ON THE DEATH OF A GOOD MAN

I’m going back to John Donne to reflect on the sudden death recently of a man for whom I had greatest respect.  When I heard the shocking news Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 10 came to mind (I’ve included a modern ‘translation’ after it).

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Do not be proud, Death, even though some people have called you powerful and fearsome, because you are neither of those things. Because, poor Death, the people you think you kill do not die, nor can you kill me.  Since we take great pleasure in rest and sleep, which are imitations of you, then we shall have even more pleasure from you yourself, and our best men go to you before anyone else, to enjoy peace for their bodies and the delivery of their souls [to God].  You are a slave to destiny, to fortune, to kings and to desperate men and live with poison, war and sickness.  And if opium or magic can make us sleep as well or better than your actions, why do you swell with pride?  After a brief period of sleep we shall wake up to enjoy eternal life where there will be no more death and Death, you will die.

A few days ago we lost a very good man.  Paulo Renato Souza, Brazil’s Minister of Education for eight years during the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, died of a heart attack at the appallingly early age of 65. I was not a close friend of Paulo but we were friendly enough to have sailed together in his boat, which I later sold for him as he had rather more important things to do, trying to reform and modernise the educational system of a country the size of half a continent where social conditions range from the wealthiest of suburbs to riverside communities reachable only by boat, via some of the largest and most violent slums in the world.

 

The technical details of his innovations, the most important of which involved objective assessment of educational attainment both within Brazil and measured against other countries through the PISA system, together with schemes for extending access to schooling, providing books to the furthest outposts of the country and encouraging distance learning, are matters of official record. What the record does not show is the manner in which the man approached the immense problems put before him, a manner I can only describe as ‘graceful toughness’.

Looking objectively at Mediterranean cultures such as that of Brazil, the outsider is struck by the savage selfishness of their citizens when personal privileges are questioned.  Shaking up the complacent lives of teachers and educational bureaucracies is a short route to attracting vituperative criticism (we are seeing a version of it in Britain today, and this is a society where people are used to making personal sacrifice for the general good), yet Paulo Renato rode over these petty attacks with the self-confidence of strong man doing what was right – in contrast to the hysteria of weak men clinging to dogma which characterised his critics.

Paulo Renato was a Renaissance man in a shabby world of specialists – he enjoyed his sailing, though when I knew him work prevented him from doing it as often as he would have liked; when he visited a relative who had just had a baby I watched him give an informal lecture on how the bones of the infant skull knit together; he enjoyed his wine and his cigars and his house had good paintings.  We read his career path and it seems to have been an uninterrupted rise from one post of immense responsibility to another and yet this was not achieved by crawling to authority: he was working for a United Nations agency Chile when Pinochet seized power and he and his wife Giovanna took into their own house refugees from Brazil whose position in this new dictatorship had become perilous – at one time hosting 17 of them.  He and Giovanna also housed for a year a family member branded a ‘dissident’ by the Brazilian dictators, but they never boasted of these acts nor sought to gain personal or political capital from them

In life Paulo was an inspiration to those of us working in education at a far lower level and even his death reminds of another of John Donne’s reflections: “Do not ask who the funeral bell is ringing for – it’s ringing for you”.  The best thing those of us can do who are lucky enough to still be in the world and have the chance to do something useful in life is to take a lesson from Paulo and keep trying to make the world a better place.

HOW TO READ A SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET

Sonnet 18

by William Shakespeare

                                Original Version                                                                    ‘Modernised’ Version

a b a b c d c d e f e f g g

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.   Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?  You are more lovely and more modest .    Strong winds shake the precious little May buds,  and the summer is too short. Sometimes the sun shines too hot And his gold complexion grows faint; And sometimes all beauty becomes less beautiful  either by chance or the unchanged course of nature;  but your eternal summer will not fade away  nor lose that beauty you owe;  nor shall death boast that you walk in his shadow  when you grow in eternal verses to time;  as long as men can breathe or eyes can see,  this will live and this gives you life.

