Welcome to the 123^rd edition of the Britblog Roundup hosted in the land where chips are double-fried in horse fat and smothered in generous dollops of mayonnaise, more specifically the city of constant police presence outside certain institutions (can’t have the great unwashed driving past unmolested now, can we? Any of them might be a terrorist, what ordinary tourist in their right mind would take snaps of the granite-façaded Stalin baroque palaces after all?), and unapologetic roadblocks excluding all but local residents (who have to prove their status by showing their address-displaying identity cards) and the badge holders who are permitted to pass even the most rigorously enforced cordon.

Given the location of your host, I think it apposite to begin the politics section with Stitching EU up at the Devil’s Kitchen in which the Devil literally is in the detail of the Constitutional Treaty (and, unlike me, he didn’t actually have to sit through the interminable drafting sessions and set-piece speeches produced for the benefit of future generations of historians poring over archival texts as opposed to a more sceptical lay audience, of the pompously-named Convention). Ever adept at sniffing out bias, the Devil points to the unpalatable fact that those who dare to speak out can be punished by being stripped of their pensions (and, if I may add, when you sign up to a contract as an official you impose a permanent gagging order on yourself on pain of same penalty), ideological purity thus extracted by force. He goes on to catalogue the heavy-handed response to an astute publicity stunt by Euro-dissenters involving an inflatable bulldozer (perfectly conceived to expose the authoritarian antipathy towards protest that increasingly hallmarks our age) before engaging in a valiant attempt to stir us out of our terminal (in more ways than one) torpor with an apocalyptic vision: “Labour, LibDems, Tories: it doesn’t matter which you vote for. Remember this time for later years, when you are talking to your children; because when they ask you (struggling with the unfamiliar words), ‘Mummy, Daddy, what was ‘democracy’? What was ‘freedom’?’ And then you can tell them about how some corrupt and hypocritical politicians (they will know that word all right) sold us into slavery and how the British people – grown fat and lazy and stupid and apathetic on a diet of mindless TV and state handouts – let the politicians do it because they had abdicated their freedoms to the state, sacrificed their liberty on the altar of an Easy Life”.

This is perhaps slightly harsh on our fellow citizens, the press must accept some share of the blame in playing down the threat from “Brussels” (shorthand for the EU’s trio of institutions), depicting it as remote (in the sense of being out-of-touch as well as beyond the Channel’s Great Divide smack bang in the middle of Here Be Dragons territory), for the most part ignoring political trends in Europe’s self-appointed HQ, occasionally fulminating against the more abstruse bureaucratic decisions or the more bizarre technical specifications (the perennial favourites being the curvature of the cucumber and condom size – the Italians wanting the standard size one millimetre shorter than the original proposal). If routinely spoon-fed such stories a certain blaséness can be forgiven.

The marvellously entitled Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for WAR ask some highly relevant and searching questions about Complicity in censorship and the firmness of our commitment to freedom of speech.

Sunny at Pickled Politics provides a thoughtful and nuanced review of the recent spate of articles on the subject of disillusionment, integration and the drift towards extremism in On dealing with terrorism. As the author reminds us terrorism has no single cause, a reality disavowed by politicians keen to push themselves into the limelight with the vote-winning “answer” claim in their knee-jerk Newtonian-physics-applied-to-human-interactions approach exacerbated by the soundbite imperative, condensing messages into quotable phrases instantly forgotten after the initial furore has died down. Sunny writes: “Youngsters, especially those religiously inclined, sometimes get involved in political movements for varying reasons. Poverty, drugs and inter-generational conflict may be some but they do not explain why so many Hizb ut-Tahrir members are middle-class and well-spoken. In that sense they’re no different to many of the white radicals who join hardcore socialist/communist/libertarian/racist movements”.

Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling draws attention to another feature of politics so typical of our media-saturated environment (although, on a depper level, the phenomenon could be described as a symptom of post-modern relativism, the loss of authority following the erosion of absolutes) in Fetishizing Public Opinion. Viewers have, after all, become accustomed to phoning in to select the stars of West End musicals, evict ruthless self-promotionalists from houses (though not, sadly, the House of Commons) and so on. The volatility of public opinion is conveniently overlooked when consultation is likely to bolster the policy being pushed and the expressed will of the people patronisingly dismissed as misguided when it jars (bringing us neatly back to the Devil’s Kitchen piece), elected representatives veering left and right as the current whim dictates, blithely ignoring supposed party affiliation, principles long since having ceased to possess any resonance or relevance, mustily old-fashioned (if not downright oppressive) as they are, sounding out the viewers a sop to the age of interactivity, a means of gaining (or maintaining) access to power, nothing more.

