enhancement: changing the meaning of disability

The victory of Oscar Pistorius in the 100 metres at the Paralympic Games in Beijing yesterday was a triumphal performance by an athlete at the top of his game. It is raising a lot of questions about enhancement in sport that have implications for the meaning of disability as a whole.

Pistorius, whose lower legs were amputated as a baby because he was born without fibulas, originally applied to represent South Africa in the Olympics, but the "cheetah blades" he uses to run put him at the unusual disadvantage of being, as the New York Times put it, not disabled but too-abled. After a long legal battle to prove that his blades did not confer an unfair advantage upon him - which all but obliterated his 2007 winter training schedule - he was allowed to compete but, perhaps because of the time spent in court, just failed to make South Africa's Olympic team.

The question of enhancement in sports is a fraught one. Steroids have definitely turned what should have been a level playing field into a quagmire, one in which arguably athletes need to be protected from their own ambition, which is so necessary to make it towards the finishing tape.

But then there's erythropoietin, a hormone which prevents breakdown of red blood cells, increasing their number and therefore their ability to carry oxygen to the muscles. If better technology is developed to detect its use, which is illegal, do athletes switch to hypoxic training in an "altitude chamber", which would have the same effect? And if this is banned, what of athletes from countries such as Bolivia, Columbia and Ecuador, who may have no choice but to train at high altitude - do they then have an unfair advantage against which athletes from lower countries are not allowed to compete?

That's just one train of thought, based on the volume of oxygen-bearing haemoglobin contained in the body's red blood cells. Andy Miah of the University of the West of Scotland considers another scenario:

A swimmer, impossibly long arms swinging at his side, takes to the starting block. He has trained for this moment for months. Keeping up with the latest developments, he has endured surgical enhancements to enlarge the webbing in his fingers and toes. He's wearing the ultimate in sharkskin swimsuit technology. He inhales deeply through nasal passages surgically widened to optimize his breathing efficiency -- and dives in.

This may seem an unlikely situation, but surgical enhancement is already upon us. In 1974, US baseball pitcher Tommy John damaged an elbow ligament in his pitching arm, an injury that until then was the death-knell for a professional career. After revolutionary surgery grafting part of the corresponding ligament from the opposite elbow to replace the injured one, he returned to baseball following a long recovery. The operation, now called "Tommy John surgery", is popular now, with pitchers (and also American football players) saying that the best performances in their careers occur after the surgery. At what point do authorities decide that surgery is required, or that no surgery-requiring injury exists, meaning that the procedure would be an enhancement bestowing unfair advantage?

Alternatively, Arthur Caplan, Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, was not sure if letting Pistorius run for the Olympics might be the right decision, comparing his blades with Tiger Woods' corrective eye surgery - without which, Caplan admits, the golfer was "almost legally blind" - which has left him with better than 20/20 vision.

Miah continues:

another vision [exists] at sports' highest levels. It is rooted in the democratization of technology -- in a world where high-tech training regimens exist even at the junior-varsity level -- and is part of a broader transition we are all making: using technology to improve everything, at every level.

This may be true as regards "able-bodied" athletes - whatever that means whenever enhancements are a possibility - but where disability is concerned any democracy depends largely upon the willingness of the state to empower and enfranchise disabled individuals, including willingness to listen to us, or even recognise our existence.

For example, in China, the country hosting the Paralympics, Townhall News quotes Chinese President Hu Jintao as saying on his country's state TV that "China's people and government have always attached great importance to the cause of the disabled...We insist on putting people first, carrying forward a humanitarian spirit and advocating equality and opposing discrimination." The Telegraph, however, reports the discrimination that disabled people have in accessing education, jobs and healthcare, and Townhall goes on to note that:

The government has long advocated sterilizing mentally handicapped people. In the early 1990s, a draft law was presented to the legislature to reduce the number of disabled through abortion and sterilization, a move that unleashed international criticism...In 1994, China ratified a law calling for the abortion of fetuses carrying hereditary diseases and restrictions on marriages among people suffering mental problems or contagious diseases.

This is an example of the eugenic madness that gripped the West from the end of the 19th century until the Holocaust forced eugenic organisations to change names and tactics. Or, at least, some of them: when Maxima was expecting Minora, a chart planted square on the centre of the examination-room wall laid out the increasing chance of having a baby with Down's syndrome as maternal age increased.

