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Appropriately, the death of Christopher Reeve prompts thoughts on Superman. Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz has written a piece celebrating Superman as the great archetypal American hero: only in the US could an alien, an immigrant, come to represent the finest American ideals:

I think the phenomenon of Superman teaches us that for Americans, our collective identity is about values and ideology, not race, culture or religion. Superman is ultimately an American because he is really Clark Kent, a person raised in Smallville with middle-American values. His origins don’t matter, only his values do. Culturally, we don’t have trouble accepting Superman as a full fledged American because we don’t really have a problem accepting anybody as an American. If you believe in American ideals, you are an American. The fact that you are a space-alien who is given near godlike powers by the rays of the Earth’s yellow sun does not really enter in to it.

Well, whatever, but that’s no excuse for him to be so dull. Facing an enemy, he’ll win because he’s got super-strength, X-ray vision, all the rest of the crap. No contest. In light of all the superpowers, odd chunks of kryptonite lying about the place are a poor excuse for plot tension. At least Batman had a touch of camp comedy about him and Spiderman was kind of weird. The Silver Surfer was just cool.

Reeve was a good choice for the Superman role because he was appropriately uncharismatic. As an actor he was, in a word, dull. The first Superman movie – the only one I’ve seen – was, frankly, rubbish. I could take him being very strong, leaping over buildings at a bound, seeing through walls, laser-vision, all that: I can suspend belief for the length of a film as well as the next person. But then when things go pear-shaped what happens? He flies round the Earth so fast it makes time go backwards and all those nasty things never happened. How pathetic is that as a plot device? How stupid do they think the audience is?

No doubt there are points that can be made about the cultural significance of Superman. In fact you could argue that the moronic simplicity of Superman – bigger and better superpowers as the answer to all problems – has contributed to America’s negative image. But in a society that was producing bebop, rock’n’roll, noir thrillers, classic movies, pulp sci-fi, beat poetry, western swing, bluegrass, and the hula hoop, Superman comes about near the bottom of the list of interesting things to discuss.

Here (scroll down) is a list of countries which drive on the left (via Oxblog). The reason that Britain (and Japan) drive on the left is that if you meet someone coming the other way, you need to be able to defend yourself. The point is obvious for knights on horseback, but applies equally to pedestrians: you want your strongest side to be presented to oncoming traffic. It still applies, in the sense that you use your dominant arm to do the serious stuff, steering, while your subordinate arm does the fiddly bits like changing gear.

So how come most countries drive on the right? Napoleon was left-handed, so when he was busy re-designing the world in his image, with new names for months and all the rest of that post-revolutionary zealotry, he decided that his armies – and traffic in general – would move on the right. The rest of Europe tamely succumbed to this imposition, with Sweden being the last to go in 1967.

What about the States? Seems like it was a fit of petulance after independence: if Britain drives on the left, we’ll drive on the right. Then, because the US produced most cars – you can have any colour you want as long as it’s black, and the steering wheel anywhere you want as long as it’s on the left – countries outside the British Commonwealth went with driving on the right. Thus was a counter-intuitive system imposed on millions of motorists. It explains why accident statistics are generally lower in the UK than in Europe, and why on the autoroutes and autobahns and autovias they drive so fast and so dangerously: they’re subconsciously reacting against a deeply unnatural set-up.

When countries that drive on the right eventually realise this, I imagine they’re going to feel pretty foolish.

Now even the French are finding Chirac’s anti-Americanism, and his enthusiasm for brown-nosing tyrants, a little de trop:

President Chirac was under fire in France yesterday for likening American culture to an “ecological disaster” and for alleged sycophancy towards China’s rulers while on an official visit to Beijing. […]

M Chirac, using unusually blunt language, told Vietnamese students on Wednesday that the United States was trying to impose “a generalised underculture in the world”. Pleading France’s case for nations to defend their languages against the “Anglo-Saxons”, he said: “Nothing would be worse for humanity if there was just a single language . . . There is a tendency towards a majority Anglo-Saxon culture which erases others. All other cultures would be stifled to the benefit of American culture . . . If there was a single language, a single culture, it would be a real ecological disaster.”

Le Monde said that M Chirac, who prides himself on his knowledge of Asian cultures, appeared to have been suffering from fatigue when he delivered his impromptu attack.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the Finance Minister and chief political rival to M Chirac, told a meeting in Paris on Friday that he and his children loved American culture and could not get enough of it.

