"DARnet Andy Roberts" - 9 new articles
- I don't hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling
- Toto recall: the Wizard of Oz hits the West End
- Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change?
- Tunisian prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi resigns amid unrest
- Drowning on Dry Land – review
- Wisconsin is making the battle lines clear in America's hidden class war
- Egypt's generals unveil reform package
- What the frack? US natural gas drilling method contaminates water
- Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple
I don't hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling
I love my iMac but I don’t sync.
In 2007, I wrote a column entitled “I hate Macs”. I call it a column. It was actually an unbroken 900-word anti-Apple screed. Macs, I claimed, were “glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy-cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work.”
In 2009, I complained again: “The better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them . . . I don’t care if every Mac product comes with a magic button on the side that makes it piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home.”
The lady doth protest too much. A few weeks later, I buckled and bought an iPhone. And you know what? It felt good. Within minutes of switching it on, sliding those dinky little icons around the screen, I was hooked. This was my gateway drug. Before long I was also toting an iPad. And after that, a Macbook. All the stuff people said about how Macs were just better, about them being a joy to use . . . it was true, all of it.
They make you feel good, Apple products. The little touches: the rounded corners, the strokeable screens, the satisfying clunk as you fold the Macbook shut – it’s serene. Untroubled. Like being on Valium.
Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn’t want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn’t on your side. It doesn’t even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple.
Here’s a familiar, mundane scenario: you’ve got an iPhone with loads of music on it. And you’ve got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your phone. But you can’t hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other device. Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes.
Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating “.docx” Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet.
Plug your old Apple iPhone into your new Apple Macbook for the first time, and because the two machines haven’t been formally introduced, iTunes will babble about “syncing” one with the other. It claims it simply MUST delete everything from the old phone before putting any new stuff on it. Why? It won’t tell you. It’ll just cheerfully ask if you want to proceed, like an upbeat robot butler that can’t understand why you’re crying.
No one uses terms like “sync” in real life. Not even C3PO. If I sync my DVD collection with yours, will I end up with one, two, or no copies of Santa Claus the Movie? It’s like trying to work out the consequences of time travel, but less fun, and with absolutely no chance of being adapted into a successful screenplay.
Apple’s “sync” bullshit is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it’s actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of gold. So rather than risk that, they’ll choose – every single time – to restrict your options, without so much as blinking.
Sure, you can get around the irritating sync-issue, but doing so requires a degree of faff and brainwork, like solving the famous logic problem about ferrying a load of foxes and chickens across a river without it all ending in feathers and death. And even if you find it easy, it’s a problem Apple don’t want you to solve. They want you to give up and go back to dumbly stroking that shiny screen, pausing intermittently to wipe the drool from your chin.
Apple continually attempts to scrape even more money from anything that might conceivably pass through iTunes’ tight, leathery anus. Take ebooks. Apple’s own iBook reader app may be nauseatingly pretty, but it’s not a patch on Amazon’s Kindle, which, far from being just a standalone machine, is a surprisingly nifty cross-platform “cloud” system that lets you read books on a variety of devices, including the iPhone and iPad. It even remembers what page you were on, regardless of whichever machine you were reading it on last. (It does that by “syncing” – but we’ll forgive it that, because a) it happens seamlessly and b) you never, ever lose any of your purchases.)
Now Apple, typically, are no longer content to let people read Kindle books on their iPhones and iPads without muscling in on some of that money themselves. So they’ve changed their rules, in a bid to force Amazon (and anyone else) to provide in-app purchases for their products. What this dull sentence means in practice is that Apple want a 30% cut each time a Kindle user buys a book from within the iPhone Kindle app.
So 30% less for authors and publishers, and 30% more for the world’s second-largest company. And that’s assuming they’ll let any old book pass through the App store: given their track record, chances are they’ll refuse to process anything they consider objectionable. Still, if they start banning books, never mind. Winnie the Pooh looks great on the iPad.
Every Apple commercial makes a huge play of how user-friendly their devices are. But it’s a superficial friendship. To Apple, you’re nothing. They won’t even give you a power lead long enough to use your phone while it’s on charge, so if it rings you have to crawl around on your hands and knees, like a dog.
