An esteemed colleague of mine challenged the blogging community to explain American healthcare and the need for its reform. This was intended, I believe, partially as a plea for more substantive online discourse given the tidal wave of frippery that has been generated recently, such as the disproportionate response to the death of Michael Jackson and the jingoistic sabre rattling some demand as a reaction to events in Iran.

The problem with trying to explain the American healthcare system is two-fold. First, it’s complex. I can describe in less than 5 minutes how the British system basically works: namely, one registers with a local General Practitioner, who then acts as the gatekeeper to further treatment. Prescriptions under certain circumstances (e.g., if you’re unemployed) are free, and in other cases, they are paid for with a modest fee. The system has waiting lists and is behind on the availability of drugs and medical technology: it’s not perfect. However, private insurance and private hospitals are also available and these supplement the system. Private medical insurance tends to be provided by one’s employer.

Similarly, I can readily explain how the social health insurance systems in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany function; I’ve personally used the Dutch system and found it to be the best of the lot. The waiting times were minimal and the medical facilities were top notch. However, I can’t as easily discuss how the American system works. I recall visiting America last December and being utterly baffled by some of the commercials which mentioned Medicare Part D. I wondered what Parts A, B and C were all about. Indeed, there were private firms which offered their services to handle the interactions with the necessary agencies. I asked my mother, herself a pensioner, to explain Medicare Part D and she struggled to do so.

Beyond expensive government schemes, there are private health insurance plans which are almost Byzantine in their complexity and akin to Medieval Venetian politics in their viciousness; for example, there is a word called “rescission” which should make every American with health insurance tremble in fear. “Rescission” refers to a process whereby insurers cut off clients from funds due to their supplying insufficient information about their present medical condition. On the surface, this sounds like a reasonable means of preventing fraud. In practice, there are cases such as a woman who was denied money to treat her breast cancer due to failing to report a visit to a dermatologist.

This mindless, sadistic bureaucratism and convolution perhaps highlights a major flaw in America’s health care: a system which is difficult for the typical citizen to comprehend or navigate is unlikely to work well. The patient is not going to understand the parameters, and firms will exploit this lack of understanding.

The second part of the problem follows the first: because of the system’s sheer density, analysis of American health care is extremely difficult and indeed, boring. Only very few people have sufficient intestinal fortitude to absorb the sheer amount of tedium associated with creating a reform plan. I recall the cold, analytical Ira Magaziner as being one of these select boffins; he was portrayed in an issue of the Economist published during the Clinton Administration as having a disk drive in his head, in which he plugged one disk after another. He managed to produce a proposal that was just as complex as his analysis: it became a many headed hydra in the eyes of the public, and subsequently died.

However, there is no doubt that the system requires reform, not just tinkering at the edges. America spends nearly twice the average proportion of its GDP of any developed nation on health care. Yet the outcomes are grossly unequal and shoddy: the contrast between the public penury of inner city clinics and the gleaming pristine temples of science which represent the outposts of the Humana corporation could not be more stark. Indeed, last week’s issue of the Economist magazine outlined some more of the system’s dire outcomes:

…infant mortality, life expectancy and survival-rates for heart attacks are all worse than the OECD average. Meanwhile, because health insurance is so expensive, nearly 50m Americans, an obscene number in such a rich place, have none…Every rich country faces some of these problems, but nobody suffers worse from them than America.

In other words, a nation that prides itself on getting good deals and having business savvy has “bought” a health care system that isn’t value for money. Yet, it is also the third rail of politics in many respects: everyone says something should be done, but when it comes down to actually doing something, citizens and politicians balk at the detail. This is understandable to a certain degree: health care, after all, is literally a matter of life and death.

Given this situation, President Obama somehow has to foist reform on an extremely reluctant Congress: here is where America’s system of government lets it down. Checks and balances prevent any one branch of government from becoming too powerful, yet at the same time, these constraints make dramatic alterations in the status quo all the more difficult. Worse, lobbyists from the pharmaceutical firms and other interested parties will put pressure on Congressmen to vote their way; let’s assume that Representatives are people too, and thus are susceptible to receiving campaign cash in order to remain in office for another 2 years with all the perks that implies.

However, even if the insurance companies and health care providers are forced into making dramatic changes, there are three additional areas of cost control which will be necessary to address. First, most new doctors emerge from medical school heavily in debt. The average debt for medical students upon graduation is $139,517, according to 2007 figures provided by the American Medical Association. In order to recompense the graduates’ expenditure, hospitals and practitioners have to ensure that sufficient salaries are paid. This requirement makes its way into medical costs. Thus, the President and his allies are also going to have to work with the education establishment to achieve cost control in medical schools.

Second, pharmaceutical firms will continue to insist that the costs of research and development will eat into their profit margins, and thus high drug prices are justified. This problem can be ameliorated if the relationship between private industry and academia is more formalised in America as it is in Britain; the British Government, in one of its more foresighted moments, has put emphasis on what it calls “Knowledge Transfer”, i.e., getting knowledge out of the realms of pure research and academia and into the hands of firms which can exploit it for society’s benefit. The links implied and fostered by this policy do not presently exist in the United States; if these were put in place, the costs associated with research and development of new drugs could be more evenly distributed.

The final item that needs to be addressed is tort reform. According to a 2003 article in Business Wire, New Jersey hospitals experienced a jump in malpractice insurance costs of 207% in four years, making the average cost at that time approximately $1.4 million per hospital. These costs also feed through into higher prices; this will mean that the present American addiction to suing anyone and everyone for the slightest breath of malfeasance is going to have to end. In order to achieve this, President Obama is going to have to turn on one of his major constituencies: lawyers. Following this, he will have to go back to the insurance companies and say that their prices for malpractice insurance are now out of date and should be lowered. This assumes, of course, he does not change course and attempt to put in place a single payer system as is utilised in Canada, Australia and Taiwan. At a stroke, the entire relationship between the providers of health care and its customers would be changed, and likely make the other elements of reform that much easier to put in place.

He probably should look at such a scheme, or the forms of social insurance as used in Europe: his present well-intentioned approach is in danger of being diluted by Congress, and the various interest groups which tug upon it, into something as diffuse and complex as the present system. In short, one mess is on course to be traded for another. Above all else, President Obama should be aiming for the clarity and simplicity which are part and parcel of nearly every other health system in the industrialised world; people should have a focused understanding of procedures, costs, and what to expect. That said, no system is perfect, but perfect should not be allowed to be the enemy of better.

Dictatorships are a waste of everyone’s time. There is no instance in which one has been imposed and it did not prove self-defeating in the end. Hitler thought he was building a Reich to last a thousand years; it lasted twelve. Germany afterward was a devastated country which was chopped into two and has lived under a cloud of mild suspicion ever since.

Stalin thought he was building a socialist future. He died in 1953; the system he created lasted less than forty years after he passed on. Russia is still coming to terms with his legacy of work camps, environmental destruction, secret police and top-down economics. There are remote communities in the Urals such as Magnitogorsk which are there merely because Soviet planners wanted them there; they are now wastelands of industrial decay, in which people who are too poor or too old to move to more prosperous places remain stuck.

North Korea too is pointless. It builds nuclear weapons yet cannot feed itself; the average North Korean must wonder what is the nutritional value of plutonium. Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il enjoys his dotage by sipping fine cognac, and his sons have the luxury of being able to go to Macau to gamble or to attend Eric Clapton concerts in the West.