Pistorius, thankfully, receives the support of his country in sending him to the Paralympics. Cambodia is another proposition entirely. It is a country that has allowed the UNFPA - United Nations Family Planning Association - which cooperated with China's forced sterilization programme aimed at, but not limited to, drastically reducing the number of disabled people, to push reproductive health services, including abortion, in collaboration with the EU.

So Cambodia's contender, Vanna Kim, received no help from his country, having got to Beijing through the largesse of private donors, North Korea and the Games organisers; I don't deny the possibility of philanthropy on the part of Beijing, but they are also desperate to show a good image to the world, in a land where image is almost totally divorced from reality.

For all that, Pistorius' victory displays an example of a "disabled" person outperforming the "able-bodied" to a degree that may require renegotiation of the two terms' significance. Everybody has the same right to hope, to aspire, and to be all they can be regardless of the establishment's prescriptions of what their abilities will be.

Modern technology has an ability to equalise many of the odds that can affect the differently-abled: all that is required is the will and the humility to empower talented people who are "different" to do as well, and sometimes better, than the crowd. The problem for our rulers is that this would prompt swathes of their populations beyond the realm of knowledge, and into that of realisation, of what is being done in their name.

burgers with nostalgia on top

I like burgers.

The other weekend, we - Minima, Minora, Maxima and myself - cycled into Cambridge. Upon locking up our bikes in town, we had a coffee at one of the little kiosks that spring up in public spaces. Later, we went to McDonalds and had four burger meals with drinks. There was scarcely any difference in price.

McDonald's, I think, is a great place to eat. Kids get toys with their meals and can be relatively loud without making you feel that you're breaking the law, the Ten Commandments and the Code of Hammurabi by allowing them to be children. Or, indeed, social conventions about the "done thing" forged in upwardly-mobile dinner parties wherein the great, the good and the gormless gather to gossip.

Many years ago, I remember my Mum taking me to an oriental restaurant up north; the only pub to sell food was shut, the café was far away, and at that time "fast food" would have conjured up a picture of a sarnie on a train. I'm sure the food must have been very good, but we made our way through it silently and uncomfortably.

There have been various styles of cuisine going in and out of fashion, but, although two radishes presented on a bed of chilli-and-banana flavoured ice-cream might make you think, when I get a meal I just want to eat the damn thing, not write a doctoral thesis about it.

Recently, my brother Asinus took me for a burger to thank me for helping his wife Patientia with her tooth-related travails. I was expecting a McDonald's, which would have been good, but he went one better.

GBK - Gourmet Burger Kitchen - is an eaterie in Regent Street that's been there for over a year, although I've managed to miss it, probably because usually when I'm walking down that way, my gaze is straight ahead as I try to weave my way through the crowd.

Through the door, I felt as if I'd entered a posh restaurant, and started to panic a little. But when I saw the menu, I knew that I'd gone to hamburger heaven. I ordered a beefburger with blue cheese and bacon, declining the offer of chips as I merely wanted to fill a hole that would be empty again in time for dinner. No problem. The staff were friendly, the lighting was subdued and so was the music. Wine or beer was available but we had coffee, which came almost immediately. The burger obviously took longer than a McDonald's, but still came more quickly than I was expecting it to. It was served with the bacon between a good-sized, freshly cooked burger and a thick, melting slab of blue cheese, atop which was lettuce, topped with a subtly-spiced chutney which was fenced in by two semicircles of purple onion. Had Mozart made burgers, this is what he'd have come up with.

Obviously it was pricier than a McDonald's or burger King than such, but I was expecting that - not just for the superior cooking, but also for the ambience (and anyway, Asinus was paying). It was still cheaper than a snack of an equivalent size in an equivalently classy restaurant.

The four of us will still go to McDonald's when in town, but I don't see McDonald's etc and GBK being in competition - they're for different types of eating. And I now know a good place to take Maxima.

