Sunshine Recorder

While people were killing and dying, what did it matter whether there were decent songs being sung, insightful films being produced, appropriate art being inspired? When did poetry ever stop a war?

Anniversaries are generally pointless; a nice round figure and nothing more, bearing little significance other than that which we have assigned. So it’s worth remembering that ten years is not the outrageous number. The true outrage, as always, is the eight-plus years over which the vast crime of the Iraq war was committed, vandalizing an entire era in the process.

Nevertheless, the fact that 2013 marks a solid decade since the illegal invasion which unleashed so much self-replicating atrocity has prompted many to reexamine the conflict, and that is no bad thing; if anniversaries have any virtue, it is to remind us of things we should not forget so easily. And anyone who lived through those unpleasantly interesting times probably wondered what hindsight would look like, after the smoke cleared. Grim, as it turns out.

I have memories and a lot of records. Sometimes, I get them confused. When our leaders told us we were at war (as Spike Milligan would say, “I loved the ‘we.’”), I was still in high school. Iraq, after a fashion, taught us how to protest; on our first school walk-out, a friend of mine brought along a gas mask, which—should the need arise—several of us would share, back and forth, like in Terminator 2. Eventually, we stormed Edinburgh castle (sort of), made the local news, and then went home again. A few weeks later, there was another demonstration, and another, and another.

In the New Statesman, in her article, “Ten years ago we marched against the Iraq war and I learned a lesson in betrayal” Laurie Penny wrote,

“My generation’s lack of faith in the political process has often been mistaken for apathy. It is only now, with ordinary people across the world putting their energies into movements that bypass mainstream politics, that the betrayal of Bush and Blair’s wars is beginning the be understood. We have known since we were at school that it’s not enough simply to make our voices heard. We have to make sure that we are listened to—and we’re still working out how to do that.” (14 February 2013)

Our reactions may have been insolent, irreverent, half-baked—in a word, teenage—but they were forced to grow up with haste. Meanwhile, the culture around us began to mutate in response to the war that had polluted it.

It was kind of poetic that, for my peers and I, our adolescence—which made no sense, at least to us—had, as its background, a conflict that was just as nonsensical. Then and now, I tried to make sense of the world through its arts—books, music, movies, whatever was handy—but when faced with the horror of Iraq, that task became monumental.

I remember there were whistles, and drums, and slogans that grew steadily more profane. There were also a lot of songs—by John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg, Bob Marley, Woody Guthrie and countless more—dredged and borrowed from history to see if they might be made use of again. Some of it was moving, some of it was cringeworthy, some it was just catchy. We weren’t particularly picky. For a lot of us, the political consciousness awoken by Iraq heralded a crash-course in nostalgia: taken unawares by how quickly the world could go insane, we had to learn how these things were done, and quickly. While a new anti-war counterculture grew slowly and organically out of our shared discontent, we looked back and cherry-picked what we wanted from those who had come before, and tried to emulate as best we could.

Chances are, you’ll find this slice of recent history familiar, if not fresh. You were there, and so was I, and I’m still trying to figure out what that did to us all. Looking at the art our society produces under such circumstances is usually a good way to gauge that creeping transformation. Yet the cultural response mirrored the war itself, a fractured mess run through with nonsense and red herrings. What did it achieve? Could it have done better?

Ask a further, cruder question: Why should anyone care? Ultimately, while people were killing and dying, what did it matter whether there were decent songs being sung, insightful films being produced, appropriate art being inspired? When did poetry ever stop a war?

In these matters, there’s always a temptation to act with a certain level of hipsterish snobbery (though there are certainly worse things to act on). Inevitably, we look back to the ‘60s and the cultural response to Vietnam, and almost always find our own era lacking in comparison. As some people have noted, it’s tough to compete with the Beatles. And even now, 45 years after Chicago police broke skulls outside of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the United States is still fighting the ridiculously named ‘culture wars’ that find their origin in the decade of Kennedy and Nixon. Everything we have now can sometimes seem like a shadow, an aftereffect, or an imitation.

However, this superficial perception clashes with the reality. The heady days of 2003 and after were not small potatoes; too few remember that the Iraq invasion provoked the biggest anti-war demonstrations in the history of the world. On 15 February 2003, a coordinated day of global protest, over three million people marched in Rome. One and a half million did the same in Madrid. Some 50,000 of us even managed to trudge through Glasgow, and that’s something nobody should have to do unless it’s for a really good cause. Looking back, it’s clear that the response from our artists and entertainers was equally varied and widespread, and deserves recognition for that. Sooner or later, the Iraq war seeped into every crack of the common culture.

