Johann Hari

In The Independent’s media section, we have a slot called ‘Guilty Pleasures’ where – in theory – Fleet Street figures confess to some shameful indulgence that keeps them going through the Long March of hackwork. But in practice, they always admit to watching a brilliant TV show like ‘Desperate Housewives’, as though that was something to hide in their highbrow existence – “Whenever I take a break from reading Tolstoy, I must confess I allow myself an hour of the Sopranos…” Well, I have a real guilty pleasure, one more shameful than a combo of cocaine, child porn and crack pipes. Reader, I am addicted to ‘The Jeremy Kyle Show’.

Yes, I know only those of you who are pensioners, students or fond of sickies will recognise this beacon in the ITV1 schedules. Forget Kilroy, Vanessa, Trisha and the other British imitators of the Springer-style American talk-show (or should that be shout-show?). Among Brits, only Jeremy Kyle has managed to mix the unique cocktail of exploitation, evil and moral self-righteousness in just the right measures.

Every day, Jeremy wheels on vulnerable, semi-crazed people in desperate situations, and rips open their wounds on national television. Even when he unveils the results of paternity tests (“Who’s the Daddy? Not you!”), something extraordinary happens: the quiet dignity of the guests trumps the tackiness of the show. When a smart 17 year-old single mother called Sally is wheeled out for him to jeer at – “Ever heard of contraception?” – she reacts with appalled decency, before leaving on the grounds that “it’s better to sort your problems out at home”.

And the audience – made up of ordinary working class people – is a daily demonstration that, contrary to the howling of the right-wing press, Britain has a silent liberal majority. They are unfailingly sympathetic to gay and transsexual people – “he’s a human being!” – and unstintingly feminist – “he cheat, he beat, he hit the street.”

Admittedly, Kyle never ascends to the heights of the American greats. He has never matched the Oprah show entitled “I’m 14 and a member of the Ku Klux Klan”, where the guest explained she was a member of the KKK because “we go camping and we sing songs”, only for a huge black woman in the audience to demand, “Why don’t you join the Brownies, girl?” Nor has Kyle reached the fatuous lyricism of Montel Williams, who once summarised an episode by saying, “I hope you’ve all learned that gang rape is a terrible thing.” But give him time. I have faith in your glorious foulness, Jeremy.

Although it has been barely noticed in Britain, 2005 marked the centenary of one of the greatest riddles of the twentieth century: Jean-Paul Sartre. All the most interesting thinkers are at war with themselves, their minds a battlefield where wildly different ideas clash – and the French philosopher-superstar was more contradictory than most.

Sartre gave us the first full-frontal attempt to develop a systematic philosophy for a world without God, without metaphysics, without meaning. Sartre saw that human beings are nothing more than the arbitrary products of evolution living on a warm rock in a void – that we are, in Emily Dickinson’s phrase, “zero to the bone”. At times, this realisation struck him as a bleak nausea, but he also saw its liberating implications: it means we are “condemned to be totally free”. We have no choice but to create a morality for ourselves, through our actions. If we try to opt out of this – if we try to delude ourselves that there is a source of meaning to be found in Holy Books or nature – we are simply guilty of “bad faith”.

But there is a hideous irony in Sartre’s career. The great philosopher of freedom dedicated his middle age to lauding the most unfree and murderous philosophies of the twentieth century: Stalinism (dead toll: 30 million) and Maoism (death toll: 70 million). He mocked Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a “harmful element”, fetishised “revolutionary violence”, and derided the notion of human rights as a “bourgeois fiction”.

And yet, even as I recoil from Sartre’s political sadism, I have a sneaking sympathy for the French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy when he says, “I would rather be terribly wrong with Sartre than right with [a middling thinker like Raymond] Aron.” Even when he is a monster, Sartre is a shimmering, captivating monster. And I could never truly hate a philosopher who – after an experiment with mescaline in his twenties – was haunted all his life by the idea he was being stalked by a lobster.

