1066 and all that

Posted on by
Reply

I spent the last three weekends giving a series of lectures to a group of Canadian law students at the invitation of the International Study Centre of Queen’s University.  The University has a sort-of campus at a Tudor castle near Herstmonceux in East Sussex, some 70 miles south of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />London and 30 miles east of Brighton.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> 

As always, the teaching experience was very rewarding.  But the richness of the experience was particularly enhanced by the fact I stayed at the residences near the castle and managed to get to know the students as more than just – well, students.  Over breakfast, lunch and dinner, walks in the grounds, drinks in the pub, or playing fusball, I got a better understanding of my students than I have ever had before, despite the fact that I spent only 18 hours – less than the equivalent of half a term – with them in class.  All in all, it was quite an enjoyable and wonderful time away.

 

But then who doesn’t like having two dozen bright, intelligent and articulate individuals as a captive audience for three weeks?  What’s more, not only did some understand what I said, quite a few actually laughed at my jokes.  What’s there not to like?  Nothing remarkable there and I should not have bothered to write if it were not for the additional benefits of going to England to teach – and there were at least three.

 

First of all, the food. 

 

What, you don’t believe me?  Well, OK – this one’s too big a lie and the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge itself would not support the suspension of disbelief on this issue. (Yes, yes, the metaphor is heavy – no pun intended – and probably inapt, but at least it is original.  I think.  Bear with me.)  No, the food was awful and universally so.  It is not just that I am not used to student residence food – and that I am not.  It is that even outside the residence, the food was bad.  Overcooked vegetables, fatty meats, unsubtle fish, unimaginative deserts, dishwater “coffee” … worst of all, this came upon me soon after my three days in food heaven, the bed-and-breakfast in Cinque Terre, when my stomach was least resistant to crap.  On my way back at the end of the first weekend, I finally skipped dinner and slipped into a McDonald’s for a gourmet meal – Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese … But, I should not close this paragraph without giving credit where credit is due.  Whatever their culinary weakness might be, the English make damn good Toffee, with real butter and cream. (By the way, that was my dinner at the end of the third weekend.  Toffee and banana smoothie.)

 

The second major benefit was driving in the English countryside.

 

You don’t know what to make of that, do you?  I am not referring to driving on the left side of the road ….  Still no help?  OK – the tongue is firmly in the cheek.  On the flight over I looked down and was impressed by the sheer beauty of the rolling hills of Kent and Sussex.  The hills are alive with the sound of music … oh sorry, wrong movie.  Anyway, the country is utterly beautiful from above and I got the urge to get a car and drive on the tiny roads that wind in and out of the hills, farms, meadows and pastures.  Except that … people drove like madmen on these narrow roads, which had no shoulder to speak of and were always hemmed in by something, occasionally brick walls.  And of course I was driving on the wrong side and so had to have all my wits about me just to get safely to the Castle … beautiful country it may have been, but I saw nothing but the narrow strip of asphalt in front of me.  It did get better the second time I got a car.  Well, an SUV – gas prices and global warming be damned.  I, too, was soon barreling down country roads at high speed, pushing all and sundry in my way into hedges, ditches and the occasional wall.  In a couple of weeks, I guess, I’ll find out how many times I had my photo taken by speed traps …

 

The third additional benefit – and the real one – of going to England to teach is (by now you will have guessed it) the English countryside. 

 

Over two weekends, I drove through large parts of Sussex, Surrey and Oxfordshire, and I can report that I never once saw the kind of small town middle America-massif centrale monstrosity that I described in an earlier note (see “A rare taste” below).  This is a particularly prosperous and traditional part of the UK; perhaps that explains why all the villages and small towns I drove through were uniformly, almost pathologically, cute – and I mean that in the nicest sense of the word.  It is a bit of a cliché, but the English really do have lovely gardens, ivy-covered cottages dotting the landscape, sheep in the pastures and insane place names and signage: on my way to the castle from the airport I went through Nutley, Uckville and Upper Dicker; Bognor Regis and Pease Pound were around the corner; the map reads like an Oscar Wilde play (Worthing, Bracknell, Windermere); and signs warned me here and there of “Heavy Plant Crossing”, prompting me to look frantically around each bend in the road for waddling Begonias or overweight palms.  

 

Then, of course, is the sheer wealth of the land in terms of historical sites – if, that is, you are as great an enthusiast of English history as I am.  East Sussex, after all, is “1066 country”.  But more on that, later.

 

The castle itself – or, at least, the foundations – dates from 1441, and is one of the major Tudor brick buildings in England.  It was heavily rebuilt in the early twentieth century, and for some fifty years it played host to the Royal Greenwich Observatory – there are still working telescopes on the grounds, though the largest was moved to the Canaries about ten years ago.  The classes were held at the castle, which is not open to the public; the residence (which also serves as a bed and breakfast) was about 500 metres up the hill.  From my room, I had a beautiful view of the surrounding meadows, cows and observatories. (You can see the pictures of the castle, the grounds, and the cows here.)

 

The name of the castle, Herstmonceux, should give you an indication of the interesting history of the land: the Hersts were Saxon nobility, while de Monceux was a Norman knight that came over with William the Conqueror.  Some time in the XII century, about a hundred years after the Conquest, a de Monceux married a Herst, joined their names, and settled in the region.

 

It is said that the Norman Conquest was the last successful invasion of England (if you do not count that little incident in 1688, when William of Orange usurped the English and Scottish thrones; after all, he was already married to the daughter of the deposed king).  An earlier William, the Duke of Normandy, had been promised the throne of England by Edward the Confessor.  After Edward’s death, however, Harold Godwin, a Saxon claimed that Edward had named him as his successor.  Meanwhile, the Norwegians thought that England belonged to them – after all, they had plundered the land, pillaged the cities and raped its people for centuries; theirs was by far the strongest of William’s or Harold’s claim. 

 

Messy business. 

 

Harold, being in situ, took the crown; the Norwegians attacked from the north, and William invaded from the south.  Harold moved swiftly north and dealt a massive defeat on the Norwegian invaders – indeed, so massive that they never came back.  But, by the time he turned south to face the Normans (who were, incidentally, the descendant of Vikings – norse men- who evidently had come to prefer the delights of the French country side to Norway’s snowy coasts), his troops were too tired to fight.  The Normans attacked, were repulsed, took out their bows and showered the enemy with arrows; Harold took one in the eye and died, the English forces fought on but collapsed of exhaustion; and William established a French-speaking court in England that changed the face of the country, and that lasted until 1485.

