dom.blog

I’d like to start this post with special recognition of life’s wonderful moments of Matthew Weinreb. *ring ring* “Hello?” “Hi, it’s Matthew here. I was wondering if you could settle a debate for us… is it true that our eyes see in 2D but our brains convert this to 3D?”

(It’s not, by the way. Not really.)

Moving on – last night I followed the pattern established since the dawn of time by responding to Nic’s fully fledged website makeovers with small cosmetic changes. The theme this time round is interconnectedness: taking a leaf from Abbi, blog posts now show up (properly!) on Facebook as notes*, whilst in return my Facebook status can be found both here and on the home page. (What do you mean you never leave your RSS client? My homepage has a lovely photo slideshow y’know!) Once I was done I sat back and suddenly felt that this web might actually get all too much one day

[*This does raise the tricky question of tagging people in notes. I mean, what exactly counts as a mention? Am I going to tag Abbi now just because her name came up? I think the answer is yes, but I’m now going to justify it further by saying something superfluous like ‘Gosh, Abbi is cool’ or ‘Abbi’s Halloween costume may have been impressive, but you should see Tasha as Sarah Palin’. Oh gosh, now Tasha gets a tag! Argh!]

Speaking of interconnectedness, today I was delighted to meet yet another American cousin which my family is so proficient at producing! Sophia was lovely, though, and coped admirably with the fact that my parents and I suddenly seemed to have a strange desire to be ‘English’ and go for afternoon tea. (Having said that, I’m not complaining in the slightest with any liberal interpretation of afternoon tea that includes chocolate fudge cake.) Of course, we also talked lots about the slight matter of an upcoming election – with only the slightest admissions that we don’t actually have votes – and I was hugely relieved to know that Sophia had voted. Mostly because I’m already hugely jealous of Jamie and her ilk for their votes already, and it would be a bitter blow if they didn’t actually use them.

The election is, obviously, important. Amongst the reams and reams that has been written on it, this editoral from the New Yorker magazine – republished by the Guardian – sums it up best for me. It’s all worth reading, particularly for tackling the vital Supreme Court issue, but a choice quote:

A presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. Dreams from My Father is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests – personal, spiritual, racial, political – that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.

Whilst following the US election, it suddenly really hit me for the first time: we’ve just lived through eight years of one of the worst US Presidencies ever. In history. And I really mean that – it’s not just heat of the moment anger at a bad President, but what will probably turn out to be the accepted historical view in decades to come: George W Bush was a failure of epic proportions. Most people have at least something going for them: Johnson escalated Vietnam, but had a decent domestic vision at his heart. Nixon was a crook, but pretty successful at international relations. Reagan stood for an ideology I fundamentally disagree with, but at least – as with Thatcher – he was a success in his own terms. But Bush has manifestly failed to ‘spread democracy’ as he came to understand his role. And meanwhile he presided over an administration which was corrupt to its very core: a lying, bullying government which tore up freedoms at home and abroad until the United States of America – the world’s superpower and the nation founded on the principle of liberty – was reduced to pathetic and shameful weaselling trying to redefine away ‘torture’ so that it could torture.

And the cost has been immense. Not just for Americans growing up in a country where it is increasingly difficult even to afford healthcare, not just for the residents of New Orleans who witnessed first-hand what ‘compassionate conservatism’ really means and not just for those still languishing in Guantanamo Bay. We will all live with the cost – for a generation – of having grown up in a world where America came to be seen as a tyrant. Because unless people around the world have trust in the United States – a basic level of respect and admiration for the country with the power – how can we possibly tackle the world’s great problems of poverty, climate change, dictatorship, war? I don’t loathe Bush because I hate America – I loathe Bush because for all these years he has deprived America, and the world, of its enduring goodness.

Yesterday was one of those bumper bonanza days: by the end of it you can’t quite believe that it was all compressed into a single day. The omens, it must be said, were not all that promising. The night before an essay on the New Deal lay barely half done, and whilst I would have liked to have stayed up all night on it I also realised my grip on writing was becoming so weak that I couldn’t even stay in the right tense. (Pfft, you think it’s easy just because it’s history and thus ‘past tense’? How very naive…) But I did try, for a while, due to the fact that I was also entirely unable to lie horizontally without coughing at *cough* a rate *cough* of about *cough* seven *mega-cough* per minute. Eventually, however, I did get to sleep and resolved to get up early to finish this essay before Sanna arrived to visit. The alarm was set for 6.30. Then changed to 7, because I’m not a masochist.

Early morning Dominic scoffed at this incurring into his territory and wisely ignored the alarm. And soon enough Sanna arrived, and learning from past mistakes I decided getting a taxi from the station to the one lecture of the day would be wiser than trying to impose Dominic walking speeds. After Magnus Ryan had expounded on the saeculum some more (actually, sadly, I don’t think it came up) we went for delicious waffles and my mood was firmly on an upward curve. (Not just because of the waffles, you understand.) This was also helped by my dad sending me the Text of the Month about the upcoming new Doctor (note to journalists from Dominic and Lucy – a ‘new Doctor Who’? No. No, you are wrong). So by the end of Sanna’s visit I was in a much better position to sit down and plan out the rest of the essay in beautiful bullet-point form, before moving on to dinner.

But not just any dinner! No indeed – for as a joint Secretary of the Caius History Society it was partly my job to host Mark and Emily Greengrass in advance of Mark’s talk that evening. Abi and I had made the risky decision of inviting them to dine with us lowly undergrads, which could have resulted in panic and disaster if the infamous chicken burger had been served. Luckily this was not to be, and all went well. Shortly afterwards we were then gratified to see that our e-mail promotion had drawn a not too shabbily sized crowd for the talk, and we possibly accidentally innovated by serving wine before getting into history. It clearly worked, and The Tears of the Last Valois was a very interesting discussion on crying (yes, really) at the French court. I tend to think that it’s quite important for these things to be at least slightly off-beat, as there’s no point in putting on your own Tripos lectures.

Plus, I think Mark Greengrass had a cool tie.

So, the final chapter: on the way back home I resolved that I really would try and dedicate the night to finishing this essay, and Michael wisely advised that the most important tool would be food. So I acquired some bread, a pizza, chocolate chip cookies and tea bags and set to work at 11pm. And lo and behold, somehow by about 2.30am I was done! (And I hadn’t even cooked the pizza…) Feeling very satisfied I finally sent the essay off and called it a day. Only supervision (later today) will reveal if the end product was actually any good, of course, but I feel I can defend it at least. Hurrah!

(Oh, and this afternoon I got an e-mail revealing that someone had left a customer evaluation of this very site. Erm, thanks though I was unaware of having delivered any goods or services at all.)