M Chirac’s failure to speak out on subjects that might displease the Chinese leadership was also criticised yesterday. Libération said that winning trade with China was necessary, “but this does not have to be accompanied by exaggerated sycophancy”.

France Inter, the state radio network, said from Beijing that M Chirac had performed “an act of allegiance” to the Chinese leadership in return for trade because he had refused to make any public reference to their human rights record.

M Chirac has also been pressing for the end of the European Union arms embargo on China, imposed after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. Speaking alongside President Hu Jintao, he criticised the ban as lacking justification. “It is a measure motivated purely and simply by hostility towards China,” he said.

M Chirac is eager to add weapons to the goods that France supplies to China. His trip has already seen the signing of hundreds of millions of pounds of contracts.

Well, who’d have thought Dylan would come out with something like this? Robert McCrum gives it a thumbs up in the Observer – “Chronicles takes its place next to On the Road and Guthrie’s Bound for Glory as an essential record of an American artist’s manifest destiny.” This is a bit over the top: there are some great moments in the book, some great lines, but there’s also some really clunky writing. If it hadn’t been Dylan, any editor would have sent the manuscript back covered with red lines. The guy is not a prose writer. But that lack of editorial intrusion means you also get some wonderfully strange stuff. Here’s Dylan on Roy Orbison:

With Roy, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountain top and he meant business. […] He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he’d start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, “Man, I don’t believe it.” His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious – no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile.

I don’t even know what he means half the time (“With him, it was all about fat and blood”), but it’s so strange, so idiosyncratic, so strong, that it just takes you along like the best Dylan songs always did. But then you get passages like this:

It was 1987 and my hand, which had been ungodly injured in a freak accident, was in the state of regeneration. It had been ripped and mangled to the bone and was still in the acute stage – it didn’t even feel like it was mine. I didn’t know what had befallen me, and this was a bizarre shift of fate. All potentialities had gone to pieces. With a hundred show dates scheduled for me starting in the spring it was uncertain that I would be able to perform. This was a sobering experience.

I imagine that the early chapters were pretty much written at the time. They have much more energy. He comes across as a typical autodidact in some ways, with an exaggerated respect for people who seem to know a lot of stuff, and a keenness to show that, yeah, he’s read a lot of these heavyweights like, you know, Thucydides, and sure, T.S.Eliot’s worth reading… But basically he’s just a guy – a musician, not an intellectual – who found himself in the impossible position of being elected as the spokesman of a generation, and not unnaturally he hated it. It doesn’t explain how come for a few years he was just so far ahead of the game that it was scarcely believable, but then what would explain that? It just happened, and we’ve got the recordings to prove it. What more did we expect?

These French politicians……..

A special French court yesterday charged Charles Pasqua, the senator at the centre of Iraqi bribery allegations, with offences in three cases of alleged corruption while he served as Interior Minister.
The move against M Pasqua, 77, although unconnected with Iraq, embarrassed Paris as it sought to pour scorn on American allegations that he and other senior French politicians, businessmen and officials had received millions of pounds in a campaign orchestrated by the regime of Saddam Hussein to influence France.

The court appearance by M Pasqua, 77, a longtime associate of President Chirac and a senior Gaullist party figure until the mid-1990s, involved the granting of a casino licence and hundreds of thousands of pounds of alleged illicit payments from businesses.

The court appearance by M Pasqua, 77, a longtime associate of President Chirac and a senior Gaullist party figure until the mid-1990s, involved the granting of a casino licence and hundreds of thousands of pounds of alleged illicit payments from businesses. […]

The colourful, Mediterranean politician was elected only two weeks ago to the upper parliamentary house for the Hauts-de-Seine département on the western side of Paris.

The seat offers him immunity as investigating judges seek to prosecute him over half a dozen cases, including alleged arms sales to Angola and illicit funding from the Middle East and Africa of his political campaigns.

As the UN deliberates as to whether or not the situation in Darfur constitutes genocide (see below), the issue of Turkey’s continuing denial of the Armenian genocide raises its head. Quite how the recently adopted new penal code, which “would punish Turkish citizens or groups with up to ten years in prison if they confirm the fact of the Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey or call for the end of the Turkish occupation of Northern Cyprus”, reconciles with Turkish attempts to present themselves as a civilised liberal nation ready to join the EU, is not entirely clear.