 

William landed in what is now Pevensy Bay; the walls of a Roman fort that served as his first base are still there.  Within the remains of the Roman walls there are the ruins of a medieval castle; the early foundations of the castle date to 1067, a year after the invasion.  The final battle between the English and the Norman forces is known as the Battle of Hastings, though in fact it was fought a little north of Hastings, at what is now the village of Battle. (There is a joke in there somewhere, but it cannot be told without eliciting a collective groan, so I will forebear.) The village was built around the Abbey founded by William soon after the Conquest to commemorate the victory.  According to tradition, the altar of the Abbey church was placed on the exact spot where Harold died.  Not much is left of the Church; the Abbey lies in magnificent ruins; the battlefield is now covered in Narcissus.

 

And William?  Here is how Will Durant captures the scene of his death:

 

“He ordered his army to burn down Mantes and all its neighbourhood, and to destroy all its crops and fruits; and it was done.  Riding happily amid the ruins, William was thrown against the iron pommel of his saddle by a stumble of his horse.  He was carried to the priory of St. Gervase near Rouen. … All his sons except Henry deserted his deathbed to fight for the succession; his officers and servants fled with what spoils they could take. … The coffin made for him proved too small for his corpse; when the attendants tried to force the enormous bulk into the narrow space the body burst, and filled the church with a royal stench.

 

As I walked around the battlefields and the ruins, as I stood where the old Abbey church of Battle rose on the spot where Harold Godwin (and Saxon England) had met his death, I remembered the story of William’s exploding corpse and fleeing servants, and I recalled Khayyam’s quatrain (via Fitzgerlad):

 

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great Hunter–the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.

 

William was not your garden variety conqueror; he comprehensively changed the face of Saxon England.  He introduced feudalism and established a landed nobility of largely Norman stock, the traces of which can still be seen today: in English, the cow in the pasture becomes beef on your plate; the same with veal and pork.  This reflects the fact that the Saxon peasants raised the cows and calf and pigs, but sold or offered boeuf, veau, and porc to the Lords in the Manor.

 

One of William’s principal supporters in the English venture was a certain Roger de Montgomery, who offered 60 ships to the invasion.  As a reward, he got the “rape” of Arundel (including what became Arundel Castle), one of the six “rapes” of County Sussex parceled out by William to his friends.  (The origins of the word “rape” are not clear, but it might well have come from the French rapiner, to plunder, which is what the Normans did to the Saxon lands.)  But Roger's son backed the wrong guy in the wars of succession that followed and lost the land.  Henry I, William’s son, gave the grounds to his second wife; she remarried, and eventually hosted Empress Matilda, Henry’s daughter and England’s first Queen, at Arundel Castle in 1139.  The formidable Matilda, or Maud, was never crowned; she was in London for all of seven months before Londoners got fed up with her manners and threw her out of town.  Her son eventually became king of England as Henry II, the husband of Eleanor, about whom I have written elsewhere (See “A rare taste” below).  It was this Henry who created the first Earl of Arundel, whose descendants still inhabit the Castle over eight hundred years later.

 

Along the way, the Earls of Arundel married into or produced other Earls, Dukes and sundry Lords, some of whom had their heads removed at the convenience of the Sovereign.  The family also produced the two most unfortunate Queens of England, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, who were nieces of the 3rd Duke of Norfolk; both went to the block.  The 3rd Duke escaped beheading by Henry VIII only because Henry died of Syphilis the night before the Execution. (Yet another bloated king whose corpse exploded.)  The 4th Duke, however, was not so fortunate; he was relieved of his head by the order of Queen Elizabeth.  Now, before you say a word against the Virgin Queen, bear in mind that the House of Lords had sentenced Norfolk to be hanged, drawn and quartered; the Queen felt compassion and after months of dithering, only had Norfolk beheaded.

 

My next stop was Stonehenge.  Sadly, I did not see any druids there.  Even more disappointingly, for fear of vandalism you are kept a good distance from the stones.  I walked around on the designated pathway, listened to the audio-guide yammer on about the construction of the thing and the properties of “blue” stone, took pictures, and ate a tuna sandwich for lunch.  I had in mind all the stories I had read about the magical properties of Stonehenge; I was half-hoping to find a time-portal or something on the path … but no such luck.  I suppose it’s interesting how four thousand years ago hundreds of people got together to build themselves what is in effect a stone calendar … but then, around the same time, the Egyptians were building the pyramids.  I guess the moral of the story is, if you want to see Stonehenge in person, go there before you visit Egypt, otherwise you risk having your perspective screwed up.

 

My final stop was Oxford.  I had persuaded myself that it was worth driving 250 km to see Oxford; I am still not sure whether it was.  Still, it was good finally to see the place I had read so much about in Brideshead Revisited and the life of Oscar Wilde.  There is, I should add, an odd serenity about the place; this is what a University should feel like, I thought to myself as I walked around Christ Church meadow.  But then, it could well be that I have been conditioned to think that way.

 

And this is the thing: how often in life do we come across an image or a place with utterly fresh eyes?  Is it even possible to conceive what a “fresh eye” might be like, might feel like?  Would Stonehenge have been more impressive had I not seen the pyramids?  Would it still be impressive if I did not know its age, or the significance of its particular orientation during Spring equinox or Summer solstice?  Would Oxford, the city and the university, be Oxford, without the lenses of Wilde and Waugh?  But then, what is a place, a building, a historical artifact, but the sum total of our experiences, gathered and received?

 

After a week of rain, the sun is finally breaking through the clouds.  The mountains beckon.

 

Cinque Terre

Posted on by
Reply

The Setting

I’d been meaning to go to Cinque Terre (pronounced “chink-weh terreh” and Italian for “Five Tourist Traps”) since 1998.  As with much else in my life, this was based on nothing other than pure hearsay: I had seen no pictures of the area and read no reviews; I had only a vague notion of where they were and an ever vaguer grasp of what they would be once I found them.  But then, in Brussels and then in Geneva, at the approach of every long weekend all I could hear was, “we’re going to Cinque Terre.”  What better recommendation for a place than over-hearing perfect strangers in diplomatic cocktail parties talking about going there?

While still in Brussels, I discovered that the villages to which the “Terre” referred were in the general direction of the Italian Riviera (that is, on the Mediterranean Sea – and luckily I knew at least where to find the Sea …), somewhere between Levanto and La Spezia.  I also found out, over the years, that accommodation in the area consisted of two general choices: respectable hotels in the region itself that were fully booked six months in advanced and that required a child or two as security for payment, and various other “two star” pensiones recommended by a “friend of a friend” that were located on a hillside twenty miles distant from any civilized point and accessible only by donkeys.

