturgeon, is sitting on a knife edge or anything.)

So why, if everything in the garden is lovely, (and I hesitate a little to go over this again) am I voting Green in the List vote?

Because for the first time, I think, it feels to me like a third area of interest has been added to the defensive mindset of Scottish politics. I'm talking about the future. About the direction of travel. I'm talking about aspiration.

If all Scottish politics has been dominated up until last year by a territorial dispute between the Labour and SNP about who best to save us from the Tories in the two areas of Holyrood and Westminster (and the less conspicuous but equally bitter heartland of local government) then “the future” is the new territory that has been under dispute online.

The future? Jings! How un-Scottish is that? How un-British is that?

Nonetheless, the direction of travel is now a legitimate sphere of dispute. (I think, by the way, that the online pages of Bella Caledonia are the ideal forum for that dispute.) I believe that the Greens having a significant presence in the parliament will sustain that optimistic exploration of possibility. I think you need only take a glance at the SNP manifesto to see that it already has.

We are no longer in referendum mode, no matter how nostalgic we all are from our different pools of experience. The referendum is off the cards (and out of the SNP manifesto) unless the British vote for Brexit, and the demand for Indyref2 is so palpable and general (which it isn't, sorry) that it is both unavoidable and a slam dunk 60% Yes.  Nicola and Co. are far too canny and competent (and, it seems, ambitious for getting on with the job in the here and now) to deliver that particular hostage to fortune just because their core vote want it from them so much. They know that competent, progressive management is the core of their support outwith the contant 25-30% of the electorate who prioritise Independence above everything else.

For everyone who was involved in that binary politics of the Yes/No campaign, we are now back in the analog world.  Baby boxes and all. This is the new normal. And it could be a hell of a lot worse.

--

Peter Arnott

Dead Sharks

The Herald this morning ran with a partisan story about the yes movement being best advised to split it's vote...keep the SNP strong on the constituency vote while voting elsewhere (Greens, logically) on the List vote. To which Wings has responded in full conspiracy mode.

The gloves are coming off today, I think. Rather as the Southside of Glasgow is preparing itself psychologically for a resumption of normal fucking service this afternoon (under our changed circumstances) so a "New Normal" is defining itself in Scottish politics.

I joked earlier today that whereas I used to write a fairly large essay most weeks in 2014 to attempt to cope with/describe what was going on in Scottish politics but that nowadays a single tweet pretty much does it.

Here it is: "The New Normal. Labour have been replaced in the centre. Scraps available on the left and right. Vote Green on list"

So, you see that the Herald's story was a partisan story with which I agreed. I'm voting for Nicola Sturgeon as my constituency MSP (one still votes for an individual with that vote) and Green on the Glasgow regional list. I happen to know, because I'm a bit of a nerd, that this is a vote, in practice, to keep Patrick Harvey as an MSP and, I hope, to have him joined from Glasgow by Zara Kitson.

It hasn't honestly occurred to me that I am therefore part of a unionist/federalist plot to undermine the new found (and evidently thrilling, if largely imaginary) POWER of the SNP. But so, I fear, I am.

(A power which, it seems to this consumer of some quite brilliant campaign videos, like that of New Labour, that is consolidating itself by an entirely ruthless and unacknowledged...but demographically and electorally unimpeachable...rush to the centre ground. New Labour have well and truly been "replaced")

Now, I'm only a small player in this nascent stooshie. But I am an SNP member (albeit not an active one) who is splitting my vote. I was sanguine in the non receipt (mostly) of shit about this online. (If I send this to Bella, and the indefatigable Mike Small "prints" it, that will likely change).

Also, I've resisted adding to the whole bogus "cybernat" furore which was such a feature of the multiply despicable Better Together campaign (whose moral taint, going well beyond the mere fact of "campaigning with the Tories" has made Labour toxic in Scotland).

But if the story of the last election to Westminster in 2015 was the maintenance of the Yes Movement into the "smart" politics of an SNP landslide that kept the momentum and ideas of the Yes campaign going, the story of this election looks like being that of the whole thing finally going smash, of the split that was already symbolised by the rival events on the banks of the Clyde one Saturday in November 2014 (attached) reaching electoral crisis.