If you want to understand the destruction of New Orleans – still the most startling event of 2005 – you have to look to a sullen, sunken alcoholic who has been dead for nearly fifty years. I spent days watching the shaming of the South on CNN, but it was only when I picked up the South’s most renowned novelist, William Faulkner, that I began to trace the psychodynamics of a society that left its poorest, blackest residents to drown.

Faulkner lived in and loved New Orleans in the 1920s, when he would take long walks along the fragile levees and write eulogies to a town he said was like “a courtesan, not old and no longer young, who shuns the sunlight so that the illusion of her former glory be preserved. The mirrors in her house are dim, and the frames are tarnished… And all who leave her return when she smiles across her languid fan.” It is a cruel coincidence that – thanks to Oprah’s book club – millions of Americans were reading him as Katrina struck.

There is a long, pointless history of critics trying to impose a political vision on Faulkner – was he on the side of the rural blacks? the Old South aristos? – when in fact he has a dissonant identification with all the inhabitants of his world. Read him and you understand how the rich whites clung to their romanticised idea of a noble, defeated South. Read him and you understand the price African-Americans paid in flesh for this romance. Read his descriptions of how mixed-race people were considered impossible aberrations, horrors to be shunned and denied, and you begin to glimpse the South’s inability to accept the common humanity between white and black – an inability that was illustrated with Faulknerian melodrama as toxic water crashed along his beloved Canal Street this year.

If the trilling of the Tory press is to be believed, 2006 belongs to one London suburb: Notting Hill. Just as Islington was condemned to be a by-word for New Labour, this patch of W11 is now a synonym for the New Tories. Their very-White Knight – the absurdly over-hyped David Cameron – rose this autumn from the malformed crescents and painfully funky markets of Notting Hill, with incense sticks wafted carefully behind him by adoring spin-doctors.

At first, this blue-washing of Notting Hill seems surreal. Doesn’t this manor belong to Rastafarians, not Trustafarians? Didn’t this postcode provide the blood-flecked battle-ground for the worst race riots in British history, the three-day “kill the niggers” rampage of 1958? Weren’t great chunks of Notting Hill a no-go area for the police as recently as the 1980s, when David Cameron was busy casting off his straw boater and sailing into Tory Central Office?

But as I wandered around the narrow streets and retro junk shops of Notting Hill this week, it seemed strangely appropriate for the Tories to stamp this suburb as their own. Since the 19th century, this area has been the Exhibition Centre for the most extreme inequalities in London, a place where massive wealth lives without embarrassment next to grinding poverty. In the 1850s, you could find grandiose, gargantuan villas where the average life expectancy was 39 next door to infested slums where the average life expectancy – the average – was eleven. At the base of the Hill, there was a rotting, fetid pool of pigswill, sewage and sludge used by the poor known as “the Ocean”.

And today? I stood at the crossroads between Notting Dale and Holland Park. To my left, there was an area pocked and cratered with poverty, where mums struggle to raise their kids on less than a tenner a day. (You try it). To my right, there was Holland Park – home of the new Tory king – lined with lime trees and scented with cool, hard cash, where mums spend more than a tenner on their child’s shampoo in the local Holland and Barrett.

I spoke to Ray Anderson, a 56 year-old black man who has seen Notting Hill transformed around him in the forty years he has lived here. “Notting Hill has been made whiter and posher, and I think it’s quite deliberate,” he says softly. “There have been two main waves of expulsions of black people to make way for the Camerons,” he explains: in the 1970s, “lots of black families were taken and placed in Hackney and Acton. It was done subtly: the council would say, you can stay in your one-bedroom flat here with your three kids, or you can have a house in Hackney.” And again, in the 1990s, the property boom gave developers an incentive to shunt black people out. “It’s weird to see Notting Hill become a brand. I never thought I would see the day when people who live in Holland Park would say they are from Notting Hill,” he laughs.

He leads me into People’s Sounds, a reggae record store on the All Saints’ Road. This used to be the front line against a racist police force, the place where the black community would gather to keep the coppers out. Today, as I browse through the records and hear a singer talk about “when they forced us out of Africa”, it feels like a museum, a place preserved in aspic for a community nudged and shoved away.