Next up are two quite different pieces that express a foreboding at the prospect of Brown at the helm, an exquisite political satire from Rafael Behr, The Last cabinet, a short play in one act and Shuggy’s blog shuddering at the thought of a Dead Poet’s Society approach to education in his essay On inspirational teaching. Whereas I share his dislike of Robin Williams in full-blown Mork mode, not all films about teachers subverting the system are as saccharine (then again, I am a Guardian reader, so I would say that in his assessment, wouldn’t I?) Try Christophe Barratier’s The Chorus, for example, where the unremitting harshness of the discipline causes problems for the “representative[s] of an institution with a set of rules”.

I certainly agree with his sentiments when he speaks of “the education department’s toe-curling ‘Everyone Remembers a Good Teacher’ recruitment adverts”. I don’t know about you, but my most vivid recollections centre on an appallingly bad specimen, a knitting teacher who gloried in the name of Mrs Clucky, though there was nothing mother-hen-like about her as she rapped us over the knuckles with a wooden ruler for dropping a stitch instilling in me a lifetime’s loathing of “feminine” handicrafts or the paedophile in my last year at primary (oh, those innocent days before we had a word for his malignant proclivity) who trembled with the sheer effort of keeping his hands to himself in the vicinity of any girl (and he had a weakness for the precocious ones such as myself) and who wielded his Lochgelly strap with particular savageness if the outstretched palm before him belonged to a sullen boy when belting the entire class for minor breaches of the mandatory hush.

Shuggy concludes: “What I’m saying is we need a system where teachers, whether they are inspiring, rather dull, or something in-between, aren’t confronted on a daily basis with behaviour that is slightly above the criminal but some way below what should be acceptable. After all, no-one goes on about the need to find more ‘inspirational’ police officers, doctors, or social workers”.

Finally, Molly at Gaian Economics muses on the fraud which is money in There’s No Way Like The American Way, whilst Scott Redding at Coventry Green Voice marks the 50^th Anniversary Of Pugwash Conferences (no, it’s not the redoubtable Captain with his crew mates who did NOT include Seaman Staines and Master Bates, but an altogether more serious gathering). In a context where missile shield plans are eliciting aggrieved growling from the Russian bear and the institutionalised insanity whereby acquisition of a nuclear capacity is seen as the passport to superpower status (or at least guarantees being taken serious notice of by the superpowers), we could do worse than remind ourselves that our tenure on this planet is precarious (Threads should be mandatory viewing), stark though that message might be: “As human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between east and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death”.

Before continuing with the political themes, a brief respite with two contributions on our relations with wildlife, the first from Anne Casselman at Inky Circus about the lengths to which scientists will go in pursuit of knowledge (or maybe Dr Barr was indulging a less rational fantasy about being swathed in latex, I will leave it up to you, dear readers, to decide) in TYB: which stands for ‘That’s YOUR boyfriend’, the second from Mr Eugenides in mellower mode about the crisis facing Parsi Zoroastrians in disposing of their dead since the local vulture population has been decimated by Diclofenac poisoning and other pollutants. The title, So you think you can love me and leave me to die? alludes to the religion’s most famous adherent (from a myopic, Western European vantage point), Freddy Mercury.

One more “stray” nomination under the miscellaneous category, a victory sure to warm the cockles of any true blogger’s heart, Manic at Bloggerheads informs us that Emap honours my invoice. Stroppiness pays off – copyright stealers beware!

By way of a prefatory digression to the feminism section, allow me to quote from Zygmunt Bauman on the subject of the result of our collective loss of faith in immortality, an acute awareness of our own ephemerality, in some respects the leitmotif of the week’s selection: “Immortality has lost its most crucial and attractive attribute: the guarantee of irreversibility and irrevocability. The table has been turned round: it is now death, and death alone, which can be assigned the status of the ultimate. Death is no longer a passage to something else. It does not usher into eternity; death is the end of the sensation of eternity which can only be ecstatic and momentary and which has made the thing itself redundant and its characteristics of durable ‘sameness’ all but repulsive. In a sense, this bankruptcy of immortality lends a new attraction to mortal life. True, that life is no longer the only chance we have to earn a residential permit from eternity; but it is now our only chance to taste and enjoy immortality, albeit in its apparently debased form of endemically volatile notoriety” (Is there life after immortality?, in The Individualized Society, p247, emphasis in original).

