“How do we say No? In the fullness of time, how can we say No?”

and

“To create is to resist, to resist is to create.”

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Whenever I find myself in a situation where I realize my own stance, though heartfelt, is hypocritical, I know that’s a good place to look for a novel. Valerie Martin.

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“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.” Gore Vidal.

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Guy on a mobile phone: And this guy wasn’t saying anything, I mean he had nothing to say, nothing… He didn’t say anything, he just kept talking, but he wasn’t saying anything… It was all just, talk-talk-talk but nothing, I couldn’t take it, talking and talking and talking and talking and nothing, nothing, nothing at all to say about anything, endless mindless talking and not saying a word. I mean, how could anyone just talk about nothing..

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“My dear good creature, do you really picture me with a pot of paste and a pair of scissors eagerly sticking press cuttings into an album? I’m thirty-three & I’ve been writing for thirteen years – no, sixteen years!” Georgette Heyer.

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South American Tango dancers, denied entry to the UK by our government’s anti-artist immigration laws dance their farewell at Glasgow airport.

“Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn’t resist it.” John Ehrlichman

Ehrlichman was Chief Domestic Affairs Advisor to President Richard Nixon. He founded The Plumbers, the group at the centre of the Watergate scandal, for which he was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury. He served a year and a half in prison for those crimes.

Nixon, himself, of course, was never guilty of anything.

( Alex Garcia, Chicago Tribune / April 27, 2011 )

“Before the possibility that on the March 26th London demonstration MET police are ordered to kettle us; use their shields as a weapon, or even draw their baton please remember that we are your teachers, your nurses and doctors, your neighbours, your checkout assistant, your child’s best friend’s parent, the disabled, the elderly, the students and the children. We are all here to stand against cuts that affect us all, you included.

We are all marching to say we oppose EVERY cut. Many of us are marching to try to protect our children’s future; knowing that without changes our children can never afford to go into further education; could you afford for your child to go to university on your wages? These cuts in public spending are going to affect everyone who is not either a banker or politician, or has a similar wage packet as either. And to make matters worse, this all comes at a time when the cost of food, fuel, and gas, and electric are rising, when youth unemployment is higher than it has ever been; when thousands face losing their jobs and homes as a result of these cuts.

This government uses the word ‘fair’ to describe what they are doing to our society, yet is it fair that this government indulges in “legitimate” criminal activities? Stealing tax payers money and giving it to corporations to run our services and makes the poor and hard-working pay? Is it fair that huge companies get away without paying their taxes; the tax that Boots alone evade could stop the cuts on the NHS, the £7 billion tax Vodaphone evades could help thousands of families get out of the poverty trap. The tax that banks such as Barclays evades could be spent on police funding and so much more. Billions more is avoided by Tesco and Amazon on their offshore tax havens. All of this money could be used to pay of this country’s debt, while not making one single cut to public spending.

The government is saying these cuts are necessary, but they are not. We are told that we ‘are all in this together’ but so far the widely supported Robin Hood tax is not being implemented. The legal loopholes that allow individuals and companies to evade millions even billions in tax have not yet been closed. We are told that it is spending on welfare, the NHS, the police force, local councils that are to blame for the financial position our country finds itself in; but it is the tax avoiders, the corporations and the banks who are REALLY responsible for this debt; as they suck out money from the system into tax havens and hidden accounts and avoid tax. They remain unchallenged by government, who are working to give them even more control over the things in our communities that matter.

How can we afford to lose the tax payers’ public sector; the things that protect us, that we pay for; the NHS, the schools, the libraries, the nurseries, elderly care services, the police on our streets, the rape crisis centres, the voluntary and community organisations; just so that already greed-driven corporations can get their claws into our tax-payer state, then be paid by us to run vital services badly. Once these changes are made it is very unlikely we will be ever able to go back to the things that mattered. The corporations, the banks and stock-market racketeers continue to get fatter salaries, bigger bonuses, larger investments while the poor and weak struggle to survive. . That is why we are fighting these cuts and we are asking YOU to join us, we are at a crucial, historical moment.

We all understand that you have to uphold the law; that is your job. What we are all asking is for you to allow us to march, not kettle and beat us. We are peaceful protesters in the main; many of us are mothers who are bringing our children with us as these cuts affect them too. We are marching to tell our politicians that we are NOT going to pay for their mistakes any longer. It would be amazing if you joined us like the police in Wisconsin did when faced with a similar situation.