So I no longer hate Apple products. In fact I use them every day. But I never feel like I own them. More like I’m renting them from Skynet.
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A preview for the Wizard of Oz opening soon in London’s West End starring Danielle Hope as Dorothy and Michael Crawford as the Wizard, with Hannah Waddingham as the Wicked Witch of the West.
‘From where I’m sitting,” splutters Jeremy Sams, “I can’t think of anything less safe in the world.” The director seems flabbergasted, wounded even, by my suggestion that his new West End production of The Wizard of Oz seems a surefire hit. After all, it reproduces much of the formula that made Sams’s 2006 staging of The Sound of Music such a triumph: it’s a musical better known as a film; it’s an Andrew Lloyd Webber collaboration; choreographer Arlene Phillips and set designer Robert Jones are back on board; the lead, Danielle Hope, is an unknown who won the part in a reality TV show, Over the Rainbow.
“Nothing’s safe,” continues Sams. “Nothing’s safe, and to say safe almost sounds pejorative and derogatory. There are good titles – but if you don’t respect a title, the audience throw shoes at you very quickly.”
If contemplating the audience makes Sams nervous, he has no fears about his creative team. “These are all people who have done big shows, so when things get hairy and scary and look massive, they can say we’ve got through this before, we’ll get through it again.” It also helps, says Arlene Phillips, that “we can pick at each other’s work. None of us are precious about anything if, in the bigger scheme of things, it isn’t going to work.”
Nor does Sams feel any trepidation about working with a young actor whose only qualifications are a drama A-level and three months of training. “We always wanted a young girl, aged 17 or 18, so whoever we cast, it would have been the same issue,” he says. As far as he is concerned, Hope’s appearance on reality TV has been nothing but advantageous – not, oh cynical reader, because of the attendant publicity, but because “someone who’s got the fearlessness to get through a TV job like that arrives with a certain amount of chutzpah. It’s an audition process and an unbelievably stressful and public one.”
Hope is perfect casting, he thinks, because she embodies “the most key thing for Dorothy – not ever to be defeated or downhearted. Even when things are going against her, she has to believe it’s going to be OK.” A few minutes in Hope’s company is enough to see what Sams means: she is radiant with optimism. She is so down-to-earth, you wonder what possessed her to enter Over the Rainbow.
“I’d never watched a reality TV programme,” she laughs. “I didn’t know what I was in for.” She only applied because she didn’t think she would be able to afford to go to drama school. Despite her inexperience, Hope talks like a seasoned actor. Asked if she feels burdened by the responsibility of comparing favourably with Judy Garland, she admits that she did initially, but then says firmly: “I’m not going to imitate Judy because no one could and no one should. I made a conscious decision to find out who [Dorothy] was – if you make that as real as possible, an audience should forget about what they’ve seen.”
Nonetheless, it’s clear that the fame of the film is as much a curse as a blessing. “There’s no way of replicating it, because how do you put a movie on stage?” asks Sams. “Movies have different logic, different structures, different feel, different tempo.” Yet there is a sense in which it is the movie that audiences come to see – and the creative team respect that. “I’d be mad to reinvent it completely,” says Robert Jones. “Everyone’s got images in their head of what The Wizard of Oz is, and to an extent you’ve got to give them that. But it’s got to be my take.”
With another Oz story, Wicked, already attracting huge West End crowds (last year it broke box-office records, earning over £1m in a single week), Sams and Jones know that, to compete, this has to be a lavish show. But it isn’t just that, says Sams: the story demands visual extravagance. “It’s a picaresque with scene after scene after scene in different places, so the show has to be perpetually delivering more things,” he says. The stage for Oz has a triple revolve, with a system of hydraulics that can raise or tilt each section. The models for the design alone took five months to make; and, with 25 scene changes, the building of the set has been “a nightmare”.
It has also made the transfer from the rehearsal room – a bog-standard space with a resolutely flat, still floor – problematic. “So much of the movement becomes hit and miss,” says Phillips. “A stage section you thought was going to be smooth has a gap and you can’t ask people in high heels to tread on it. It’s a complicated process.”