The body now more than ever before acts as the focal point of anxiety about own transitoriness in a secular substitution of older religious concerns about purification and purging rituals, the body separating us from the eternal, the flesh as source of sin and impurity, with dieting bringing us closer to the ideal of perfection as opposed to fasting bringing us closer to God. Perhaps inevitably, “lifestyle panics” have featured prominently on the policy agenda, with smoking bans and warning labels in the offing on bottles of spirits: “Bodily life being the only thing there is, it is impossible to conceive of an object more precious and more worthy of care. Our times are marked by an obsessive preoccupation with the body. The body is a fortress surrounded by shrewd and surreptitious enemies. The body must be defended daily, and since the traffic between body and hostile ’world out there’ cannot be barred altogether (though people afflicted with anorexia, the disease made to the measure of our times, do earnestly try), all points of entry, the bodily orifices must be closely and vigilantly guarded. Whatever we eat or drink or breathe in or let touch our skin may be unmasked tomorrow as poison, if its virulence has not been revealed already. The body is an instrument of enjoyment, and so it must be fed the attractions the world has in store; but the body is also the most precious of possessions, and so it must be at all costs defended against the world conspiring to weaken and in the end to destroy it. The irremediable contradiction between actions called for by these two obviously incompatible considerations is bound to be an inexhaustible source of anxiety; I suggest that it is the principal cause of the most common and typical neuroses of our time” (op. cit., p248).

Winter at Mind the Gap explores the downmarket end of the women’s magazines market in Vile Bodies with great perspicacity. I have to confess to dipping occasionally into the “brain deads” as I refer to them, when tired and faced with a long train journey. They lack the glossy sophistication and blatant appeal to snobbery of Vogue or Elle, the target audience revealed by the products advertised, washing powder and ready meals predominating rather than Chanel fragrances or Gucci watches. I have surmised that their appeal is broadly similar to that of the “misery memoirs” – with the parade of victims of appalling misfortune, women whose faces have been distorted beyond recognition by tumours, women whose sons have been murdered by knife-wielding yobs, you are reassured that no matter how dissatisfying and shitty your mundane little life might be there are those who are worse off by far – all presented in a lurid freak show-like parade of grotesques.

Winter rightly pinpoints the contradictions and concomitant tensions that operate in their pages. One moment, celebrities are held up as examples of stunning and unattainable perfection only to be demolished the next as nevertheless flabby, ugly and wrinkled in an attempt to cosy up to the constituency who are most unlikely to make the grade (and I count myself amongst the baggy pants brigade without apology) to avoid alienating them altogether with the constant chivvying to buy this face cream and that slim for success book. These limited and rare concessions are just enough to preserve loyalty, all the better to manipulate you with, my dear.

Winter goes on to brilliantly summarise the unease which these publications inspire: “I think my own rather visceral reaction to these magazines comes from my feeling that they’re underlined by a palpable loathing of the female body put across through a stream of images which reiterate a sense that women’s bodies are, at best, deficient and, at worst, disgusting. Over and again they suggest that there is something deeply wrong about being a woman, something potentially horrible, which always threatens to make its appearance, no matter how good you think you look, this inherent repulsiveness always lurks beneath the surface. It is your job as a woman to try and prevent it from becoming visible”.

The body has been the vehicle of entitlement and privilege since time immemorial. Whereas certain blemishes are reputed to enhance the dazzling beauty of the rest, like Cindy Crawford’s mole, one flaw is deemed unforgivable: fat. Lady M at EC1 Cruise Control tackles obesity and the scramble on the part of pharmaceutical companies to beat the competition to the “cure” and ponders how the Internet subverts local legislation with all the associated risk to the buyers of weight loss pills in In search of a miracle. Although well-intentioned, Lady M falls into the usual trap of classifying fatness as “a result of lifestyle choice”, lapsing into the kind of moralising rhetoric which conveniently lets our political masters off the hook by denying the validity of any factor beyond the immediate control of the individual (poverty, absence of outlets selling fresh fruit and vegetables within easy reach of residential areas, lack of affordable sports facilities, overwhelmingly sedentary employment coupled with long hours, etc.).