A sonnet is defined by the number of lines it contains – 14. In the English language these lines conform to what we call the ‘iambic pentameter’, the standard line of English verse, which is defined by the distribution of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, if we take the first line of the sonnet above we see that the natural stresses in pronunciation (if we exaggerate a little) fall like this:

shall I comPARE thee TO a SUMmer’s DAY

You might argue with my distribution of stress in this line and when scanning poetry it is often better to start with the second line of the poem because poets often break the rules in the first line to attract attention to it, so let's have a look at:

Thou ART more LOVEly AND more TEMPerATE

What is happening here is that the line is being divided into five ‘feet’ consisting of two syllables each, an unstressed one followed by a stressed one, thus:

   1     |        2       |     3     |      4        |    5

Thou ART| more LOVE| ly AND| more TEMP | erATE

This ‘foot’ is known as the iambic foot (there are other different kinds of feet, but for now we shall just look at this one, the form of which is easy to remember because the phrase i AMB | ic  FOOT consists of two iambic feet). As there are five of these in the standard line of English poetry, the line is known as the ‘iambic pentameter’.  Just as a point of interest, the phrase ‘blank verse’ means poetry written in non-rhyming iambic pentameters, whereas ‘free verse’ means poetry written in no recognised formal distribution of sounds.  Most of the poetry in Shakespeare’s plays is blank verse.

The other aspect that defines the sonnet is its rhyme scheme. If we look at the first four lines above, we see that the first and second, and third and fourth lines rhyme, so we label this distribution as ‘abab’. The next four lines also rhyme, but with different sounds, so we call this group ‘cdcd’. If we look at the poem as a whole, we see that the rhyme scheme is the following:

abab  cdcd  efef  gg

The four-line groups are called ‘quatrains’ and the two-line group is the ‘couplet’.  In passing, it's interesting to note how formal poetry has a mathematical element, just as music has; we have specific numbers of syllables in line, specific numbers of lines that rhyme in a set order, specific numbers of lines in a verse (or stanza) and in the case of the sonnet, a specific number of lines in the poem as a whole.

The point about the 14-line sonnet is that this number can be formulated in various ways, e.g.:

abab  cdcd  efe  ghg

Finally, the sonnet usually contains two linked themes.  The change in theme usually happens around the 9th line, although in this poem it happens in l.10. Let's see how it happens:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st

In the first part of the poem Shakespeare has been telling his loved one how her beauty is more permanent than that of the summer and the general tone is light, airy and cheerful; then the mood changes and refers to death and ‘his shade’. 

We find that in discussing the technical aspects of the sonnet we are now talking of its meaning, so let's go back to the beginning and start an interpretation of the theme of the work.  At the end of the 1960s I remember seeing a film made by or for the British Council about the role of nature in Shakespeare's works. The theme of this film has stayed with me ever since because it reminds us that until the Industrial Revolution ordinary people had a three-part relationship with nature that most of us have lost. The first part is based on the fact that almost all the objects they had contact with were organic; they deatl mainly with wood and leather and with clay in the form of pottery. Metal was expensive to obtain and relatively few domestic or professional objects were made of it. (In passing, this makes us realise how phenomenally wealthy the armour-wearing gentry and nobility were.)

The second aspect of the relationship with nature is the intimate knowledge people had of the names of plants and natural phenomena. If you or I walked out into the countryside today, how many plants or trees could we identify by name? Shakespeare and his contemporaries not only knew the names of plants but also knew what nutritional or medicinal properties they had. In addition, these people were in intimate contact with both wild and domesticated animals, the former for hunting and the latter for farm work and/or eating. Again, how many of us have killed, plucked and gutted chickens for our table? I'm told that there are children today who believe that roast chicken starts its life on the supermarket shelf.

The third aspect of the relationship with nature concerns time. Shakespeare and his contemporaries would not have easy access to clocks or calendars. They measured time of day by the sun and the months of the year either by the seasons or by religious festivals.  We find frequent references in literature to temporal concepts such as: "We shall be gone before Michaelmas" and as late as 1820 we find John Keats writing his long poem The Eve of Saint Agnes (the day before the Festival of Saint Agnes). My mother was born on a hill farm in Wales at the beginning of the 20th century and long after she had moved away from the farm she still had a parallel sense of ‘agricultural time’ and I remember her commenting as we looked out of the window on train journeys (in those days ordinary people could still afford to travel on British trains): "Hmmm, they’re late getting the hay in here".