And so it was that, year after year, at the approach of each long weekend, I would announce my intention to visit the Cinque Terre, only to have my plans – hopes, really – scuppered by my bank’s refusal to extend the line of credit necessary for the hotels or inability to reserve a donkey or a mule to access one of the more affordable pensiones.  When, some time in early April, I yet again announced my intention to check out the Cinque, friends received it with the same roll of the eyes and knowing smile that I used to get in University every time I mentioned a date for the weekend.  This time, however, things were going to be different, for I was armed with Karen Brown’s Charming Bed and Breakfasts in Italy.  Within a week I was booked into one, and a week later we were off to the fabled Five Lands.  (OK, I lied; Terre does not mean “tourist trap”, it means “Lands” or, I guess, “Villages”.  “Tourist trap” translates into Italia in Italian.)

There

I have a policy – no doubt, you are shocked and surprised to hear this, that I have a policy on anything – I have a policy never to stay in any place that is described as “charming”, or to eat at a restaurant that has “romantic” or “Mama” in its name, or to read a book with the letter Z in the title.  This last one is a total non sequitur, I know, but I put it there simply to note that I know very well that such policies are utterly irrational and easily broken.  Still, the policy is there, and had it not been for the fact that I had waited nearly eight years to find the right hotel, pension, bed and breakfast, cottage, or mud hut to rent in Cinque Terre, I probably would have stuck to it.  But desperate situations demand desperate measures, and so I decided to forego the policy.  If it was the only way to get there, a “charming” bed and breakfast it was going to be.  And so it was.  And a good thing too.

Locanda Miranda is in a village called Tellaro, which is literally at the end of the local road.  I mean it.  The road from Sarzana to the sea winds its way through Lerici and another village before coming to an end in front of the village church.  From there, you can only walk down to the sea, or up into the hills.  Not just that, but the walk down to the sea goes through the village and in front of multicoloured buildings, and ends at a fortified medieval church built on a rock jutting into the “Gulf of Poets”.  “Charming” does not even begin to describe the surroundings: this was charming with whipped cream, frosting sugar and a cherry on top.  Filled with custard.  On a bed of crumbled Oreo cookies.  And that was only the village.

Then there was the pensione itself.  By Italian standards, our room had palatial dimensions (that is, you could turn around with your luggage without knocking out a wall); we had two balconies, once of which overlooked the gulf (and the sunset); the bathroom was clean and – I trust you are sitting down for this shocker – big enough to accommodate a bidet …. (Question: What is the best quote incorporating the word ‘bidet’?  Answer: Ava Gardner on her marriage to Frank Sinatra, ‘We were always great in bed. The trouble usually started on the way to the bidet.’  I digress.)

We would have been happy enough with the arrangements, but the service, and the food, made the experience one of the most memorable travelling experiences I have ever had.  We had a five course seafood dinner, and different each night they were, to describe which would take up far too many words than your patience or my wordsmithing abilities would permit.  Let me say this, though, about the genius of the chef: he made polenta that was not only edible, but downright enjoyable; I leave it to your imagination to figure out what he would have been able to do with red mullet, sea bass, sea bream, scampi, calamari, and lobsters …

The dead poets

From Tellaro, it’s a ten minutes drive to Lerici, where you can take a ferry across the Gulf of Poets to the Cinque Terre, passing La Spezia and stopping at Porto Venere. 

I keep repeating the name of the city, La Spezia, in the hope that some of you will suddenly say, “Ah, La Spezia; of course”.  Me, I never did, despite all the years I read about Cinque Terre, La Spezia and Levanto.  The reason for my continued ignorance was, of course, that from a purely historical perspective, La Spezia offered nothing to make me remember it.  It is not connected with any of the murderous families that have ruled Italy’s city-states; no Pope installed his illegitimate children as a bishop or a military governor; no painter of note purchased from La Spezia its condemned criminals to crucify them for greater verisimilitude in his paintings of the Passion; you cannot name a single Mafioso or blood-thirsty explorer who admits to having hailed from there; and there is no record of any Roman Emperors or generals who left their heads, or other body parts, in the Gulf of Poets, courtesy of the Praetorian Guards.

Perhaps they did not because at the time of the Romans, the Gulf was not known by its present name.  Indeed, “the Gulf of Poets” is a fairly recent appellation, as far as Italy is concerned, going back to the middle of the nineteenth century.  La Spezia, Gulf of Poets, XIXth Century … By now, most of you will be saying, “that La Spezia; of course.”  Me, I still didn’t get it, until I read the brochure. 

Shelley (Pyrce Bysshe, the poet) got himself drowned there and Byron (Lord George Gordon, another poet) went there from Geneva, where he was renting a Château, to console, or “console”, Shelley’s widow Mary (that would be Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein).  La Spezia, you could say, was the seat of the original Dead Poet’s Society.

The Walk

And so across the Gulf we went, past La Spezia and around Porto Venere, to stop at the first of the five villages.  As my ancient film camera had run out of batteries, I was hoping that Riomaggiore would be packed with tourists and, therefore, covered in tourist-related shops.  I was not disappointed.  Within a few steps into the old town, we found a Kodak shop (thank God for Globalisation) and I started clicking away.  From the first village we walked along the coast to the second one, and from there we went, to no one’s surprise least of all ours, to the third.  There we found refuge from the throngs of tourists (I no longer had any use for them or their shops) in a quaint little restaurant that served a wonderful seafood pasta, walked around a bit, and helped a couple of confused and lost German tourists (“The train station is down there, just follow the signs, with a picture of a train. … Well, that way goes up, as you see, and takes you to the top of the cliff ….”).

By this time, it was four p.m.; we had enough time to get down to the train station, buy a ticket, wait for the train (“The train will be ten minutes late”; the phrase is repeated often, in relation to every train, and only in Italian, so that you learn it by heart very quickly.), get to the fourth village, walk up to the tower, go to the Marina, have a gelato (there is always enough time for gelato) and catch the last boat to Lerici. 

At least, what we thought was the last boat to Lerici.  It was the last boat alright … but after 90 minutes of high waves, strong winds and an endless stream of announcements in Italian about getting on and getting off at this or that destination, we found ourselves not in Lerici, but in La Spezia (that city again).  We paid homage to the dead poet, his wife and her lover, and took a bus through the industrial suburbs back to Lerici, the car and the comforts of Locanda Miranda.

The surrounding region

Having “done” the Cinque Terre – well, at least four of them; we figured the fifth would be more of the same and so decided to give it a pass – on Holy Sunday we asked the good owner of the Miranda to tell us about the local attractions.  In mixed Italian and French she told us of La Serra, Mount Marcello, a precipice, Punto Curvo, going up and then down and through a medieval village called Ameglia, a geographical feature that goes by the name of “Bocca di Magra”, and of course the local big city … no, not La Spezia but Sarzana.  Both at the time and now, having done the tour, these names and features make as much sense to me as they do to you.  The only advantage I have over you is that, thanks to Italian signage, we managed to drive for an hour, hike for another hour and a half up a steep mountain path and walk down a windy road for still half an hour, without having seen any of the attractions mentioned by the good host.  Well, I exaggerate: there was a lovely Easter festival at Sarzana, which boasts the odd feature of a house built on – yes, right on – one of the turrets of the still extant medieval walls.

