Thrill of the Chaste
What does it mean to be a virgin nowadays … and is it important? By Stephen Phelan
THERE WAS a time when people believed that only a virgin - and only females were considered true virgins - could coax a unicorn out of hiding. Like most other folk tales, that legend can now be easily re-read in Freudian terms. Seven centuries of secular thought and medical science have discounted, if not discredited, the idea that sexual inexperience is a source of spiritual power, along with any number of pseudo-biological theories as to how maidenhood manifests itself physically. But virginity has not yet been demythologised. A few still believe in unicorns. Almost everyone still believes in virginity, which is elusive in its own way.
"If someone asks you what it means to be a virgin," says Anke Bernau, author of the newly published Virgins: A Cultural History, "or what it means to lose that virginity, you might start by saying, Of course, we all know what it is', or Of course, it's not important any more'. But the more you think about it, the less certain you become about defining it. Virginity is still important to people, but they don't actually know what it is."
Bernau is speaking from experience as a professor of mediaeval literature at Manchester University, where her students consistently choose to write papers on such subjects as Joan of Arc and the sexual politics of the 15th century. Their assumptions, and her own research, led Bernau "into thinking about how the modern world regards the mediaeval in general". "Ideas of contemporary virginity," she says, "especially all this talk of abstinence education and chastity movements, made me interested in how scholars from other periods thought and wrote about it. How does the idea of a virgin saint make sense today?"
Virgins: A Cultural History begins, as do most examinations of this subject, with the hymen. First referred to in print by Italian physician Michael Savonarola in the 1400s, its existence was still being doubted and debated 400 years later. Doctors have since proven it, but also that its intactness proves nothing as regards virginity. What Savonarola called "the subtle membrane" has become common knowledge, as has the possibility that it may be broken by the mundane activities and accidents of girlhood, long before any form of sexual contact.
Bernau quotes a 1978 article from medical journal The Lancet: "Contrary to popular belief, no definite criteria have ever been established for deciding whether a woman is a virgin or not." That statement remains as true as when it was written, even though the patently false claims of mediaeval patricians - that a virgin was detectable by her facial expression, her body shape, or her smell - would seem to have modern equivalents in the "virginity tests" that women are still subjected to in certain countries, or the surgical "rehymenisation" procedures that some now volunteer and pay for as a means of restoring what they feel has been lost.
"The modern," says Bernau, "is more like the mediaeval than most people realise. Look at contemporary value concepts of female sexuality, where teenage girls are described by peers as slags' or frigid'. Those concepts have a long history."
She accepts that she is talking, and writing, almost exclusively about the Western world, while the aforementioned tests and surgeries are much more common to the Middle East, where religious and social codes place anxious emphasis on a traditional association of male honour with female virginity. Muslim extremists famously believe that suicide bombers will be rewarded in paradise with 72 virgins, although Christoph Luxenberg's contentious recent assertion that the original language of the Koran was Syriac, rather than Arabic, has given rise to an alternative translation - holy martyrs may in fact have been promised luscious "raisins", rather than "virgins". (The operative word in this confusion is "hur", which has long been interpreted by scholars as an enigmatic mention of dark-eyed heavenly maidens. Luxenberg instead deciphered it as a feminine plural adjective which means "white" in Syriac, but implicitly refers to dried grapes, and arguably makes more sense within a written Islamic Hadith that describes the full buffet of Paradise.) "It's a vast topic," admits Bernau. Bigger than her book can accommodate. She had no room for a planned chapter on male virginity, which is so rarely discussed outside of American teen comedies - a recent and honest example being the film Superbad - that when it does come up, the word "male" is still required as a modifier.
"Absolutely. When you say virgin', it shouldn't automatically be assumed that you mean female', but people do make that assumption, and it says something about how we perceive the differences between male and female sexuality. Also, female sexuality these days is so often talked about in terms of Islam and other cultures. There is a reluctance, perhaps, to talk about where Western secular culture gets its ideas of virginity. Which is, from 700 years of Christian thought."
In the middle ages, the Church idealised virginity because of the example set by Jesus Christ and his mother. Feudal aristocracies prized it no less, but for different reasons - a virginal bride was a guarantee of legitimate heirs to inherit property and title. The combined effect was a confused and suspicious form of social control over women in particular, by which a rape victim might still be considered a virgin, if only the courts could be convinced that neither her body nor soul had consented.
Protestantism arose partly from a conviction that humanity was too weak to sustain chastity, as demonstrated by the lapses of monks and nuns, and that marriage was therefore more natural, plausible, and worthy of veneration. (Sectarian animosity is, as such, partly the product of conflict over the figure of Mary, whose virginity is not necessarily doubted by Protestant denominations, but historically considered a distraction from the attention due to God himself.) With every advance towards sexual equality, there have been religious adaptations. During the Victorian era, "purity leagues" such as the White Cross Society demanded pre-marital abstinence of both genders, an equivocal concession to early modern feminist thought that also found validation in Biblical passages such as Ephesians 5:3 ("But among you there must be not even a hint of sexual immorality ... "). There is nothing new, then, about the US-based evangelical pressure groups which now militate for abstinence as the only acceptable form of sex education, and the only valid choice outside wedlock - the best known being the Silver Ring Thing.