Given these examples, it is rather interesting that dictatorship is still a growth industry. Iran is the latest to openly join the club, which is a retrograde development considering that those who created the Revolution of 1979 seemed to grasp the idea that rule imposed from on high might not be sufficient to maintain stability. After all, it hadn’t worked for the Shah. Yes, the country is essentially run by a set of religious leaders, but this was counterbalanced by a democratic element: this feature allowed the expression of dissent on behalf the populace, and underpinned the idea that the government was there due to a genuine mandate. Sometimes, there were hints of reform in the offing, such as when Mohammad Khatami was President. Genuine progress was frustrated, but the presence of Khatami alone was sufficient in order to maintain the system’s balance and legitimacy.

This makes the behaviour of Iran’s present religious leadership all the more puzzling. Let us be clear: all available evidence suggests that Iran’s presidential election was rigged. Mir Hossein Mousavi was not even allowed the dignity of winning areas in which he should have had a thumping majority; the number of votes cast in some regions exceeded the number of voters. It appears that the government engineered the outcome, and the mechanism for achieving that result was extremely clumsy. This was in spite of the fact that Mr. Mousavi cannot be considered a radical voice by any means: he was a veteran of the 1979 Revolution, and apart from a change in tone and perhaps a better grasp of economics, would not represent a gigantic shift in Iran’s domestic or foreign policy. Yet, the religious leaders apparently decided to throw in their lot with Ahmadinejad, and sent out the thugs and riot police to crush any and all dissent.

The stupidity of this move is startling: the regime has just sent an unmistakable message to the populace that the democratic element of their government is a fraud. The only way that people are allowed to vote from here on in is the “right way”, namely for the candidate which the religious leaders decide is best. Accountability and legitimacy have gone out of the window. However, the Iranian government should be warned; breaking illusions of this kind have previously proved fatal.

All governments rely to a certain extent upon illusions; for example, America relies upon the hagiography of the Founding Fathers. Their genius is deemed beyond question, although a read of the so-called “Anti-Federalist Papers”, in which the then-proposed Constitution is critiqued, contains some intruiging foresight. A good example comes from a letter dated 15 November 1787 written by a correspondent calling himself “Brutus”:

According to the common course of human affairs, the natural aristocracy of the country will be elected. Wealth always creates influence, and this is generally much increased by large family connections: this class in society will for ever have a great number of dependents; besides, they will always favour each other — it is their interest to combine — they will therefore constantly unite their efforts to procure men of their own rank to be elected.

Considering the prevalence of old families and big money in politics (including the Bush clan), this foreboding appears to have been justified. Nevertheless, the Founding Fathers’ reputation remains largely undimmed; it is a necessary illusion which keeps the government functioning. Belief is an absolute necessity to keep it in place.

A good rule of thumb is as follows: the more dictatorial the government, the greater the reliance on fiction. Hitler promoted the fantasy of the Aryan race. Mussolini provided the idea of a revived Roman Empire. Stalin demanded fealty to the idea of “Socialism in One Country”. Once these fictions died, so did the systems that they supported.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this kind of collapse was provided by the Romanian Revolution of 1989. Nicolae Ceausescu was a brutal, Soviet backed dictator; his occasional differences with Moscow (such as allowing his country to participate in the 1984 Summer Olympics) gave the West the false impression that he was somehow more agreeable than his Warsaw Pact counterparts. In reality, he crushed all dissent; inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China, in July 1971, he undertook a Romanian variant of the same upheaval. Meanwhile, he squeezed his country economically, while building pompous monuments to his ego such as the Palace of the People in Bucharest, the second largest man-made structure in the world, which contains over one million cubic metres of marble, and over 3,500 tonnes of crystal. Somehow, however, he expected to be able to maintain the fiction that his dictatorship was building a socialist state. He thought that by utilising his security forces, the feared Securitate, that this power base could remain in place.

However, inspired by events in other parts of Eastern Europe, rebellion began in provincial Romanian cities like Timisoara; Ceausescu thought he could fight back with more fiction, e.g., by organising a “spontaneous” rally on December 21, 1989. A cry went up from the assembled masses, which caught the dictator off guard. His expression of puzzlement, broadcast live on television, represented the end of the illusions: his was not a popular government, nor had it ever been. His state was not a worker’s state, nor had it ever been. He tried to flee, was caught, summarily tried and then executed on December 25.

Iran’s fictions similarly lay in the dust, and time is not on the regime’s side. 60 percent of the population is under 30; this is a marked contrast to the gerontocracy which governs their lives. By throwing out the democratic element of the system, the regime has also thrown out any believable mechanism of reform; the sole remedy that remains is the government’s overthrow. We can take the recent rant by Iran’s Supreme Leader stating that the protestors should be executed as his channelling of old Ceausescu. The problem from his perspective is that this is likely to work out as well for him as it did for the Romanian Communist. It may not happen tomorrow, nor even in several years; however, once fictions are shattered, they are very difficult to put back together. It seems unlikely the present regime has the guile to achieve this feat.

As much as I would have liked to remain on vacation, it’s impossible to escape current events in this day and age. Switch off the television, and news pursues one onto the radio. Turn off the radio, and there’s the internet. Unplug the computer, and there are the news stands. And then, even if one isolates oneself in a country cottage in, say, the middle of Wales, the phone rings and someone says, “Did you hear…?”

Did I hear about Michael Jackson’s death? How could I not?

It would be gross to say that his death is anything other than a tragedy. Fifty is quite a young age for anyone to pass away in an era of modern medical care, and Jackson certainly had access to the best. Furthermore, it’s a sad tale because he has been disfiguring himself over a number of years: there can be no doubt that he subjected himself to extensive plastic surgery which changed a dynamic young African American man into a distorted, ghostly shadow of his former self. I must confess that I am as guilty as any of having had a laugh at his expense due to his progressive degeneration: I recall back in 1990, I was seated in a high school English class. The classroom was too small for all the chairs; they were arranged in a compressed semi-circle. It was a grey January day, and the lights were dim. The teacher, named Mr. Jesse, was attempting to elucidate the tricky topic of how one appears is not necessarily what one is.

He said, “For example, who is the real Michael Jackson?”

I replied, “Janet Jackson.”

The ensuing laughter in the classroom, even from Mr. Jesse, was indicative of how far gone Michael Jackson seemed to be at that time. He lingered on for nineteen increasingly distorted years. Now Michael Jackson is now a name that will join others like Janis Joplin or Elvis Presley, renowned simultaneously for musical talent and an aptitude for self-destruction.

However, the present media blitz is beyond all proportion. We are presently on Day Three of the Death of Michael and the bandwagon appears to be only marginally slowing down. I switched on the news this morning and saw an item about how both record companies and souvenir vendors are capitalising on Jackson’s death. Turn to the Times, and there are reports about what medicinal cocktails he was consuming prior to his demise; the nanny he hired to look after his children stated that she had to regularly pump his stomach. Speculation as to his exact cause of death is still at fever pitch: the family has ordered a second autopsy. There are items about his financial affairs, what the fate of Jackson’s children will be, and how his musical legacy will manifest itself for future generations, as if he was the heir to Beethoven or Mozart. If “Thriller” is still played in concert three hundred years from now, then he’ll be worthy of the comparison.