When I got home my interest in burgers was piqued. My Gran once worked as a cook - I got her old book of "Plain Cookery Recipes" from the Edinburgh School of Cookery and Domestic Economy (which used to award housewives' diplomas) from the shelf. She had marked it "1929" on the inside front cover; there's no printed date on the book, but the only editions of it that I can find are 1920 and 1932. Inside, there's a recipe for "croquettes", which appears closer to burgers than croquettes as we now understand them. It evoked poignant whiffs of a kitchen at the edge of living memory. Here's some equivalents if you're interested, and here is the recipe:

Croquettes

Half-pound cooked meat.
Half-ounce dripping.
Half-ounce flour.
One gill second stock.
One teaspoonful of chopped parsley.
One teaspoonful ketchup or Harvey's sauce.
Pepper and salt.

TO COAT THE CROQUETTES

One beaten egg.
Dried bread crumbs.

Free the meat from fat and skin, and chop or mince it finely. Make a sauce of the dripping, flour and stock; add it to the meat, parsley and seasonings, and turn the mixture on to a plate to cool. When cold and firm divide into equal-sized portions, and form into croquettes. Brush with beaten egg. Toss in the bread crumbs, and fry to a golden brown in smoking-hot fat. Dish, and garnish with fried parsley. Serve with a suitable sauce.

To fry parsley. - Wash the parsley, pick each sprig from the stalk, and dry carefully. Put the parsley in a frying basket, and cool the fat till there is no smoke rising from it. Put the basket gently into the pan, and fry till the hissing noise stops. Drain well.

when stone-throwing becomes a blitz

A tangled skein of gender-related issues seem to be in the media lately. For example, the Daily Telegraph reported recently that bosses might be less likely to hire women now that maternity leave has increased to a year, and women are to receive benefits in kind that they would have had they still been at work, for example gym membership. (A single male friend of mine wondered about the gym membership. I told him to talk to women with children in secondary school. He did, and, somewhat wiser, now concurs with the measure.)

There's a lot going on there, however. For example, is it really the job of employers to maintain their employees' pelvic floors? Saint Lawrence, when ordered by the prefect of Rome to produce the treasures of the church, produced the poor. I don't believe that government should be bigger than it needs to be, but should not the state provide for the treasures of the country - its children - instead of demanding that employers do this and recoup their costs from poor consumers?

In another story, the Telegraph again tells us that HarperCollins have offered an apology to Australian aborigines because, in the Australian edition of The Daring Book for Girls, authors Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz suggest that girls play the didgeridoo, something that is the subject of a gender taboo pertaining to Aborigine culture. Mark Rose, head of the Victorian Aboriginal Educational Association, says that the suggestion is the equivalent of "encouraging someone to play with razor blades", and is warning that girls who do so could "face infertility".

(Gender issues have touched my family's lives as well. When my sister-in-law Patientia attended an orthopaedic consultant as an out-patient regarding joint-pains, once he had ran out of tests he told her: "Your problem is that you are a housewife. You're not busy enough, so you're imagining these pains. Get a job, and get a life." Personally, I'd say that being a housewife is pretty hard work, without a minimum wage and paid holidays, let alone gym membership.)

Gender politics - literally - seem to be on the agenda in the US as well. Something quite remarkable has happened: as a correspondent on Michelle Malkin's website states, "The feminists have suddenly decided that a mother should be home with her children in lieu of a career."

This remark was made in the context of the forthcoming US elections, where Republican presidential candidate John McCain has chosen Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, ie to become Vice-President should he be elected.

Two things are happening here to rain on the ideological parade of those who people the liberal-socialist axis.

Firstly, having trawled through bios, it seems to me that the candidates are more in touch with people from backgrounds liable to economic upset than presidential/vice-presidential candidates have been for some time. It comes as no surprise to me that this should happen in a right-wing party; in the UK, Margaret Thatcher, a shopkeeper's daughter, was the Prime Minister to see through the cant of union bosses grown fat on their members' hardships. Her successor, John Major, was the first Prime Minister ever to call for a classless society. Now that the nominally democratic socialist Labour party has reneged on its promise to offer a referendum on a European superstate, its pet papers are presenting attempts to consult the people on this as "a challenge from the right".

Secondly, three days after her selection as running mate, Sarah Palin announced (not "admitted", as the New York Times said) that her daughter was pregnant. Wonderful news. But suddenly Democrats and left-leaning folk generally became moralists to an extent that makes Queen Victoria look like Paris Hilton on ecstasy. Their problem doesn't seem to be the pregnancy so much as that the pregnancy is continuing. The Sharp Right Turn blog posted a YouTube video of Obama Barack speaking to a crowd, saying, "If [my daughters] make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby, I don't want them punished with an STD at the age of 16".