What is new is the recognition, among similar but secular organisations, that virginity may be a choice made independently. Denise Pfeiffer is media co-ordinator for the Silver Ring Thing in the UK, but also director of an internet-based support group called Celibrate, which provides a platform for non-religious abstainers. "This is a market that has not been catered for," says Pfeiffer. "There is a fraction of our sexualised society for whom some of the ideas that have become the norm are quite repulsive. Their concerns are almost taboo now, but they shouldn't be, because this society is damaging a lot of people in ways that haven't really been measured yet. Look at the UK's rate of sexually transmitted infections STIs ... "
Pfeiffer is celibate herself, having decided as a teenager that the standard biological sex education was going to "lead somewhere disastrous". Celibrate is her belated resistance movement, attracting over 6000 members since it was founded last year. According to Pfeiffer, the website appeals to those who are chaste or virginal for their own private and positive reasons (as opposed to physical or psycho-sexual problems that may force people to become involuntary celibates, or "in-cels"), but they are generally dedicated to a few core propositions.
First, that celibacy should be taught in schools as "the most viable and healthy option". Second, that an organised response is required to the stigmatisation of virginity. And third, that asexuality should be considered a sexual category in itself.
"If someone out there has never had a sex drive," says Pfeiffer, "and never looked back or regretted it, then I would argue that person is not heterosexual, or homosexual, but something different." The Celibrate site includes a "roll of honour" of the famous names who supposedly belong to this other type - JM Barrie, Isaac Newton, Cliff Richard, Marlene Dietrich (who had sex, but reportedly "hated" it).
The list could be longer. Besides the resounding examples set for women by Joan Of Arc and Queen Elizabeth I (both of whom achieved mythic political power through outright defiance of patriarchal custom), some of the world's greatest male artists and thinkers are rumoured to have been virgins. Children's authors form a peculiar cluster: Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Anderson. Philosophers too: Kant, Descartes, Kierkegaard.
Nietzsche, however, who is sometimes speculatively mentioned in that company, took the view that virginity, like liberty, was an invention of the ruling classes, having nothing to do with human nature. That view may now be less popular than ever.
"I personally think this resurgence of concern for virginity is a negative thing," says Anke Bernau. "I'm all for young men or women being confident enough to say no to sex and resist peer pressure. But I don't think you can use the concept of virginity as a kind of ideal, and at the same time hope to illuminate all its very problematic connotations."
The most fundamental of these is the question of definition. Who or what is a virgin? A person who has not (yet) engaged in penetrative sex? What about all the other kinds of sexual contact? What about gay men and lesbians? What about abused children? Do love, or morality, come into it?
Even if virginity could be quantified, there would still be the question of how and why it is lost in the real world, where the young cannot always reflect on such abstracts. In Scotland, sex education is directed by a national policy of Respect And Responsibility, summarised as: "Delay until ready, be safe when active." But this country's levels of STIs remain among the highest in Europe, and NHS Quality Improvement statistics suggest teenagers in deprived areas are at least three times more likely to get pregnant than middle-class peers.
All of which suits what Bernau calls the "post-modern view", that our governing institutions do not address either the environmental factors or private emotions at stake, and instead obstruct our understanding of virginity as a social construct which has no meaning other than that which the individual decides to give it. But even those who don't feel represented by the definitions of church, or school, or parliament, still refuse to believe that it is meaningless. Virginity, and its loss, satisfy our sense of narrative.
On one hand, the women who undergo hymenoplasties, or declare themselves "revirginised" in the sense of being reformed, seem to buy back into a concept that predates and even repudiates feminism. Wendy Shalit's book A Return To Modesty argued that women's liberation has only increased misogynist violence, so the entire project should be reversed. Wendy Keller based her Cult Of The Born Again Virgin on the premise that sexual freedom "is not getting us what we thought it would".
On the other hand, so-called born-again virgins might be seen as rewriting their own stories, trying to find a way back through a rite of passage that they feel has been dictated to them. In a recent interview, a spokesperson for London's secretive and exclusive women-only chastity society The Prim And Proper Pussy Club said that "celibacy is as much a rebellion as promiscuity". "No two girls are in the club for the same reason," explained the pseudonymous Miss Angeline. "Some think abstinence is the new laid'. For me, abstinence is a personal quest ... I am now as free as I can be in a capitalist world."
For most, however, virginity is a private fairytale that still works because of its power as a metaphor for life itself - once lost, gone forever. Each story is unique, but universal. "The loss of virginity is a personal experience," says Bernau, "but that is mediated through a cultural narrative that belongs to everyone. There are only so many plots and locations - the back seat of a car or whatever.
"For my research I read autobiographical stories about lesbian virginity loss, and they were similar to the heterosexual ones, which disappointed me a bit. Why are these narratives picking up on the concept of virginity rather than relinquishing it?"
This is an academic question, which may not be of interest to those who cannot take the concept for granted. Earlier this year, at the age of 22, Nick Wallis lost his virginity to a sex worker after giving up hope of that conventional narrative. "I got fed up with waiting," he says, six months after the fact. Wallis was born with muscular dystrophy, a life-shortening illness which progressively debilitates the body without directly affecting the mind. He had the same sex education as most other British kids - "general biological stuff" - and all the same urges, but a narrowing window of time and opportunity to act on them.
"I wanted the experience, like everyone else. I've got a right to feel normal. But there's always this issue of not having a girlfriend. What I want more than anything is to be in a proper relationship. I thought it might happen at university, but approaching girls was a bit of a farce. From their body language you knew they weren't interested. So I got disillusioned."
His decision to pay a "surrogate worker" was recorded in a BBC documentary about Helen and Douglas House, the Oxfordshire hospice where Wallis receives part-time care. The staff, and his mother, had their problems with it, but could not dispute his logic or his urgency. "I just want things to happen now," he said on camera, when someone called him brave for speaking out on the issue. Wallis hadn't thought in those terms. He thought it was his story, and his problem, alone.
Since the deed was done, and the programme broadcast, there has been, he says, "a lot of bullshit out there making me out to be a bad person".
"I'm not bothered about what those people think. But it does make me sad that it didn't happen with a girlfriend, within a proper relationship. I've had the physical experience of sex, but I still feel like a virgin."