The vitally important aspect of the human relationship with nature in the pre-Newtonian world is that, although rational-thinking people accepted the Copernican universe in which the Earth and the planets revolve around the sun, there was a ‘poetic’ way of thinking that still gave value to the Platonic view of the universe as one in which the sun and planets were fixed in transparent, concentric spheres that circulated around the earth. Proof of the validity of this kind of philosophical ‘doublethink’ can be seen in the fact that even  today the most serious newspapers carry daily or weekly horoscopes alongside news reports of the latest discoveries of the Hubble telescope. And it's a reasonably safe bet that more people read the former than the latter.

No matter which astronomical system Shakespeare is following in this poem, no one can doubt that the sun is an element of maximum value in the lives of human beings, so much so that various civilisations have worshipped it. Therefore, if Shakespeare is saying that his loved one is more beautiful than the earthly elements nourished by the sun, she gains extra value from the comparison.

The great problem with beauty, of course, is time. As soon as the human being achieves a state of beauty that state begins to decline with the onset of wrinkles, unwanted weight, lack of hair where it is needed and excess of it where not needed, and various appendages becoming victims to the laws of gravity. And this is where Shakespeare is able to defy the natural processes by saying that even the sun's rule over summer comes to an end, but the summer of the loved one is eternal because she has been enshrined in his poem.

I suspect that, had Britain had Ayatollahs or the Inquisition at this time, Shakespeare could well have been hauled up on a charge of heresy because what he is doing here is saying that he, a mere mortal, is capable of endowing immortality upon another mortal whereas this is something that only God can do. I feel this shows, as most of Shakespeare's plays show, the opening of the modern age. Although Renaissance man does not deny the existence of God, he does question many of the traditional Church's official lines concerning God. Shakespeare's great characters like Hamlet and Macbeth bestride the narrow Earth and hurl their questions at the Deity. In Germany, where the Reformation began, Dr Faustus makes his pact with the devil in quite a rational way while even in ultra-Catholic Spain, Don Juan defies Christian rules knowing that he will go to Hell.

In other words Shakespeare is showing us here the authentic arrogance possessed by the great artist who is aware of his own power - and history has proved him right. You and I are reading this poem today and there is no reason to doubt that it will be preserved somewhere and read once again after the generation that believes Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and computer games are the height of culture has sunk into oblivion.

CRYOSTASIS AND THE MODERN STATE

OK, I’m showing off because I’ve just discovered the meaning of cryostasis, “the reversible cryopreservation of live biological objects”, but it is a useful word to convey the ideas I have in mind.  The thought came to me as I was watching on television the ceremony of Trooping the Colour in London. The public were treated to the spectacle of 3,000 British soldiers, 400 bandsmen and about 250 mounted cavalry performing intricate parade ground manoeuvres before the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

The television presenters made a point of reminding us that the soldiers on parade were on a rotation of duty from Afghanistan, where they would presumably return after this period of being posted back home. What struck me, however, was the fact that the uniforms of the infantry seemed to date from the Crimean War (although the guns they carried were those currently issued to British forces) whereas the uniforms of the cavalry and the bandsmen seem to be of an earlier period. Where exactly is the logic in this? How was it decided to freeze ceremonial uniform at a particular point in history? And if the uniform dates from a certain period, why are the men not carrying weapons of that period?  (Incidentally, the gun they were carrying has received a considerable amount of criticism as a fighting weapon, leading to the subversive thought that the time and effort put into ceremonies such as this might be better employed improving the soldiers' working tools.)

The same question must be asked about the cavalry: although they were the main motive for me watching the ceremony as I ride in a very amateur fashion, we do have to ask what the purpose is of maintaining what must be an extremely expensive ceremonial outfit, even if the men do serve their time on the modern battlefield, although in armoured cars rather than on horseback. We have to ask this question because men have died on those battlefields because of the lack of adequate equipment, equipment that had not been provided because of cutbacks in military expenditure instigated by a Chancellor of the Exchequer who is possibly a candidate for a treason trial (just to clarify, I refer to Gordon Brown). I have to be very careful making this point for fear of being denounced as what I once heard a senior Paratroop officer laughingly refer to as a “BGR” (Bloody Guardian Reader); no, this essay is not in the least anti-military, indeed I am striving to find ways to see where the British armed services may be enabled to act more effectively in spite of the country’s continuing economic decline.