There's lots to unpack there, for example the view of STD's as punishments (from whom?), but the description of a baby as a punishment says it all. I'm sure US politics is no Buckingham Palace garden party; but to Mr Obama's credit, on the same day as Mrs Palin announced the news, he gave out the order that families were "off limits", on pain of being fired. That, however, hasn't stopped a miscellany of starlets declaiming on the issue. Some atrocious material has been forwarded which, insulting as it is to Mrs Palin, amounts to nothing less than a concerted campaign of abuse directed at a minor. As high-minded as I'm sure Obama's motives are in calling for a cease-fire, I'm sure he also wants to put a damper on the strange compulsion of left-leaning stone-throwers to bring the fragile edifices of their own construction crashing down upon all their ears.

As passionate as I am about the prospects for the British election, when it comes, it has to be admitted that the US elections, especially now, are the most important in the world. I pray for strength for Mrs Palin as the most shockingly sexist mores are borne from the scrapheap by people who demand that these same standards do not represent their own - many of them not much more sophisticated than becoming infertile by touching a didgeridoo. And may God bless all of her family.

instant gold - keep it in the ground

On those occasions when I leave the draughty old fen to visit Cantabrigia, I like to go to the market. Having been a drugs worker, I have to bite my tongue when passing paraphernalia for using cannabis, in order to get to the really important bits: the book stalls.

I've found many a gem there. Something I love is the smell of the book, especially if it's been on somebody's shelf for a long time. And you can come across titles that you might never think to order on, say, Amazon (as much as I value this site), because you can't stand and browse through a book's pages on the internet. Yes, you can look through the text, but you can't stand with the sounds and smells of the marketplace around you and flick through a book to see whether it's got that quality that you can't name, but is essential to enjoy a book.

One such that I found recently was a novel (or novella) by Frank O' Rourke called "Instant Gold". O' Rourke, born in Colorado, was known for writing Western novels (things beloved of my Dad), but this is called science fiction. I looked at the back page:

PROFIT UNLIMITED

1 can of powder: cost $500

add

8 ounces of sea water: free

result

16 ounces of gold: value $560

My curiosity was piqued, and it's not often that you see a 125-page novel these days, unless it's Mills & Boon.

It's a wonderful piece of writing that lends credence to the old saw that sometimes good things come in small packages. Basically, one day in a residential area of San Francisco, a shop opens up offering "instant gold" in cans, obtainable through the recipe above. The establishment, whose heads are referred to not by name but as "Security", "FBI", etc, try to stop the proprietors, but since they are not selling gold but instant gold, there's nothing to be done. They are threatened and fêted in equal measure. The outcome is predictable, perhaps, but O' Rourke presents it with a lyrical hilarity that is all too rarely seen now:

The rush for California became a stampede reminiscent of forgotten homestead raffles and land races. Tractors were left running in Iowa fields, mlingerers leaped from hospital beds, Detroit assembly lines faltered, brides spent lonely wedding nights; fifty thousand people entered the state each and every twenty-four hours, clogging the highways, glutting the freeways, creating a gasoline problem that strained the resources of the giant oil companies...

Remembering that the book was written in 1964, O' Rourke's description of the international scene shows a remarkable degree of observation and prescience, which I read with a sense of "would it had been so...":

People stormed U.S. embassies and consulates, beggin for visas. A rumor spread that instant gold shops would open in West Berlin; on Sunday morning two million East Germans rose up, tore down the wall with their bare hands, and crossed over, their ranks swollen by eighty-two percent of the East German Army. In Viet Nam the Communists and Liberals declared an end to war, ripped down the no-dancing signs, and awaited the rumored arrival of the first instant gold ship. De Gaulle made good his threat and withdrew France from the world; the French peasantry formed eighteen thousand village pools and dispatched representatives by sea and air to Sand Francisco; the British Prime Minister at last proclaimed peace in his time and signed the agreements joining England with the Common Market. Australia and New Zealand, ignoring the jettisoning, flew their Prime Ministers to San Francisco...The directors of the South African gold mining syndicate addressed desperate pleas to Washington, begging the federal government to stop the vicious flooding of an honourable market. The long-expected came to pass in Cuba. A group of inner-circle patriots quietly removed Castro to the nearest asylum, reorganised their government, and sent wires to the American sugar companies, begging forgiveness and throwing wide the ravished gates. Seventy-seven percent of the Russian cadre in Cuba renounced Soviet citizenship and took the Cuban oath of allegiance. The Vatican was reported making a survey of ceilings, statues, and other artifacts in dire need of regilding; at existing prices heaven and edict could wait."