We did manage to break out of the itinerary suggested by our host long enough to visit Pisa and Lucca.  And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven – um, er, ah … Sorry, for a moment I got carried away with my Biblical allusions … references … plagiarisms …

We set out for the long trek back on the Monday.  For lunch we stopped at Parma. (I don’t mean to be pretentious; it was on the way.) We also visited the Cathedral (known for its Renaissance frescoes of the life of Jesus) and the Octagonal Baptistery covered in pinkish marble. 

I am not a big fan of Renaissance or even post/counter-Reformation church frescoes; but then, I almost converted to Protestantism when I set foot in the St. Ignatius Loyola – one of the two principal Jesuit churches in Rome.  Almost, because of course I am not a Catholic, but too many paintings on the walls give me the creeps.  Give me a Gothic church with stained-glass stories of the life of Jesus over frescoes any day.  Well, except for the Sistine Chapel.  I digress.  Parma.  Well, if you’re into Baptisteries, stick to the one in Florence.

The Return

From Parma, instead of taking the “direct” route through the Mont Blanc tunnel, we decided to go through one of the more spectacular mountain passes in Switzerland.  The Simplon Pass connects the very beginning of the Rhone Valley in Switzerland to Italy, via Domodossola.  You go through the mountains, rise to an altitude of 2005 meters, and then for 23 kilometers you descend, on a 9% gradient, to the bottom of the valley.  From there, it’s another 200 kilometers (197, to be precise) to my place.  And it is a stunningly beautiful drive: the road itself is fairly straight and uneventful, but the mountains on each side rise to immense heights.  Going through the Simplon added two hours (if not more) to the trip, but it was well worth it.

Next week I am off to the UK, where I will be teaching at a castle belonging to Queen’s University.  I am planning to visit Hastings – as in “The Battle of” – and possibly Oxford, time permitting.  I’ll let you know if I come across anything interesting.  

The Thirteenth Day

Posted on by
Reply
It's gloriously sunny and warm outside, and I ought to be out there skiing, bicycling, in-line skating along the lake, or hiking in the mountains rather than sitting in front of my computer composing another mass email … all the more so because today is “Sizdah-bedar” – the thirteenth day of the Persian New Year – when traditionally we leave town to go to the country, there to leave behind, to let go, of the “evil thirteen”, and to cleanse our souls for the coming year.
 
Well, I already live in the country and, this season at least, I have spent enough time already in the mountains trying to “cleanse” my soul, and my environment, of evils and evil omens. (Other people call it “skiing”; but nothing so simple or banal for me, you appreciate ….) And both needed a lot of cleansing.
 
The Christian year began well enough.  As usual, friends came over, we drank and danced and ate and talked and bid farewell to the old year, all in style.  We all wished the best for one another, looked forward to another year of success – or, at least, no regression – and drank Champagne to our health.  When, on 9 January, I boarded the plane for Toronto – to teach, to see the family, to spend time with close friends – the coming year looked very promising indeed. 
 
And then disaster struck, one after the other. (The next three paragraphs, indented, are real downers, so please do not hesitate to skip.
 
On the 13th, I learned that a good friend had passed away, of stomach cancer.  It had come suddenly, took all unawares … he went quickly, leaving much unsaid.  We had last spoken together on the November before; we were going to have dinner, but work intervened; we postponed it to February, when he would be back in Geneva.  The day before Christmas he was given the news of his cancer: terminal; three weeks later he was gone.  It was, and remains, a terrible shock.
 
A few days later I had coffee with a close friend.  He seemed out of sorts … the wife of a mutual friend had been diagnosed with cancer.  I didn't, and don't yet, know of the prognosis; if I could pray to unseen gods, she would be in my prayers; she is in my thoughts and not a day goes by that I do not wish her well and her husband and children strength.
 
I finished the course on the 20th of January and came back home on the 22nd.  A week later, a very good friend of mine was hit with acute leukemia and confined to the hospital.  The prognosis is good, but the treatment is hard.  She is in isolation for fear of infections; and the Chemo and the follow-up are going to take close to two years … she is too weak most days to even take calls.  But, when she has been let out on furlough from her confinement, she has been in good spirits.  The story of her daily torture is harrowing and I shall not put you through it … the only good thing that can be said is that it was caught, and caught just in time, and there is a good chance that she will come through it ….
We all have coping mechanisms to deal with disasters: some disengage in spirit, others cause their bodies to disengage through sports or drinks or drugs or other healthy and unhealthy activities; some reflect and lose themselves in introspection, others take carpe diem to heart and squeeze every last bit of juice out of life; some bury themselves in work, others find work pointless; some spew banalities and bromides, others write mass emails …
 
I am not yet sure where I land in the midst of all this.  It is true that last week, skiing in the Swiss Alps, I sensed a deep serenity at 3300 meters looking down into the valleys and looking out at Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn.  I was not itching to come down. (Well, that might have had to do with the 60% incline and the fact that I was testing out boots and skis, and neither was working out well … but then again, why bother with a simple explanation when a deeper, more philosophical one would do?)  But, staying up there was not an option; and once I foolishly left the relative safety of the station, the only thing left to do was to struggle down the steep incline of the glacier, avoid the crevasses, get myself to the bottom in one piece and try to enjoy it in the meantime.  Perhaps that was the metaphor I was looking for?
 
Detachment is not an option, no matter how lovely the view.  Life, H.L. Mencken said, demands to be lived.
 
…
 
In the time it has taken me to write this email, the clouds have gathered and soon it will rain.  Some of you would say that that's my punishment for having inflicted this on you; others would point out that had I not begun writing this note, I would have been caught in the gathering storm.  I'm going out in any event, to the lake, to the city, to the mountains – wherever I can reflect for a moment and let go of evils and evil omens on this Thirteenth Day of the New Year.

Escape from Bagram

Posted on by
Reply
A number of detainees escaped from the US-run Bagram prison in Afghanistan on 3 December 2005.
 
As I read the newsreports on the escape from the Bagram prison, I wanted to be outraged, or at least bewildered, but instead I was bemused.  All I could think of was Ronald Reagan's famous “there you go again!”
 
To ask the question, “is there no end to the incompetence?”, is to answer it.  A Wildebeeste stampede is more organised than Mr. Rumsfeld's Pentagon.
 
The prisoners had studied the “guards' routine” over many months?  Shouldn't a high security prison have a randomised secrutiy detail?  The prisoners had fashioned “implements” to “pick” the locks?  Is it not basic to strip-search prisoners upon cell transfer, especially if they had caused “disturbances”?  And they picked a prison lock?  They fled under “cover of darkness”?  Has the US army not heard of security floodlights, trip-wires, infra-red motion detectors, electronic bracelets …? 
 