On the one hand it is quite clear that for soldiers taking part in these ceremonies and presumably for their colleagues watching, these events make an immense contribution to morale and esprit de corps. Another argument trotted out when the subject arises is the contribution such ceremonies make to the tourist trade. This is, or should be regarded as, irrelevant nonsense.  On the other hand I have to make a private mental reference to the two most successful armies of recent times: those of Vietnam and Israel. To the best of my knowledge neither of these armies takes part in such elaborate ceremonies and they are certainly not famous for their military bands. Also, in the case of the Vietnamese army’s conflict with, and victory over, the most powerful armed forces on earth, there was no comfortable recycling of men (or women) from the front line back to a few months of ceremonial duties in Hanoi.  Neither do we notice a significant presence of cavalry in the armed forces of either of these countries; and does morale of their soldiers suffer from the lack of globally televised marching exercises?

Just in passing, it is interesting to note that the fighting forces of both these countries contain women. The units on parade at Trooping the Colour included no women; the only females taking part in the ceremony were the Queen and Princess Anne and while one would not wish to enter into conflict, armed or otherwise, with Princess Anne, it’s interesting to speculate why female members of the British Armed Forces are not represented in Guards’ Regiments.

Now that Britain’s global status has declined to the point where we have to share an aircraft carrier with the French and when soldiers are being killed because their regiments cannot afford appropriate body armour or properly protected vehicles, we should perhaps be looking at the kind of expenditure that goes into these events. I would estimate that a cavalryman’s cuirass costs about the same as a flak jacket; how much does an infantryman’s dress uniform cost and is it necessary for him to have one at all? Sorry to labour the point, but Israeli servicemen do not wear dress uniform unless they are military attachés serving abroad.

I don’t intend to get started on the question of military bands but was told recently that bandsmen are trained in first aid and function as medics when their regiments are in action. Now, I’ve never been a soldier and would have been a very bad one if I had, but there’s something at the back of my mind that says if I were facing the AK-47s of persons ill-disposed towards me I would actually prefer to receive medical assistance from a full-time professional rather than someone who divides his energies between learning first aid and practising his scales. In the 21st-century the argument that military bands have been in existence since the 17th century and served to rally men in the confused scenarios of mass battles does not cut much ice.

Something that also concerns me is that this cryostasis invades other areas of life and is given a superficially attractive historical gloss. One example of this is the Beefeaters at the Tower of London; once again we ask: why is their uniform frozen in a certain point in the 16th century? A possible answer is that these individuals have been removed from the reality of modern life and placed into a living tableau that serves up the Tower of London is a cosy piece of national history with one or two gruesome elements thrown in to simulate reality whereas the authentic nature of the edifice is a symbol of the Norman brutality that subjugated a conquered people. Our law courts as well remove their officers from daily life by disguising them in gowns and wigs trapped at a certain point in the nation’s history (fixed at the time of mourning the death of Queen Anne in 1714). In this case the alienation from reality is presumably intended to bestow some kind of mystical virtue and the officers of the court as religious vestments do for the clergy.

The same thing happens with the inanimate world. Scattered all over the country are the ruins of cathedrals destroyed by Henry VIII and castles destroyed in the Civil War.  I have a personal link to these monuments because my father and grandfather were stonemasons employed by the Ministry of Works in the 1930s and 40s making these ruins safe for tourists to visit.  So ironically, we have the state first of all constructing these edifices then destroying them and later ordering their cryostatic preservation in a state of frozen decay. This is about as logical as maintaining a military band today and possibly has something to do with the Romantic movement of the 19th century, which had a soft spot for, and in some cases even built, ruined buildings. 