Yes, it occurs to me, this is a fitting symbol for the New Toryism: a suburb where Richard Curtis characters nonchalantly wander through a Ken Loach movie on their way to a Saturday night soiree. The Cameroonian residents live by a discrete, unspoken code: price the black people out the door (with a sweet smile, of course), ignore the pockets of poverty up the road, and congratulate yourself on how tolerant and cool you are for living in a “mixed” neighbourhood. Welcome to David Cameron’s Britain.

I remember the precise moment I realised London had got over the 7/7 massacres. It was early August, and the makeshift missing pictures hanging outside our Ground Zeroes were beginning to yellow and peel when I ran onto a train in my local bomb-scarred station, Aldgate, carrying a heavy black rucksack stuffed with books. The tube was back to its usual veal-calf swelter, and in amidst the sweat and dense, tense flesh I suddenly became locked in one of those everyday fight-to-the-death London Underground showdowns.

A seat became free in the middle of the carriage, and I locked eyes with a woman at the opposite end with that glare that says: the seat is mine, bitch. We both began one of those undignified tube-sprints, shuffling at High Noon high-speed to the vacant resting place – and I flopped my flabby arse down before her with a smug grin. And it hit me: I had not made my new nervous scan around the tube carriage. Nobody was staring at my rucksack. The polite, concerned smiles of the weeks after the killings had melted away, and none of us were minding anything more than the Gap. Ken’s words to the suicide-murderers – “no matter how many of us you kill, you have already failed” – echoed in my head as I realised my terse, rude, this-is-my-seat London was back – and I let out the longest, happiest sigh of 2005.

I’ve been e-mailed an article from the World Socialist Website that claims to be a comment on my recent Harold Pinter column. You can read it at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/pint-d29.shtml

I say it merely “claims to be” a comment, because the writer – somebody called Paul Bond – simply invents a straw man position that bears very little relation to what I actually wrote, and proceeds to attack it.

For example, Bond writes, “Hari explicitly attacked Pinter for his record of political opposition to the escalation of imperialist carnage in the Middle East and the Balkans. He criticised Pinter’s opposition to the imperialist show-trial of Slobodan Milosevic, for example, seeing it as impermissible to attack US and British imperialist intervention in the region.”

Here's three errors in just two sentences. Firstly, there is no mention of the Middle East – none – in my article on Pinter. Look at it at http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=741 and see if you can spot a single one.

Secondly, nowhere do I say or imply it is “impermissible” to attack the Kosovo war (never mind Middle East policy generally, as he says later in the article); anybody who knows anything about me will know I am a militant defender of free speech.

Third, my article provides evidence that the Milosevic trial is not a “show-trial” or anything like it. The director of Human Rights Watch – in the article Bond has apparently read – says, “This is not victors’ justice – this is justice for the victims of horrific crimes. Slobodan Milosvic was at the top of the chain of command of military and security forces that wrought mayhem in Kosovo in early 1999.” All the major human rights groups regard the trial as legitimate. Indeed, it is so far from being a show-trial that it looks like Milosevic will be acquitted on the most serious charge he faces, genocide. Bond knows this – but rather than engage with the argument, he chooses instead to ignore Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International etc and hurl Serb propaganda smears instead.

Bond refuses to tell his readers that Pinter is a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, a campaigning group set up by racist Serb ultra-nationalists who want Milosevic to be freed on the grounds that he was “a pillar of peace in the region”. Since that was the biggest slice of my criticism of Pinter, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Bond is trying to mislead his readers. (Revealingly, he doesn’t put a link to my article – if his readers followed it, they’d see he was arguing against a fake position).

He then tries to debunk what I said about Pinter’s plays, again by inventing a position and ascribing it to me: “Hari’s intention becomes clear when he compares Pinter to Beckett. Beckett’s work is underpinned by “an elaborate existentialist philosophy,” whereas with Pinter, according to Hari, “if you turn on the light and switch off the atmospherics, you find...nothing, except a few commonplace insights.”
To supposedly illustrate this, he points to what Pinter has called “the most important line I’ve ever written.”