Regardless, the atmosphere is so frenzied that a satire on the Huffington Post suggesting that the Weather Channel was going to run a retrospective on the climactic conditions during various high points in Jackson’s career is almost believable. Meanwhile, Iran is still in the throes of political turmoil, President Obama is trying to shepherd through a remarkable shift in policy on climate change, and North Korea is still as belligerent as ever. Yet, turn on the television, and the media is continuing to stuff its face with ever greater doses of Jacksonian hype.

If we take the treatment of Michael Jackson’s death as a symptom, and then, as Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek would suggest, treat the symptom as a message from the subconscious, we are left with some disquieting thoughts: none of the possible reasons why the media is indulging itself so profusely are particularly comforting.

It could be that this is a signifier of pure sloth; it’s tricky for news organisations to provide detailed, comprehensive analysis of complex situations like those in Iran. In comparison, the “King of Pop” dying is relatively easy to broadcast. Reporters need only fly to Los Angeles, rather than analyse the few precious drops of information leaking out of Teheran. Hysterical fans leaving flowers at Neverland or weeping beside his Hollywood star heighten the emotional resonance of the story. Even the staid and sensible Guardian newspaper has indulged by drawing out comparisons between Jackson and Orpheus, the musician of Greek myth. Very little fact actually is reported, all that is broadcast is grief and angst. News becomes a matter of opinion rather than truth.

More troubling than sloth, this could be a symptom of how celebrity culture has become a form of abuse. A quick perusal of the Daily Mail website will show a number of stories about famous people: some are gaining weight, some are looking too gaunt, others are arguing with their significant other, all are subjected to microscopic analysis, in which every nuance is read for a story which guesses, suggests, infers. Not the grandeur of the march of liberty in Iran for such journals, rather, we need to know that the young woman who makes commercials for the Iceland supermarket is eating profusely and gaining weight while she is on holiday. Scrutinised by such an intense gaze, even the strongest individual would crack; it is fair to suggest that Michael Jackson’s abusive childhood may have left him without the social and personal skills to brush off such attention. Could it be that he remade himself in his perception of our image of him, whereby he tried to preserve himself at his peak of fame and glory, and managed to destroy himself in the process? Celebrities are in many instances vulnerable in the first place, requiring validation from a wider audience rather than relying upon internal fortitude: in which case, the culture has an endless series of victims through which to chew. Michael Jackson is not the first, and he is certainly not the last: his funeral will likely symbolise the completion of this particular meal, a glorious banquet of sorrow, but his very public destruction only temporarily satisfies this latent appetite for sacrifices, a barbarism akin to victims being thrown to the lions at the Roman Colosseum. In short, we appear to need to build up people, only to have them destroyed; there is a latent enjoyment of sadism in our culture which remains unaddressed.

The most dangerous response, perhaps, is to accept this situation with a weary sigh and say that it is somehow normal. We validate the illness by saying that it is acceptable. We need to remember that the 24 hour news cycle didn’t always exist, nor did the modern variant of celebrity. It was only after the invention of cinema and mass production that this culture arose, rather simply, with focusing on the lives of Douglas Fairbanks and his wife, actress Mary Pickford. This early form of celebrity was often used as a gimmick to sell products such as perfumes and cosmetics. Technology has only made matters more intense, turning what was a marketing tool into a self-perpetuating industry. The best memorial to Mr. Jackson and his fellow celebrites, is perhaps to deprive the industry of its lifeblood, namely our attention and our money. In such circumstances, celebrities will require other means to achieve validation, and the media machine may actually have to concentrate on reportage rather than gossip. Such a cultural shift may sound far fetched, but most of the great achievements of the progressive agenda, from the elimination of slavery, to the emancipation of women, to the idea of human rights, were even more so at one point. If put in this context, “Michael Jackson Mania” seems like a relatively minor social malady to overcome.

This will be my last post for an extended period, as I intend to go “on vacation” from my blog for a time. The reasons are personal; however, I will not be actually evacuating the scene, rather, I will be concentrating on my reading and my studies. If my motivation levels go higher, I will do some of this down at Brighton pier, or find time to go to the Isle of Wight to cast stones into grey waters of the English Channel.

In many respects, now is the perfect time to disappear. In one week, it is officially summer. Elections are over for now as is the aftermath; Gordon Brown has survived and will continue to bore the British public into submission for a time. Apart from the dreadful theft of a democratic dream in Iran, most thoughts in the Northern Hemisphere are turning to sunlight, deck chairs and sunscreen. The halls of my university are empty; the corridors hushed not of their own volition, but by absence. Despite the work of the custodians and the academics that remain, the heartbeat of the institution will only return with the autumn leaves and the bite of chill in the air.

Just for fun, I looked up “vacation” in the dictionary. It is defined as:

1. a period of suspension of work, study, or other activity, usually used for rest, recreation, or travel; recess or holiday.
2. a part of the year, regularly set aside, when normal activities of law courts, legislatures, etc., are suspended.
3. freedom or release from duty, business, or activity.
4. an act or instance of vacating.

It is interesting that in my instance, all four variants have an application.

Vacation and “free time” is a concept that has grown up only relatively recently. It was considered normal by most people to work almost every day of the week (apart from the Sabbath) until one dropped dead. However, changes in productive relations made a rupture with the old way inevitable; as mass production and the assembly line took hold in the early 20th century, workers began to organise themselves into unions in order to better negotiate the terms of labour. I recall seeing a film of a strike in the 1930’s at the Renault plant in France; the labourers occupied the factory and shut the gates and bolted the doors. Their families sent them food by delivering it in baskets, which they then raised up to the second-floor window. The film further showed the nocturnal activities of these strikers: they organised impromptu dances. I remember how they showed burly car workers spinning gently around a dusty shop floor with their wives dressed in gossamer floral print dresses, turning what was once a place of science and industry into an area lit more by romance and joy.

The Renault workers eventually won. Management even granted them paid holiday. This is perhaps where the most striking element comes into play: one of the strikers was later interviewed. She confessed that she hadn’t ever been on a holiday, and despite living in Paris, which by no means is distant from the ocean, that the hard-won holiday was her first opportunity to go to the sea. She mentioned that her colleagues were just as pleased by the spectacle: she stated that they could be seen on the shore, “playing like children”.

Those early victories were trampled underfoot by the cruelties of the Great Depression, though they were restored by the dawn of prosperity after the Second World War. Vacation is perhaps now one of the most under-threat elements of our present era: if my recent sojourn in London was anything to go by, at least half the populace could do with one, yet there is an element in the city’s demeanour of being driven grimly on, even if it means to breaking point. The drive never ends, the in-tray always fills up, but vacation is there, in part, to remind us that there is more to life than incessant struggle. Quite frankly, the only company that appears to have gotten it right in terms of balancing free time and cutting costs is Honda, which sent its workers away on a long, paid (at reduced rates) holiday; when the break ended, the labour force was motivated and revived. I have no doubt that they will prove to be one of the winners once the smoke clears.