And then there’s the last-minute work required to tailor the show’s lighting and sound. I spend an afternoon watching rehearsals, and progress is agonisingly slow. I start watching at 2pm, as the projections team screen a just-finished animation of the haunted forest. There is a long lull, then the Wicked Witch’s wrought-iron castle revolves into position, presided over by Hannah Waddingham’s imperious witch and two terrifying monkeys. It looks glorious – but it has taken an hour and 20 minutes to run through barely two minutes of show.
The danger, Sams recognises, is that this intense focus on getting the technology working, testing lighting and sound effects, tailoring the choreography to the stage, might swamp the story at the heart of the show. “The trick,” he says, “is to take what we had in the rehearsal room, which is a heartfelt, touching, small thing, and make it small but big.” But despite all his jitters, he’s clearly having the time of his life. “It’s The Wizard of Oz,” he says cheerfully, “and who wouldn’t want to work on The Wizard of Oz?”
The Wizard of Oz opens at
the London Palladium on Tuesday March 1st,
St David’s Day Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blog
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A plan to publish ‘the definite truth about Climate Change‘ using open sourced data and workings.
In 1964, Richard Muller, a 20-year-old graduate student with neat-cropped hair, walked into Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined a mass protest of unprecedented scale. The activists, a few thousand strong, demanded that the university lift a ban on free speech and ease restrictions on academic freedom, while outside on the steps a young folk-singer called Joan Baez led supporters in a chorus of We Shall Overcome. The sit-in ended two days later when police stormed the building in the early hours and arrested hundreds of students. Muller was thrown into Oakland jail. The heavy-handedness sparked further unrest and, a month later, the university administration backed down. The protest was a pivotal moment for the civil liberties movement and marked Berkeley as a haven of free thinking and fierce independence.
Today, Muller is still on the Berkeley campus, probably the only member of the free speech movement arrested that night to end up with a faculty position there – as a professor of physics. His list of publications is testament to the free rein of tenure: he worked on the first light from the big bang, proposed a new theory of ice ages, and found evidence for an upturn in impact craters on the moon. His expertise is highly sought after. For more than 30 years, he was a member of the independent Jason group that advises the US government on defence; his college lecture series, Physics for Future Presidents was voted best class on campus, went stratospheric on YouTube and, in 2009, was turned into a bestseller.
For the past year, Muller has kept a low profile, working quietly on a new project with a team of academics hand-picked for their skills. They meet on campus regularly, to check progress, thrash out problems and hunt for oversights that might undermine their work. And for good reason. When Muller and his team go public with their findings in a few weeks, they will be muscling in on the ugliest and most hard-fought debate of modern times.
Muller calls his latest obsession the Berkeley Earth project. The aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the undertaking is easy to miss. Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and more data than has ever been used, they will arrive at an independent assessment of global warming. The team will also make every piece of data it uses – 1.6bn data points – freely available on a website. It will post its workings alongside, including full information on how more than 100 years of data from thousands of instruments around the world are stitched together to give a historic record of the planet’s temperature.
Muller is fed up with the politicised row that all too often engulfs climate science. By laying all its data and workings out in the open, where they can be checked and challenged by anyone, the Berkeley team hopes to achieve something remarkable: a broader consensus on global warming. In no other field would Muller’s dream seem so ambitious, or perhaps, so naive.
“We are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious,” Muller says, over a cup of tea. “We are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find.” Why does Muller feel compelled to shake up the world of climate change? “We are doing this because it is the most important project in the world today. Nothing else comes close,” he says.
Muller is moving into crowded territory with sharp elbows. There are already three heavyweight groups that could be considered the official keepers of the world’s climate data. Each publishes its own figures that feed into the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City produces a rolling estimate of the world’s warming. A separate assessment comes from another US agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). The third group is based in the UK and led by the Met Office. They all take readings from instruments around the world to come up with a rolling record of the Earth’s mean surface temperature. The numbers differ because each group uses its own dataset and does its own analysis, but they show a similar trend. Since pre-industrial times, all point to a warming of around 0.75C.