Both my grandfather (who was the Clerk of Works) and my father (who was his apprentice) worked on the ruins of Tintern Abbey in the Wye Valley which, of course, inspired one of Wordsworth’s great Romantic poems. But should this be the function of what was originally a magnificent piece of architecture in one of the most beautiful parts of the country - providing inspiration for poets and a background for modern day-trippers to eat their ice creams?  I hesitate to suggest that the Abbey should be rebuilt and turned into flats, and there is neither the public nor the demand in the area to justify it being rebuilt and turned into a concert hall but surely it is absurd to leave these ruins in their frozen state. Reconstructing the building would involve re-learning old skills and perpetuating skills that are in danger of dying out and then, who knows, given the way spiritual life is developing in Britain, it could probably become a mosque.

Back in the 1960s Harold Wilson entertained us all as possibly the last Prime Minister endowed with genuine wit and one of his funnier jokes was to claim that the country was about to pass through the “white hot revolution” of technology. Since then there has been much rhetoric about cutting the nation’s coat according to its economic cloth, but this has not really happened except when the cloth has been cut for us by outside forces. It really is time to take a good look at those elements of our society that we have chosen to freeze at a certain point in time and to debate whether they should continue to exist and if so, how they can be properly brought up to date.

LANGUAGE AND FORMULAE (updated)

I was talking recently to one of my neighbours and he told me he and his wife were going to spend their holidays in a place he called ‘Mumbai’.  I asked if he would also be visiting Chennai and Kolkata and he looked puzzled.  I pointed out that these were the local Indian names for Madras and Calcutta respectively and that if we British are going to express our post-colonial guilt by reverting to local names for places, we should at least be consistent in adopting these names and not just follow the fashions of the British media. Also, if we go beyond the old Empire and visit Russia we don’t talk of going to Moskva, nor is it customary to pronounce the name of the French capital as Paree.

What has happened of course is that my neighbour has ‘tagged’ his discourse with a symbol intended to show his multicultural credentials, along with a sub-text of “God, what a terrible thing that Empire was!  Look how I’m making the effort to use your names in an attempt to say sorry.  Please love us now that Britain in poor and in debt and we need your investment”.

Another case where language formulae reveal a lack of knowledge is the pronunciation in British English of the variations of the word ‘harass’ as in ‘sexual harASSment’.  The formulation of the concept of sexual harassment as a social problem was a valuable outcome of the feminist movement in the USA, where the pronunciation is ‘harASS’.  As we know, ever since the First World War, when America has sneezed Britain has said “Bless you” and so the concept of sexual harassment (and later other variations) soon crossed the Atlantic, where the semi-literate who were unfamiliar with words at the intellectual level of ‘HARass’ (in British English pronunciation) had no idea of how to say the word and so followed the American pattern.

To those with ears attuned to accents an interesting phenomenon has appeared over the last fifteen years or so in the spoken language of young, middle-class Englishwomen.  This is the introduction of a weak ‘yod’ (the vowel /i:/ or the semi-vowel /j/) before the phoneme /u:/, especially in the word ‘you’, which is pronounced ‘yiu’, as in “Can I help yiu?”.  It also creeps into the verb ‘do’, as in “How do yiu diu?”  These young people probably do not realise what they are doing; they are simply adopting formulae of social identity just as they adopt the physical formulae of identity by buying the clothes and makeup they find in magazines aimed at the market they represent.

It is interesting that this mainly appears in female discourse because theoretically English does not distinguish between male and female speakers, whereas some nations and tribes have different languages for men and for women. However, I have noticed that in Spain women in Madrid turn the ‘s’ sound into ‘sh’ in certain words.

Television is a transmitter of these patterns and sometimes creates its own formulae. Two examples have become common in recent years. The first is the automatic official response to loss of life, where some unfortunate PR person is landed with the task of saying: "Our thoughts go out to the relatives" of murder victims or whatever, and the second is when the news is given of the death of a member of the Armed Forces: "His/her relatives have been informed". What is tedious about these formulae is that they are completely meaningless and exist only as a kind of signal that says: "We are dealing with tragedy here". The first is a total lie: the thoughts of relevant authorities very rarely "go out" to anyone, and the second is totally irrelevant: obviously the dead person’s relatives have been informed before the news item goes out and whether they have or not remains a matter of complete indifference to the general public. Television crime fiction from the USA is bringing us the phrase: "I'm sorry for your loss" and it will be interesting to see if this infiltrates into common usage in Britain.