Sometimes O' Rourke sounds like a lecturer who's a little too fond of his own voice, after the manner of Peter van Greenaway; but his dealings in the relationship between language and logic might not lend themselves to any other style, and are not the major part of the book. As it turns out, action and dialogue are exquisitely balanced, and tempered with a hint of a love story.

Many books are described as "laugh-out-loud" that are anything but. This is one of the very few books I've read which actually did make me laugh, which unsettled the cat somewhat (sorry, Magus). I laughed especially at the very end, but then the meaning hit me like a punch.

Perhaps it's not for nothing that President Paul Kruger of the South African Republic (Transvaal), upon hearing of the discovery of gold in the hills, is siad to have cried: "For God's sake, keep it in the ground!"

PCSO's shine

Sometimes, certain professions are made scapegoats for failings which emanate from much larger sectors of society. For instance, in the late 1970's I remember people being booed on game shows if the answer to "what do you do?" was tax inspector, although they were not responsible for setting taxes. Rather, this was the job of the democratically elected government, which was democratically voted out at the first opportunity. Again, the Metropolitan Police were seen as Margaret Thatcher's private union-busters, when what they were doing was resisting Arthur Scargill's strike (illegal according to the constitution of the National Union of Miners) which - contrary to the intentions of many individual miners - was intended by an inner cabal to unseat the Government that was democratically brought in.

I spoke to a couple of Police Community Support Officers yesterday. They were very knowledgeable about the area and very professional. They also demonstrated an understanding of the average fenny's frustrations about the leniency of the courts and lack of information on arrests and convictions, some of which frustrations they shared. They also played a role in looking in on people who might be vulnerable for various reasons, not always connected with legal issues. Significantly, their powers include handing out fixed-penalty notices to eejits who buy alcohol for distribution to young people who can't handle it, and go causing havoc that can't always be prioritised for the attention of Police Constables.

In her podcast "Home grown officers", Cambridgeshire Constabulary Chief Constable Julie Spence talks about how most of the current crop of PCSO trainees are from Cambridgeshire. They are needed because 19 former PCSO's from the county have qualified as PC's, bringing their local knowledge and experience. Ms Spence, who will be a judge at this year's Daily Mirror "Pride of Britain" awards, says that "PCSO's have proved their worth in Cambridgeshire". (Click the picture at the bottom of this blog for further details of her support for PCSO's.)

The problem with the reputation of PCSO's goes back to a tragic drowning case when ten-year-old Jordon Lyon drowned trying to save his sister, who had become trapped in underwater vegetation in a lake, allegedly while two PCSO's looked on. Suddenly, national frustrations about PCSO's - which were in fact frustrations about governmental broken promises regarding numbers of PC's - found a focus and headlines screamed about "Blunkett's bouncers" and "plastic policemen", while a clarification from the PCSOs' Assistant Chief Constable that rebutted key aspects of the story was largely ignored.

People who say that we need more PC's instead of PCSO's seem not to be bothered by the question of why they see a need for more PC's. For example: judges from the liberal intelligentsia are deluded that criminals will be reformed if treated as if they too were members of the liberal intelligentsia, instead of releiving society from them for a spell; virtually unimpeded immigration, intended to defer the pensions crisis to the next generation, is exacerbating a crime-wave without precedent; and care-needs abandoned by neighbours are left unassessed by social work departments which prefer to target traditional families who have have hit a rough patch.