For us or against us. For Nicola without qualification or an agent of Yoonyunist Darkness. Nuance lies scattered on the roadside like a an unfortunate liberal bunny rabbit.

This is not unfamiliar emotional territory from a lifetime on the fringes of left politics here or anywhere. It's normal, in fact. it's how people everywhere are. But I had hoped we'd keep the broader "movement" together.

Because what is happening now is precisely a question of "movement" against consolidation. And entirely predictably and even properly, what the SNP are doing now ( whether in public or not) is consolidating their control (partial though it is) of the commanding heights of our political economy,. They recognise (again, not publically) that devolution mark two is now in for the long haul and are using their electoral base - now much more extensive and deep - to cement the new normal, the new equilibrium of our political culture.

There is no room for "movement" in equilibrium. So, dear friends, the territory for those of us in the Yes camp who enjoy movement for the sake of the exercise has been circumscribed. Behind the scenes, there has already been acrimony among the former comrades...the surface has been cracking...in some ways Loki's recent work has also been symptomatic (as well as pointing at a much bigger and dirtier truth about class and nation.)

But what it comes down to is this: in relation to Westminster, to where the power really lies (and lies) in the UK, it is absolutely essential that the SNP represent us. No one else can do it. They have that mandate.

In Scotland, their mandate is again unchallenged. but should not go unquestioned. The movement that built to 45% of the vote cannot and will not simply be absorbed into a hegemony. Movement, as such, matters. Without it, the shark dies.

Which means the smart vote, I think...is a split one.

http://peter-arnott.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/what-happened-whats-happening-where-are.html

Introduction to "Face"

This is a play that was written for a specific actress at two specific times and that is still in transition. (Plays, like films, as Antonioni said, are never actually finished – they are only ever ABANDONED)

The actress in question is Janette Foggo, who I first worked with in 1986 at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow in a play of mine called “Muir” directed by Michael Boyd in which , the only actress in a cast of eight actors, she gamely portrayed just over half of the human race.

I've been trying to make this up to her ever since. FACE, in which I asked her to play twin sisters Isobel and Morag (Morag first for a mini-tour under the aegis of Perth Theatre directed by Kenny Miller) and later, in that order for a week each at Glasgow Lunchtime Theatre at Oran Mor under the direction of Stasi Schaeffer..is my latest attempt.

The plays were very well received critically and by the audiences...and Janette was rightly praised to the skies in the Glasgow Herald, Scotsman and Scottish Review of Books, so I hope we're making progress.

The two sisters in this play, which can be performed as a single play with an interval or in two performances, are conceived to be delivering their versions of the events surrounding their mother's deaths at the same moment but under very different circumstances. They share, for the moment, a face...but very little else, or so it seems. The two women viewed together, I hope, encompass in their different ways of telling their stories – the same story, in essence – a reasonable catalogue of ways of feeling about things. Of course, the presence of a third real person, the actress in who is both embodying and observing these women while the audience identifies with, and distances itself, from them...brings in a whole lot of pother possibilities beyond the scope of any writer to predict. Which is what makes theatre...and reading..what they are...interactions that are both controlled by craft and entirely unpredictable.

Which is what the present tense – the only one that really maters – is all about.

Introduction to "Shall Roger Casement Hang?"

At the time of going to press, this play has been written and work shopped but not yet performed. It is due to open on May 20^th 2016 with Benny Young as Casement and Stevie Clyde as Hall - and everybody else - at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow directed by Andy Arnold.

Sometimes, it's all about the present tense. This is particularly true when working on a story that is almost exactly 100 years old and a play that is being published before the first performance. I mean that in that to begin with, the play is about the Irish Independence struggle at a time when Ireland is very largely re-imagining itself, especially with regard to homosexuality. On the 50^th anniversary of the Easter Rising (when Casement was dis-interred from Pentonville Gaol and re-buried – against his wishes – in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin) it was still conventional wisdom in Irish Republican circles that the British had forged the notorious “Black Diaries” that recounted the sex life of this most complex and contradictory of the complex and contradictory revolutionaries of 1916. In Ireland itself the centenary is being marked with nuances and negotiations that owe as much to what happened in the years after the celebrations of 1966...and the way they fed into the Civil Rights struggle in the North ..as they do to the ways in which Irish Society is re-imagining itself on both sides of the border of 1921.