Virgins: A Cultural History is published by Granta, £18.99 www.celibrate.org www.helenanddouglas.org.uk
Story published October 14, 2007, The Sunday Herald
Tuesday 20 November 2007
Naomi Klein Interview (Sept 2007)
Beyond the Brand
What next for the controversial author whose critique of fashion labels sparked a backlash against multinationals? Stephen Phelan meets Naomi Klein
WHEN NO Logo was published in January 2000, it addressed the new century directly. The argument advanced by that book, and the movement articulated by debut author Naomi Klein, seemed to promise a new world to go with it. From the perspective of those holding high office in tall buildings, this seemed more like a threat. Street-level activists had already demonstrated Klein's prescience even while her manuscript was being bound and printed, shutting down a World Trade Organisation conference, and downtown Seattle in the process, towards the end of 1999.
Almost eight years later, Klein does not believe that the anti-globalisation movement is finished, but accepts that the "moment" has passed. "For a little while there," she remembers today, "you had thousands of people crashing this experts-only world, demanding to be involved in wonkish discussions about economic policy and intellectual property rights."
One reading of recent history - Klein calls it "the official version" - suggests that moment ended on September 11, 2001, when the resistance to Western capitalism went violently out of fashion. What momentum it had gathered was then redirected against the pressing matter of the "war on terror", and questions of how, and where, and whether, it could or should be fought. The fact that No Logo had been fashionable in the first place came to suit the reactionary view that Klein's book was no more than an ephemeral artefact, and the author herself a hypocrite for writing such a youth-oriented, style-conscious, marketable treatise on the true cost of high-street shopping.
"Oh yeah," she says. "People used to enjoy informing me that I was actually my own brand. Hopefully I won't be getting that any more. I've done lots of different things in the last few years, but I haven't started a consulting agency or anything like that. So I'm obviously a bad brand manager, and I've probably lost a lot of brand recognition."
Which is to admit that her follow-up book has been a long time coming. (Fences And Windows, published in 2002, was a collection of Klein's then-contemporary speeches and journalism.) But Klein is never inactive, and usually the opposite. She and her husband, the documentary-maker Avi Lewis, spent most of 2003 in Argentina shooting The Take, a film about the factory workers who reoccupied their former places of employment, under their own terms and management, in a collective rejection of the capitalist model that had imploded and left them abandoned.
Klein visited Iraq in spring 2004, just before the Coalition Provisional Authority nominally transferred power from the United States and its contractors to the new domestic government. What she saw and heard resulted in Baghdad Year Zero, an essay which became notorious for its portrait of the reconstruction process as a lethal free-trade bazaar, where insurgent viciousness was being generated as much by the CPA's bold new liberalised and deregulated economy as by the US military occupation itself.
"Instead of creating the best place in the world to do business," wrote Klein, "they have managed to create the worst not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded."
A year later, she was in Sri Lanka, where post-tsunami building work had become grounds for profiteering land-grabs, as developers seized prime beachfront property from the fishing communities that had literally been wiped out. Within weeks, she was watching the same thing happen first hand in New Orleans, when those parts of the city drowned by Hurricane Katrina were rapidly redesignated as flat-tax free-enterprise zones.
"Things got a bit crazy for a few years," says Klein, referring to her workload in terms that would also do fine as an epigraph for the early 21st century. But since 2005, Klein, who still lives in her birth city of Toronto, has been sitting in her parents' home amid the quiet woods of British Columbia, formulating all of this field data into a unifying theory, and an unofficial history, that might actually explain how the world now works. She calls it The Shock Doctrine, and it is the title of her new book, which was finally published last week. The subtitle: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism.
"I don't claim that it explains everything," says Klein. "But I do think it explains a major something. We already have the official version of events, but there are huge parts of that history missing. This book is a supplement that I hope fills in some of those missing parts. It gives people an important piece of the story, which maybe they can use to create their own theory."
On the afternoon I meet Klein at her British publisher's office in central London, The Shock Doctrine has not yet gone on sale, but she has already spent the morning responding to the objections of those who have reacted badly to extracts they read in a newspaper, or had heard enough about it to decide that they disagreed.
"I knew that defending this book would be part of the deal," she says. "I also think the book speaks pretty well in its own defence. The problem is it's not quite out there yet, and already people are getting the wrong ideas about it." Klein has at least two weapons to use against pro-capitalists and neo-conservatives: her facility for debate - "You have to answer the language of faith with the language of morality" - and her ability to make them sound silly.
She does this literally, mimicking the stentorian voices of those invariably male experts who tell her, "Oh, but you don't mention how bad state socialism was" or ask her, "Oh, so what are your alternatives?" The day before this interview, Otto J Reich, who was Ronald Regan's ambassador to Venezuela, and more recently George W Bush's special envoy to the Western hemisphere, dismissed Klein and her new book without having read it. "There is no such thing as disaster capitalism," he said, and if he said it anything like the way Klein now quotes him, Reich must have spoken with the pomposity of an elder cartoon elephant.
Amused and perversely validated as she was to hear a phrase of her own invention even used, however dismissively, by a man she politely describes as "one of the most, um, controversial US foreign policy figures in Latin America", Klein is expecting more of the same. This is why she asked her husband to travel with her while she promotes The Shock Doctrine ("We see this as kind of a political campaign, and I couldn't really deal with the attacks by myself"), and why she has gained a new empathy for the apathetic.
"I think for the first time in my life I can see how people just throw in the towel. I never understood that before. But it's hard. I guess I'm saying I can see the appeal of not bashing my head against a wall. But then you look at people who have made the decision to become cynical and disengaged. Really, just look at those people. Look where it leads, ha ha. They don't look relieved to me, they look self-loathing. I won't allow myself to go there."