We live in a society where it can't be denied that the fear of crime magnifies the effect of actual crime. But to situate the debate within this hall of mirrors obfuscates issues; for example, on knife crime, Labour MP Kali Mountford stated to the House of Commons this January:

Accepting that knife crime is up, however, does not mean accepting that more young people are carrying knives and using them. It does not mean that crime in general is on the increase. We must be able to accept that that one crime is going in the wrong direction, while other things are getting better. We must be mature enough to say, “But burglary is down, and car theft is down. Those things are going in the right direction.” Those are the sets of figures, and we must be mature enough to accept them in the round. We should not say, “You are massaging the figures, because you are not accepting this aspect of violent crime.” We should not be having an artificial debate about which is the true figure, when the truth is that one aspect of crime is going in the wrong direction and another is going in the right direction.

In other words, violent crime is up, but a reduction in some non-violent crimes makes that acceptable. This is the result of that political species of game theory whereby, as the Telegraph reports, different types of crime are given equal weighting and the added score, and not the type of crimes solved, indicate a police-force's performance in the eyes of government.

None of this is the fault of PCSO's, who slog away in very challenging circumstances for not enough pay. It's a truism to say that we live in a broken society, but PCSO's aren't part of the problem; rather, they're part of the solution. They are shining stars in the firmament of law enforcement, and I predict that they will shine ever brighter as time goes by.

the sum of our fears

The Sum of all Fears
by Tom Clancy
GP Putnam's Sons 1991 (US)
HarperCollinsPublishers 1991 (UK)
pp 1030

Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of their fears.
- Winston Churchill

This is one of the quotes with which authour Tom Clancy opens his 1991 thriller The Sum of all Fears. I recently snapped up the DVD when it was on sale at XV, the draughty old fen's charity shop. Directed by Phil Alden Robinson and released in 2002 - it was held back when 9/11 occurred just as they were putting it to bed - it differed somewhat from the book, which inspired me to pick it out of my shelf-ful of Tom Clancy books and read it again.

In one of the DVD's special features, director Phil Alden speaks of the difficulty of rendering such a large book into a film of just over two hours. I can't argue with that - my dogeared copy of The Sum of all Fears, at 1030 pages, is around a third again as long as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which Warner Bros have found themselves having to split into two films.

The film of TSAF opens with a pilot in the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and Syria over the Golan Heights flying into an anti-aircraft-missile through a fatal error. His cargo, a nuclear warhead, is buried without detonating and lies there for many years, having been covered by the Druse farmer who needs every square inch of land to eke out a living.

The book and film share this plot-point in common. They also have a stand-off between the American and Russian presidents over an atomic device that has exploded at a football stadium, made from uranium which the US stole from one of its own reactors and gave to the Israelis. The similarities just about end there.

In my opinion, The Sum of All Fears is Tom Clancy's darkest book, and, like many works which explore our shadows, his most profound. After the prologue referred to above, at the start of the book we see Jack Ryan in the midst of a physical and mental breakdown. He is smoking and drinking too much, and is experiencing problems in his relationships with his wife and son - which drive his mood lower - mostly due to overwork and "carrying" people who are senior to him but are not as good at their jobs as he is at his - and theirs.

As the screw tightens, the group whom President Bob Fowler has promoted to high office through an old-boy's network starts to break down, the chief buckler under pressure being Fowler himself. "Old boys" is the operative term - the only woman in this inner circle has attained her position through sexual favours.

It surprised me that Liz Elliott doesn't pop up in the film, because she is central to moving forward much of the American part of the plot before the bomb goes off. Those parts of the novel dealing with the downward spiral overlapping Jack Ryan's work and home life seem to comprise a meditation upon Othello (Clancy has a degree in English). In particular, how Elliott, the scheming National Security Advisor, latches on to the insecurities of the flawed ruler, but overstretches herself and finds that Cathy Ryan cannot be forced into the role and the fate of the credulous wife, suggests a recontextualisation of the play with a twist. The key difference is that Clancy has the grizzled old warrior John Clark communicate important information to Cathy about Jack’s relationship with the widow of a former comrade: Desdemona's swapping notes is the one thing that could have undone Iago in Othello. The showdown between Cathy Ryan and Elliott is a masterpiece of observation about women's cultured brutality towards each other in the theatre of manners: the sort of scene that strikes a room quiet - ostensibly through shock, in reality so the audience doesn't miss a thing.