Second, the “present-tenseness” of a play about events around the Easter Rising in the context of Scotland at a time when, had the referendum gone the other way, we would be in the early weeks on Independence ourselves is another source of currency for a play about the beginning of what Tom Nairn called “The Break Up of Britain.”

Third, and most importantly for the way the play is written, there is a general problem with historical drama, and that is in deciding what the present tense of the play IS! This is particularly true in a context where a good many of the first audience (this being Glasgow) will know a good deal of that history, but rather more of the audience (it not being Ireland) will know little or nothing. Indeed, the advance publicity for the play (which had to be written before the play script was finished) doesn';t quite describe the exact manner of setting that I decided on quite late in the process.

I had thought initially that the present would be Casement in between his sentence of death (on June 28^th 1916) and his execution (on August 3^rd that year) and that we and he would look back on his long and varied career as a British Diplomat, Irish Revolutionary and Human Rights Pioneer while his reputation was being surreptitiously destroyed by the circulation of the “Black Diaries” by the prototypical Special Branch. But then I looked at the partial transcripts of Casement's two days of interrogation at Scotland Yard immediately after his capture that took place on Easter Sunday and Easter Monday...and quickly saw that in the contrasting circumstances on those two days – both Casement and the British thought on the Sunday that the Rising had been called off, and both were shocked when it actually happened at noon on Easter Monday – and that here was a “present tense” when “what-everyone-knows-happened-hasn't-happened-yet.”

It then became my job to shoehorn all the complexity and ambiguity I've felt about Casement since I first learned the outlines of his story into those two days...and the memories and prophecies, the past and future tenses... evoked in that present. The help of Andy and the actors in doing that (with the support of the Playwrights' Studio, Scotland) was invaluable.

Now, I hope that on the page or the stage, or both, and both for the historically informed (and committed, this being about Ireland, God help me as a Scotsman!) what follows will be of interest and provocation. Because it's too late to change it now.

That's the problem with the present tense. It's over before you know it.

Thinking about "terrorism?" Why Not Try the Movies?

To Bomb or not to Bomb?  That is the question.

Why do they do it?  Why would anyone do it?  How did "normal" kids from Brussels, Paris or Bradford end up doing something like THAT?  Something so extraordinary and terrible as detonate themselves on a tube train or get out of a car outside a Paris restaurant  (my God I've BEEN to that restaurant, or restaurants just like it) and start firing an AK 47 through the window, murdering anybody, Christian, Moslem gay, straight male or female (my GOD, people just like ME) who had the bad luck or divinely directed destiny to be on the tube or in the restaurant at the time?

They must have been brainwashed, controlled by a mastermind, seduced away from the "normal" by something or someone inexplicable and demonic.  They must be "other", or have been made "other"...So we have to close the borders of "our world" and send the bombers to obliterate "theirs".

It's terrible, it doesn't make us fell good...but what choice do we have...?

We have to destroy "them" before they destroy us.

That's roughly what counts for a personal and political response to the new and terrifying "normality" that the attacks in Paris that seems to command consensus...if a degree of unease.  To Bomb or Not to Bomb...that is the question.  The opposition to bombing seems as predictable and obvious as the advocacy.  Of course, they would say that! each side of this week's argument in Britain says about the other.

To the majority, those on the "left" who argue against British forces joining in with the American, Russian and French air-forces in stirring up the rubble where an advanced, mixed, secular and complex Middle East Society used to be are entirely predictable "peacenixs" ;beardy-weirdy pacifist types whose consciences would never permit any form of military action under any circumstances. While equally predictable to those who oppose the proposed "action" (whatever it amounts to) are equally unsurprised.  Of course "they " want to bomb people and make things worse, addicted as "they" are to oil and guns, to fantasies of force and control.

There are slightly more interesting - and more informed sounding - interventions on both the left and right which ask questions about the "endgame"...post conflict planning, coalition building.  But these too seem predicated on the actual Syrians being regarded as a "them", not like "us".  "They" are still people for whom religion is a powerful factor in their identity, as Sunnis and Shiites, as Alevis and Kurds...(it is amazing how few technical "ethnic" terms it takes to sound like an expert, whether as a pundit or on the Joint Intelligence Committee) How will we manage "them" afterwards?