Klein herself looks as good at 37 as she did when No Logo made her famous in her late 20s. She is wearing a white jacket that might well be designer, and carrying one of those new Apple iPhones. "It's terrible, right?" she asks me when the thing goes off. "It's my book tour phone. I've never had one of these hand-held devices before, but I'm not going to be home for three months, and I knew I'd need constant access to email, so I decided to go straight for the cool new gadget. It's not such a good phone though. You need really tiny fingers to push the buttons."
Attractiveness and stylishness have not always worked in her favour, and may still give her ideological opponents whatever licence they feel they need to get at her by way of her profile. The Economist defined this approach with a 2002 op-ed piece that attempted to assassinate Klein's character as manifesting "all the incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent". That assessment could just as easily be interpreted as a superficial reading of Klein's true substance: her continued dedicatation to the teenager she had in mind when she wrote No Logo.
"I was writing that book for the girl I had been at age 19. For any girl at that age, who has the politics but doesn't have the arguments to back them up. That's who was sitting on my shoulder. I wanted to arm that 19-year-old. And then so many of the letters I got about No Logo came from young women, which to me was the most gratifying thing about it.
"Just knowing that I engaged with those women by being who I am that is very, very, very important to me. Because I get so much flak for writing the way I do, for not being an old man."
Klein acknowledged throughout that first book that she was typical of her peer group in some ways and not in others, having made herself a model of the average teen consumer in a brief and calculated bid for rebellion against her socialist parents. Her father was a physician, her mother a film-maker, and both of them were US citizens who had dissented from the Vietnam war by relocating to Canada (and who were, in turn, the children of American Marxists - Klein's grandfather worked as a Disney animator until he was fired for organising the corporation's first labour strike).
The values implanted by her family were not activated until she went to university in Toronto, but Klein has always allowed for the possibility that her politics are in themselves luxury products of a safe liberal environment. This might make her work more, or less, impressive, depending on your point of view. But she is not boasting when she describes The Shock Doctrine as "a big book" and "a radical thesis".
Klein gives all due credit to her research team, and defers to those who have risked or even given their lives to provide some of the stories she uses. China would have no place in her thesis if it wasn't for the work of dissident journalist Wang Hui. She would never have noticed the insidiously unchanged economy of post-apartheid South Africa if William Gumede, a writer on such matters, had not admitted to her that even he didn't notice it at first. And her chapter on 1970s Argentina owes at least some of its power and clarity to the words of Rodolfo Walsh, who effectively signed his own death warrant with his Open Letter From A Writer To The Military Junta.
As a finished product, The Shock Doctrine says more than she set out to write, or to prove. Klein's conclusion is that every natural and man-made disaster on Earth now occurs within the context of a global power structure that has been engineered to turn financial and political profit from the resulting panic. Klein has come to see violence in Iraq, poverty in Russia, torture in Latin America and market collapse across Asia as evidence not of chaos but of order, resulting from a "50-year crusade to privatise the world".
And the architect of this era she identifies as the recently deceased American Nobel laureate and intellectual, Milton Friedman, whose pathological devotion to pure capitalism, and no less zealous aversion to any and all forms of public investment, has influenced so many modern policy-makers that almost every recent government - including brutal South African dictatorships - has owed something to the application of his logic. "It's more than an implication I'm making," says Klein.
"It's not a conspiracy theory either. I'm talking about a deliberate project by these so-called technocrats to remove economics from democratic accountability. If we look at who these men are and what they believe, they don't really hide the fact that they think government should disappear, except as an ATM machine for their businesses."
The men she is referring to include self-confessed Friedman accolyte and former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, as well as serving vice president Dick Cheney, who owns stocks in Halliburton that have increased in value by 300% since the corporation was granted its contract to provide "logistical support" to the American military in Iraq.
By declaring that the slaughters that occupation has perpetuated are the consequences of a plan, rather than the absence of one, on the part of the Bush administration, Klein appears to be suggesting that these men are either ignorant or antipathetic to the human cost of their decisions. Which is it? Does she believe, as Professor Andre Gunder Frank once said of Friedman, that they are guilty of "economic genocide"?
"Yeah. Some of them. But their rationale is that all this human pain they clearly see as a difficult stage on the road to utopia. This is what all ideologues believe - OK, 72 million are impoverished in Russia but these are growing pains on the way to a free market economy which will ultimately be so much better than state socialism that it will all be worth it'." Capitalists used to say of communists that they were bound to fail because their system did not acknowledge the truth of human nature.
Klein now seems to be saying the same thing right back at them. "Well, I think we're complicated. We are both selfish and generous, and these impulses compete, and any ideology that claims we're only one is probably full of it. But this ideology of disaster capitalism says you are free to indulge in your greed because by that indulgence you are actually helping the most people possible. I don't believe it. And it's not just a difference of opinion. Because I think that is less an ideology than a cover story."
It is difficult to imagine what Klein's 19-year-old self would think of all this, or whether she could even comprehend it. "If you were 19 when you read No Logo, then you're 26 now," she says hopefully, although she admits that The Shock Doctrine may be less "galvanising" because of the size and complexity of the historical force it refers to. There is also a strange lack of anger in the language that she uses for this book. Klein saves her "snarky remarks" for her speeches. "You want to present the facts with a gravitas and a sense of morality that gives people the tools to have their own reaction. You don't want to crowd them with yours."
And her favourite positive comment on The Shock Doctrine so far has come from one of her heroes, the artist and novelist John Berger, who said he read it not with anger, but with "calm".
