Pineapple Juice 1: We had the bouncers chucking them in
Green New Deals, jazz, luxury beliefs, Ash Wednesday, etc
Dear Reader,
My previous letter promised you a regular round-up feature called “Pineapple Slices”, but I had misremembered my strategy. It’s actually going to be called “Pineapple Juice”, the idea being that this newsletter has taken the rough, scaly, pulpy mass of contemporary writing and extracted from it only what it sweetest and most nutritious...
...and sharpest, as with Aris Roussinos’s essay for UnHerd on 21st-century geopolitics. In short: imperialism is back, and this time it’s green. “Some form of Green New Deal,” Roussinos writes, is “now the dominant medium-term economic model for Britain, the United States, China and the EU.” Not because they’ve been taken over by tree-hugging vegans, but as
a means to restart a sluggish global economy after decades of stagnation, a gigantic form of Keynesian stimulus analogous to the New Deal after which it is named, or to the Trente Glorieuses during which a shattered post-war Europe rebuilt itself.
Sounds good, no? Maybe the jobless Class of 2021 can all find work constructing sensitively-designed hydroelectric dams in remote lakes. However, the Green New Deal also means a new kind of global contest:
Though it has barely impinged on the popular consciousness, we are already witnessing a new “Great Game” as industrial economies seek to secure their control of elements like lithium, essential to the production of the lithium-ion batteries which are rapidly turning electric vehicles from an expensive toy into the affordable, and soon dominant, mode of transport. China … is buying up controlling stakes in lithium mines from Australia to Bolivia.
Control of raw materials can be a very ugly game. But that, it seems, is what we’re in for. Read Roussinos for a preview.
From the future to the past. In The Critic, Dominic Green reminisces about Ronnie Scott’s, the club which brought to London some of the great figures of 20th-century jazz. Even if the names of Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis raise barely a shrug from you, I think you’ll enjoy Green’s depiction of a world from which us non-musicians are excluded, though we share in the benefits.
Ronnie’s was our clubhouse, the place you could go when everywhere else was closed or full up with office drinkers and tourists. I never had to join, never had to pay, was never turned away even when they were queueing round the block. “You’re family,” Pete King would say, flicking his square head back towards the red darkness and the wave of music. “Go on.”
The article also quietly shows how a small institution, run for love, can end up forming a micro-culture with an impact far beyond itself.
I only wish Green had given a fuller portrait of the eponymous Ronnie Scott. He sounds like a character. His obituaries quoted his ludicrous, self-deprecating MC’s patter: “You should have been at the club last Monday,” he would tell the crowd. “Somebody should have been here last Monday. We had the bouncers chucking them in. A guy rang up to ask what time the show started and we said, ‘What time can you get here?’”
The author of The Pineapple has been moonlighting. I’m in the current issue of the Spectator, writing on the surge of interest in Anglo-Saxon history, culminating in Netflix’s The Dig but also discernible in TV shows like The Last Kingdom, trends in history publishing, and the enthusiastic public response to the Staffordshire Hoard and the British Library’s Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition. The exhibition’s curator Claire Breay and the historian Tom Holland gave me some thoughtful suggestions about why the era is back in fashion. I also got to fly the flag for
the BBC’s Detectorists (2014-17), featuring Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook waving their metal detectors over open fields, chatting about nothing while hinting at everything. One running joke is that each time their metal detectors start beeping, the characters spring into action – could this be the next Staffordshire Hoard? – only to dig up a Fanta ring-pull, a 20p coin or a crisp packet. It’s a sort of metaphor for the plight of the English, searching for a national identity and only finding the debris of consumer culture. Or is there something beneath the surface after all?
Really, has anything in the last five years of British TV surpassed Detectorists? (Genuine question. Answers on a postcard to danhitchens1989@gmail.com.)
For those who prefer the audio experience, I also discussed the piece on the magazine’s podcast, and on Spectator TV.
Steven Parfitt has written an eye-opening potted history of the various dark arts – private detectives, blacklists, digital censorship – used to stifle workers’ rights since the 19th century. There’s a bit too much “This is the real cancel culture, not the one those terrible right-wingers keep talking about”, but still – recommended.
A useful phrase: “luxury beliefs”. Thanks to Louise Perry at the New Statesman:
The psychologist Rob Henderson has coined the term “luxury beliefs” to describe, as he puts it, “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class”. For instance, a member of the bourgeoisie can elevate his status by proposing to “defund the police” with little fear of negative consequences for himself if this policy were ever enacted, since those most affected by crime are poor people who can’t afford to move away from dangerous areas.
Similarly, rich people in the modern West can experiment with alternative relationship arrangements, such as having multiple partners, in the knowledge they can always fall back on their financial and social capital if it doesn’t work out. But not everyone has the luxury of rewriting relationship norms. A poor woman with several children by several different men, for example, is placed in an intolerably precarious situation if she finds herself suddenly single. For the rich, luxury beliefs are about gain with little pain.
Perry applies the term to an NHS Trust’s foisting of gender-neutral language (“chestfeeding”) on, of all things, perinatal services.
At UnHerd, I marked the fifteenth birthday of Eat, Pray, Love, with more regret than I expected:
Fifteen years on, self-help has become a far more sensible affair. Or rather, it has been supplanted by “self-care” — those miniature, fine-tuned adjustments to soothe you through a demanding day. Instead of going on a voyage of self-discovery, people download mindfulness apps called things like “Ten Per Cent Happier”. Whereas Elizabeth Gilbert searched for a God who is “an experience of supreme love”, we have Marie Kondo telling us to throw more stuff away and Sarah Knight offering The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F***. The new mood was anticipated by the ironic subtitle of Oliver Burkeman’s 2011 post-self-help book Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done.
Also for UnHerd, I wrote about the enduring – and counter-intuitive – popularity of Ash Wednesday, and how police forces have repeatedly failed to distinguish between offensiveness and offence.
Discuss:
“In single, sometimes forgotten events the essence of a time quite often lies.”
(Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies)
Free pineapple fact:
“Pineapple”, a reader informs me, is Australian slang for a $50 note. I may have to make use of that when and if this newsletter begins to demand money from its grateful readers.
Photo: Part of a helmet cheek piece from the Staffordshire Hoard (Flickr/Portable Antiquities Scheme, Creative Commons)