In criticizing the film for not following the book, I realize it’s unfair to ask Alden transfer Clancy’s prose in the prologue to celluloid. He compares Israel’s challenge in the Yom Kippur war to the Greeks’ victory over the Persians at Thermopylae, the Allies pushing back Nazi lines at the Bastogne section of the Battle of the Bulge, and the Gloucesters and other regiments facing the Red Army at Korea’s Hill 235. The story arising from a solution to the middle-east crisis, TC’s references to heroic struggles against vastly superior numbers presents us with an idea of Israel’s everyday position. There are also references to Tsar Nicholas II, who is blamed by many Russians for hastening the October revolution by entering World War I while the country was in a state of military unpreparedness, and to Moedred (Mordred), the Arthurian traitor who helped bring down the original Camelot.

The crisis comes to boiling point not through military action, but when a group of students stops throwing stones at soldiers and commences on a course of civil disobedience, after the manner of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Footage of an Israeli policeman killing a non-violent protester with rubber bullets is beamed around the world. Ryan comes up with a possible solution to the resulting international situation: it is a brilliant vision which Liz Elliott assures is not credited to him, his crime having been to speak to her robustly. The book is the story of how that vision is attacked by a cabal of those for whom that vision would leave reasons for living, and indeed pockets, empty.

In the film, as in the book, the object of the terrorists' actions is to create a war between the US and Russia. Alden uses a special feature in the DVD to defend himself from charges of political correctness by changing the villains to a neo-Nazi group, although it appears that there was extensive lobbying by the Council on American-Islamic Relations to effect this result. One of the characters we are therefore presented with is a neo-Nazi Russian air-force officer, which frankly I find hard to swallow. Robinson could have exploited far greater opportunities for stereotype-busting by exploring the motivation of the pacifist Palestinian students. (It should be noted that Clancy defended Islam before the sun had set on 9/11.)

Thankfully, Clancy has no need to defend himself from any such accusation - he simply writes his books, and leaves it up to readers as to whether or not to spend money and time on them. We are happy to invest both.

His original villains are Palestinian terrorists who recruit a disaffected Native American as they refashion the bomb's original fissile material into a new, improved bomb. The only reference to Nazis of any vintage that I could make out was that the East German nuclear physicist Manfredd Fromm's father had been a member of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany who was executed by the Reich, and is willingly recruited by the terrorists because he sees the Deutsche Democratische Republik's return of material and research to Russia redux as a betrayal of both his life and his father's sacrifice.

Clancy's villains are no two-dimensional baddies: they love, feel loss, and often regret those of their actions which entail the murder of innocents. He anticipates, and provides a foil to, the phenomenon manifested in modern politics whereby, as Michelle Malkin notes, politicians assume that educating terrorists will kindle empathy in their hearts and turn them away to a less destructive way of living. (Tony Blair's Opposition soundbite "education, education, education" seems to have been an early manifestation of this.) But TC's terrorists dismantle an atomic warhead and build a hydrogen bomb; and in the real world, terrorists learn how to fly aeroplanes, design missiles that can carry goodness knows what in the head, and manufacture chemical and biological weapons - even if they lack a heart-warming frisson, they're quite brainy. The only baddie without an emotional dimension - Marvin Russell, the Native American - is executed by his masters precisely because of this lack: he kills without it having any effect whatsoever on him, a manifestation of extreme antisocial/sociopathic personality disorder. As Clancy states succinctly, "there was something missing".

As always, Clancy tells of high intrigue through personal stories in such a way as to hold up a mirror to each of his readers. We might not understand the Washington insider or the subsistence farmer, but we understand loss and human weakness and the love for one's family that keeps you muddling on when other hopes seem fled. Jack Ryan, snowed in at his office while the bomb goes off in Denver, manifests a calm in the face of seeming hopelessness that we all have felt, that perversely helps us get through the sum of our fears in the hospital waiting room or the mortuary and back to better times. The story of how Jack achieves this, an impossible feat without the support of those who love him, is - among many other things - a story of personal redemption within a fragmented, hostile world where our enemies are not necessarily those towards whom our defences are directed, and friendship often hides under one's radar to surface at the most unexpected times. The east-west emergency having been fuelled not just by malicious design but by a spiral of errors worthy of the Bard, Jack will need to draw on all his reserves of will, refilled by his friends as, after he has declared that Fowler has disappeared into his own contradictions, he faces his greatest temptation ever.