"To me, that's, like, the highest compliment. When you get information that you don't know how to process or articulate, you tense up, right? But when you read something that just says it, that makes the right connections, it's a relief. Your body relaxes. So I don't want this book to make people feel mad, or dumb. I want them to feel calm."
The Shock Doctrine is published by Penguin, £25
Story published The Sunday Herald, September 22 2007
What next for the controversial author whose critique of fashion labels sparked a backlash against multinationals? Stephen Phelan meets Naomi Klein
WHEN NO Logo was published in January 2000, it addressed the new century directly. The argument advanced by that book, and the movement articulated by debut author Naomi Klein, seemed to promise a new world to go with it. From the perspective of those holding high office in tall buildings, this seemed more like a threat. Street-level activists had already demonstrated Klein's prescience even while her manuscript was being bound and printed, shutting down a World Trade Organisation conference, and downtown Seattle in the process, towards the end of 1999.
Almost eight years later, Klein does not believe that the anti-globalisation movement is finished, but accepts that the "moment" has passed. "For a little while there," she remembers today, "you had thousands of people crashing this experts-only world, demanding to be involved in wonkish discussions about economic policy and intellectual property rights."
One reading of recent history - Klein calls it "the official version" - suggests that moment ended on September 11, 2001, when the resistance to Western capitalism went violently out of fashion. What momentum it had gathered was then redirected against the pressing matter of the "war on terror", and questions of how, and where, and whether, it could or should be fought. The fact that No Logo had been fashionable in the first place came to suit the reactionary view that Klein's book was no more than an ephemeral artefact, and the author herself a hypocrite for writing such a youth-oriented, style-conscious, marketable treatise on the true cost of high-street shopping.
"Oh yeah," she says. "People used to enjoy informing me that I was actually my own brand. Hopefully I won't be getting that any more. I've done lots of different things in the last few years, but I haven't started a consulting agency or anything like that. So I'm obviously a bad brand manager, and I've probably lost a lot of brand recognition."
Which is to admit that her follow-up book has been a long time coming. (Fences And Windows, published in 2002, was a collection of Klein's then-contemporary speeches and journalism.) But Klein is never inactive, and usually the opposite. She and her husband, the documentary-maker Avi Lewis, spent most of 2003 in Argentina shooting The Take, a film about the factory workers who reoccupied their former places of employment, under their own terms and management, in a collective rejection of the capitalist model that had imploded and left them abandoned.
Klein visited Iraq in spring 2004, just before the Coalition Provisional Authority nominally transferred power from the United States and its contractors to the new domestic government. What she saw and heard resulted in Baghdad Year Zero, an essay which became notorious for its portrait of the reconstruction process as a lethal free-trade bazaar, where insurgent viciousness was being generated as much by the CPA's bold new liberalised and deregulated economy as by the US military occupation itself.
"Instead of creating the best place in the world to do business," wrote Klein, "they have managed to create the worst not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded."
A year later, she was in Sri Lanka, where post-tsunami building work had become grounds for profiteering land-grabs, as developers seized prime beachfront property from the fishing communities that had literally been wiped out. Within weeks, she was watching the same thing happen first hand in New Orleans, when those parts of the city drowned by Hurricane Katrina were rapidly redesignated as flat-tax free-enterprise zones.
"Things got a bit crazy for a few years," says Klein, referring to her workload in terms that would also do fine as an epigraph for the early 21st century. But since 2005, Klein, who still lives in her birth city of Toronto, has been sitting in her parents' home amid the quiet woods of British Columbia, formulating all of this field data into a unifying theory, and an unofficial history, that might actually explain how the world now works. She calls it The Shock Doctrine, and it is the title of her new book, which was finally published last week. The subtitle: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism.
"I don't claim that it explains everything," says Klein. "But I do think it explains a major something. We already have the official version of events, but there are huge parts of that history missing. This book is a supplement that I hope fills in some of those missing parts. It gives people an important piece of the story, which maybe they can use to create their own theory."
On the afternoon I meet Klein at her British publisher's office in central London, The Shock Doctrine has not yet gone on sale, but she has already spent the morning responding to the objections of those who have reacted badly to extracts they read in a newspaper, or had heard enough about it to decide that they disagreed.
"I knew that defending this book would be part of the deal," she says. "I also think the book speaks pretty well in its own defence. The problem is it's not quite out there yet, and already people are getting the wrong ideas about it." Klein has at least two weapons to use against pro-capitalists and neo-conservatives: her facility for debate - "You have to answer the language of faith with the language of morality" - and her ability to make them sound silly.
She does this literally, mimicking the stentorian voices of those invariably male experts who tell her, "Oh, but you don't mention how bad state socialism was" or ask her, "Oh, so what are your alternatives?" The day before this interview, Otto J Reich, who was Ronald Regan's ambassador to Venezuela, and more recently George W Bush's special envoy to the Western hemisphere, dismissed Klein and her new book without having read it. "There is no such thing as disaster capitalism," he said, and if he said it anything like the way Klein now quotes him, Reich must have spoken with the pomposity of an elder cartoon elephant.
Amused and perversely validated as she was to hear a phrase of her own invention even used, however dismissively, by a man she politely describes as "one of the most, um, controversial US foreign policy figures in Latin America", Klein is expecting more of the same. This is why she asked her husband to travel with her while she promotes The Shock Doctrine ("We see this as kind of a political campaign, and I couldn't really deal with the attacks by myself"), and why she has gained a new empathy for the apathetic.
"I think for the first time in my life I can see how people just throw in the towel. I never understood that before. But it's hard. I guess I'm saying I can see the appeal of not bashing my head against a wall. But then you look at people who have made the decision to become cynical and disengaged. Really, just look at those people. Look where it leads, ha ha. They don't look relieved to me, they look self-loathing. I won't allow myself to go there."