You might think three groups was enough, but Muller rolls out a list of shortcomings, some real, some perceived, that he suspects might undermine public confidence in global warming records. For a start, he says, warming trends are not based on all the available temperature records. The data that is used is filtered and might not be as representative as it could be. He also cites a poor history of transparency in climate science, though others argue many climate records and the tools to analyse them have been public for years.
Then there is the fiasco of 2009 that saw roughly 1,000 emails from a server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) find their way on to the internet. The fuss over the messages, inevitably dubbed Climategate, gave Muller’s nascent project added impetus. Climate sceptics had already attacked James Hansen, head of the Nasa group, for making political statements on climate change while maintaining his role as an objective scientist. The Climategate emails fuelled their protests. “With CRU’s credibility undergoing a severe test, it was all the more important to have a new team jump in, do the analysis fresh and address all of the legitimate issues raised by sceptics,” says Muller.
This latest point is where Muller faces his most delicate challenge. To concede that climate sceptics raise fair criticisms means acknowledging that scientists and government agencies have got things wrong, or at least could do better. But the debate around global warming is so highly charged that open discussion, which science requires, can be difficult to hold in public. At worst, criticising poor climate science can be taken as an attack on science itself, a knee-jerk reaction that has unhealthy consequences. “Scientists will jump to the defence of alarmists because they don’t recognise that the alarmists are exaggerating,” Muller says.
The Berkeley Earth project came together more than a year ago, when Muller rang David Brillinger, a statistics professor at Berkeley and the man Nasa called when it wanted someone to check its risk estimates of space debris smashing into the International Space Station. He wanted Brillinger to oversee every stage of the project. Brillinger accepted straight away. Since the first meeting he has advised the scientists on how best to analyse their data and what pitfalls to avoid. “You can think of statisticians as the keepers of the scientific method, ” Brillinger told me. “Can scientists and doctors reasonably draw the conclusions they are setting down? That’s what we’re here for.”
For the rest of the team, Muller says he picked scientists known for original thinking. One is Saul Perlmutter, the Berkeley physicist who found evidence that the universe is expanding at an ever faster rate, courtesy of mysterious “dark energy” that pushes against gravity. Another is Art Rosenfeld, the last student of the legendary Manhattan Project physicist Enrico Fermi, and something of a legend himself in energy research. Then there is Robert Jacobsen, a Berkeley physicist who is an expert on giant datasets; and Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Institute of Technology, who has raised concerns over tribalism and hubris in climate science.
Robert Rohde, a young physicist who left Berkeley with a PhD last year, does most of the hard work. He has written software that trawls public databases, themselves the product of years of painstaking work, for global temperature records. These are compiled, de-duplicated and merged into one huge historical temperature record. The data, by all accounts, are a mess. There are 16 separate datasets in 14 different formats and they overlap, but not completely. Muller likens Rohde’s achievement to Hercules’s enormous task of cleaning the Augean stables.
The wealth of data Rohde has collected so far – and some dates back to the 1700s – makes for what Muller believes is the most complete historical record of land temperatures ever compiled. It will, of itself, Muller claims, be a priceless resource for anyone who wishes to study climate change. So far, Rohde has gathered records from 39,340 individual stations worldwide.
Publishing an extensive set of temperature records is the first goal of Muller’s project. The second is to turn this vast haul of data into an assessment on global warming. Here, the Berkeley team is going its own way again. The big three groups – Nasa, Noaa and the Met Office – work out global warming trends by placing an imaginary grid over the planet and averaging temperatures records in each square. So for a given month, all the records in England and Wales might be averaged out to give one number. Muller’s team will take temperature records from individual stations and weight them according to how reliable they are.
This is where the Berkeley group faces its toughest task by far and it will be judged on how well it deals with it. There are errors running through global warming data that arise from the simple fact that the global network of temperature stations was never designed or maintained to monitor climate change. The network grew in a piecemeal fashion, starting with temperature stations installed here and there, usually to record local weather.
