You are currently browsing the daily archive for December 22nd, 2007.
As the country’s most high-profile historian of the British monarchy, one might expect David Starkey to take a warm view of the house of Windsor.
But in a week in which the Queen overtook Victoria as Britain’s longest-lived monarch, Starkey has delivered a less than rose-tinted verdict on the head of state, accusing her of philistinism and being uninterested in her predecessors, largely due to being poorly educated.
“I think she’s got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture,” the historian told the Guardian. “You remember: ‘Every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.’ “…
Josef Goebbels? Whoa! A minute, please?
How did we get there? It’s foolheaded enough to start with, in comparing this Queen to a Nazi “in attitude to culture” because she may not approach historical exhibitions from the Professor’s supposedly well-refined perspective:
When Starkey was showing the Queen round an exhibition he had curated about Elizabeth I in 2003, he found her more preoccupied with the late arrival of her drink (gin and Dubonnet) than the works on display. Her only comment on the exhibition was that one of the objects was hers…
But even worse is how, for someone who smugly deigns to criticize her for being poorly educated, Professor Starkey cannot himself even be bothered to get his own quotation source correct. For while the Professor may “remember” Goebbels having said it, many of the rest of us sure don’t: probably because Goebbels didn’t.
Curiously, the Professor then concludes his trenchant Goebbels/Elizabeth comparison this way:
“I think that in many ways she has found her role often very frightening, often bewildering, and requiring her to do things in which she has absolutely no interest, and to meet people she finds deeply unsympathetic, like me.” Why him? “Well - I don’t think she’s at all comfortable with anybody - I would hesitate to use the word intellectual - but it’s useful. I think she’s got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture - you remember: ‘every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.’ I think the queen reaches for her mask.”
Indeed, the “media tart” — …at the tail end of nearly 30 years of middling-successful academe (at Cambridge and the LSE), he discovered the joys of being an “all-purpose media tart” (his words)… — Professor Starkey may shortly wish he had a mask to reach for . . . when word of this gets ’round, and he finds he spends most of his time trying to “clarify” himself.
Blair converts to Catholicism
Well, that seems to settle it. Obviously, the devious Mr Bush was unsuccessful in his attempt to “turn” Mr Blair into a wild-eyed, crusading evangelical.
Whether your idea of a cultural evening is Strictly Come Dancing or Shostakovich, everyone fits into four cultural groups, say academics.
Researchers at Oxford University have identified the groups for a study into the link between social class, status and people’s tastes in music, visual and performing arts…
…Dr Tak Wing Chan, who conducted the research with his colleague Dr John Goldthorpe, said: “There’s little evidence for the existence of a cultural elite who would consume ‘high’ culture while shunning more ‘popular’ cultural forms.”…
That is evidently what passes for “the science” these days: “identifying” four groupings that are so broadly-encompassing that when placed side by side manage to embrace just about everyone and everything, somehow “proves” that . . . everyone and everything fits into those four groupings.
And (wouldn’t you know it?) therefore “there’s little evidence for the existence of a cultural elite.”
But we shouldn’t be too quick to judge. Clearly, that does make for some refinement in at least this one sense. For instance, that four group approach is obviously “scientifically” more accurate than another series of 12 groupings.
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That above is not a life or death situation, so it is hardly critical. Essentially, if that “research” is not exactly vital, so be it. In contrast, if policy is to be changed based on its recommendations, since this following could well cost many lives at some point, presumably these researchers have utterly and totally exhausted every reasonable possibility. Reuters tells us:
Airport security lines can annoy passengers, but there is no evidence that they make flying any safer, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.
A team at the Harvard School of Public Health could not find any studies showing whether the time-consuming process of X-raying carry-on luggage prevents hijackings or attacks.
They also found no evidence to suggest that making passengers take off their shoes and confiscating small items prevented any incidents.
Everyone who flies has had moments with airport security. We all wish a “better way” could be found. So, at first read, we certainly naturally hope this research will prove promising.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration told research teams requesting information their need for quick new security measures trumped the usefulness of evaluating them, Eleni Linos, Elizabeth Linos, and Graham Colditz reported in the British Medical Journal…
…”We’d like airport security screening to be of value. As passengers and members of the public we’d like to know the evidence and the reasoning behind these measures,” Linos said in a telephone interview.
“Can you hide anything in your shoes that you cannot hide in your underwear?” they asked…
However, it seems those researchers weren’t quite as utterly exhaustive as they could have been. Indeed, given that they are not evidently sure about the fundamental difference between shoes and underwear, those of us who might find ourselves on board an aircraft someday enjoying the “security benefits” of this research would therefore seem to have a right to ask our own questions.
Particularly, here is one suggestion for some groundbreaking, additional new “research”. Those researchers might role play, each as a member of a jihadist suicide-hijack cell, with each cell member intent on sneaking only one part of an ultimately explosive liquid concoction on board, which they aim to pool together with the others when in flight. To test the best method by which to slip each through security, one of them should pour some, say, sulphuric acid into a holder placed inside a hollowed out shoe heel . . . and then, to compare as rigorously as possible, pour some other of that same liquid down his underwear.
Hmm, which makes for an easier “hide”? This is just an untested hypothesis on this writer’s part, of course. But one suspects that of the two methods the latter provides something more of a vexing ”carry on” issue?
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