An early report compared this breakout to “The Great Escape”; this is more like “Hogan's Heroes”. 
 
A memo to Dick Cheney: it's pointless to have the right to torture prisoners, if you can't bloody well keep them there.  Forget about thumbscrews and water-boards, and concentrate on putting your own house in order.

Forgotten Empire

Posted on by
Reply
Well, yes, I said I would not write again until 2006. And I meant it.  I should have honoured my promise had I not surreptitiously – nay, serendipitously – found myself in London last month on a weekend’s pleasure jaunt.  And so here I am, once again crowding this site with more words. 

Now, if this were a blog merely about London, I should advise you to skip reading it. (What more can anyone say about London that has not yet been said?  Especially since I did not discover any new restaurants, crash any interesting parties, or stumble unto (or into) any new and exciting clubs.)  But this was no ordinary excursion into the old Imperial capital.  I went there for the express purpose of seeing the “Forgotten Empire” exhibition, on Achaemenid Persia, at the British Museum (with the rare participation of the Iranian National Museum).  So, if you are interested in things ancient, read on.

The exhibition has got rather mixed reviews in London papers and, interestingly enough, the reviews do not necessarily reflect the usual political fissures of English newspapers.  

On the left, the anti-war crowd crowed about the past glories of a country now under verbal attack by another Empire, warning the US of a similar fate to that of the Persians. (With what glee some commentators noted that Persepolis lay unknown and under dust for well over a millennium, until a lost European explorer suggested that the ruins might be the fabled city mentioned in Herodotus.  Take that Washington!)  Also on the left – more on the lunatic side – anachronisms heaped upon anachronisms as ideology got the better of common sense, with critics questioning the wisdom of “glorifying” Imperial conquest or “the oppressive system that forced slaves to build vast palaces and monuments to egos” at a time when other Empires are being built, etc.

On the right, most critics used the occasion to drag the whole history of post-Seljuk and post-Moorish Islamic decline into their “analysis”, predictably tut-tutting what had happened to glorious Persia as a result of – what else? – fundamentalist and calcified Islam.  And why wait for Islam?  After all, weren’t the Greco-Persian wars of the early Achaemenid era merely a precursor to the “clash of civilizations” of today?  The right drew its own conclusions, of course: some opting for war, others for encouraging Persians to find their past glory, again … 

Bah, humbug, was my reaction to the critics.

And, alas, to the exhibition.

As I walked about in the dark, dank, small, and stiflingly hot room in which the exhibition was mounted, I was not entirely thrilled but could not quite put my finger on what it was that I found problematic.  After all, many of the items were part of the British Museum’s permanent collection, and so I had seen them before.  But then, perhaps that was it: they had been in far better display cases in the permanent collection, as opposed to the cramped and dark corner to which they were relegated in the exhibition.

But it was something else that was bothering me.  Some of items on display had already been displayed in another touring exhibition only five years ago.  Of these – and this is unforgivable for a museum of this caliber – the two most prized items were silver and gold rhytons (drinking cups) about which the only information available was that they were “said to be from Hamedan”.  I was struck by this.  “Said to be”?  By whom?  What are the doubts?  What is the real provenance?  Have they not been authenticated?  If not, why are they on display? 

They are beautiful pieces alright.  But it does make a difference whether they were made by Lydian artists resident in Ekbatana and Persepolis around 540 B.C. or fifty years ago in some faux-antique-producing workshop in Tehran.  It gives me no confidence in an exhibition to simply gloss over the uncertainties.

This was not all – it got worse. 

There were plaster casts of the bas-reliefs from the Gates of Nations in Persepolis.  At first I allowed myself to be impressed – I have not been there and had only seen pictures of the reliefs.  The sensation did not last long.  I was reminded of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, in which the Ishtar Gate of Babylon is mounted in all its full glory; in another room, you can see an entire temple.  In the British Museum itself, the Assyrian collection, or indeed the Elgin Marbles, is set in halls and spaces that give you at least an inkling of the majesty of their original setting, of the artistry of the architects.  And the plaster cast?  It was pathetically set in a dark room with low ceilings.  There was no sense that the cast was from a part of two grand staircases going up to a gate opening onto the Apadana, the Hall of Nations, at some 120 meters long and wide, or that the staircases lead from road to a stone platform (on which the palace was built) of an area about 125,000 sq. meters.  There was no sense of scale in this reproduction.  Not to mention that there were no interpretative notes telling the viewers what all the figures meant.

After all, all along the staircases (on the site) are the images of people bearing gifts.  This is the most ancient representation that we have of the rites of Noruz – the Iranian/Persian new year – celebrated each year on the Spring equinox.  Each figure represents one of the “nations” that formed the Empire; each national representative carried a gift from their territory for the Great Kind.  Some were accompanied by a Persian guard; others were alone.  Some of these national representatives (such as the Medes or the Parthians) appear armed on the reliefs; others are not.  The differences in representation were significant; they indicated whether a nation was a partner or a subject nation to the Persians (only free peoples were armed).  Another thing you could see on the reliefs is the nature of the national costumes.  The Persians are fully covered, whereas the Medes (and certain other nations) showed skin.  And so on.  I did not see any notes explaining the significance of the carvings on the staircases.  Without such interpretative notes, the reliefs are simply crude images on a wall; you get no sense of why this Forgotten Empire needs to be remembered.

And the biggest travesty of all: the treatment of the Cyrus Cylinder.  The notes said something along the lines that, “although the cylinder was found in the site of Babylon, successive Iranian governments have laid claim to it as a Persian heritage.”  The notes further point out, quite helpfully, that “notions of human rights that Iranians claim to find in the cylinder did not, of course, have much resonance at the time of the conquest of Babylon.”  And so on.  All of which is true; all of which is beside the point.

The cylinder was found in Babylon and it is dated to the conquest of Babylon by … Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. It begins with the words, “I, Cyrus, King of Kings, king of the four corners [of the world] …”.  It talks about how Cyrus came to Babylon, freed the people from their yokes, respected the Babylonian gods, etc. etc.  Of course the cylinder was found in Babylon: it was a propaganda piece by the conquering army of the Persian Empire for the benefit of the Babylonians.  But in this, it is no more Babylonian in origin than General MacArthur’s statements of assurance in Tokyo were “Japanese” in origin merely because they were delivered there. 

And of course to talk of “human rights” as we understand them in connection with the 2500 year old cylinder would be anachronistic.  The point is that in its context what Cyrus said in Babylon was quite revolutionary.  Only forty years before the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, Babylon had conquered Jerusalem, razed the city and enslaved its people.  This was in living memory. (“By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and remembered Zion.”) Barely a century before, the Medes and the Babylonians had conquered Assyria, destroyed Nineveh, sowed salt in the land, massacred hundreds of thousands and sold the rest to slavery.  The descendants of those slaves would still have been in Babylon at the time of the conquest.  Thus, for Cyrus to show up and – even if in propaganda – proclaim his respect for the Gods of Babylon, and offer to “lift their yokes”, would have been, and indeed was, a unique event, a huge departure from the conduct of warfare and of Empire-building. 

