An Arc of Extremists…. and a Hypotenuse Triangle of War Mongers?

02-08-2006

TonyBlair's been speechifying again - this time in Los Angeles - to members of the World Affairs Council (who?) He described an "arc of extremism" spreading across the Middle East. A what? An "arc" of extremism, that's what. Peter Millington is not impressed...

Tony Blair has always been one for an over sincere idiom.

Language is, after all, the real weapon of the truly great politician.

And the pen is, after all, mightier than the sword - a truismbest demonstrated by a tale once told to me by an Irish ward sister in a Birmingham hospital who as a teenager attended an all-girl's Catholic boarding school withjust that motto.

One dark and cloudy night some rebellious piggy-tailed school girl shimmied down the drain pipe beside her dormitory window, then took her spray-can to the coat of arms on the front gate and added the two letters ‘is' immediately after the word ‘pen'.

The mirth of this young satirist's school pals is no doubt the stuff of school legend within her alma materto this day.

Personally I doubt if the young Tony Blair ever had the rebellious gene necessary to turn phrase and dictum into satire and irony.

(and besides which he didn't attend a girl's boarding school, or one assumes he didn't… without having read his autobiography…)

Perhaps that's where over-sincerity plays it's part, stifling the impulse to leap from the disciplined path of practised intellectualism into the anarchic jungle of original and truly inspired expression.

Every thing is carefully thought out, carefully practised and delivered repeatedly with complete sincerity and a touch of humble understatement. The risk is controlled, measured. It's all spin and sound bites.

Unfortunately for Blair, his limp well-rehearsed rhetoric will never put him up there with the truly great orators.

Gritty old Winston: “never has so much been owed by so many to so few, we will fight them on the beaches, we will never surrender”.

Martin Luther King: “I have a dream… we hold these truths to be self evident, all men are created equal… we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt”.

JFK: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man”.

Even Mrs T: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope… this lady is not for turning”.

Sadly for our would-be global statesman and orator, nothing springs immediately to mind in quite the same way.

Just this sixth form obsession with geometric metaphors.

Arcs of evil terrorist nations and global extremists. Arcs of people who don't understand fair values like we have in democratic countries.

And like school children in awe of the popular and (some say) brainy head boy giving a speech in support of the head master, the rest of us take his word for it because we don't know anything about arcs or geometric shapes of any description for that matter.

The Iranians want to impose strict Muslim law on the whole world. Tony and George must know best.

Sadam had weapons of mass destruction pointed at my house in Birmingham. Tony and George knew best on that one too.

The war in Afghanistan will be swift and effective. They don't say much about that anymore so that must be right as well.

Israel just needs a tincey bit more time to finish a messy but necessary job. We bow to your superior knowledge once more oh great ones.

Watch out for the rising arc of nasty people!

I can almost see it with mine own eyes as I gaze out of my window. If Tony and George say there's an arc… well, who am I to disagree? Arc it is then.

Actions speak louder than words. Judge a man by what he does not what he says. Just don't leave the microphone switched on when you're in profound debate with a brain whose in-depth analysis of a potential world war is “get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit”.

And we thought they were discussing geometry!

An arc of folk doing shit then? Or an oblong of democracy haters perhaps? An ellipse of global capitalists?

A black hole of screaming babies?

A hyperbola of journalists? A polygon of politicians?

A hypotenuse triangle of war mongers?

But if our Tony really wants inspiration from great American orators, perhaps he should revisit the one they silenced:

"So let us begin anew -- remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate".

The arc is in your head Blair!