Well, this‘ll help:

A five-member panel to investigate whether genocide has taken place in Darfur has been appointed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The commission has been given three months to report its verdict about events in the western Sudanese region.

I imagine them wandering around the camps and deserted villages armed with their dictionaries…

If Jack Straw gets censured for shaking Robert Mugabe’s hand, what are we to make of Tony Blair visiting Khartoum and chatting with President Omar Ahmed al-Bashir?

During the talks, Mr Blair coupled his message with a new £100m aid package for the country next year.

But he also pressed home the international community’s concern over the Darfur conflict.

“We can’t have a situation where thousands of people are dying, and nothing is done,” he said.

The United Nations World Food Programme say they are now feeding more than 1.3m people a month in Darfur.

It was important that people in Darfur realised the international community was determined to ensure the government of Sudan realised its responsibilities, he said.

The rebel forces must also recognise their responsibilities, he added.

So we’re rewarding Bashir for his actions in Darfur with a £100m aid package. And which rebel forces is Blair referring to? All those women who rebel against being raped? Or the men who rebel against being marched out of their villages and shot?

Blair has often been criticised for his messianic streak, particularly in relation to Iraq. His current jaunt around Africa, and his avowed determination to make a difference there, are evidence that there may be something to it. Not that there’s anything wrong in expressing a desire to help Africa, but if it’s in the form of jetting around making feel-good speeches and dispensing aid packages to tyrants, then we could probably do without it. But really, coming just a few days after his heart operation, this is surely aimed at domestic consumption – no lame duck prime minister here! While the Tories blather away in Bournemouth, Tony is the world statesman, energetically working towards international peace.

Here’s a thoughtful article by Sadik J. Al-Azm, professor of modern European philosophy at the University of Damascus (via Milt’s File):.

Despite current predictions of a protracted global war between the West and the Islamic world, I believe that war is over. There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline, and the opposition by other Muslim groups will surely grow. 9/11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge. […]

Although unique in its horror, in its desperation 9/11 can be compared to past terrorist acts that foretold the ends of the movements in whose names they were committed: for example, the abduction and murder of the German industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer by the Bader-Meinhoff gang in the summer of 1977 and the abduction and murder, a year later, of Aldo Moro, the dean of Italy’s senior political leaders after World War II, by the Italian Red Brigades. In these cases a swift and decisive response would devastate not only the plotters, perpetrators, and their supporting networks and organizations, but ultimately their protective communist regimes and worldwide radical leftist movements as well. Looking back after 9/11 it seems to me that the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s in Europe was indeed a futile attempt to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis reached by communism, radical labor movements, Third Worldism, and revolutionary trends everywhere. The terrorism of that period was the first visible manifestation of that impasse and the prelude to the final demise of those movements, including world communism itself.

Today the hard-core Islamists’ spectacular terrorist violence reflects a no less desperate attempt to break out of the historical impasse and terminal structural crisis reached by the world Islamist movement in the second half of the 20th century. I predict this violence will be the prelude to the dissipation and final demise of militant Islamism in general.

The Times publish a gushing interview with Desmond Morris, plus an extract from his latest book, “The Nature of Happiness”, under the heading, “How to be as happy as I am (if that’s possible)”. That sets the relentlessly smug tone – “The family joke is ‘Where did we go right?’” – interspersed with restatements of the clunkingly obvious:

“If you want to watch the postures and expressions of intense, delirious happiness, watch the actions of the players and fans when a last-minute winning goal is scored in an important match. I doubt if any primeval hunter ever leapt in the air with such abandoned joy,” he writes.

Well, he’s a smart self-publicist, and there’s always a place for easily-digested happiness-by-numbers recipes. There are no doubt worse around. What gets me is the lazy assumption that we evolved for a nice easy life in the treetops – or the savannah – but now we find ourselves unsuited to the stress of modern life:

According to Morris, to appreciate happiness we first have to understand our evolutionary past and the difference between our contented tree-dwelling ancestors and the striving, risk-taking, pleasure-seeking urban apes that we have become.

Contented tree-dwelling ancestors? A constant risk of meeting a grisly death from some carnivorous monster, scrabbling around for scraps of food, kids being carried off for lunch by a pack of hyenas, attacks from marauding bands of rivals…. We evolved so rapidly because it was such a struggle that any little genetic mutation could provide a crucial advantage. If it was such a blast sitting up in the trees munching fruit and scratching our arses, we’d still be there.