Klein herself looks as good at 37 as she did when No Logo made her famous in her late 20s. She is wearing a white jacket that might well be designer, and carrying one of those new Apple iPhones. "It's terrible, right?" she asks me when the thing goes off. "It's my book tour phone. I've never had one of these hand-held devices before, but I'm not going to be home for three months, and I knew I'd need constant access to email, so I decided to go straight for the cool new gadget. It's not such a good phone though. You need really tiny fingers to push the buttons."
Attractiveness and stylishness have not always worked in her favour, and may still give her ideological opponents whatever licence they feel they need to get at her by way of her profile. The Economist defined this approach with a 2002 op-ed piece that attempted to assassinate Klein's character as manifesting "all the incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent". That assessment could just as easily be interpreted as a superficial reading of Klein's true substance: her continued dedicatation to the teenager she had in mind when she wrote No Logo.
"I was writing that book for the girl I had been at age 19. For any girl at that age, who has the politics but doesn't have the arguments to back them up. That's who was sitting on my shoulder. I wanted to arm that 19-year-old. And then so many of the letters I got about No Logo came from young women, which to me was the most gratifying thing about it.
"Just knowing that I engaged with those women by being who I am that is very, very, very important to me. Because I get so much flak for writing the way I do, for not being an old man."
Klein acknowledged throughout that first book that she was typical of her peer group in some ways and not in others, having made herself a model of the average teen consumer in a brief and calculated bid for rebellion against her socialist parents. Her father was a physician, her mother a film-maker, and both of them were US citizens who had dissented from the Vietnam war by relocating to Canada (and who were, in turn, the children of American Marxists - Klein's grandfather worked as a Disney animator until he was fired for organising the corporation's first labour strike).
The values implanted by her family were not activated until she went to university in Toronto, but Klein has always allowed for the possibility that her politics are in themselves luxury products of a safe liberal environment. This might make her work more, or less, impressive, depending on your point of view. But she is not boasting when she describes The Shock Doctrine as "a big book" and "a radical thesis".
Klein gives all due credit to her research team, and defers to those who have risked or even given their lives to provide some of the stories she uses. China would have no place in her thesis if it wasn't for the work of dissident journalist Wang Hui. She would never have noticed the insidiously unchanged economy of post-apartheid South Africa if William Gumede, a writer on such matters, had not admitted to her that even he didn't notice it at first. And her chapter on 1970s Argentina owes at least some of its power and clarity to the words of Rodolfo Walsh, who effectively signed his own death warrant with his Open Letter From A Writer To The Military Junta.
As a finished product, The Shock Doctrine says more than she set out to write, or to prove. Klein's conclusion is that every natural and man-made disaster on Earth now occurs within the context of a global power structure that has been engineered to turn financial and political profit from the resulting panic. Klein has come to see violence in Iraq, poverty in Russia, torture in Latin America and market collapse across Asia as evidence not of chaos but of order, resulting from a "50-year crusade to privatise the world".
And the architect of this era she identifies as the recently deceased American Nobel laureate and intellectual, Milton Friedman, whose pathological devotion to pure capitalism, and no less zealous aversion to any and all forms of public investment, has influenced so many modern policy-makers that almost every recent government - including brutal South African dictatorships - has owed something to the application of his logic. "It's more than an implication I'm making," says Klein.
"It's not a conspiracy theory either. I'm talking about a deliberate project by these so-called technocrats to remove economics from democratic accountability. If we look at who these men are and what they believe, they don't really hide the fact that they think government should disappear, except as an ATM machine for their businesses."
The men she is referring to include self-confessed Friedman accolyte and former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, as well as serving vice president Dick Cheney, who owns stocks in Halliburton that have increased in value by 300% since the corporation was granted its contract to provide "logistical support" to the American military in Iraq.
By declaring that the slaughters that occupation has perpetuated are the consequences of a plan, rather than the absence of one, on the part of the Bush administration, Klein appears to be suggesting that these men are either ignorant or antipathetic to the human cost of their decisions. Which is it? Does she believe, as Professor Andre Gunder Frank once said of Friedman, that they are guilty of "economic genocide"?
"Yeah. Some of them. But their rationale is that all this human pain they clearly see as a difficult stage on the road to utopia. This is what all ideologues believe - OK, 72 million are impoverished in Russia but these are growing pains on the way to a free market economy which will ultimately be so much better than state socialism that it will all be worth it'." Capitalists used to say of communists that they were bound to fail because their system did not acknowledge the truth of human nature.
Klein now seems to be saying the same thing right back at them. "Well, I think we're complicated. We are both selfish and generous, and these impulses compete, and any ideology that claims we're only one is probably full of it. But this ideology of disaster capitalism says you are free to indulge in your greed because by that indulgence you are actually helping the most people possible. I don't believe it. And it's not just a difference of opinion. Because I think that is less an ideology than a cover story."
It is difficult to imagine what Klein's 19-year-old self would think of all this, or whether she could even comprehend it. "If you were 19 when you read No Logo, then you're 26 now," she says hopefully, although she admits that The Shock Doctrine may be less "galvanising" because of the size and complexity of the historical force it refers to. There is also a strange lack of anger in the language that she uses for this book. Klein saves her "snarky remarks" for her speeches. "You want to present the facts with a gravitas and a sense of morality that gives people the tools to have their own reaction. You don't want to crowd them with yours."
And her favourite positive comment on The Shock Doctrine so far has come from one of her heroes, the artist and novelist John Berger, who said he read it not with anger, but with "calm".
"To me, that's, like, the highest compliment. When you get information that you don't know how to process or articulate, you tense up, right? But when you read something that just says it, that makes the right connections, it's a relief. Your body relaxes. So I don't want this book to make people feel mad, or dumb. I want them to feel calm."
