Martin Meenagh blog

A Little Late Summer Sun Right, let's shake the bars a little. It's my first weekend off in a while, the Sun is shining pleasantly on a cool late August Day, and after a nice tortilla breakfast, (well, I say tortilla, but Huevos rancheros is possible too), I thought that I'd have a look at alternatives to the doom and gloom with which the largely accurate and illiberal pronouncements of this blog are usually associated. I'd like to be uplifting for a while anyway; if I can impose upon readers, my mother would welcome your prayers again and so would I. She's at the foot of another peak, which she will scale, but there are times when you wish you were either on top or in the valley with a beer. Let's look at the gloomy, and realistic scenario, first. In a parody of Medieval microcosmic analogies, the financial system is riddled with imbalance. Globally, states with trade surpluses are accumulating dollars which are depreciating in the United States at a dif...

What if, 2012? The circus of the Republican nomination process aside--six strange people competing to be a schizophrenic footstool--there are some interesting questions arising from the current American scene that I think it would be diverting, on a Saturday morning, to explore. One is that Obama should not win. I don't mean that from any partisan point of view, since I rather like his calm intelligence and demeanour, which I presume he picked up in Asia. No winning candidate in 2008 should really have expected to win in 2012, because for an increasing number of Americans, regardless of rigged unemployment and inflation figures, an income squeeze is turning ineluctably into a depression. Vast scandals that were tolerated during the long boom have mired that country in mortgage fraud, overleveraged banks, and a sort of financial dementia which an alienated political and media class can only contribute to. Anyone in charge would be in trouble. From a more prosaic point of ...

Lyndon, What Did You Do? Johnson, by the way, is shouting to a helicopter pilot in that picture, on the campaign trail; he isn't aggressively attacking a heckler, and Kennedy isn't holding him back so much as steadying him--but it's really a matter of what you want to read in, isn't it? Who'd be a serious political leader? I don't mean the untested and managerial leaders of present days, but those who aspire to Empire. There's a huge amount of evidence in the American presidency of the psychological requirements and costs of leadership, for example. Every single president since Eisenhower, until Obama, has been weird, with one exception. Kennedy was priapic; Johnson psychotic; Nixon neurotic; Carter strange; Reagan a delusional liar; Clinton not far off that, and, well, the Bushes . If Ford escapes my list, it's because Leslie Lynch King (his first and therefore 'real name') wasn't elected to any office and was acutely aware of ...

Those London 'Riots' Now that the dust has settled, so to speak, on the latest of the London civil disturbances, I thought that I would try to record what I thought. I think that, in the heat of the event, it is difficult for people not to fall to type and to project. Some people have been unable to resist seeing the riots as the rise of a disenfranchised class; others have condemned 'sheer criminality'; some have reached for race or ethno-cultural explanations'; others have found fault in the police. I think that the weakest explanations have placed the blame on 'the cuts' (which have really not happened yet, and which overall may not) and my own favourite, the corruption and isolation of the political and media classes. That latter point reflects my own prejudices, rather than any truth, I think--very few of those involved in riots must say to themselves 'well, the Prime Minister is a former gang member and cokehead and his deputy is an arsonist...