It occurs to me that I'm using inverted commas a hell of a lot.  This is because I'm increasingly feeling that there is a failure of language going on here as well as a poverty of political thought.  I'm increasingly coming round to thinking that we should maybe try, just try on for size, a rather different way of thinking about "terrorism" (there I go again), using "culture" and "imagination" just to see where that gets "us."

(There I go again)

So rather than just carry on with the exhausted, quotation marked ritual of just another argument, I'm going to get all post-modern...and quote things, and then examine them in a nice, safe cultural criticism kind of a way.

Example One: I Want It to Come Here

I want it to get worse!  I want it to come HERE!  I want to see it in an English house, and the floral chintzes and the school blazers and the dog leads hanging in the hall.  I would like us to be tested.  I would like a fugitive to run to our doors and say hide me...I would like the running bowels of fear over the English morning smell of gin and the roasting joint and hyacinth.  I would like to see an English dog playing on an English lawn with part of a burned hand.  I would like to see a gas grenade go off at an English flower show and nice English ladies crawling in each other's sick.  And all this I would like to be photographed and filmed so that someone a long way off, safe in his chair, could watch us in our indignity.

Who said that?  Something as sick as that? Why, Glenda Jackson, love, on stage at the Aldwych in 1966 for the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of a semi-improvised show about responses to the Vietnam War (which war Kurt Vonnegut Juniors described at the time as a rehearsal for the more ruthless wars to come).  It was called US...as in United States, of course, but also as in "us."

Two things about it are remarkable, I think.  One, is that the fantasy of Bringing the War Home isn't just confined to the terrorists.  That punishment of comfortable people whose political elites send the bombers to the Vietnams and the Afghanistans of the world while they enjoy a meal in a nice restaurant, that visceral violent application of the reality principle, that, (in the eyes of the terrorists) moral, aesthetic and educational act...was quite imaginable to the self aware and guilty liberal conscience that is as much part of an English Country Garden as are the hyacinths.  The other thing is, that in 1966, the idea that "it could come here" was exactly that.  A fantasy. Something that might be wished, but was never going to actually happen.

Example Two : People Like Us


A young, attractive, light skinned  Arab woman takes off her veil.  She looks at herself in the mirror, applying make up.  Her mother does her hair in a fashionable style.  She looks at herself.  She seems unfamiliar.

She dresses in a fashionable suit with a short skirt, ready for a night out.  She looks at herself again. She'll do.  She'll pass for white.

She makes her way down the steep, delipidated, narrow medieval streets of the Arab Town towards the checkpoint where French soldiers get to decide which of the Arabs, workers or party goers, gain entrance to the European Town, that nice level piece of developable terrain where new beachfront hotels look on to the gleaming Mediterranean.

She breathes hard.  But she gets through.  The soldier smiles at her cooly.  She bats her mascara'd eyes, flirts back at him as he lets her through.  He watches her ass appreciatively as she sashays down to a beachfront bar.

Where young, attractive people, people like us, are enjoying themselves to the sound of a sixties jukebox. She looks at them.  They seem nice.  And she is one of them.  They look just like her. We see thought pass over her face.  She makes a decision, an individual moral decision based only in part on the collective identity as one of the "others" that she took off with her anonymising veil just moments before.

She leaves her handbag tucked under the table. She walks out of the bar.

The handbag explodes, sending showers of glass and formica shrapnel through the attractive bodies of people like us.  The young Arab woman  stands across the road, impassive, sparing herself no detail of the pain and shattering on innocence she has just inflicted.

The music swells.

A contemporary posting on Youtube from Islamic State or the Taliban?  By no means.  That is a scene from Gillo Pontecorvo's brilliant "The Battle of Algiers" from 1966.  The music is by Ennio Morricone.

It got three Oscar nominations, a BAFTA United Nations Award and a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.  It is described by The Observer as "One of the most remarkable films of all time."
I thoroughly recommend it if you haven't already got the DVD.

Am I saying that all these institutions foster terrorism?  The RSC?  Glenda Jackson? The Oscar Committee? Bafta?  The Observer, for God's sake!

No.  But it has always been easier to portray the complex humanity of terrorism when it was somebody else's problem.  Even when, in the 1950s and 60s...not so long ago, really...it was a bit of a problem for the French.

