A Lost Speech Written by One of Obama's Team for Ed Miliband.

The following is an exert from a speech written by President Obama's speech-writing team for Ed Miliband. Apart from its nationalistic tone, which I find difficult to digest, the rest is rather good: - - - "Britain's greatness is not located in its ability to compete economically with nations of 260million, 340million, or even 1000 million people. It is not our economic power that makes us a serious player on the world stage, but our symbolic and our moral power. For generations we have been a nation globally admired not essentially for our love of liberty and fairness, or for our tolerance for diversity of person, belief and opinion, but for the integrity of the institutions that maintain and transmit these noble qualities from generation to generation. But recently we have seen these virtues threatened from many directions: from misguided politicians who have stained our global reputation for justice and legality with the crimes of an unjust and illegal war; from selfish bankers who exposed the corruptness of our system by feeding greedily from our tables while leaving us to pay the bill; from self-interested politicians who behind parliamentary privileges exposed their unfitness to lead by claiming expenses no decent British person would ever claim. And now from a tribe of ideological politicians, who, in the name of saving us from economic ruin, unnecessarily unravel our greatest institutions in the hope they may save a few extra pounds, win the next general election, and thereby maintain the power their schooling told them would always be theirs. But as we read closely the book they are writing, it turns out that the pounds they save are not from the pockets of the wealthiest in society, but from the pockets of the poorest and most needy. We read that under their policies it will soon be more expensive than in any recent decade for middle and working class parents to raise a family and put food on the table, more unlikely for an ambitious middle or working class girl to enjoy a university education, and more hopeless for the unconnected but hardworking youth to create for himself a brighter future. For these reasons, and many more besides, we find ourselves bemused when they say their current policies will make Britain more fair, more just and more mobile. Let us be clear - their policies will do nothing of the kind. All they will do is increase the likelihood that the types of people who lead us today will end up leading us tomorrow. I believe that what makes this country, this Britain, this Great Britain, deserving of its special name, is not the stubbornness of politicians to stick to their guns when they have got it wrong, not the vested interests of those with power to ensure their power remains, not the people who enjoyed the best university education making it harder for those who can’t, but the capacity of our institutions to uphold the moral foundations – fairnesss, justice, tolerance, equality of opportunity – that secured our place among the great nations of the world. But once these institutions, built by the labor of generations, begin to crumble at the hands of an irresponsible few, we lose far more than our current hope and our birthright of opportunity - we lose the keys to our future. If ever we were a United Kingdom, then let us Unite this Kingdom tonight in our opposition to the unraveling we see around us. Let us unite in saying no more and no way to what they intend to do..."

The Difference Between Cameron and Obama (the artist and the bureaucrat)

Perhaps it is unfair to place these two men side by side. They are entirely different kinds of men, almost different species. But if pressed to summarise the heart of the difference I would say simply this: one man is self-made while the other is a product of a system. Obama defined for himself the man he wanted to be, his own identity, the direction he would take. The answer to his life's riddle was not given ready made. He had to sweat and bleed for the answer. But from the struggle the answer finally came, that is, after years of searching, reading, living alone, getting sidetracked, sometimes getting high, often falling deep into introspection. For Cameron things were different - in his biography we detect no struggle at all, no strain or self-inquiry beyond the pedestrian, or even the superficial. He knew who he was from the outset; his family in the Cotswolds told him; a message consolidated by his schooling, by his university trajectory, by his choice of friends, lovers, associates and employers. Cameron, unlike Obama, is an entirely predictable creation of conventional circumstances - he is an untarnished and faithful product of where he is from. A polished artefact of the upper-middle-class establishment. His values, aims and beliefs are not exactly his own, they were not creatively fashioned by himself, they were simply inherited by default, as were his range of choices, which were narrow: Eton or Winchester, Oxford or Cambridge, the Civil Service or Chambers, Kensington or Notting Hill, Sally or Samantha. In the end, all lines tend in the same direction. For Barack, however, his choices were as complex as they were diverse: State College or Private College, basketball player or novelist, Junky or community activist, college professor or journalist, corporate lawyer or politician, writer or teacher, white wife or black wife. The path was not already lain, the range of possibility far from circumscribed or provincial, as it was for Cameron. Each step for Obama was uncharted and experimental - each step for Cameron had been walked by a thousand others before. Each conviction for Obama was gradually, individually and thoughtfully fashioned, each conviction for Cameron was predictably and communally instilled. It is in this sense that we can say that one man is largely a product, while the other, comparatively speaking, is his own creation; a creation that could have gone any way. One therefore seems curious and exotic, the other commonplace and entirely known; one intrigues and surprises us, while the other is someone we have seen before, who stands next to someone we have seen before. For me, one difference between the two men with respect to their characters, their passion and their the capacity to inspire is that in one we sense the inspiration born from true individual searching and experiment, while in the other we sense that oddly dogged and old-fashioned conviction that their upbringing was true and right. The fact that one man thought individually, while the other followed faithfully, can be illustrated by the following contrast: at Columbia Uni Obama spent his spare time reading the core works of the Civil Rights Movement and writing poetry, while at Oxford Cameron spent his spare time watching Neighbours and the game show Going for Gold!? If anything captures the difference between the activities of the 'self-made man' and 'the product of convention', it is this illustration. For a man who follows the well-travelled road does not need to search in his spare time. But it is precisely what Cameron lost from not searching, from always being the prefect, if you like, that I feel constitutes the heart of their difference - and which more broadly always seems to constitute the difference between the artist and the bureaucrat.