I was at a rugby match recently and had the misfortune to sit next to one of those boring young men who insist on sharing his own take on the game with all those in earshot. It was interesting to note the number of phrases he used that are normally only heard in television commentaries: "He's usually good with ball in hand" and "Oh, good skills there!” As if we Welsh supporters don't suffer enough from watching ‘our lads’ underperform, we now have to put up with instant commentary in the stands.

We also have formulae that try to imply an air of professionalism (were usually professionalism does not exist) as in "These bargains available in store now" and "The programme airs at 5 pm" and the related "It’s on air now". Had I but world enough and time I would try to track down the originators of this nonsense but time’s chariot is at my back and there are more important things to do in life. In moments of leisure, however, it is amusing to draw a mental picture of the updated David Brent figure responsible: today he would have the obligatory shaven head, the Subaru Impreza and a three-button suit jacket with the top two buttons done up.

And then we have those people who are only one step up the food chain from graffiti-vandals, those who proclaim details of their personal lives through the medium of car stickers. I have sometimes thought of setting up a small company to manufacture car stickers, or perhaps we might call them anti-car stickers. The first would be: "So your baby is on board. Now what do I do?" Then we might try: "I don't own a horse so I don't care whether you slow down for them or not". This would form part of a general campaign against the smugness that produces the "Baby on board" or "I slow down for horses" stickers that are really saying: "I have a baby, so there" or "I'm rich enough to own a horse, or at least my daughter’s in the Pony Club". In real life, I did see a beautiful sticker in Brazil some years ago that read: "Next time let's vote for the bitches because their sons have done nothing for us".  Also in real life, I was once leaving my office to go to lunch and noticed a sticker on a car parked in the street that read: “Abortion kills”, so I returned to the office and printed on a sheet of paper “So does over-population” and taped it to the vehicle.

Do any of these points take us any further than the ramblings of a grumpy old man? Actually they do, and here I am backed up by George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language in which he shows how lazy language leads to lazy thinking and lazy thinking in its turn can lead to oppression. We may say that subtle variations in accent on the part of teenage girls in England are not particularly important but we have seen how the rise of tribalism among young people, fostered by certain social contact programmes on the Internet, has led to violence and suicide among teenage girls and accent is one of the most significant markers of tribal difference. The recent dismissal from an American television series of a young woman from the north-east of England called Cheryl Cole because of her accent, before she had even started work, is interesting from this point of view. I am certain her extremely attractive accent would have been perfectly intelligible to the US audience; the problem was that it was an unfamiliar accent from outside the group of tribes acceptable to US television executives practising their own form of isolationism.

Another point of Orwell's essay is that formulaic language can be used to manipulate the masses. This tends to occur most often in periods of armed conflict and the military are masters of this, with their ‘collateral damage’ and ‘blue on blue strikes’, but these terms have spread in our politically correct times so that we now have ‘social housing’, meaning ‘homes for the poor’ and ‘ethnic minorities’, which almost always applies to coloured minorities rather than, say, Polish immigrants. Life is too short for us to even begin to tackle the phraseology of political correctness, so we'll let that one lie for the moment. After I first published this essay online I was watching some nonsense action film on television where they used the pretentious phrase "I have you visual" - another bit of pseudo-professional jargon meaning 'I see you' that goes along with 'Affirmative' or 'Roger that' for 'Yes'.  People who use radios may say that 'Yes' is too short a word and might get lost in transmission in less-than-perfect conditions, but 'Yes I do' or 'Yes I can' would be perfectly effective.  Do US lorry-drivers still use CB radios?  At least their jargon, which came to us in the 1980s, seemed to be slightly self-mocking and came up with the wonderful word 'negatory' for 'no'.

