Martin Meenagh blog

In one way or another, I was involved with the British Labour Party for some 32 years. I was once a minor candidate. However, unlike many, I was never in love with the party, and it was never a substitute religion. What happened to it in the latest election here is of interest to me, so I have written a long and tedious blogpost about it--commence at your peril.... British politics are remarkably conservative. The three main parties have been around for over a hundred years in one form or another. One of them has been around for at least two hundred years, and arguably for a further century and a half on top of that. Until recently, even the exceptions could fit into a coherent rule; when the main parties are in broad ideological and social agreement, an alternative, such as the Common Wealth Party in the 1940s, or UKIP in the noughties, will generally arise and, whilst not successful in terms of seats, might well prove a depository for new ideas. Similarly, when one large party is...

I keep this blog alive because there are occasionally things that I want to write which I don't put into letters or articles. These being the low, long days of Summer, I've been musing over on facebook about some Wold Newton-style displacement of 80s TV--the emetic synthesis if you will of the last great era of television shows. The medium was as extensive and dominant as it ever would be, the writers had no easier alternatives, and the culture was still throwing up themes and stories that could workably be used. There were miles to go before our present state of cultural madness and dissolution. Anyway, what about this--it started as a whim, and then became a fancy, and then a hypothesis; with a little more huckstering, I could I guess turn it into a theory, and then an idea; A committee of well connected people in Montreal, headed by Michael Archangel and Devon Miles analogies, needs to disseminate alien technology; they do this via a car, a motorbike, a self-realising ...

Experimenting with voice blogging I want to put a partial intro to a voice blog here to see if it works....

I used to teach a course in Bath for an American undergraduate placement programme. It was a lovely programme, based in Nelson House, just down from the train station, and run by lovely people. An American university oversaw its courses. Over ten weeks or so, five to seven students and I would study the English, French, and American revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the counter-revolutions too. We would range from the barebones parliament to Napoleon, and from Tom Paine to the diggers. The courses were based around a source book, and I loved travelling down from Oxford or London to Bath, which I would hang around in at the end of the day before going back via the train bar and a good book. For many years, I taught the source book as a kind of chrestomathy—a collection of documents that illustrated key moments, each of which would help the students learn the language of liberty in the Atlantic world. Though I did of course introduce and refine religious ...

The Easter message which we will soon be taught is one of sacrifice and hope, but is a powerful story because it bears lessons and repays deep readings in a variety of ways. I am a Catholic. Though I can recite the Nicene Creed in English and Latin, which thanks to a catholic schooling in nine different institutions I taught myself, and therefore I share some things with Protestants, I do not believe in progress. I do not believe that much in human moral growth, though I think that some societies and attitudes are or were unhealthy and that more openness, tolerance, and acceptance, particularly of things to do with sex, probably makes the world a bit better. I think that the great event of history has already happened, and echoes back and forward--the Easter passion story. Most things that people believe, if rooted in the world, are fun to know and sometimes of practical use, but pointless without love. What I take from this, as much as hope, is something Irish people in the past, ...

I spent a great deal of my life reading or writing about, or lecturing on, the history of the United States of America. I do have other near-loves--Austria-Hungary being one, a certain idea of England, and the Catholic Church others, and I have a bit of a thing for Russia too--but I find it difficult to be too appalled by my one love for very long. It's the constant disappointment and the way America makes me feel old that usually get to me.... Let America Be America Again Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. (It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is fre...

And thus I clothe my naked villainy With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ And seem a saint, when most I play the Devil….   Richard III , William Shakespeare A presidential doctrine is a term for an overarching strategic rule or a set of broad rules under which strategic national security policy will be implemented. It is not a formal position, and not all administrations have had one; the term has also been used reactively and pro-actively. In the case of the administration of George Walker Bush, the term ‘Bush doctrine’ was used to characterise several propositions, which blended traditional and neoconservative ideas about national security.   One proposition was that there was a close association of the inward and outward behaviour of regimes, and that consequently, it was sensible to concentrate American diplomatic and military power on those regimes which supported or enforced values that were antagonistic to the United States. These were seen as ...