Example Three:  I'll Be Back

Besides, I doubt very much whether any of the British and French born terrorists were (or are) familiar with the more esoteric reaches of Art Cinema and state subsidized theatre.  But I'm willing to bet that every single one of them has seen Terminator.

Where an invulnerable robot from the future, without conscience, absolutely secure in his/its purpose, wreaks satisfying havoc on police stations and shopping malls. Where that kind of mastery of life and death can be safely enjoyed, just as it is in computer games.

Where James Bond, with his License to Kill so expertly and cooly controls everything around him, turns everything into a weapon to be used on Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Where, in a quite brilliant contemporary take on the action hero as demi-God, Jason Bourne can safely enjoy and be horrified by his own mastery of  the mechanics of mayhem, because he doesn't remember who he is.

Now before everyone shouts at once, I'm not saying that Sean Connery or Grand Theft Auto are "to blame" for terrorism.  What I am saying is that, like movies and computer games, terrorism is part of the modern cultural mainstream of who we are here and now.  Culture is where we get to safely rehearse human possibilities.  Those possibilities very much include conscienceless, purposeful, professional, detached,expert murder.

You can all start shouting now.

Feel like going on?  Good.

Example Four : Now Do You Believe?

A lonely young man has a feeling that something is wrong with the world.  He is distracted and unhappy in his work and social life. Night after night he sits at computer screen, searching.   There must be a secret.  The truth must be out there somewhere.

Then he meets the man who knows the secret.  The world is not what it appears.  The world is controlled by amoral, ruthless machines.  Everyone around him is a fool and a slave...unreal...potentially an enemy, an agent.

But there is salvation.  If he accepts the truth, joins the band of sexy brithers and sisters in poverty, isolation, deprivation of all the superficial pleasures of the world, then he will become special.  He will be "the One."

He resists...of course he does...till "reality"...the truth of the secret...forces itself on him as he is tortured and manipulated by the Agents who recognise how potentially dangerous he is to the superficially attractive but morally monstrous "reality" of things.

And he accepts his destiny.  He finds out just how deep the rabbit hole goes. He finds the truth.  he finds love.  He finds mastery.  He finds superhuman abilities..he learns Kung Fu.  He machine guns numberless policemen in complete moral freedom and effortless, balletic, computer generated grace.

And finally, he faces the agents, more than their equal.  He is killed...and rises again.  The veil falls from reality.  He sees the truth.  he sees the world the way it is. He sees the programming running green and white round the unreality of the world he used to live in.  he is a God.  he can fly.  He is Superman..  The sexy girl says she loves him.  

He is in Paradise.   Unlike everyone he left behind, he knows the truth.  He sees the Matrix.

For me, the Matrix...(the first movie, the other two are pants except for that bit on the freeway)...is not only one of the finest entertainment features of the 1990s, it is an absolute template for terrorism. I think that the glamouress knowers and killers in black, them and their designer shades and their slow motion mastery of all existence, are exactly who "they think they are."  I think all the stuff about islam is a distraction. an ideological surface just as superficial as any pseudo-structiralist cyber-babble from the Wachowski Brothers.

They are us.  In our dreams.  Just as the lonely kids who shoot up high schools and universities every other week in America are exactly the same as lonely kids in Korea and Croyden and Casblanca. But with access to automatic weapons.

Add in a little training, a little experience of the horrors inflicted just as surely and viscerally by bombs and drones as they are by armalites and kitchen knives...add in a little identity conflicted alienation, a little longing jealousy of white people having a good time, a little turning of that jealousy to righteous condemnation and underemployed energy and imagination and you've got a terrorist.

Of course you do.

Now I don't know enough about middle eastern history and politics or cultural history in the Middle East to pretend to know whether adding some british Bombs to the hideously mixed strategy (and conflicting interests and fantasies) held by the governments and military of Russia, Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, France, the USA, Turkey and Saudi Arabia is the right thing to do.  Not really.  It doesn't intuitively seem to me to be a good idea when dealing with a Wasps' Nest to hit it with a hammer, however well "targeted."

But one thing I do know.  They are not they.  "They" are "us." I know that because that's what culture...movies, books and computer games...all tell me, no matter what politics says.

Why don't we try starting from there?