The Song Remains the Same No 4: "It can call itself what it likes"

"When the Czech police use their truncheons in Wenceslas Square we describe this as an act of brutal repression consistent with the practices of a totalitarian regime. When the English police charge students on horseback on Westminster Bridge we describe this as a maintenance of law and order and are advised that it is a containment of essentially subversive forces. The Czechs use precisely the same language (as of course do the Turks, the Chileans, the South Africans, etc: the demonstrations are against the state and must be crushed. Here, as there, I believe we must assess a governing power not by what it says it is, or by what it says it intends, but by what it does. It can call itself what it likes."

Harold Pinter, from an article 'Eroding the Language of Freedom' published in Sanity in 1989.

Merry Xmas!

The Song Remains the Same No3: King's Cross

There's an interview here with PSB about coming up with this song, still one of their most moving for the way that it makes the personal and the political indistinguishable from each other, "I've been hurt, and we've been had" (because it's not just about the economics of it, we're dealing with crushed souls, defeated imaginations here), for its exquisitely mournful tone, the echo of fading promises, just the delivery of lines like "I've been guilty of hanging around"

For these purposes, the key lines are obviously about the "smack of firm government";"good luck, bad luck waiting in a line/it makes more than a matter of time."

Isn't the problem with the prized idea of social mobility that it's about exceptions that prove the rule, the dream of transcending your allotted station (which is why the Daily Mail are obsessed with it, with the idea that Kate Middleton is a beacon of hope for their readers' petit bourgeois desire for social advancement). You have the opportunity to move up in the world, you just have to take your chances ("someone told me Monday, someone told me Saturday"), and if you don't then you're to blame. The notion of social mobility is a symptom, and a salve.


Love the idea in the interview of King's Cross as "the end of the line, the place from which there is no escape but death", especially given the area in question's shiny 'regeneration'.

Sit Down and Be Counted

Student sit down protest in Cambridge's 'Grand Arcade'/Lion Yard yesterday.