The great wave of the use of the word ‘community’ seems to have passed but in its heyday  it represented a classic attempt at social marketing. Ever since the Industrial Revolution began to systematically destroy traditional communities, a situation ironically made worse by later well-meaning but misguided attempts at renovating slum housing, we have seen urban life in Britain evolve into social wasteland. At some point in the 1960s the decision was taken to include the word ‘community’ in government documents at every opportunity in the hope that, like the speck of grit in an oyster, the very word would attract the ethos of mutual help, street parties, Pearly Kings and Queens and the Harvest Festivals beloved of Prime Minister John Major's little old ladies cycling to church. In response to calls for more ‘bobbies on the beat’ we were given the ‘community policeman’, though if you could ever locate one of these characters in the event of an emergency or a crime you would be doing very well indeed.

Is there hope? Not, I think in our generation. The problem lies in the example I gave above of the young man at a rugby game: broadcast and print media have such a central part in our lives that it takes a strong (or grumpy) personality to stand against the formulaic phraseology that represents formulaic thinking. Going back to Orwell, one of his recommendations for good writing is: if you find yourself using a phrase you have read before, strike it out.

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN – AN AMERICAN ALLEGORY

There may be a younger generation out there that is unfamiliar with the story of the film The Magnificent Seven, so let’s just run over it. The film, directed by John Sturges, appeared in 1960, and is a re-working of the Japanese film Seven Samurai (1954, directed by Akira Kurosawa). The American version tells the story of impoverished Mexican farmers whose village is regularly raided by bandits. The villagers raise a pathetic amount of money to send three representatives across the border into the USA in search of gunmen who will drive the bandits away permanently. As the film is set at the time when the Old West was coming under the rule of law, seven professional gunfighters choose the excitement of practising their trade over the boredom of conventional employment and go south to train the villagers to build defences around the village and to shoot revolvers and rifles. The outcome, obviously, is the defeat of the bandits along with the inevitable sacrifice of some of the seven, while the youngest of them, shown to be an excitable youth rather than a cold-blooded killer, stays behind to marry one of the village girls.

One of the natural pitfalls of the critic (and God preserve me from becoming a ‘critic’ – I never criticise anyone whose job I could not do and I could never direct a film – can we call me a ‘commentator’?) is to read too much into a work of art, but nevertheless, while we must tread very carefully around this film, it shows some interesting projections (no pun intended) into the world of the 1960s. Firstly the film breaks away from the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the early phase of American cinema in which actors have Anglo-Saxon names and those playing upper-class characters have English accents. If we look at the technical credits of such films once again Anglo-Saxon or at least ‘European Union’ names predominate.

The cast of The Magnificent Seven however is led by Yul Brynner, who was born in Russia and also includes Charles Bronson, born Charles Buchinski, the son of Lithuanian immigrants and who did not speak English until the age of 11, Eli Herschel Wallach, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, Brad Dexter, christened Boris Michel Soso by his Serbian parents and the young German actor Horst Buchholz. Only the most fanatical fans of the film will be able to name any of the actors playing the Mexican peasants, but an interesting piece of trivia is the fact that the wise old man of the Mexican village is played by Vladimir Sokoloff, who was born in Moscow when it was still the capital of the Russian Empire.

Another aspect of the film that marks its period is the calculated cultivation of ‘coolness’ among the lead characters, with the exception of the youngster played by Buchholz and the cynical optimist, played by Dexter. This sense of being cool permeates the counterculture of the Vietnam era and is found in films such as Easy Rider, the rather self-regarding and overrated jazz of Miles Davis, the technical slickness of pop art and the Camelot myth of the Kennedys.

Two scenes from The Magnificent Seven typify this theme: the first is the sequence where Yul Brynner’s character Chris and Steve McQueen’s Vin drive the horse-drawn hearse to the cemetery to bury an indian while threatened by the hidden guns of certain racist citizens, muttering professional advice to each other without making eye contact. The second scene that stands out for its ‘coolness’ is where James Coburn’s character Britt performs the anatomically impossible and tactically stupid feat of throwing a knife that apparently pierces a man’s rib cage with the blade in a vertical plane. Having spoken perhaps two words in the whole of the episode, the character then returns to his original position, lying on the ground with his hat over his face. Interestingly, Coburn was a big fan of the original Kurosawa film and was desperate to get this role, which paralleled that of his favourite character in the Japanese version. Although we think of Coburn as one of the stars of the film, which he is, he actually only speaks 11 lines of dialogue.