My reasons for needing a break are admittedly not labour-related; I am one of those individuals who doesn’t know what to do with free time except to fill it with other tasks. Nor does vacation solve anything in particular, it merely provides respite, a breathing space, a temporary diversion by losing oneself in the pages of a book and by going on search and destroy missions for typos. There will come a point, to be sure, when this will not be particularly satisfying; time will turn, there will be more politics to which to attend, more philosophy to expound upon, more crises bubbling up from the entrails of the earth which require explanation. But for now, bon vacance.

I recently purchased a new mobile phone; generally speaking, I’m not one of those people who needs to replace his handset more often than he replaces his socks. However, I managed to save a fair amount of money on my monthly bill in the process and thanks to its wi-fi connectivity, now I am never far away from the internet, which is a state that warms the cockles of my heart.

Still, switching over does raise problems; I think most phones are designed to come with wallpaper and ring tones that are destined to irritate the user. I won’t go into the horror of a snippet of D-grade sitar music that was supposed to pass for a message alert, nor will I describe the bland seascapes that the manufacturer apparently believed would have mass appeal. It is all engineered, perhaps, so that one is compelled to spend more money in order to get the phone’s aesthetics into a pleasing state. While ultimately this was not my selection, I did linger on one candidate for the wallpaper image: it was a reproduction of a famous British World War II poster which read simply, “Keep Calm and Carry On”.

This motto has become ubiquitous as of late. Earlier this week, during another of my strolls across the campus, I saw a student wearing a t-shirt with precisely the same legend. In April, the Daily Telegraph revealed who the hardest working member of Parliament was: it was Philip Hollobone, MP for Ketttering. Perhaps strangely, his photo revealed that he had the exact same poster in his office. I’ve seen it in other offices; I’ve even seen it recast as a bumper sticker.

Given its prevalence, one wonders what is the source of its appeal. After all, we’re in an era in which such ideas are subsumed by the notion of taking another pill or doing bungee jumping as a remedy to all ills; we would rather pretend to leap to our deaths than simply to sit quietly and do nothing outrageous. Just “keeping calm and carrying on” in light of contemporary mores seems archaic, passe. Perhaps it is merely the force of nostalgia that gives it its potency. Way back in the day when such posters were there to encourage the British public to do its duty, all there was apart from the occasional pint of ale to swallow day-to-day woe was comforting words.

However, there is more continuity for “keeping calm and carrying on” than there is for modern hyperactivity. Even during the Seige of Harfleur in Shakespeare’s Henry V, King Henry tells his troops:

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man. As modest stillness and humility…

These days, we expect a hero not to preach stillness of any kind; rather like Superman, Batman or the X-Men, immobility is reserved for moments of sleep; one is either up and about with the blood pumping, flinging oneself into action or shut down entirely. There is no halfway state, there is no pause for contemplation.

If we take the point of view of the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek, and suggest that symptoms are messages arising from the subconscious, we perhaps should take the new-found prevalence of “Keep Calm and Carry On” as the collective psyche trying to tell us something. We have been through a period in which hyperactivity has not only been proven to be out of character, but also it’s been shown to be dangerous. We have had bankers and traders working in the City of London on 24 hour schedules, tossing back caffiene as readily as they sucked up greed. We have had frenetic buying and selling of property, passing cash and deeds hand over fist. The London Underground has been packed with miserable travellers going back and forth to their jobs, pushing themselves onward, spilling out days until the brief respite of holidays. But those holidays too require bundling oneself onto a bus or train and then flying out to some hot country where one dances through the night till one chokes on alcoholic soft drinks. And now, even the Government seems to think that a period of modest stillness is unbecoming; in order to prove his worth, Gordon Brown feels the need to throw out initiatives (such as electoral reform) like birdseed, hoping that the public will peck at the miniscule morsels of change and find them to their liking.

But perhaps the answer to many of our problems lay in something in simple as “keeping calm and carrying on”. The economic crisis is not the end of the world: things will rise as well as fall. Be patient, be persistent, be not possessed by panic: keep calm and carry on. The political crisis will end one day, though perhaps in a way that is not to Labour’s liking. Labour, however should not try to compensate for a lack of popularity by being overexcitable. Keep calm, be deliberate, and carry on. On a more personal level, when one is faced with a breakup or personal crisis, the answer is not to be found in booze or nights out or wallowing in bad relationships. Let the tide roll in, let it roll out again. Keep calm and carry on. Not every day is meant to be filled with sunshine or success, nor are they meant to be filled with complete tragedy; as Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If” stated:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

In other words, no matter what, keep calm and carry on.

Perhaps the phone wallpaper, the MP’s office poster, the bumper sticker and the young man’s t-shirt indicate we’re more ready for this message than we have been for quite some time. No doubt when economic recovery comes, we will hear the refrains of “Happy Days are Here Again” accentuated with a techno beat and feel tempted to let the pulse race and the acid house dance of modern life continue apace. But this would be to ignore the lesson of our times, and to set ourselves up for yet another fall. It may be more dull to be self-contained, rational, and peaceful; however it was this attitude that got Britain through the extreme of a war. It would be wonderful if it could get us through the rigours of normality.

As a supporter of the Green Party, the results of the Local and European elections have rather been like receiving the same birthday present for the second year running, with the exception of getting a nicer card to go with it; it’s an indication that one is more well regarded, but the overall utility of what one receives hasn’t altered. Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert have been returned to their posts. Brighton and Oxford are apparently daubed in shades of the brightest Green. The wider European result is also reasonably positive: there are now 50 Green MEPs, 9 more than last time. This is good, but it isn’t having Rupert Read in Brussels, nor is it, regrettably, the triumph that would have accompanied the Green Party defeating the BNP in the North West region.

My initial thought as to why we didn’t do better harks back to the eternal contest between spinach and ice cream. Spinach is preferable to ice cream in nearly every way: it contains more minerals, vitamins and fibre. It’s healthy, wholesome and good for you. If you pan fry it lightly in olive oil and with a pinch of cumin or black pepper, it’s delicious too. However the average person, given the choice, will generally pick ice cream over even the best prepared leafy vegetable.

Similarly, the Green Party is filled with wholesome, decent, ethical people who believe in caring for the planet and others. There are likely more PhDs as a proportion of membership than in any other political party in the land. The policies put forward by the Green Party are well thought out, written clearly, and presented calmly. This is the Green Party’s greatest strength; however it’s the political equivalent of spinach, and it looks like in some regions that there was a greater appetite for the BNP’s greasy doner kebab which will now fester in the bowels of the body politic for 5 years.

As unenviable as this situation may sound, it is far worse for the Labour Party. It’s one thing to lose a straight fight with the Conservatives. It’s quite another to lose to the Conservatives and the UK Independence Party. It’s still another thing to lose Wales, something which hasn’t happened since 1918. At this point one should pause and take in the significance of this loss: Wales, with its heritage of coal mines, unions and Anuerin Bevan, the father of the National Health Service, is the receptacle of the Labour Party’s soul. Furthermore, it was not lost to say, Plaid Cymru, which was what had been expected, it was lost to a political party which carries the stain of being alien to Wales and responsible for its coal industry being destroyed.