It’s perfectly alright to try to demystify the cylinder, but not at the cost of distorting what is not just Persia’s heritage, but the heritage of mankind: this is where we were 2500 years ago.  How much have we progressed since?

And so, despite the superficially admirable effort of mounting this exhibition, the real Empire remains forgotten.  Perhaps I should get back on my dormant novel …

To get over the disappointment, I got a ride on the London Eye.  Unlike Paris, though, London is not a pretty city from above.  The twelve pounds I spent on the large Ferris wheel would have been better invested on an open-top double-decker.  Live and learn.  

A rare taste

Posted on by
Reply
You begin to doubt the wisdom of ordering a “rare” steak when, upon taking your order, the waiter rushes into the kitchen and returns with a lasso and a Ginsu knife. The rest of the conversation passes in silence: You look up with a face bearing a combination of fear, bewilderment and faux-machismo, while the waiter stares back at you with a vague sense of satisfaction and a beaming “you-don’t-expect-us-to-kill-it-too” expression on his brow.  Not less then thirty seconds later the slab of meat arrives, for the moment resting on a bed of french fries.  Before you know it, the steak is mooing and kicking and trying to run away and you are down the street, lasson in hand, running after it. 
 
Well, I managed to catch mine, bring it back to the table and harness it to the plate, before finishing it off with stabbing movements of the Ginsu knife that would make Mrs. Bates proud.  Another twenty minutes of wrestling with and gnawing on raw fat, sinews and meat, and I felt like climbing a tree and lying there with my paws swinging, or better yet, finding a soft comfy spot in the Savannah for a long long long sleep among the tall grass.

But that was not to be.  I had to get in the car and get onto Route 76.  We passed town after small town: first the gas stations, then the fast food joints, then the massive shopping centres and car lots, followed briskly by boarded-up stores, decrepit concrete housing, motels with all-you-eat buffets, dead city-centres – only to have the entire thing repeated in reverse.  From town to town we sped, cornfields and wheatfields on each side extending to the vast flat horizon; the road, in front of us, mercilessly without any features.  There we were, plains to the left of us, plains to the right of us, plains in front of us … on rode the six hundred, theirs not to- ah.  Er.  Um.  Sorry there, forgot myself for a second.  So there we were, driving among farms and pasture lands and prairies …

No Toto, we were not in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Kansas, but in the flatlands of middle France.  It’s remarkable how similar, in some basic details, middle France and middle America are.  The average Parisian, who has far more sense than drive in the middle part of France, would never admit to it, but there it was.  But for the fact that each village boasted a XIIth century church – and, believe me, that gets pretty old hat pretty soon – many towns and villages in the middle of the country (the part that does not see any tourists) have the same basic build of a small American town.  The average Praisian would no doubt blame this on globalisation, or better yet, globalisation! (pronounced with a snooty French accent), Americanisation, imperialism, capitalism … N’importe quoi.  The big difference between France and the US is the distance between the towns.

When you go through enough of these in the space of a few hours, you realise that whoever invented the pattern of economic activity in an American small town (now replicated here and there) was a genius: who wants massive trucks winding through city centres looking for gas or food?  And where else are you going to put car dealerships?  As for the hyper-markets: well, let me tell ya, “charm” costs, even in France, especially in France.  You can get a kilo of nectarines in a hypermarché for the kingly sum of One Euro, or you can wait for the Wednesday market and buy the same kilo from a smelly farmer with one black tooth for three times the price and a lot more attitude.  I know, because I live near a market and I used to do my shopping there.  I stopped going there when a farmer told me not to touch his produce and proposed to select for me: two rotten avocados and two unripe ones for €10.  Non merci.  I trundled off to the hypermarché, manhandled a dozen avocados until I found the ones I wanted and came home.  Because of the all choice, I also spent about €100 on stuff I did not need, but that should not detain us.  And the avocados? Two unripe and the other two rotten.  But that too is beside the point.  I forgot what the point was.

So we got on the road and sped toward … well, the first night we were staying in a XIVth château in Burgundy.  We were not there for wine-tasting – this was only our first stop on the way to the Loire Valley.  And as it happened, we got there around 10 pm – too late, the host informed us, for any restaurants in the region.  No problem: we got sandwiches from the local gas station – 7 km away – scaled the three floors to our room and passed out on the beds.  The next morning …

Ah, but it is always the next morning when you realise what magic, what beauty, this country has to offer.  Our room was under the roof, in the left wing of the château.  We looked out onto towers on top of a moat and a quaint granary.  We had breakfast in a lovely formal dining room with a painting (original) of Erasmus looking over us.  Simply wonderful.

From there we headed to our first destination, the city of Bourges, near the geographical centre of France.  This is the capital of the province of Berry – the ducs de Berry were quite rich and enormously famous at some point (see Chambord, below) – and, more important, it is here that one of the two earliest examples of Gothic architecture was built.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> 

The Cathedral is unusual in many respects.  It was begun about the same time as the Cathedral at Chartres, and so each of them presented a model of Gothic architecture to follow.  As it happens, it was Chartres that was copied and not Bourges.  Some suggest that it was because Chartres was closer to Paris, and so it ended up being more copied.  For my own money – and I have not been to Chartres, though I have seen many of its progeny, including the Cathedrals in Köln, Barcelona and Prague – it is probably because Bourges is far more human, more immediate and – therefore, fatally if you want to impress people with the glory of God – less imposing than the Chartres models. 

It is also less ideological as a building: it is not in the shape of a cross.  The absence of a transept does wonders for the lighting in the place: inside, the nave is like a basilica, only wider, higher and much brighter.  There are five aisles but the two on the side rise to a height of 69 feet.  The church, at 130 feet, is the widest in France.  And yet: from each point in the church I could see all five aisles.  There is no mystery here, no hidden corners, no shadows.  You can see why church leaders would have gone with Chartres.  It was well worth the trip. 

Two hours later and we were in Chenanceaux.  The chateau there is preposterous.  It straddles the Loire – turrets and all – nestled in acres and acres of woodland and parks and riverside terraces.  The living and partying areas of the chateau are not that grand – but still, the idea that you can just build a chateau over a river, thus blocking the height of the boats or the width of the barges that could pass … It really is something out of a fairy tale. 