In short, then, the casting of the stars and the projection of their demeanour is an enlargement of how the USA saw itself in the 1960s: the melting pot has succeeded in fusing people whose families originated in different lands and with different names, and also the raw ex-colonial society has now achieved its own form of sophistication.

And what is the new USA going to do with its people and its world-view? In addition to standing as a bulwark against the evils of the original communist states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it is going to prevent communism from spreading into other parts of the world by sending soldiers to fight in Vietnam. This is where The Magnificent Seven, takes on its allegorical form. The poor, downtrodden South Vietnamese (in reality the brutal and corrupt South Vietnamese elite oppressing poor, downtrodden South Vietnamese peasants) asks for help in defending itself against the vicious communist bandits from the North (in reality vicious communist bandits from the North).

And so poor, downtrodden American peasants who could not afford the strategies to avoid the draft, or who had joined the military because of their poverty, were sent halfway around the world to try to survive for two years in an alien environment, defending an alien people whose desire to be defended was often difficult to discern. The Magnificent Seven, however, performs the role of Olivier’s film of Henry V during the Second World War, a return to the national mythology (in this case the Western, rather than mediaeval history) in order to summon popular support for a national conflict. The seven characters never question the justice of their cause, they either bemoan the condition of their lives in which they can no longer go around killing people with impunity or, like Shakespeare’s murderous kings, nourish the inner demons that have resulted from their earlier killings.

Given that we are dealing with relations between Americans and Mexicans, there is another allegorical element to The Magnificent Seven and that is US involvement in Latin America. As a neutral Briton, I am surprised at the strength of anti-American feeling I find in Latin America, but when one reads of the long-standing incompetence of American foreign relations with relation to the southern neighbours this becomes explicable, and here The Magnificent Seven shoots itself neatly in the foot. Firstly, there is the language question: the American characters who are clearly living near to Mexico speak no word of Spanish while illiterate Mexican peasants have somehow acquired quite fluent English. This mechanism places all of the Mexican characters, by reason of their "I weell keell heem" accents, on an inferior linguistic level to their American helpers, reinforcing their technical inferiority in terms of defending themselves.

(As an aside, it is worth commenting on an interesting technique used by non-Latino Americans when they are forced to use Spanish words. Words ending in the letters ‘-os’ are distorted in pronunciation so that the name ‘Carlos’, which should be pronounced ‘Carrloss’ is in fact spoken as ‘Carloce’. In the same way, plural nouns such as ‘tacos’ are pronounced ‘tacoce’. Although this phenomenon applies principally to Spanish words, by extension, it affects Greek words such as ‘kosmos’, which becomes ‘kosmoce’.  The fascinating point in all this is that no American has ever heard a native Spanish speaker introduce himself as ‘Carloce’, nor has he ever been offered ‘tacoce’ in Mexico. This distortion is a form of linguistic apartheid by which the non-Latino distances himself from a possibly suspect ancestry.)

Be that as it may, we must return to our film which, in addition to showing flawed but basically noble Americans defending the freedom of the weak, also attempts to ingratiate itself with a Latin American audience. The Americans castigate each other for eating well at the expense of the locals, some of them die in defence of the village, Charles Bronson’s character chides children who despise their fathers for not being fighters, there is a terrible, mawkish scene where the villagers process, singing La Paloma, and there is the obligatory inclusion of the local folk dance and fireworks to show how culturally inclusive the filmmakers are.

In conclusion, do the wider ripples cast by the film detract from its quality? Probably not, if you can drag your mind away from those wider implications and enjoy it as just a film. The ‘coolness’ is very well portrayed and it was the feature of the culture of the time (brilliantly parodied later by Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther films and by James Coburn himself in spoof spy films) and we must not forget the excellent performance by Eli Wallach. Unfortunately, this does bring us back to the broader aspect of the film: no Mexican actor could be trusted to play the major Mexican character so the filmmakers looked to this descendant of Polish Jews. Wallach is one of the major actors of his generation and plays the role brilliantly but today we look back at The Magnificent Seven from a cinematic environment in which Antonio Banderas or better still, Javier Bardem, would automatically be looked at for this part. So we have made some progress, a small step for mankind.