Among the trickiest errors to deal with are so-called systematic biases, which skew temperature measurements in fiendishly complex ways. Stations get moved around, replaced with newer models, or swapped for instruments that record in celsius instead of fahrenheit. The times measurements are taken varies, from say 6am to 9pm. The accuracy of individual stations drift over time and even changes in the surroundings, such as growing trees, can shield a station more from wind and sun one year to the next. Each of these interferes with a station’s temperature measurements, perhaps making it read too cold, or too hot. And these errors combine and build up.
This is the real mess that will take a Herculean effort to clean up. The Berkeley Earth team is using algorithms that automatically correct for some of the errors, a strategy Muller favours because it doesn’t rely on human interference. When the team publishes its results, this is where the scrutiny will be most intense.
Despite the scale of the task, and the fact that world-class scientific organisations have been wrestling with it for decades, Muller is convinced his approach will lead to a better assessment of how much the world is warming. “I’ve told the team I don’t know if global warming is more or less than we hear, but I do believe we can get a more precise number, and we can do it in a way that will cool the arguments over climate change, if nothing else,” says Muller. “Science has its weaknesses and it doesn’t have a stranglehold on the truth, but it has a way of approaching technical issues that is a closer approximation of truth than any other method we have.”
He will find out soon enough if his hopes to forge a true consensus on climate change are misplaced. It might not be a good sign that one prominent climate sceptic contacted by the Guardian, Canadian economist Ross McKitrick, had never heard of the project. Another, Stephen McIntyre, whom Muller has defended on some issues, hasn’t followed the project either, but said “anything that [Muller] does will be well done”. Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia was unclear on the details of the Berkeley project and didn’t comment.
Elsewhere, Muller has qualified support from some of the biggest names in the business. At Nasa, Hansen welcomed the project, but warned against over-emphasising what he expects to be the minor differences between Berkeley’s global warming assessment and those from the other groups. “We have enough trouble communicating with the public already,” Hansen says. At the Met Office, Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution, was in favour of the project if it was open and peer-reviewed.
Peter Thorne, who left the Met Office’s Hadley Centre last year to join the Co-operative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North Carolina, is enthusiastic about the Berkeley project but raises an eyebrow at some of Muller’s claims. The Berkeley group will not be the first to put its data and tools online, he says. Teams at Nasa and Noaa have been doing this for many years. And while Muller may have more data, they add little real value, Thorne says. Most are records from stations installed from the 1950s onwards, and then only in a few regions, such as North America. “Do you really need 20 stations in one region to get a monthly temperature figure? The answer is no. Supersaturating your coverage doesn’t give you much more bang for your buck,” he says. They will, however, help researchers spot short-term regional variations in climate change, something that is likely to be valuable as climate change takes hold.
Despite his reservations, Thorne says climate science stands to benefit from Muller’s project. “We need groups like Berkeley stepping up to the plate and taking this challenge on, because it’s the only way we’re going to move forwards. I wish there were 10 other groups doing this,” he says.
For the time being, Muller’s project is organised under the auspices of Novim, a Santa Barbara-based non-profit organisation that uses science to find answers to the most pressing issues facing society and to publish them “without advocacy or agenda”. Funding has come from a variety of places, including the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (funded by Bill Gates), and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab. One donor has had some climate bloggers up in arms: the man behind the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation owns, with his brother David, Koch Industries, a company Greenpeace called a “kingpin of climate science denial”. On this point, Muller says the project has taken money from right and left alike.
No one who spoke to the Guardian about the Berkeley Earth project believed it would shake the faith of the minority who have set their minds against global warming. “As new kids on the block, I think they will be given a favourable view by people, but I don’t think it will fundamentally change people’s minds,” says Thorne. Brillinger has reservations too. “There are people you are never going to change. They have their beliefs and they’re not going to back away from them.”
Waking across the Berkeley campus, Muller stops outside Sproul Hall, where he was arrested more than 40 years ago. Today, the adjoining plaza is a designated protest spot, where student activists gather to wave banners, set up tables and make speeches on any cause they choose. Does Muller think his latest project will make any difference? “Maybe we’ll find out that what the other groups do is absolutely right, but we’re doing this in a new way. If the only thing we do is allow a consensus to be reached as to what is going on with global warming, a true consensus, not one based on politics, then it will be an enormously valuable achievement.”
Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change?
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Down with the interim coalition Government. The Tunisian mass movement is being emulated in the whole region. In the revolutionary process, the mass of workers, young people and poor are learning very quickly. Past illusions in the ‘benevolent’ and protective role of the army have been replaced by a much more defiant attitude. Egypt take note.
Tunisia was thrown into turmoil once more after Mohamed Ghannouchi resigned as prime minister of the post-revolution government amid further clashes between police and protestors. The interim president, Fouad Mebazaa, named the former government minister Beji Caid-Essebsi as Ghannouchi’s replacement.
Ghannouchi said he felt forced to stand down “because I am not willing to be a person that takes decisions that would end up causing casualties”. He made the announcement after three people died on Saturday and nine others were injured during outbreaks of violence on the streets of the capital, Tunis.
Tunisia’s interim coalition has struggled to assert its authority since a wave of protests that started in December sparked what was called the “jasmine revolution”, leading to the overthrow in January of president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled for 23 years.
Protestors have targeted Ghannouchi, accusing him of being too close to the former government. They have also become frustrated over the slow pace of change since the revolution despite the interim government’s pledge to hold a general election by 15 July this year.
Ghannouchi, 69, who since 1989 had held various ministerial posts under the old regime, told a news conference he had thought carefully about the decision. “I am not running away from responsibility,” he said. “This is to open the way for a new prime minister.”
He added: “This resignation will serve Tunisia, and the revolution and the future of Tunisia.”
On a third day of clashes, police fired tear gas and warning shots in an effort to disperse stone-throwing youths and protesters shouting anti-government slogans around Habib Bourguiba avenue in central Tunis. More than 100 people were arrested and accused of “acts of destruction and burning”, according to a statement by the Tunisian interior ministry put out by the state-run news agency Tunis Afrique Presse.
Demonstrators want the interim government disbanded along with the current parliament. They also seek the suspension of the constitution and the formation of an elected assembly that can write another, organise elections and oversee the transition to democracy.
Ghannouchi took power after Ben Ali fled on 14 January. He formed a new “national unity” government, including opposition party members and a blogger.
Tunisia’s revolution was sparked by the death of a young street vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, in December. In an act of desperation which sparked unrest in several other Arab countries in the region, Bouazizi set fire to himself after officials stopped him selling vegetables without permission.
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Theatre review of Alan Ayckbourn’s Drowning on Dry Land at the at the Jermyn Street theatre.
Long before it became trendy to attack celebrity culture, Alan Ayckbourn satirised it brilliantly in his 1988 Man of the Moment. He returned to the theme in this play, which had its Scarborough premiere in 2004: the year that The X Factor made its debut. And, even if the fame game is now madder than even Ayckbourn foresaw, it’s salutary to be reminded that comedy, at its best, can have a moral purpose.
Ayckbourn’s hero, Charlie Conrad, is a TV celebrity who has charm but no talent: he has risen to the top by his persistent failure, first as a middle-distance athlete and then as a hopeless quiz contestant. But Charlie’s world unravels when he is caught in a compromising position with a female clown at his son’s birthday party. Even if Ayckbourn takes time establishing Charlie’s epic incompetence, he is very good at showing what happens when the bubble bursts. While Charlie’s wife, agent and the sexually impetuous clown all benefit from his humiliating downfall, he himself retreats into a shrunken private life. Although Ayckbourn ends with a faint gesture of hope, the play burns with indignation at the way fame is now divorced from hard work and achievement.
Christopher Coghill makes Charlie a little too blandly apologetic. Otherwise, Guy Retallack’s production nails all the key points. Mark Farrelly is buoyantly funny as a vain celebrity lawyer who helicopters in to destroy the charges brought by the litigious clown, played by Helen Mortimer with a touching solemnity. Emma Swain as Charlie’s resentful wife and Les Dennis, who knows a thing or two about the whirligig of fame, as his agent also lend weight to a play that may not be major Ayckbourn but is one that effectively harpoons our society’s elevation of the untalented.