From there we drove further west to the outskirts of Nantes, to the Chateau du Breil, where we were staying.  We were in the middle of Muscadet vineyards and pasturelands here and there where sheep grazed peaceably.  The night sky was overflowing with stars.  And the chateau boasts a lovely heated pool, and a crazy Frenchwoman who was never without her glass of Chablis (“in Paris we don’t consider Muscadet wine”) and her Gauloises.  Her eldest, my age, is a French diplomat in London and so she immediately adopted me.  We were well taken care of. 

On the Sunday we went to Fontevraud to visit the Abbey where Eleanor of Acquitaine, Henry II and Richard Lionheart are buried. (See the movie The Lion in Winter, and you will want to drive 600 km to see this Abbey and to pay homage to the great Queen.)  There we saw the Dungeon of the Chinon Castle, where Henry II had his court. (Although king of England, Henry had lots of territory in France and preferred to stay in the region, to fight his endless wars with the French king, Philippe Augustus.  Philippe was, incidentally, Richard’s (Henry’s son) lover, before Richard became king.)  I went down to the bowels of the dungeon, fell in the dark and the damp, and bloodied my elbow.  The romantic in me wanted to think that perhaps Richard or Eleanor had also fallen there when they were imprisoned in the castle. (Complicated family.)  But, of course, it was an illusion: the dungeon had been built by Philippe in 1205, a year after Eleanor’s death and six years after Richard expired.      

From Chinon to Saumur and the Disney castle on the heights overlooking the Loire.  This, by the way, is the region of the Troglodytes – the cave-dwelling peoples who carved their abodes into the limestone hills along the river.  If you are interested in that sort of thing, go to Capadoccia, in Turkey. 

Our last stop was the Château de Chambord.  It is stunningly beautiful and strikingly impudent.  It is a hunting lodge of sorts, designed to near absolute mathematical precision.  Its royal quarters have housed kings and queens and mistresses, in quick succession.  There is a double-helixed staircase in the middle of the château, reportedly designed by Da Vinci – proving, once again, that he was an alien.  No doubt, three hundred years from now we will decode the DNA message encoded in the staircase.  The château anticipates Gaudi in its strangeness, Dali in its surrealism, and Fiddler on the Roof in the many staircases, inside and out, going nowhere, just for show ….  If I were a rich man, indeed.  I could hear the last owner of the château singing that as he gave up the crumbling building to the French government for the princely sum of one franc.  He sold the land for another five million. 

That owner, a certain Comte de Chambord, was a descendant of an earlier count by that name who, in 1873 declared his readiness to accede to the throne of France as Henri V.  He was not as batty as all that: he was the son of the last duc de Berry (see above).  During the Empire – the second Empire, led by the third Napoleon – the good people of France collected money for the impoverished count to buy back his estate (the château).  And so he did.  After the collapse of the Empire, the fall of the Commune and the declaration of the Third Republic, the good count put his name forward as the next king: the Bourbons and the Orléans having expired, the Berrys were the last royal line to remain.  Though impudently declaring himself the successor in spirit to the great Henri IV, the count was not well-received and he died ten years later. 

And so it goes.

Call me a food snob

Posted on by
Reply

This was in response to an Article in the Globe and Mail, in which the author, Ann Birch, suggested that attention to food preparation somehow “gets in the way of living”, or that cuisine interrupts conversation.

I sincerely hope Ms. Birch’s paean to chips-and-dip and macaroni-and-cheese was written with a tongue firmly tucked away in the cheek.  After all, how could any sane person suggest that the Italian or the French or the Spanish or the Belgian devotion to food gets in the way of their lives and – even more incredibly – conversation?  Is it at all tenable to argue that cultures that thrive on prepared food and/or simple fare – boiled kidneys and mash, sausages and potatoes – somehow have a better grasp on life than those that insist on at least four courses at dinner, with good wine, all prepared with natural and fresh ingredients?

But if she was even remotely serious, there are at least two objections to her line of thinking: first, good food (in the sense of well-prepared food from good and varied ingredients) has value in and of itself; second, the preparation and enjoyment of food is the very epitome of a healthy social activity.

I confess I’ve never been a fan of chips-and-dip as a proper way to introduce a dinner, not for business contacts, and certainly not for friends.  In this I am a creature – perhaps, a prisoner – of my background.  I grew up in a country where the average meal takes about four hours to prepare.  A typical Iranian dish overflows with herbs, fruit, tastes and colour.  There are the “starters”: eggplants, garlic, tomatoes and eggs, topped with fried mints and onions; yoghurt mixed with walnuts, cucumbers, raisins and rubbed mint.  There are the rice dishes: one mixed with dill, coriander, parsley and shallots, served with fish or a shank of lamb (which takes four hours to cook properly); or another mixed with sweetened orange zest, almond and pistachio halves, dried berries, served with saffron-lime chicken and topped with saffron rice.  There are the stews (sun-dried plums, spinach, celery and sun-dried lime; or pan-fried eggplants, split peas, sour grapes, potatoes and tomatoes).  And then there is dessert: Baklava (filo pastry filled with crushed almonds, or pistachios and topped with syrup) is the simplest fare; then there is the saffron-rosewater ice cream, with chunks of frozen cream, which can only be savoured to be believed.

And so on.  What this taught me – and that, early on – was that to insist on fresh, tasty and varied ingredients was not food snobbery.  Far from it: it was an acknowledgement, an affirmation, that even “normal” people have taste buds that could be teased and titillated, that it does not take the palate of a food critic or a jet-set gourmet to be able to tell the difference between refined food and that which is merely (and often barely) nourishment. 

Of course, this also taught me one of the most dangerous lessons of being an epicurean: once you’ve experienced arugula salad (say, with dried cranberries, pomegranate vinaigrette and pine nuts), it is next to impossible to go back to the iceberg lettuce, the Model-T of greens.

But what of the charge – and grave it is – that cuisine gets in the way of life and of conversation?

It is a curious thing, the Dinner Conversation.  It is even curiouser (to borrow from Alice), how societies with lively dinner conversations tend also to be those that pay a great deal of attention to food preparation.  This is not idle musing by an armchair connoisseur; there is an entire continent across the pond that has served as something of a controlled experiment in these matters over the past thousand years, give or take a century.

I lived in Belgium for three years.  Belgium – for those not familiar with the social history of Europe – straddles The Great Beer Divide: the line going through the middle of Europe that separates “beer” cultures from “wine” cultures.  The Divide is, admittedly, a crude measure, but one that is for the most part accurate. 

Simply put, look at a country with large consumption of beer, and the food is likely to be heavy, unrefined and uncomplicated.  Swedish cuisine is an oxymoron; Ms. Birch would feel right at home in a German kitchen and its quasi-religious insistence on efficiency über alles.  But there is more: beer cultures tend also to kill food as a cultural phenomenon.  Babette’s Feast was not far from reality.  A culture that considers the point of food to be simply to stuff one’s mouth to avoid hunger (as opposed to spending time to make something interesting) would also pay little heed to the social aspect of enjoying dinner.  Big Night could not have been set in a German restaurant.