Votes bled away even in places like Sunderland; if Labour couldn’t win there, they may as well collectively disappear into the proverbial quiet office with a loaded revolver and a bottle of whiskey. That said, in some places, Labour died altogether: they came in fifth place in the South East, and behind Mebyon Kernow (in 6th position) in Cornwall. If the voters felt the Green Party was altogether too nice and correct and thus did not take the party to their hearts, their emotion insofar as Labour is concerned is apparently raw hatred. They have kicked and beaten Labour, and left a flaming bag of dog excrement on their front step. I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who actively works for them; this must be the political equivalent of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, with the strains of “Siegfrieds Tod” rising in the background as Gordon Brown, ever more grey and worn, soldiers on. Worse, Peter Mandelson, now bloated with power, appears to be pulling the strings.

Indeed, for the average Labour activist, a few lines from Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” seem apropos:

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Thinkst thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

In 1997, the Labour Party said “Things can only get better” and swept to victory on a wave of popular support. I recall the May evening in which Tory seats tumbled like dominoes, taking out long-term irritants like Michael Portillo and Neil Hamilton. Pictures beamed in from throughout the country showing rallies in which smiling young people were touched by that most precious of emotions, hope. Surely from the perspective of Labour activists, this was heaven, filled with joys that seemed eternal at the time. Now in such bitter circumstances, hell is not confined to a particular place, it is all around them; it manifests itself in unpopularity, derision, anger.

“Doctor Faustus” perhaps is also apropos in another way. When I look at Peter Mandelson, I can’t help but think of Mephistophilis, the demon who tempts Faustus to sign away his soul. Like Faustus, Gordon Brown has apparently become very dependent upon his dark arts-versed companion; according to the Jackie Ashley in the Guardian:

Most of these friends, however, complain that he (Brown) just refuses to listen to anyone now except Mandelson.

For the idle pleasure of 24 years of Mephistophilis’ service, Faustus sold his soul to Satan. Brown seems content to sign away his for much less: at best, 11 months of continuance in Downing Street. It is as if he is echoing Faustus in the final scenes, awaiting being dragged off to Hell:

Ah Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually.
Stand still you ever moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day, or let this hour be but a year,
A month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent, and save his soul.
O lente, lente, currite noctis equi:
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

I can imagine Brown staring at the clock in his office, watching its black hands move slowly across its white face. It’s easy to envisage him begging the seconds not to tick, the minutes not to pass, the hours not to turn, and the sun not to set, so that he can relish and luxuriate in the joy of being where he is. But time does move on, and Brown marches towards a fate perhaps worse than to die and go to hell: he may gain a reputation as a failure. Should this scenario occur, he will not be able do anything in the public sphere without the taint following him; for a man who sunk so much of his life into the achievement of ambition, this is a terrible destiny. However, this is almost inevitable now; perhaps this is the reason why he fights so desperately, a panic which again finds an echo in Faustus:

Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God.
No no, then will I headlong run into the earth;
Earth gape! O no, it will not harbour me.
You stars that reigned at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist,
Into the entrails of yon laboring cloud,
That when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven.

But plead as he might, Faustus is torn limb from limb; it is a morality play. Similarly, the dismemberment of the Labour Party continues apace, but the question of what next remains: it has been rent from Derbyshire and Staffordshire, severed from power in Lancashire, thoroughly humiliated in Scotland. At what point, Labour activists are entitled to ask, do we allow ourselves to be bound to Gordon Brown’s fate? It is a question that should echo in the country more widely. We are likely to see panicked policy intent on avoiding the yawning gap that lay before the Government, which cannot be good for the nation; when the country needs spinach, they may be about to serve another helping of populist ice cream in the hope that sugary taste of cheap policies will make them loved again. But the love like that they had in 1997 is not destined to return; it has disappeared underneath the steamroller of a bossy, nannying, bullying, bureaucratic government. Both Mephistophilis and Faustus went to hell and did not come out of it. The best Labour can do for us is to end this perdition as soon as possible.

One of my favourite words is verdant. In order to spare any readers the agony of consulting a dictionary, the word is defined as:

1. green with vegetation; covered with growing plants or grass: a verdant oasis.
2. of the color green: a verdant lawn.
3. inexperienced; unsophisticated: verdant college freshmen.

All three definitions are congruous with my university’s appearance and demeanour at the moment. Yesterday, amid the bright, late Spring sunshine, I walked between campuses along a woodland pathway; not so long ago, the bare trees were unable to filter out the grey, dim light of a winter sky. Now there were green leaves to act as a filter to the hot sun, and the scent of honeysuckle and the sounds of insects buzzing filled the air. Verdant.

Beyond the path, there was the campus common; exams are nearly done, and the students decided to have an impromptu festival on the lawn. Bottles of beer and cheap alcoholic cider were in evidence. Books were thrown aside, sunglasses donned. It’s unclear how many were first year, second year or third years, but they had a freshness which came from the belief that the highest obstacle of which they could conceive had just been overcome. Crack a bottle open, listen to music, lay out on the lawn, life is good, thank God that’s over with. Naive. Young. Verdant.

Tomorrow is full of verdant possibilities too. As anyone who has been following the news for the past month knows, we have endured a period of drudgery and muck. But at the same time, there have been undeniable benefits: there had been legitimate concern that Britain had been succumbing to the lethal poison of apathy. When no one longer cares about democracy, that is the moment when liberty ceases to exist; the bland, grey corporatism of New Labour had seemed precisely calibrated to smother any instinct for freedom with its technocratic rhetoric and its bureaucratic impulses. As nauseating as the expenses scandal has been, its stench has awoken the public to levels of political awareness that I haven’t seen in over 20 years of living here; we will find out in the local and European elections on Thursday what precisely this will bring. Will we enter a time that will be verdant with the same weeds of corruption which will continue to choke the system? Or will it be verdant with new strains of political extremism which may strangle the nation’s traditions of decency? Or will it be verdant in a new way, in which a thousand flowers of reform will bloom?

The latter path is the most fascinating one, if the most complex. However, there are signs that we may go precisely that way: for example, a ComRes poll indicates that the Green Party has hit 15%, overtaking the Liberal Democrats. While this poll may be an outlier, it does match up with personal experience; two weeks ago, I decided to go out for dinner at a local restaurant. As I waited for my order to arrive, the two women seated at the table across from mine began to discuss politics; they were both middle aged, and judging from the way they had been complaining about their employer over their drinks, I guessed they worked in an administrative capacity. They were understandably furious at the Government: phrases and words like “pigs in the trough” and “sleaze” were used with all the vehemence and frequency of machine gun fire. They debated for a while what they should do about it; voting was an absolute necessity, they decided. They discussed voting for the UK Independence Party. However, they felt that there was something not quite trustworthy about them either: given the UKIP MEPs who have been thrown out of the party for financial irregularities, they were correct. There was no chance they would vote for the BNP. One then said that the Greens were trustworthy; the other lady agreed. Their tandoori chicken arrived, covered in onions and sizzling in an iron skillet; it was perfectly understandable that they abandoned politics at that point.

I felt like saying something or buying them another round of lager, but I wasn’t sure if activism in a curry house was a good idea; after all, what would it say about the Green Party if its message was “Vote for us, have a beer”? I slightly raised my glass to them without their noticing it and settled back into thought. This was just one curry house in a prosperous corner of rural southern England on a sleepy Saturday evening. How many other such conversations were going on, I wondered, in other curry houses, or down at the pub, or over a family dinner? How many of the arguments, disagreements and discussions came to the same conclusion? Could it be that the polls are wrong and the results will be even more dramatic than can be presently foreseen?