The Shock Doctrine is published by Penguin, £25
Story published The Sunday Herald, September 22 2007
Jimmy McGovern Interview (Nov 2007)
Street Wise
From Brookside to the street, Jimmy Mcgovern has been on a 25-year tv journey. But he’s never left Liverpool far behind
By Stephen Phelan
THE STREET where Jimmy McGovern lives is not like The Street he writes about. His house is surrounded by tall trees. They look best, he thinks, at this time of year, most of them having turned to gold. Leafiness is not the only difference between this side of Liverpool and the postwar dockside where he grew up. But from his perspective, McGovern hasn't moved far, or changed much. Today, the imminence of Bonfire Night reminds him that when he was a boy, his city had its own name for November 5.
"The wood for our bonfires came from houses that had been bombed by the Germans," says McGovern. "So we always called it bommy wood'. There was enough of it to last us right through the 1950s, along with the stuff we raided from the slums that were falling to bits around us. It made the whole night a slightly different thing in Liverpool. Bommy night'."
The programmes McGovern has written over the past 25 years - first Brookside, which was Britain's only social-realist soap opera back when Channel 4 was young, then Cracker for ITV, and most recently The Street on BBC One - have established him as the best known, loved, and respected TV dramatist in the UK, with the possible exception of Stephen Poliakoff, CBE. (Who is, according to McGovern, exempt from the BBC's rules on swearing, which allow for a maximum of four "f***s" per script. "But no c***s'", he claims, in passing, and presumably in jest, "unless you're Poliakoff.") A second series of The Street begins next week, with an episode in which David Thewlis plays a housing benefit officer who can barely afford to keep a roof over his own family's heads. "At least we earn our poverty," he screams at a recalcitrant client. Writing like this has made McGovern so wealthy that his circumstances no longer resemble those of his characters.
He invites me inside the workroom in his garden, which he calls "the big hut". He thought he could claim back the cost of its construction as a tax break - only afterwards did his accountant tell him that the requisite clause does not apply to buildings. "I should have put it on bloody wheels," he says, having written it off as a funny story instead.
The big hut is carpeted, kitted out with a bookshelf and soft chairs, and heated to a soporific temperature. It doesn't seem the sort of room where a working-class man writes working-class dramas, but that must be what happens in here, although McGovern does admit that comfort has made him less productive. Another story: not long ago, the wife of popular Liverpool playwright Willy Russell told McGovern that her husband was finding it hard to come up with new ideas lately. His (joking) advice was for Russell to give away all his money.
"You'll write if you have to," he says, seriously. In his own case, he now works mostly for the sake of working. His career and reputation are founded on the increasingly unfashionable belief that television is an industrial process, and each programme is, or should be, a product of intensive labour.
"Why isn't TV better than it is? Primarily because the writers don't work hard enough. There are people in the Writers Guild who despise me for saying this. I'm in the guild myself, because I'm a trade unionist, and I feel I need to be in a union to speak. But every week I want to resign, because most writers are so f***ing lazy. The Street is only good - and I can tell you that it's very f***ing good indeed - because a group of experienced people got together and worked their bollocks off."
Not all of them were so experienced. The full, official title of the show is The Street By Jimmy McGovern, but as with the first series, he hand-picked scripts from a select team of relative novices and veterans.
Episode one, in which Thewlis's character assumes the identity of his wealthier twin brother after he chokes to death on a sherbet lemon, was written by former plumber Arthur Ellison, a childhood friend of McGovern's. That premise could be reverse-engineered into an ancient parable, or adapted, as McGovern admits, into a "blacker than black Hollywood comedy".
Instead, like the five episodes that follow - each of which visits a different domestic crisis along the same row of terraced houses in an unnamed Lancashire satellite town - it imagines what might actually happen. "The only way to approach these stories is real," says McGovern. "A real working-class man does this, and these are the real consequences. That's why it works. We get away with it because we keep it so true."
Episode two, or "ep two", as he calls it, was co-written with the longer established professional Andy Lynch. Ep five is the debut screenplay of Alice Nutter, former singer and agitator with the shouty pro-anarchist pop group Chumbawamba. "They all do a first draft," says McGovern. "Then we criticise it.
"Then we make them do a second, or a third, or a fourth. And then, when they're totally knackered, I'll come along and do a big rewrite. I won't insult the more experienced writers, but anything in there that I wouldn't have written meself, I'll change it. And I know the less experienced ones will learn so much from that, because I learned the same way."
As a result, The Street is ruled by his voice and signature. He has previously said of working-class communities that there are few things wrong with them money couldn't fix, and he tends toward stories that bear this out. "Yeah yeah," says McGovern, "that's always a factor. If you're writing a working-class drama, you have to question the economic consequences, which lots of other dramas don't do. If you sit and watch what happens in the third ep, you'll be thinking, The wife must leave the husband'. But then he approaches her and says, We can't divorce'. They can't afford to live under one roof, so how could they afford to live under two? It's just a fundamental consideration."
Another thread common to these stories is the narrative circuit through which characters are driven to folly by the fear that a partner does not love them, only to conclude, after a chain of mistakes, that love was the one thing they could be certain of. This is so old-fashioned that it seems bold on the modern screen. In the second episode of The Street, a taxi driver (Timothy Spall) launches into a fugue of helpless spending while his wife (Ger Ryan) forms a mental block against telling him about the lump in her breast.