This brings me to wine cultures – the countries to the south of the Great Divide – and their attachment not only to elaborate meals, but to the social production that a proper meal should constitute.  There – in France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium, which was governed by France and Spain for centuries – the food is refined, the ingredients fresh and tasty; and the object of cooking is not to cook all the taste into oblivion, but to preserve it.  Wine is a central aspect of dinner, and not an adjunct. (And, incidentally, is not that expensive.) In those countries, preparing, serving and enjoying food is not an atomistic exercise but a highly social one.  She who thinks Italian cuisine – with all its complexity, and I mean more than simply three-dozen sorts of pasta – “gets in the way of conversation” has never sat at an Italian table.  Similarly, a seven-course meal served à la Provençale is an occasion for boisterous conversation and enjoyment of life.  The cuisine is the conversation and the life: a big gathering of family and friends, around the same table, enjoying the bounty of nature (or the Lord, if you prefer) eating, drinking, talking, living.

Call me a food snob, but I’ll take a linguine alle vongole over chips-and-dip any day.

Don't blame international organisations for anarchist demonstrations

Posted on by
Reply

This was in response to an article of 20 June, 2001, in which Roger Scruton lay the blame for the recent thuggery and wanton destruction caused by anarchists and layabouts in Gothenburg, Prague and Seattle (not to mention Quebec, and before that, Vancouver) at the feet of “unaccountable” decision-makers and “nameless Olympians” of various international organisations such as the World Trade Organisation and the European Commission. 

So Roger Scruton thinks that “violent protest is probably the only instrument through which” the “steadily disenfranchised” can make their opposition felt.

Well bully for him. 

I might agree with him and pick up my own brick to throw at the closest McDonald's or live target (aka the neighbourhood police officer), if I could find even a trace of accurate information in his article – other than that he spent May 1968 in Paris. But, I'm afraid, the premise, the analysis and the conclusions are suffused with such breathtaking ignorance that I am moved to question even whether the man spent any time on the continent.

Let us begin from the “dictatorial commission”. This is not the place for a seminar on the politics and constitutional mechanisms of the European Union, but it is worth noting some basic facts. The Commission is the executive arm of the Union (the same way that the Canadian civil service serves the Government of Canada). It proposes policies and laws, oversees their implementation, and may challenge member states in court when they do not implement EU laws (here it is different from Canada's civil service). The more routine legislation of the EU, though it originates from the Commission, must have the consent of the European Parliament (freely elected in elections every five years) and must ultimately be approved by the Council of the European Union. The Council, in turn, is composed of political representatives of the democratically-elected governments of the member states of the EU.

The same governments are responsible for negotiating the treaties from which the Union, and therefore the Commission, obtain their authority. Once negotiated, these “constitutional” documents of the Union must be ratified by parliaments, or in referenda, in member states to enter into force. Thus, the ultimate legislative power in the Union — including the power to rewrite the very treaties that underlie the authority of the Commission — rests with the political leadership, and the people, of the Union and not the Commission. 

But there is more, for any action taken by the Commission is subject to scrutiny, not just by the Council, but also by the European Parliament. Indeed, only two years ago, all the Commissioners (equivalent to our Ministers) were forced to resign by the Parliament. And, finally, any decision of the Commission that affects the rights of individuals, in particular their property rights (of which Mr. Scruton is especially fond), may be challenged before European courts.

Unless one operates on the premise that all bureaucracies are “dictatorial”, it is impossible to credit Scruton's characterisation of the European Commission as such with any degree of accuracy.

He is even more off-base – if that were possible – with the World Trade Organisation. 

He argues that the WTO “has put in place the mechanism whereby the United States can penalize any country that tries to protect its local agriculture from U.S. agribusiness.” He goes on to state that “every treaty signed by governments is a diminution of sovereignty, and an erosion of the democratic franchise.”

He is wrong; terribly wrong.

Let us examine the facts. How does the US “penalise” such countries? Does it send the Stealth bombers? Does it attempt assassination by poison darts? No. It denies access to its market. That's right. The US imposes import restrictions in the form of high tariffs on products from countries that are (according to Mr. Scruton) trying to protect their domestic markets.

Wait a second, you might ask. Imposition of tariffs: is that not a basic exercise of sovereignty? The US does not need the WTO to impose high tariffs for any reason. It is not the WTO that sets up the “mechanism” for such “penalties”. Rather, the imposition of tariffs is the basic operation of the sovereign right of nations to give access when they feel like it, for whatever reason they would like to. And so we see that Mr. Scruton's whole premise is wrong: the “penalties” (the high tariffs, protectionist measures, quotas, sanctions) are the norm; they are the aspects of unfettered sovereignty, of democratic franchise unbound by international treaties. The WTO is the legal and institutional framework within which the use of unilateral penalties, including wanton increases in tariffs, is outlawed; the rights and obligations of members negotiated freely and defined; their recourse to economic force as an instrument of national policy curtailed; and their disputes channelled through logical, legal processes, including an instance of appeals. In the WTO, you negotiate away your right to “protect” (up to a point), in return for unfettered access to rich markets such as that of the US. If a country reneges on its end of the bargain, is it the fault of the WTO if the US decides not to continue to give access? If a country breaks a treaty, should its people march into the streets, burn stores and blame “Olympian” bureaucrats for the loss of the benefits they got under that treaty?

Let us remember that, above all, it is the members of the WTO who are ultimately responsible for the negotiation of the treaties that bind them to one another and that define their legal rights. In the course of the last fifty years, the WTO and the GATT before it have gone through eight rounds of negotiations and another round might well be around the corner. In each of these rounds, the members have examined and re-examined their commitments under the treaties and reaffirmed – and indeed expanded – them. Why? For the same reason identified above. Each gives up a little; all benefit in the end. That's how contracts are negotiated; that what the rule of law implies.

At the core of Mr. Scruton's angry diatribe against “international organisations” and his unhealthy praise for street-ripping, store-destroying anarchists and hooligans lies a fundamental misconception of “sovereignty” in an age of ever-increasing international interdependence and co-operation. Sovereignty is not about doing as one pleases (“protect local agriculture”) while demanding that others do as we please (give unfettered access to such “protected” produce). It is about negotiating access rights and the laws within which those rights might be exercised. And this is no more and no less than what the WTO is all about. And sovereignty is not about passing laws in disregard of what our neighbours are doing. It is about working together to arrive at policies of common interests and common benefits. And this is no more and no less than what the European Union is all about.

Now, it is one thing to argue and protest against all this – we are entitled to disagree – but let us at least know what we are talking about. And, to try to undermine international organisations by looting and destroying disinterested local stores does nothing to advance either democracy or sovereignty.