Speak it softly, but perhaps we are witnessing a revolution. The old way has been conclusively proven to be bankrupt, and the common sense of this aged democracy is telling the citizenry to shed it for something better. The institutions’ ramparts are being stormed, not by men with chiselled jaws like one sees in old Soviet art, but by secretaries and call centre workers, car mechanics and bank clerks, plumbers and bricklayers. I suspect that the queues to the polling booths will be full of them tomorrow, who by their individual marks on ballots, will call time on our present epoch. I will join them, casting my vote for the Greens where I can, casting my vote for other reformers if that option is not available to me. Then I will go home, and settle into a deep night of waiting for events to unfold. It will likely be a long evening, but pregnant with possibility and thus unmissable: it could be that by the time the dawn comes, we will be set on a course which will deepen a revolution. The Prime Minister may finally realise that he is lingering idly in the corridors of power though power has deserted him, and having supped too long on the bitter meal of futility, he may finally stand aside to let the cleansing effect of revolution do its work. Or, he may continue to believe in the myth of his own indispensability and remain resolved to stay; in which case the pressure could build to exploding point, and the revolution will do its work anyway. Revolutions, like Spring, have their own logic which cannot be constrained nor fully tamed: life bursts out in all its multitude of forms, as do ideas. We are verdant with both this June; it’s exciting to be witness to it and even more exciting to take part.

Labour’s listing ship of state continues to suck up the attention of the British media. It’s rather peculiar; after talk of duck houses and digging out moats, one might think that there can’t be much further to go. Anything else should be superfluous, if not dull. Yet, it’s usually at this brink of tedium that another unforeseen outrage explodes across the front pages of the newspapers. Today, it’s the allegation that the Chancellor of the Exchequer made expense claims he shouldn’t have: this is an unacceptable paradox for a man who is charged with managing the nation’s finances.

The saga was infused with a further frisson of negative energy by Gordon Brown’s indifferent performance on yesterday’s Andrew Marr Show. He talked far too much, appeared to lack any sense of inner discipline, and he managed to reveal some rather disturbing character traits. For example, he made it plain that even if the Cabinet told him to go, he wouldn’t. He also said that the expenses scandal offended his “Presbyterian morals”; though by rights the scandal should offend any coherent system of ethics, whether Presbyterian, Jewish, Hindu or Zoroastrian.

Meanwhile, life goes on. Thanks to Gordon Brown and his Keystone Cops administration, one of the more important stories out of America has been obscured: yesterday, Dr. George Tiller, an abortion doctor in Kansas, was assassinated by a gunman named Scott Roeder. Dr. Tiller’s speciality was performing late term abortions, a practice which he vigorously defended to the end.

What is particularly disturbing about this incident is not just how heated the matter of abortion has become in America, it is the moral system that is being utilised in finding solutions to society’s ills. This is perhaps one area that Britain, as damaged as the political culture has been in recent weeks, is doing rather better than its trans-Atlantic counterpart; at least the ethos here hasn’t descended in some quarters into a form of Stalinism. Indeed, Stalinist ideas appear to be pervasive in America despite President Obama’s efforts to remedy the issue.

This statement should be made with a caveat: when I say “Stalinism”, I am not referring to some masturbatory right wing fantasy in which the President refashions himself as some “Great Leader” in the Kim Jong Il mode. Nor do I refer to neo-con paranoid dreams about Democratic economic policies that involve the state squashing private initiative in the name of central planning. I refer to something far more basic within Stalin’s philosophical mindset and far more insidious; allegedly, he once stated to his henchmen: “When a man is dead, he is no longer a problem”.

Of course, Americans would never consciously refer to Stalin in such a manner. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Karl Marx is right about one thing: the operation of an ideology requires that we do things without knowing we do them. This statement appeared in Marx’s “Das Kapital”, in a chapter which described the functioning of our economic relations: when we assign a value to a particular good and we work in a certain way, we adhere to a particular set of norms without thinking about it. This is evidenced in something as simple as the man who wakes up, gets dressed, buys a newspaper and sits at his desk and works on desgning widgets all day. His actions support the existing capitalist superstructure in satisfying his individual wants and needs, but he doesn’t know that he does it. It is only when we are exposed to the dynamics of philosophy or political economy that we start to become aware of these processes and question whether they are just.

Many Americans do Stalinism, but they don’t know they do it. They have no idea that they’re invoking old Uncle Joe whenever they say that the solution to a problem is merely to get rid of whoever is supposedly perpetrating it. Is Iraq building weapons of Mass Destruction? Blow them up; when a man is dead, he is no longer a problem. Is North Korea threatening its neighbours? Bomb them; when Kim Jong Il is eliminated, he will no longer present a danger. Is an abortion doctor creating an atmosphere in which tiny babies are being destroyed? Shoot him; if he’s blown away, he can no longer harm anyone.

Reason and history should indicate that purposeful annihilation of other human beings is a terrible means with which to try and solve problems. Stalin attempted to liquidate the kulaks (“rich peasants”) as a class, in order to make collectivisation work; the result was famine and an agricultural sector that never was able to supply the needs of the Soviet Union’s people. Shattering Iraq has led a body count of thousands of American troops, billions of dollars spent, and an unknown price tag yet to come in terms of regional instability, shattered lives, and the burning up of American credit. If North Korea is destroyed, what will happen to the starving people there? What will occur if they run across the border to China or to South Korea? Even the extreme anti-abortionists have managed to score an own-goal with shooting Dr. Tiller: surely they must know now that their activities will be policed more heavily by Homeland Security, and indeed, they have forfeited much credit in the court of public opinion.

However the ideology continues to permeate downward, seeping out of the halls of government and the camps of political activism into the darkest recesses of the mentally disturbed. One of the most troubling aspects of the Virginia Tech shootings was how the killer, Seung-Hui Cho, had cold bloodedly determined to go on the rampage in eliminating his classmates; when his peers (or “snobs” as he called them) were dead, they would no longer be able to torment him, he thought. This was the paradigm in action even within the depths of pathological behaviour.

The question remains as to how this red, white and blue Stalinism took root. I can’t help but recall Stephen Fry’s recent documentary which followed him through all fifty states. In Massachusetts, he stopped off for tea at the residence of a Harvard Professor of Divinity, who stated that Americans dislike complexity, even if an intricate answer was more interesting than a simple one. Stalinism has a brutal efficiency in its logic: it states the way to the promised land is paved with the bodies of society’s enemies. There is also a certain pioneer rapaciousness in its assumption that the end justifies the means. But complexity and truth dictate that a moral result cannot be achieved through an amoral method; human beings possess nuance and spirit which defies even the most brutal repression, which is why the Hungarians revolted against Soviet domination in 1956, Czech student Jan Palach set himself on fire in protest in 1968, the Poles rose up in the 1980’s, and why Communism was eventually toppled. Stalin’s immediate successors in the Kremlin were not immune to such impulses either; I recall visiting the graves along the Kremlin wall during my first visit to Russia in 1994. Eventually, my Russian guide and I came across Stalin’s tomb. It featured a stern-looking bust of the dictator which rested atop what I assume was a granite plinth. My Russian guide then informed me that Krushchev had Stalin’s coffin buried, and then had the grave filled in with cement.

“Why?” I asked.

“To prevent him from rising again, I think. Superstition.”

