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Leamington letters #137: "Everybody talks about the weather. We don't."

11/12/2017

11 Comments

 
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I don’t do Pinterest, or Instagram, or Snapchat. But I do tweet and I do, occasionally,  do facebook.
 
Twitter I use primarily for monitoring and commenting on politics, literature, music and baseball; facebook is to see what friends and acquaintances are up to. Both are also and often sources of the kind of news which the mainstream media choose to ignore, an invaluable resource at the moment.
 
But yesterday, social media was all about the snow: how beautiful it was, how dangerous it was, how it had disrupted travel, and isn’t my snowman gorgeous?!
 
Which, in the way that my mind works, took me straight to Ulrike Meinhof, because she wrote a powerful essay in konkret entitled “Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t”.
 
The slogan came, originally, from a Deutsche Bahn (West German Railways) poster of the mid 1960s, showing a train powering through the German snow. It was adopted and transformed by the German SDS, this time featuring portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. The message was clear: socialism would plough through any obstacles in order to create a juster, fairer socialist society.
 
(“At least they make the trains run on time” you may think, and Lenin, of course, had particular reason to be grateful for the reliability of European train services.)
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​Yesterday, skimming through social media, I was struck by the absence of any serious political debate on a day on which David Davis revealed that the new ‘agreement’ with the EU was not an agreement at all. It was merely a ‘statement of intent’.
 
But hey, look at my snowman. Look at the view from my bedroom window. What happened to the gritters?
 
The statement by Davis was particularly significant because the Sunday press had been full of the triumph of the negotiations with Ireland and the EU. The Tories and Mrs May had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat etc etc.
 
In fact, it appears, they had agreed to agree to almost everything to keep Brexit negotiations going. And if the implication of this ‘statement of intent’ is a soft Brexit, then 1. no it isn’t and 2. so be it.
 
Of course, for those of us for whom even a soft Brexit is a disaster in waiting, Brexit continues to be rather more important than the fact that we couldn’t get to the pub at lunchtime. And it is clear that the question is made more vexed by the refusal of Labour to make a clean break with the whole issue.
 
It is time Corbyn and Starmer did that, doing what they say they do which is being a party whose policies are determined by the memebership.

As members, we do not want Brexit hard or soft. And nor, I suspect, do many of those who voted to leave Europe last year.
 
The need for a parliamentary vote and, if necessary (although legally it isn’t) a second referendum, is what I and my chums are talking about.
 
Not the weather.
 
We know that an overtly anti-Brexit Labour Party will plough through the snowdrifts of these shambolic negotiations and Tory in-fighting.

​And we know that we don't need a weatherman to know which the way the wind blows.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: There is now a fair representation of Dohnanyi’s work in the vaults, and much of it has been playing recently; punctuated by the Dead from 76, those FM broadcasts after the hiatus and also Luna at Brooklyn Steel last month. All that good stuff.
11 Comments
Dom
11/12/2017 15:06:08

Yes - although a long journey to get to the Dylan quote which I suspect you started with and which is of course more American SDS than the later West German version which grew into the RAF.

But the key point - Labour's need to state clearly their policy rather than letting the Tories dig deeper and deeper into a black hole - is right, as is the subsidiary point about power to the membership.

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Allan
11/12/2017 15:28:01

Agree on social media. Agree on Brexit. Agree on Labour re Brexit. Agree on Dohnani. Luna?

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Pat
11/12/2017 16:00:38

Please don’t correct the typo: love the idea of a ‘meme-bership’.

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Dan
12/12/2017 07:43:08

Rather think events have overtaken your post with Labour moving closer to single market and customs union and Torres uniting round May. But still only LibDems 100% against the whole stupid idea. Enjoyable read though.

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Catherine
12/12/2017 08:33:00

Everybody (not everyone) talks about the weather. We don't. is also the title of the collected writings of UM. I have a copy still and see that, remarkably, it is still available. FYI.

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PhilipB
12/12/2017 10:11:17

What's interesting about the collection is to see her change from liberal protest to direct action over a couple of years or so. And a poignant final piece from her daughter. If the translation is to be trusted, she was a fine essayist as well as political thinker.

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Max
12/12/2017 10:17:44

Catherine, have changed to "everybody". Thanks for the correction.

Philip, not sure the afterword is poignant. More downright hostile to Ulrike and all her works!

Pat, will keep the meme running!

SteveR
12/12/2017 10:47:07

One wonders where her political development would have taken her. Horst Mahler of course, a close friend, went from RAF to extreme right and holocaust denial and claimed that Meinhof would have taken the same path.

Laurie
12/12/2017 13:08:15

What is this about Baader-Meinhof?

It is true that Ulrike Meinhof had some integrity and intelligence. But Baader had neither. And we understand she was not talking to her comrades when she died. I accept that her death was suspicious, but they managed to make the West german state at the time paranoid!

I know Max is working on something to do with them - a history? - but the point is they failed totally and killed people in doing so. No justification for what they did.

Would she have taken Mahler's path? No way. At heart, she was a liberal. Not even a socialist.

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Sam
12/12/2017 17:03:58

This was rock n roll urban guerilla shit. People like Max sat in their ivory towers reading and dreaming of making a difference. Which they never could nor would, even if they had the opportunity. Baader Meinhof were like the Stones doing Street Fighting Man. Ego.

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Martin
14/12/2017 20:48:17

Are you sure Labour is united on Brexit? I thought there was a north-south split and that this is why the PLP can say nothing.

Yes, ivory towers - they do afford perspective. In this they have much to recommend them.

Yes, the B-M Gang, what did they achieve but murder and memories. You might as well accuse them of reading and dreaming of making a difference ... which they never could or would.

Yes, Dohnanyi. I'd never heard of him. Bought recordings of Quartets 2 and 3 by the Lyric Quartet. Worth serious listening, I'd say. No. 2 does seem to be in the Brahms tradition. No. 3 is more what the CD notes call 'mature' and so far, for me, more interesting. More in the tradition of another well-known 19th century German composer.

Yes, it's Germans all the way down.

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    Max Smith

    European writer, radical, restaurateur and Red Sox fan. 70-something husband, father, step-father, grandfather and son. Resident in Warwick, England.

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