Painting Fakes

I've just finished reading Simon Reid-Henry's Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971-2017.   Because I could.  It's quite a tome and I read each of its three parts separately with a bit of time in between reading something a bit lighter. Reid-Henry teaches history, political economy and international law at the University of London as well as being Senior Researcher at the Oslo Peace Research Institute.  I'm super-impressed by people who can write books like this.  You would have to read and catalogue an almost unimaginable number of sources - the end-notes alone cover 87 pages - and then somehow make sense of all those little pieces of data to try and tell a coherent story.  I'm convinced that history writing is a kind of conjuring trick, but without historians we would have to do all that fact-checking ourselves, or just rely on our memories.  All the events he covers in this book took place in my lifetime, but there's plenty

In Lady Windemere's Fan  Oscar Wilde has one of his characters define a cynic as someone who 'knows the price of everything and the value of nothing'.  This much quoted aphorism provides the title of Mariana Mazzucato's recent book, The Value of Everything: Making and taking in the global economy. Mazzucato is an academic economist, born in Italy, educated in the USA and currently working at University College, London.  Her central concern is, how does value get created in modern economies?  In an earlier book, The Entrepreneurial State,  she examines the often overlooked role of government in creating valuable and even game-changing innovations.  This book repeats some of that, but focuses mainly on the position of the financial industry.  Does this industry create value, or simply extract it? The problem, she says, is that economists, and hence the rest of us, are confused about what value actually is.  The classical economists - Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Ma

Thanks to my friend Tricia, I've been reading a great book by Parker J Palmer called Healing the Heart of Democracy: The courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit.   Although this is a book about the US, it has a lot to say to Australians and others in democratic societies.  He writes simply and elegantly so that you think what he is saying must be obvious, but he covers territory that is not often discussed in 'political' books and debates. Palmer is an American Quaker activist, now in his late 70s.  This book, published in 2011, arose out of what he describes as a 'season of heartbreak - personal and political heartbreak - that soon descended into a dark night of the soul'.  This arose partly out of his awareness of his personal mortality on turning 65, and partly from feeling increasingly out of step with wider American culture. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had deepened America's appreciation of democracy and  activated d

Lately I've found myself singing this little gem to myself as I go about my business. Unless you've been under a rock for the whole of the last 46 years you would surely have heard Don McLean's 'American Pie', his cryptic song about late 60s rock music and the death of Buddy Holly.  You've probably also heard 'Vincent', a beautiful tribute to Vincent Van Gogh.  However, you could be forgiven for not having heard this song, which appears on the same album. It's funny reading about it on the internet because so many reviewers fail to see what it's about, suggesting it's about an ego-driven singer or self-centred lover.  You have to wonder if they actually listened to it.  Perhaps they are so mesmerised by the album's title track that everything else just goes straight over their heads.  Or perhaps it's true that Americans just don't get irony. Fortune has me well in hand,  Armies wait at my command My gold lies in a fore

I'm sure you all know the story of Pandora's Box. It's an ancient Greek tale, found in Hesiod's Works and Days.   Pandora was the first woman on earth, wife of Prometheus' brother Epimetheus.  Zeus, who was angry about Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, gave her a beautiful box as a wedding gift, with the instruction that she was never to open it.  What would you do?  Of course she eventually gave in to the temptation. Inside were all the evils of the world, in the form of flying creatures that I have always imagined as tiny, vicious wasps.  They swarmed out of the box, stung Pandora all over and then flew off into the wide world.  Once out, they could never be recaptured. This is, of course, a Fall story, much like the story of Adam and Eve .  It provides a metaphorical description of the entry of evil into the world and the irreversibility of the process.  But I have a feeling Hesiod got it a little bit wrong.  I'm not convinced that the box is a bina

So, after eight years Barack Obama's presidency is over. Nothing on my Facebook feed is as polarised as the reaction to Obama's departure and the man who will replace him.  Some are mourning, others are celebrating.  Some are praising his graciousness and his lovely family, and dreaming of his wife Michelle launching her own candidacy in 2020.  Others are celebrating wildly, rejoicing that his destructive reign is finally over.  And that's just my Australian friends. I'm certainly not a fan of Donald Trump (I'll get to him in a moment) but I find it hard to join in the full-throated weeping for Obama. To my mind, Obama's presidency is summed up in his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009.  At the time he had been President for less than a year.  The Nobel Prize Committee cited  'his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples', his 'vision of and work for a world without nuclear

Speaking of hope and despair , I've just finished reading a horrible and wonderful book by Matt Taibbi called The Divide: American Justice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. Taibbi is an American journalist who has written for publications such as the New York Times, Rolling Stone and many more.  He is no stranger to controversy and even seems to court it, once writing an article called "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope", which led to the sacking of the editor who approved it for publication. The Divide  was published in 2014 after years of research, and it shows he is far from being a cheap publicity-seeker.  It is a penetrating analysis of the way the 21st century American justice system works. The book opens with a scene in a New York courtroom in 2013.  A group of bank executives and employees is paraded in chains, charged with fraud.  Their crime?  They signed up mortgages based on minimal and often false documentation, then on-sold these

So I finally have time and brain space to blog again, and I've been thinking: what do Brexit, Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump have in common? To my mind, there are at least three similarities. The first is that each of them represents a response to perceived threats to the wellbeing of their nations from people who are labelled "terrorists". These terrorists are pictured as an existential threat and mainstream political forces are portrayed as being too weak to respond to these threats. Hence, a certain proportion of our population turns to someone who will be "strong" and act decisively.  In Britain, a majority turned against their more moderate leaders and voted for a movement led by the right-wing UKIP and the far-right elements of the Conservative Party.  In the US, establishment Republican figures are rejected in favour of an outsider who promises to fix their broken nation.  Here in Australia Pauline Hanson remains a marginal figure but after 18 y

I've just read a most enlightening and thought-provoking book, Arrival City:How the Largest Migration in History is Changing our World  by Doug Saunders.  Saunders is an English journalist who writes for the Globe and Mail, the kind of journalist who looks beyond the headlines for the social trends and ideas that lie behind day to day events.  If I was journalist, that's the sort I'd like to be. Our world, he says, is going through the largest and most rapid process of urbanisation in human history. Millions of people in developing nations are leaving their villages and heading to the major cities, most of them never to return.  By the end of this century approximately two to three billion people - a third of the world's population - will have made the shift and most of the world will be as urbanised as the wealthy nations are now. At the centre of this movement is what Saunders calls the 'Arrival City' - those communities on the edge of major cities that