I noticed, however, that someone had laid a fresh bouquet of red flowers at the base of the marker. The body may not be able to arise, but the poison still flows through the veins of Russia, of Asia, and of the West. We continue to do it, but we mostly don’t know that we do it. We glorify violent solutions in both public policy and video games. Our notions of power and strength are more tied up with the ability to kill rather than the ability to think. We operate like puppets bound to strings in the performance of the ideology. We were told by the Bolsheviks that this was justified in the name of their Revolution, we are told by some of the minions of the far right that violence is justified in the name of the American Revolution, citing Thomas Jefferson’s importunate quote that the “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

However, this interpretation strikes a discordant note. The American Revolution (or War of Independence), for example, was actually a case of thought being more important than violence. The colonists repeatedly petitioned the British government for redress of grievances; armed conflict only occurred after the British government decided to use force. Note the inversion: taking up arms was not the first resort of the revolutionaries, but rather their last response to military coercion; furthermore, it was the complex, yet startling ideas that gave the Revolution its force, not a macho fantasy of mowing down redcoats. George Washington has somehow been swapped for Rambo and Stalin since that time.

We’re not immune in Britain either; after the victory at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was quoted as saying that saddest thing other than a battle lost, is a battle won. The same understanding of the tragedy of violence has faded. We have followed, albeit reluctantly, yanked along our puppet strings into many of the same cultural and political morasses. Perhaps the only shield against abject surrender has been the inherent scepticism inherent in Britain’s culture. This creates conditions by which the marionetteer is looked for, and the constraints are observed and loosened. Total freedom from such attachments is perhaps a fantasy for any society; so long as one nation remains bound by the ideology of violence, it is likely that all others will need to have a response ready. However knowing the poison is there is a prelude to a search for the antidote.

It’s atypical to write a review of a play after it closes: perhaps such an item bears closer resemblance to an epitaph. However, it’s impossible for me to let a production of Cyrano de Bergerac to pass unnoticed.

I admit this is partially due to the fact that I am a Cyrano aficionado: this work has been an obsession of mine since an early age. I have several versions of the original and its translations, most of which were bought on sojurns to Paris; perhaps my most proud possession is a 1964 American hardback edition, which contains engraved prints of the various tableaux. I purchased it at a venerable place as well, namely, the Shakespeare Book Store near Notre Dame, which is where Ernest Hemingway bought his books.

I am compelled also, perhaps, because productions of Edmund Rostand’s classic are rare. There are good reasons for this; first, the running time of the play is in excess of 3 hours. The role of Cyrano is extremely taxing as a result: the sheer amount of verse that an actor has to memorise and portray with feeling is enormous. Furthermore, if it’s done in any other language besides French, it simply does not possess all of the author’s intent or meter. This issue is particularly troublesome as the play is comprised entirely of rhyming couplets. A good example of the problem arises from Cyrano’s “duelling poem”: in French, its refrain reads, “A la fin de l’envoie je touche!“. Its English counterpart, “At the end of the poem, I hit”, lacks a certain poetry, if not panache (a word imparted to the English language by Cyrano). Still, there are a few good English versions available, in particular the Anthony Burgess variant; however, for every Burgess, there are several that should be readily discarded.

That said, there is another, perhaps greater difficulty with Cyrano: it’s rare to see a man and a role match in a way that could be described as sublime, but just such an event occured when Gerard Depardieu donned the nose, cape and sword in the 1990 film version. Any other actor that wishes to take up the part has to do so in the shadow of that magnificent performance.

However, the play runs a risk of obsolescence if it remains trapped within the confines of a 19 year old French movie. The Chichester Festival Theatre run, limited as it was to just over three weeks, presented an opportunity for the work’s revival, particularly as Joseph Fiennes was selected for the lead role.

Fiennes is best known as a film actor; he has portrayed Shakespeare in the film “Shakespeare in Love” and Sir Robert Dudley in “Elizabeth”. However, he has recently returned to his Royal Shakespeare Company and Old Vic roots, and has stated he is more comfortable on stage than on the silver screen. Despite his excellent credentials, I was somewhat concerned about Fiennes’ suitability for the part, particularly as I was uncertain he could summon the primal force that Depardieu so readily accessed. In short, to make a mark in my recollections, this edition was going to have to rise above everything else I had absorbed.

Early signs were promising: as the lights went down, I noticed that the production utilised the limited space of Chichester Festival Theatre in a way that was refreshing and clever. The world of Cyrano and the audience were jutxaposed, with characters milling about the theatre as if 2009 and 1640 lay side by side without touching each other. This had the effect of making the audience more than mere spectators. We were locked in the play’s action, part of the scenery.

The play begins, appropriately enough, in the audience pit of a theatre. While the other characters were compelling, from the very first mention of Cyrano, we are anxiously awaiting his arrival. In the 1990 film, Cyrano stormed in with a violent outburst. In this play, his entrance was more of a contemptuous saunter. Fiennes rightly decided to be his own Cyrano, and while there was a few moments of adjustment on my part to the new parameters of the character, his portrayal was no less heartfelt or accurate. Depardieu’s Cyrano is the warrior, whose tough exterior belies the poet. Fiennes’ is the poetic Cyrano, who has a surprising capacity with the blade; Fiennes’ facility with the sword, even two swords at once, is impressive.

Beyond swordplay, however, “Cyrano de Bergerac”, above all things, is about blindness. Cyrano is blind to how easily love could come to him. The object of his affections, Roxanne, cannot see where love truly lies. I have read a preface to one version of “Cyrano de Bergerac” which stated Roxanne is a “silly little fool”; yet, without a Roxanne that a man of refinement and wit like Cyrano could potentially love, the drama loses much of its potency. Alice Eve in the Chichester production is perhaps the definitive Roxanne. She loves words and philosophy, but at the same time is more moved by the handsome face of Cyrano’s rival Christian than by Cyrano’s bravery and intellect. She is petulant, yet pretty, pretentious, yet sincere. In contrast, Christian, as played by Stephen Hagan, is a convincing dullard: the addition of a West Country rural accent to his character was a clever choice.

However, the play hinges on how much pain Cyrano can summon out of his predicament: here Fiennes rises to the challenge. His tears of loneliness are convincing, as is his lofty rhetoric when he allows his heart to soar. Perhaps the most successful scene is the play’s most bittersweet: Roxanne meets with Christian, and due to his stupidity, it is an encounter that turns sour. Cyrano, donning Christian’s cape and hat, then speaks to Roxanne from the darkness below her balcony, assuming the young man’s identity. He then pours out the contents of his heart to her, using words to say more than words could say; at this critical juncture, we need to feel Cyrano’s frustration at his inability to bend language to love’s purposes in the way he would like. Yet the emotion and the words are effective, and they move Roxanne to proclaim her love…for Christian. Cyrano’s suffering at having “laid the banquet”, yet remaining unable to enjoy the feast as Christian then does, is expertly done too; I must admit that hot tears welled up in my eyes.

The second act is also a great challenge. It takes place at the siege of Arras, in which Cyrano and his band of Gascony cadets are facing a vastly superior Spanish force. To make this scene work, we must have a sense of desperation, hunger and misery. This was done, in spite of the stage’s limitations; the costumes, make up, and even the spare lighting were perfect. The only way it could have been more convincing is if they had scattered dirt on the ground. However, this scene does expose one weakness of the production: there is a lengthy battle scene, during which there is a great deal of musket fire. While the noise is realistic, it is excessive, and not necessarily conducive to the play’s purposes apart from masking a large scene change in the background.