The Sum of all Fears was written as the Soviet Union was disintegrating and was released as Russia rose from the former's ashes, and is possibly more relevant today than when it was published. I have revisited this Thucydidean epic many times, like an old friend, and each time seen something I had previously missed about the human condition, realpolitik and often both. If you are under 30 and value exquisitely-written thrillers, I heartily recommend this book. If you are over 30, read it - whether it's for the first time or the fifth - and you will see echoes of your life and your country, wherever that may be.

at the close of the Olympics

It's all over now; two weeks of fevered sporting madness, during which some of our acquaintances appear to have forgotten resolutions not to watch the Olympics. Personally I kept to mine, but am now wondering if I did the right thing; instead of Minora watching events behind my back as a form of rebellion, it might have been educational for both of us to see, as the Telegraph's Peter Foster reports, the the Chinese Communist Party thumbing its nose "spectacularly" at the International Olympics Committee and getting away with it.

The subterfuge started at the opening ceremony, where a girl was rejected for having uneven teeth, yet her voice was used for the opening song, "Ode to the Motherland", which was lip-synched by a girl judged to be "prettier", whatever that means when grown men use it in relation to pre-pubescent girls. Chen Qigang, music producer for the ceremony, justified this as being "in the national interest".

Using children in the national interest doesns't stop there. Again the Telegraph reports:

the training regimes are still reminiscent of those used in East Germany in the Soviet era. Promising children are hothoused from as young as six in elite, sports-focused boarding schools, where their access to their families is often limited. Only last week, Joseph Capousek, a successful German kayak coach who was recently sacked as trainer of the Chinese national team, said his former employers ran a military-style training regime where athletes were worked "like horses". Chinese officials have denied his claims.

In fact, there is an enquiry ongoing as to whether a Chinese gold-medal athlete, He Kexin, is actually 16, as it says on her passport, or is really 14, which would invalidate her entry (there are fears that practicing gymnastics can stunt the growth of young people). this does not seem to bother the Chinese - on a visit to an athletics hothouse in 2005, rower Sir Matthew Pinsent "saw a seven-year-old girl crying while being made to do handstands, and a boy with marks on his back" (click picture above for story).

Towards the other end of the mortal coil, two women in their 70's were interrogated for 10 hours and then, without a trial, sentenced to a year's re-education through labour. Their crime? The Chinese Government had set up "protest pens", so they applied to stand in one of them to protest. Peter Foster compares the protest-pens to the "‘Hundred Flowers' campaign of 1956-57 when intellectuals were invited to be frank about matters of public policy and then promptly purged for their honesty".

Although all the tickets for this Olympiad were sold out, all 6.8 million of them, there have been many empty seats in the Olympics. These were filled by students and volunteers, who were instructed to sit in the vacant seats whether or not they were interested in the individual contest being played out. I would've liked to have pointed this out to Minora, but the chance is lost now.

Anyway, the Chinese government decided that there would be much more visitors than turned up, and so set up procedures to divert water supplies to the capital from outlying farming areas. You don't have to be a genius like Professor Calculus to figure out what happened next: wells dried up; the price of water in the parched areas rose 300%; farmers got in hock to moneylenders and, in order to escape notification that payment was due, killed themselves by drinking pesticide. The biting irony of the situation is that, due to the poor turnout at the "sellout" Olympics, not a single drop of water was diverted from these regions to Beijing. The official reaction was that "the entire population was overjoyed to be making a sacrifice for the national good".

So despite the neglect of its own people, harrassment of the vulnerable and ideological certainty that it need not be troubled by doubt, a veritable army of the world's quangocrats has descended upon Beijing to present their countries in surrender mode. I said in an earlier post that "unless the International Olympic Committee stands up for itself, China will use it as a doormat." The IOC hasn't, and China has done so, and is taking its place as king of the castle.

I'm sure Boris Johnston, London's Mayor, is getting so much advice about the 2012 Olympics due to be held in London that he doesn't know whether he's coming or going. But if I may add my own straw to the camel's back, I would suggest: hold another austerity olympics. Let sport and the human spirit share the gold.


Related posts:
Sport isn't worth that much - Yamiti's Olympic struggle
As the Olympics begin