We are marching to protect your jobs too!

Please, join the people. The people who care about this country!

With love and solidarity, the concerned, peaceful, law-abiding citizens of Britain”

And this short video is called Bringing the Cuts Home . . .

Aunt Evelyn was triumphant but my father was stymied, said almost nothing, and at the dinner table that evening looked especially glum when Sandy got around to reporting on what a paragon Mr. Mawhinney was. First off Mr. Mawhinney had graduated from the College of Agriculture at the University of Kentucky, while my father, like most other Newark slum children before the World War, hadn’t been educated beyond the eighth grade. Mr. Mawhinney owned not just one farm but three – the lesser two rented to tenants – land that had been in his family going back nearly to the days of Daniel Boone, and my father owned nothing more impressive than a six-year-old car. Mr. Mawhinney could saddle a horse, drive a tractor, operate a thresher, ride a fertilizer drill, work a field as easily with a team of mules as with a team of oxen; he could rotate crops and manage hired men, both white and negro; he could repair tools, sharpen plow points and mowers, put up fences, string barbed wire, raise chickens, dip sheep, dehorn cattle, slaughter pigs, smoke bacon, sugar-cure ham – and he raised watermelons that were the sweetest and juiciest Sandy had ever eaten. By cultivating tobacco, corn, and potatoes, Mr. Mawhinney was able to make a living right out of the earth and then, at Sunday dinner (where the six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound farmer consumed more fried chicken with cream gravy than everyone else at the table combined), eat only food that he himself had raised, and all my father could do was sell insurance. It went without saying that Mr. Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the negro and emancipated the negro and segregated the negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it – generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to – while my father, of course, was only a Jew.

Roth’s political novel is a fable of an alternative universe in which America has gone fascist. Roth imagines that Charles A.Lindbergh, a friend and admirer of Hitler, aviation pioneer and popular hero, defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election.

The Plot Against America was first published in 2004. At once mesmerizing and unsettling, it views Lindbergh’s presidency through the knowing eyes of a six-year-old Jewish boy in Newark. A child who is seriously scarred by the developments to which he is a first-hand witness: ‘Our incomparable American childhood was ended . . . never would I be able to revive that unfazed sense of security first fostered in a little child by a big, protective republic and his ferociously responsible parents.’

The novel is about disenchantment and is the work of a novelist entering the final period of his career. It is also unrepentantly nostalgic for both writer and reader. Roth enters history and fiction and takes us by the hand. It is a wonderful excursion, passing landmarks which we may have imagined but which may also have been real. It is a journey into terror and into the unimaginable, and although we enter a recognizable period of history, we are always close to our own time. And the historic events, the fictions we visit, have their counterparts in our own contemporary history and fictions and facts.

The branch of the linden is leafy and green,
The Rhine gives its gold to the sea.
But somewhere a glory awaits unseen.
Tomorrow belongs to me.

Based on the Broadway musical of the same name and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabaret is centered around the figure of Sally Bowles, an American ex-patriot in Berlin in the 1930s, star-struck and naive and holding down a singing and dancing job in a cellar bar and cabaret.

‘I’m going to be a great film star. That is if booze and sex don’t get me first.’

Outside on the streets Nazi thugs beat-up and destroy anyone who opposes them. Inside the cabaret the show goes on; but we have to question for how long? The good times are coming to an end as the curtain of the swastika inexorably eliminates the light.

The film depicts Berlin’s poverty, it’s alcoholism and its decadence; and it goes some way to disclosing the Nazis false promises of beauty, tradition, order, pride, and their affinity with the world of nature:

Nature is so marvellously beautiful and every animal has a right to live. It’s just this point of view that I admire so much in our forefathers. They, for instance, formally declared war on rats and mice, which were required to stop their depredations and leave a fixed area with a definite time limit, before beginning a war of annihilation against them. You will find this respect for animals in all Indo- Germanic peoples. It was of extraordinary interest to me to hear recently that even today Buddhist monks, when they pass through a wood in the evening, carry a bell with them, to make any woodland animals they might meet keep away, so that no harm will come to them.
Heinrich Himmler