The final tableaux takes place many years later, and again it is an opportunity for Cyrano to shine. He is literally dying, and yet has a final chance to tell Roxanne the chapter and verse of all his grand emotion as his life ebbs away. Fiennes makes us believe he is on his way out, he has lost everything, but it is only love that matters…apart from his panache. At that point, tears did flow, followed by a moment of utter quietude. It took the audience a second or two to realise there should be a storm of applause.

Afterwards, I headed home, haunted by the poetry and the sad thought that I had just seen something that too few people have seen. There is no indication that the production is moving on to another theatre or another town. What has been done may lie buried; perhaps this review merely preserves a memory. But I hope that there are enough comments out there, enough affection and enough demand that another revival of this quality could one day emerge.

I heard on radio this morning that today, May 29, is the anniversary of the birth and accession to the throne of Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland between 1660 and 1685. In this instance, the mention was just a preface to playing a piece of music from the period; however, I had to smile. As a writer and an amateur historian, I have a rather special relationship with this king. Also, while I am generally no big fan of royalty or the institution of monarchy, I do have reasons to have sympathy for Charles.

It is a strange coincidence that I had been thinking about him recently. I use an exercise bike in the evenings, and in order to distract myself from the intense pain that this sometimes causes, I put on a DVD. This week, I had chosen a BBC miniseries about Charles II, without any conscious realisation of this day’s importance. As I sweated, toiled and suffered I was able at least to enjoy Rupert Graves’ sensitive portrayal of a complex man who seemed to have virtue and vice in equal measure. There are points in the programme where one cheers, such as when he defends religious toleration; other parts, such as when he gives in to the insane demands of his advisors and his mistresses, have all the allure of witnessing a giant car accident.

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I have other reasons to recollect Charles II from time to time; the first piece I submitted for my Master’s degree course in Creative Writing was entitled “The Court Poet”, and told the story of a bard who had been hired by this monarch. While it was an amateurish effort on my part, it was a point of departure for all my writing afterwards; I was particularly proud of how I had captured the character of Charles’ famously boistrous mistress, Nell Gwynne. For example, after the poet presented his credentials to the king, Nell interjected: “He’s sweet. Are we keeping him?”

It was not until this morning, however, that I found out for quite how many writers, playwrights and poets for whom Charles also represented a beginning. I was previously aware that Charles tore off the constraints on theatre which had been imposed by Oliver Cromwell, his dictatorial and Puritan predecessor; indeed, during Charles’ reign, women were allowed on the stage for the first time. However, it was also said on the radio that he that created the post of Poet Laureate, a position he gave to the accomplished and inspiring John Dryden. Truly, Charles’ Restoration saw a rebirth in the arts, a revolution that perhaps secured Britain’s reputation as a centre of culture. This is a pride of place the nation holds to this day. In other words, I and every other writer, musician and artist in this country, owe him a debt of gratitude.

Despite the sometimes uneven nature of his reign, there is much to learn from his political philosophy as well. One of the first reasons why I felt obliged to write about him was the discovery of his creed, which in some respects mirrors my own: according to the historian Antonia Fraser, his earliest tutors advised that he should be sceptical and moderate, and to be suspicious of ideologues. This was rare advice given the period in which he lived; his was a time in which oscillating between extremes seemed to be the norm. The Tudors, the predecessors to the Stuarts, had put England through periods of rampant Protestantism and heretic-burning Catholicism before settling on middle-way Elizabeth. James I, the first Stuart king which followed Elizabeth’s reign, was a middle-way Protestant, but his son, Charles I, was so determined to impose High Church Anglican religious harmony on the entire British Isles that he managed to provoke a civil war, which ended with him with having his head chopped off. Charles II’s brother, James, later James II, also had problems with extremes: he was a Catholic, and couldn’t stop himself from flaunting his faith to a nation that had reached a more-or-less Protestant settlement. James II was dumped by Parliament and the Dutchman William of Orange in 1688, in what later became known as the “Glorious Revolution”.

Charles II, in contrast, radiated good sense. He was pragmatic when he needed to be: in order to gain the throne, he was willing to cut a deal with the Scots and convert to the Presbyterian creed. This deal fell through, however.

After he was restored (thanks to the chaos left behind by Cromwell’s death), he had Catholics in his government; perhaps this may have been because he was la closet Catholic, he certainly converted to to the faith on his deathbed. That said, during his reign he remained a Protestant king; he understood that ideology should end where good governance began. As such, his overall emphasis was on religious toleration; he had little patience for rabble rousers like Titus Oates. He also acted as if he didn’t quite believe in the fire and brimstone that the religion of the age seemed to summon at every possible instance; while the BBC miniseries is just a drama, it is telling that one of its most effective passages occurs after the Black Death has struck London in 1666. A representative of the city comes to visit Charles in Oxford and informs him of the widespread belief that somehow the vistation of the disease is due to the immorality of Charles’ court. Charles replies, “Curious then that we continue as gaily as we have before, meanwhile it is the poor people of London who are dying.” I have no idea if he said these exact words; however the point is, given his track record, it sounds like something he would say.

The other appealing aspect to his character is his mercy. The country was in sympathy with him upon his restoration; he could have used this in order to gain a greater measure of revenge on those responsible for executing his father and depriving him of the throne. Indeed, there was a list of 50 people who were purposefully excluded from Charles’ amnesty; however, out of these, only 9 were executed. The rest were merely imprisoned or simply excluded from office. “Blood lust”, another feature of the age, was simply not part of his character.

There is a downside to Charles, however: while he was moderate in many respects, he did believe in the absolute authority of the monarchy. He dismissed Parliament in 1679. He was also less than honest: he signed secret treaties with France, and took Louis XIV’s money to help sustain his reign. His ideological suppleness was interpreted negatively by wits of the age, including John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester:

God bless our good and gracious king,
Whose promise none relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

But having heard this, Charles’ response was not to get angry, but to reply:

That is true; for my words are my own, but my actions are those of my ministers.

It’s difficult to be too harsh towards someone who possessed so much candour and good humour. However, apart from fits of Restoration revivals and the occasional documentary or miniseries, mentions of Charles II are limited in comparison to those of Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria or Henry VIII. One can understand the emphasis on Elizabeth, given how she led the country into a prosperous age and was key to defeating the Spanish Armada of 1588. However, Henry VIII was a syphilitic wastrel who bankrupted the country; he dragged the nation into Protestantism only to get money by raiding Church property and to have more chances of fathering a son with a greater variety of women. Queen Victoria had a lot of children, and for good or ill, thus managed to perpetuate the same genes throughout most of the royal families of Europe; in terms of actual progress, however, much of that died with her husband the Prince Consort Albert. After Albert departed, Victoria succumbed to ceaseless and petulant mourning; the monarchy had to be pushed back into public affections by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. In contrast, Charles II seems unpretentious, quick witted, aware, and astute; he is definitely not getting the prominence he deserves, nor the recognition he should receive from those involved in cultural pursuits. So perhaps it falls to me, as one of his few open admirers, to raise a glass on this day and say heartily: wherever you are, Happy Birthday, your Majesty.