And yet, it’s still hard to imagine that, years or decades from now, the cultural impact of the war will endure on a scale approaching the artistic legacy of Vietnam, or even the myriad militarist bungles of the Reagan years, which acted as Vietnam’s hangover. Maybe that’s simply because the two wars are not equivalent: Iraq polarised America, but Vietnam traumatised it.

Already under attack from the European Commission for its policies on banking, the law and the media, Hungary’s national conservative government is now facing a tide of protest from the arts community. The government, led by Viktor Orban, stands accused of systematically replacing key figures in cultural institutions, staging pro-government exhibitions, rethinking permanent museum displays and replacing historic statues to fit its political agenda. “The fact that an authoritarian government wants to control the arts is in itself not surprising,” says the Hungarian economist Janos Kovacs. “But it’s incredible that this is happening in the middle of the European Union without provoking angry reactions in Brussels.”

One phenomenon that the Occupy Wall Street movement has crystallized in remarkable fashion is the unapologetic negotiation of the physical occupation of urban space. But before considering the context within which OWS has been operating, and what its successes and challenges may be, it is instructive to look into the deeper history of public space in New York. While some observers have examined how the spatial reality of the city, as presently constituted, influences the ability of its citizens to assemble and, implicitly, protest, I would submit that said spatial reality is really a symptom of not just physical geography, but also the landscape of legal precedents, political negotiations and accretions. This is an enormous – and enormously interesting – topic, so I will attempt to limit my remarks to the history of New York as seen through its street grid, its negotiation of what appear to be rights, and the intersection of political and commercial reality.

Thus it is a timely coincidence that 2011 marks the anniversary of the original “grid” plan, as conceived by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. Prior to its adoption by New York, street-grid planning had already had a long history – consider, among others, Francisco Pizarro’s original plan for Lima, Peru, conceived in the mid-16^th century. The grid was seen by planners as an attractive alternative to the messy results of “organic” growth, that is, growth that lead to narrow alleys, winding streets and tortuous property claims. Such bottom-up density also made the broader provision of services difficult, and seemed to encourage the spread of disease and crime. Thus an authoritative master plan was the perfect means to sweep away the accumulated social and economic flotsam and jetsam that came with the decades of  thousands of citizens scrapping and scraping for economic survival/prosperity over decades. (This tendency to overly treasure the act of tabula rasa continues to manifest itself today, most frequently as usually disastrous slum clearances in the cities of the developing world).

However, these same planners were confronted with a dilemma: by creating cleaner city layouts, the same designs that encourage mobility, commerce and interaction may, at the same time, encourage unwanted assembly, whereby citizens congregate in order to air grievances, hold strikes and generally foment the kind of unrest that might bring down a government. It is one thing to be all in favour of freedom of assembly or expression, but quite another to embody those rights within the built environment itself, no matter (or especially) what UNESCO might hold dear.

Less than a year has passed since the uprising began, but the euphoria in Tahrir Square already seems like a distant memory. The young people who launched the revolution are still protesting, but they have been outflanked by the hard men, the soldiers and Islamist politicians now calling the shots. The Mubarak regime was replaced by a military junta, the 20-member Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), headed by Field Marshal Muhammed Hussein Tantawi.The Scaf has all but declared war on Tahrir, assailing protesters calling for civilian rule as ‘enemies’ of the revolution which it perversely claims to embody. On 16 December, military police officers armed with electric prods and clubs, and assisted by thugs, moved into the square at dawn. At least 14 people were killed and hundreds injured; a woman was stripped half naked and beaten in the square. The country’s newly appointed prime minister, Kamal El-Ganzoury, blamed protesters for the violence, accusing them of an ‘assault on the revolution’.

The other principal beneficiary of the uprising, the Muslim Brotherhood, has seen its political party, Freedom and Justice, win more than 40 per cent of the vote in the first round of elections, and appears to have done just as well in the second round. The Egyptian Bloc, a left-liberal secular coalition, came a dismal third, and performed well only in Cairo: a reminder that ‘Egypt isn’t Tahrir Square’ (as Major General Mukhtar el-Mallah put it), and that Cairo isn’t either. The runner-up was al-Nour, a fanatical Salafi party that promises to impose Islamic law, and to lead the country ‘on the path to light’. Al-Nour appeared on the scene shortly after the revolution, when scores of Salafi prisoners were released from Mubarak’s jails; they are said to receive support from Saudi Arabia, perhaps as a way of sticking it to their neighbourhood rival Qatar, which backs the Brotherhood. The bearded men of al-Nour frown on women’s rights and make little secret of their hostility to Christians. Their strong showing only added to the anxieties of the Copts, nearly a hundred thousand of whom have already emigrated, a number expected to rise to 250,000 next year.