Failing at School (does it matter?)

The following is an exert from my book, "The Importance of Suffering: the value and meaning of emotional discontent" (to be published by Routledge 2012). Those of you who did not do too well at school should consider the following - you are in excellent company:

 Emile Zola, the great French novelist, at school received a zero in literature and also failed in German and rhetoric. D.H. Lawrence, whose novels rank high in English literature, came thirteenth in his class of 21 students and at graduation was placed below average. Sergi Rachmaninoff’s grades at the music conservatory were so low that he altered his report card to hide his failings from his mother. Puccini fared even worse than Rachmaninoff, as he consistently failed his school examinations. The same can be said for John Lennon who did not pass one final school exam, and only barely got accepted into Art College. Marcel Proust as an adult continually complained that his school teachers thought his compositions odd and disorganised, and graded them accordingly. Stephan Crane, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald all experienced failure at college because they did not like the content of their courses. And when Cézanne eagerly applied to the Beaux Arts he was flatly turned down.

 Many other creative individuals’ temperaments were highly misunderstood by teachers who privileged types of personality that honoured the common standard. James Lovelock, one of the greatest scientists of the modern age, was frequently hit with a cane at school. And when he won his school’s general knowledge competition, this infuriated his teachers so much that he was called a freak rather than intelligent. Albert Einstein’s teachers complained to his father that he was mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish dreams. At school Pablo Picasso would stubbornly refuse to do anything but paint, and at the age of 12 was finally removed, as it seemed there was nothing else to be done. Nietzsche continually provoked his teachers’ annoyance by asking questions they could not answer. Hugh Walpole wrote long historical novels as a schoolboy, which nobody wanted to read. Carl Jung was branded a ‘dreamy child’, and when writing on a topic that fascinated him, produced an essay so utterly brilliant that his teacher did not believe it was his own. He was then punished severely for plagiarism.

 Among famous military men and politicians we also find our casualties. Gamal Abdel Nasser spent two years in grade two, failed grade three, and was twelve before he passed his primary school examinations. Thomas Edison was always at the bottom of the class and felt his teachers could not sympathise with him and thought he was stupid. Lord Randolph Churchill was a problem student at Eton and failed his Oxford examinations. His son, Winston Churchill, one of the greatest orators of the twentieth century, when at school at Harrow was thought so poor in English grammar, spelling and composition that he had to forgo his Latin and Greek classes to attend remedial English classes.

 More generally, Thomas Mann, Ernest Jones, Leon Trotsky, Pear Buck, Isadora Duncan, Willa Cather, Sigrid Undset, Susan B. Anthony – all intensely disliked school; whereas as William Randolph Hearst, Paderewski, Brendan Behan, William Osler, Sarah Bernhardt, and Orville Wright were so unruly that they were all expelled.

 There is no need to labour the point by accruing further examples (and there are many more), for what is important is that these illustrations belie a powerful idea that incompetence at school is not only an index of personal failure or obtuseness, but a portent of grave things to come. What these illustrations teach is that failure at school may be rather due to rigid criteria of adjudication, lack of insight into creative temperaments, over-valuation of the judgements of school-tests, or just bad luck with one’s allotted teacher, than to any inherent failing within pupils themselves. The unfavourable judgements these children received we now realise in the light of their adult successes to have been misplaced and short-sighted. But teachers do not possess the benefit of hindsight; and their present judgements cannot be challenged by outcomes that do not yet exist. Furthermore, limited time and resources, as well as today’s huge governmental pressure to obtain high results, do not give teachers the time to make critical distinctions between children who fall below the norm and children who surpass it.

The Pultizer Prize winning psychologist, James Hillman, to whom I am grateful for many of these examples, has argued that it is precisely because creative children are forced to adapt to the norm, that they become maladjusted. He takes the view that creative people often ‘do not allow compromises with standard norms’ even if ostracism and unhappiness is the result. In this sense their maladjustment acts ‘as a kind of preventative medicine, holding…[them] back from a false route.’ He proceeds to remind us, ‘that school for teachers was once called ‘normal’ school, the goddess of school is the Roman Minerva, the great normalizer, the great weaver into the social fabric.’ 

A Great Woman at Your Side

I am reading at present a biography by Andersen entitled Barack & Michelle. I am gripped to learn of the central role michelle played in her husband's ascent. Firstly, she was the main bread winner for many years, while Barack made almost nothing establishing his career. Secondly, she changed jobs frequently, and often strategically, in order to make highly valuable political contacts for him in Chicago (where they lived). Thirdly, she constantly networked on his behalf, introduced him to the right people (including Jesse Jackson), and was such an excellent host at their political dinner parties that guests just wanted to come back. She secured his campaigns more money than anyone else, she forewarned him that he would fail before he failed, and knew where and when he would succeed before he succeeded. And all the while she predominantly raised their two kids and kept the household afloat.  Oh, and to cap it off, she came up with the phrase 'yes we can'. Well, yes, she certainly can!

After reading this book my admiration for barack, while remaining undiminished, has been joined by a deepened admiration for her, not because she served her husband, but because she served through him a far greater cause, and for a while, was willing to take the risk of almost losing herself in the process.