Taking Acomplia as a case study, Lady M notes “a fairly high number of patients that participated in the Acomplia trials are so depressed and unhappy about their size that they are more likely to consider suicide or self-harm as a means of coping, whether administered weight-loss drugs or not”. The sheer leaden weight of disapproval, barely suppressed sniggers and censure not sugared with the least trace of politeness takes its toll. Humans prefer quick fixes and let’s not forget that in the West we have been rigorously conditioned from birth to buy into the latest fad. It’s called consumerism, and denial, self-imposed austerity and abstinence in the midst of abundance are not virtues it encourages us to cultivate, yet we cruelly (and hypocritically) demand such behaviour from “defectives” whether they be dole-drawers or the amply padded.

On an albeit obliquely related matter, Pandemian negotiates the fashion minefield in Bedizen: “I have had visions – oh such visions! – of summer finally arriving and me with a glass of something 23% proof in one hand and an unpronounceable French cheese in the other, tripping lightly over Hampstead heath or Primrose Hill in something flighty, light and attractively unsuitable for playing Frisbee. A cross between Holly Golightly and a ten dollar a night hooker who reads Sartre in her spare time, if you will”.

You might be tempted to think that since summer is the season for discarding extraneous layers of clothing, with wardrobe woes correspondingly skimpier, that staying cool and comfy might not be fraught with tensions, but Pandemian disabuses you of such naïve misapprehensions, the internalised Foucauldian panoptic monitor constantly gauging the impression conveyed to the beholder.

Tom Hamilton of Let’s be sensible, ventures into the neat little world of certainties of Christian fundamentalists where everyone is straightforwardly either saved or damned and all little girls are filthy tramps and whores in the making, the slightest whiff of forbidden fruit enough to lead them astray from the path of chaste and virginal righteousness, vividly illustrating the perniciousness of the religiously inclined seeking to force their rigid definition of morality on flock and strays alike in Youthful charms: “(…) according to the Christian Institute, who may well be operating as some sort of atheist fifth column aiming to make Christians look like complete idiots, that vaccinating young women against a sexually transmitted disease will encourage them to have sex – and underage sex at that. Their argument goes something like this: people want to avoid getting sexually transmitted diseases; this vaccine protects young women against one particular sexually transmitted disease; 12 year old girls are currently deterred from engaging in sexual intercourse largely because they think it will give them cancer, and not because they still think (rightly, as it happens) that boys smell; vaccinating young women against just one of very very many sexually transmitted diseases will make them disregard the risk of all the others, and of pregnancy, and of smelly boys, and encourage them to jump into bed with the nearest spotty youth at the next available opportunity, probably without a condom”.

If the born again contingent had their wicked way schoolgirls would no doubt be automatically issued with chastity belts (or the slightly less effective rings also alluded to in the above). Not everyone favours such an unenlightened approach to sex, however, as the Grumpy Old Bookman demonstrates in his celebration of the work of publisher Andrew George Elliott, the first offering in the culture section.

Jonathan Grant at My London Your London invites us to what sounds like an intriguing night out in his eloquent review of Bloody Mess: “(…) a Bloody Mess is just that; high-energy, pokerfaced, farcical and whimsical. Delinquent cheerleaders, crazed gorillas, naked men holding stars, women running, screaming, pouring water over themselves and the stage. Each cast member plays their own role, seemingly not interacting with one another. None of these stories are connected. Why should they be? This is life. This is a bloody mess. And yet this is the point”.

The ever-reliable, informative and thought-provoking Natalie at Philobiblon examines Geoffrey Parker’s Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe in her stimulating 1588 v 1688 – one victory, one defeat.

Early Modern Whale most kindly provides a musical interlude in The sumptuous Delilah floating this way with an excerpt from Saint-Saens’ opera.

In our concluding compilation of humorous snippets, Dizzy Thinks extols Communication and Marriage – the key to success!

The Spine sardonically comments on the passing of a notorious comedian. No words needed.

Finally, Scary Duck shows how cosmic principles have a nasty habit of intruding on mundane minding-your-own-business reality in Good Karma/Bad Karma.

Next week’s edition will be hosted by Mr Eugenides.