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From Wisconsin, class politics emerges into the US news, but the interpretation here has more to do with culture and aspirations than the relationships to the means of production. And who is responsible for these ‘distorting filters of media representation’?
You can tell a great deal about a nation’s anxieties and aspirations by the discrepancy between reality and popular perception. Polls last year showed that in the US 61% think the country spends too much on foreign aid. This makes sense once you understand that the average American is under the illusion that 25% of the federal budget goes on foreign aid (the real figure is 1%).
Similarly, a Mori poll in Britain in 2002 revealed that more than a third of the country thought there were too many immigrants. Little wonder. The mean estimate was that immigrants comprise 23% of the country; the actual number was about 4%.
Broadly speaking, these inconsistencies do not reflect malice or wilful ignorance but people’s attempts to make sense of the world they experience through the distorting filters of media representation, popular prejudice and national myths. “The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe,” wrote John Berger in Ways of Seeing. “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”
When it comes to class, Americans have long seen themselves as potentially rich and perpetually middling. A Pew survey in 2008 revealed that 91% believe they are either middle class, upper-middle class or lower-middle class. Relatively few claim to be working class or upper class, intimating more of a cultural aspiration than an economic relationship. Meanwhile, a Gallup poll in 2005 showed that while only 2% of Americans described themselves as “rich”, 31% thought it very likely or somewhat likely they would “ever be rich”.
But trends and ongoing events are forcing a reappraisal of that self-image. Social mobility has stalled; wages have been stagnant for a generation. It is in this light that the growing resistance to events in Wisconsin must be understood. The hardline Republican governor, Scott Walker, has pledged to remove collective bargaining rights from public sector unions and cut local government workers’ health benefits and pension entitlements.
As the prospect of becoming rich diminishes, many are simply trying not to become poor. Inequality of income and wealth has been more readily accepted in the US because equality of opportunity has long been assumed. The absence of the latter raises serious questions about the existence of the former. This tension brought thousands to the streets in all 50 states to support the Wisconsin unions last weekend.
For Walker’s measures to pass, a certain number of local senators must be present in the chamber for the vote. To prevent that happening, the entire Democratic delegation fled the state and is refusing to return until Walker agrees to negotiate. Meanwhile, thousands of pro-union demonstrators have descended on the state capitol to protest, sparking solidarity rallies nationwide.
Polls suggest the public is siding with the unions locally and nationally. A survey last week showed 53% against cutting benefits and pay for government workers and 61% opposed to removing collective bargaining. Even conservative polls suggest a majority in Wisconsin is opposed to Walker’s attempt to eliminate collective bargaining.
Coming so soon after Republican electoral victories at federal and state level, Walker might have anticipated an easier ride for his agenda than this. After all, membership of unions is at an all-time low and public support for them does not fare much better. Moreover, support for unions ordinarily falls when unemployment rises. But these are no ordinary times. For if organised labour has fallen out of favour, the illusion that you can make it on your own is not far behind. A Pew survey in 2008 – before the banking system imploded – showed that fewer Americans than at any time in 50 years thought they were moving forward in life. The number of those who don’t believe you can get ahead by working hard has doubled in 10 years. Half the country thinks its best days are behind it. While many may question the role of the unions, few believe firing 12,000 government workers, as Walker has pledged to do, is the answer.
Walker’s case is as predictable as it is weak. Government workers, he claims, have higher pay and better benefits than others in a bloated state that must slim down if it is to keep running. This is hardly true. Accounting for age and education, US local government employees earn 4% less than their private sector counterparts. Yes, the shortfall in pensions is real. But if the political will existed, calamity could be avoided with a fairly modest increase in the budget allocation. Union members do generally enjoy better benefits. That’s the whole point of being in a union: to improve your living standards through collective action. And that is precisely why Republicans like Walker want to crush them.
His agenda has nothing to do with redressing a fiscal imbalance and everything to do with exploiting the crisis to deliver a killer blow to organised labour. If fixing the budget deficit were really Walker’s priority, he would not have waved through $140m in tax breaks for multinationals or refused to take federal funds for transport or broadband development. Like 10 other states, he might even have raised taxes progressively.
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