“In The Birthday Party, when Stan is being taken away, Petey cries out, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do.” Pinter has said that he has lived that line “all my damn life. Never more than now.””

“For Hari, this is “depressingly revealing”; the line is an “unobjectionable platitude” and Pinter’s point is “banal.” This comes from a man who believes it impermissible to denounce the British and US governments for their actions in the Balkans and Iraq. For a man who makes a living from parroting precisely the sort of propaganda Pinter has resisted to describe this comment as banal is merely impudent.”

When have I ever said it is “impermissible to denounce the British and US governments for their actions in the Balkans and Iraq?” Loads of the people I praise all the time - from George Monbiot to Peter Tatchell to Hugo Chavez - do exactly that. It's a demonstrable lie. And as for the idea I’m a propagandist for Bush and Blair… yeah, they love propagandists who accuse them of being “complicit in massive human rights abuses” and “destroying the very basis for human existence, our ecosystem” and more.

Bond then adds, “Hari is unable to reconcile Pinter’s early resistance to fascists in London with his subsequent critical independence.”

No, I’m unable to reconcile fighting against fascists in your teens with lining up – on an official committee! – with fascists and ethnic cleansers fifty years later to get their Fuhrer released.

Bond then gushes about Pinter, “That he has been able to maintain this critical independence throughout a 50-year career marks him as quite extraordinary.” Oh yeah? Tell that to the ethnic Albanians as they browse the website of the International Committee to Defend Milosevic. And before you say Milosevic's ethnic cleansing was the rest of the NATO bombing campaign, remember: most of the charges he is facing - based on Amnetsy reports - are from the mid-90s in Bosnia-Herzogovina, long before a single NATO bomb fell. Yet the closest Pinter has ever come to condemning this man is to say, “I am not saying he is not guilty of crimes…. But what is going on down there is a civil war. Actually.” He then proceeded to call the groups fighting on behalf of Milosevic’s victims “the real criminals” and joined a committee of Serbian fascists who were personal friends with the tyrant.

Bond later says, “For Hari, one of the greatest crimes committed by the Swedish Academy is to award the Nobel Prize to a man who wrote these lines about the Gulf War:
We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works.
We blew the shit out of them,
They suffocated in their own shit!
We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.'
Hari sees nothing here beyond the scatology. He certainly cannot acknowledge Pinter’s searing anger and rage at the barbaric crimes committed by US and British imperialism, because that would involve having a critical attitude towards those crimes.”

Sigh. It’s a crap poem. I don’t know anybody who likes poetry who would deny it. Of course I can see Pinter is angry, just as he was filled with rage against the trade unions in the 1970s, leading him to vote for Margaret Thatcher (another fact Bond omits). Rage is politically neutral, and it certainly doesn’t confer artistic merit. If there is a case to be made against US and UK foreign policy – and regular readers will know that I am opposed to at least 70 percent of what these governments do – then it should be made well, not in doggerel.

Bond concludes: “Most of Pinter’s early contemporaries made their peace with the establishment long ago. As Hari has demonstrated, many younger hacks have never had a disagreement with it. Pinter’s resolute commitment to his art and its independence provides a valuable model for anyone serious about the development and defence of artistic expression.”

Oh, Paul, go and read what I say about global warming, or asylum seekers, or the arms trade, or prisons, or taxation policies, or the IMF. I have plenty of problems with “the establishment”. Can’t any mature person see that it is possible to believe it is simply wrong to join the Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (or indeed to leave him in power while he commits ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide two days' drive from Auschwitz) and be on the left? Can’t you dispute what I actually said like an adult, rather than squabble with a phantasm of your own creation?

POSTSCRIPT: I am happy to post a link to any reply Paul Bond might write. I hope he will be decent enough to link to my original article and to this reply.