"There's a lot of my life in that one," says McGovern. "I've been married for 36 years, and nobody knows better than me how easy it is to forget that you love someone. Well, my wife might know more about it, but if you ask her you'll get the same response. It's amazing when something reminds you that you do. That thing about the health scare, Irene and I have been through that, and fortunately it was OK. But the shock of your partner experiencing pain and distress, it reminds you, Oh my god I love this woman. This is the most important person in my life, and I forgot that I love her.' Ep two, I think, captures long-term marriage beautifully well."
Almost as soon as he mentions her, his wife approaches the big hut to offer us ham butties and soup. "Thanks love," he says. McGovern considers himself living proof of certain truisms about his nationality, gender and class, particularly the one about northern English working men being the least emotive and communicative in the UK, if not the world. "Ask Irene. She'll tell you. I'm hopeless." His programmes are eloquent and compassionate enough to be admitted as evidence to the contrary. In Cracker, Dr Edward "Fitz" Fitzgerald, the police psychologist played by Robbie Coltrane, engaged in a moral battle with murderers by means of language alone. "Often, I give the insane people beautiful lines," said McGovern of the show during its prime in the mid-1990s (Cracker returned last year for a one-off special episode). "But they have killed people, and they will suffer for it." In retrospect, he defines the difference between himself and Fitz, which is also the difference between the writer and the actor, as a matter of two separate facilities for words. "It was interesting to work with Coltrane," he says. "Fascinating. I'd watch him, and admire the way he could sit down and charm the pants of anyone. He's so witty, so quick. I have a stammer, and I could never even attempt to do what he does. But give us both a piece of paper, and I'd leave him for dead."
The stammer is audible today, as, occasionally, is the hesitance and diffidence that presumably come with it. He is also, despite this supposed handicap, as personable in conversation as anyone I've ever met.
"Here's Arthur," he says suddenly. "You must meet Arthur. This guy is great." Arthur Ellison, his old friend and collaborator on The Street, has called round unannounced, not at all unlike a kid wondering if his mate can come out to play. He comes into the big hut for a cup of tea.
"Do you want to tell the story?" asks McGovern.
"Which story?" asks Ellison. Between them, they have many, one of which ends with McGovern putting Ellison in a drunken headlock after the US launch party for The Street on BBC America last year, shouting, "We're going to bed, you c***" in front of "all these LA trendies".
The story McGovern meant was the one about how Arthur finished his first script - he had always been too busy working as a plumber, but then he had his jaw broken in a fight, and that gave him three months off work to sit down and write it. Ellison's wife advised him to show it to his friend Jimmy, who flung it to the ground and said: "F*** off."
"He's a funny, funny fella," says Ellison when McGovern goes to the loo. "But he knows so much as well. Other writers see him as a god, which he is, but it's a bit different for me because I've known him all me life. I helped carry his mam's coffin ... " When McGovern returns, and Ellison leaves, we talk about his parents. He was the fifth of nine children, "three born before the war, the rest of us after". McGovern himself was born in 1949.
"Me dad worked all the hours God sent," he says, "and we were still skint, but you would be with nine bloody kids." His mother, he remembers, was part of a circle of local women who told stories among themselves. His brother Eddie was the tough one, and Joey was the great footballer, but Jimmy was "the dreamer".
"I think it was because I didn't speak. I would watch people all the time, especially these women. I was entranced by the way they would talk. They were as eloquent as anyone else, but they expressed that eloquence in the context of a supportive community. I listened to them for hours, and it sent me into a dream world of me own."
McGovern's core subject has always been the failure of the UK's institutions, and he learned it from experience. He had three children by the age of 23, and worked a series of low-paid jobs to feed them, eventually retraining as a teacher in the 1970s, and writing plays for community theatres. When Channel 4 gave him the chance, he used Brookside - and particularly Ricky Tomlinson's character Bobby Grant - as a means to comment on 1980s Thatcherism. When he left the programme after six years of fighting over dialogue and storylines, it became just another soap, and declined towards cancellation. "I owe everything to Brookside, but when you leave an organisation, you want it to miss you, and fail because you're not there."
Cracker, and Robbie Coltrane, became his 1990s equivalents. "I had a lot to say, and with Fitz I could say it. I found that very cathartic, because I much prefer to hide behind a fictional character. If I say it myself, then I'll say the wrong thing, because I'm physically incapable of saying the right thing."
IN the case of his docu-dramas about the Hillsborough stadium disaster and the events of Bloody Sunday, he was invited to write both screenplays by families of the deceased. He worked hard to supplant his own opinions with facts, and is proud that he kept his mouth shut on the first issue, directing every question he was asked about Hillsborough to the families' support group, after checking every detail of the film with them first. "The process of writing a drama-doc is as important as the drama-doc itself," he has said. "It has to empower the powerless."
McGovern has also claimed that the other film, Sunday, was the most extensively researched programme ever broadcast on British TV, but now regrets saying that Paul Greengrass's screen version of the same events - made and transmitted almost simultaneously in 2002 - was "a film to give comfort to the English". Which is not to say he didn't mean it.
McGovern does not believe the English have earned the right to be comfortable. This view extends from the current prime minister ("I always bang on about Gordon Brown. Most successful chancellor, my arse. Indians and Chinese are beavering away making everything we need at a fraction of what it should cost ... ") to the national broadcaster.
"I love the BBC, but this needs to be said loud and clear: they get away with murder. If I write a BBC hour, like The Street, that's 59 minutes, which is 59 pages. If I do an ITV hour, it's 43 minutes because of time taken out for commercial breaks. But ITV will pay more. Now I'm not supposed to think in these terms. I'm supposed to be an artist. But I'm a working man, and those extra 17 or 18 pages kill me. It's a massive consideration that, more work for less money."
McGovern recognises no contradiction between his feelings for his medium, his city, his country. Each is held to the highest standard. "Iraq ... don't get me started. We deserve bombing more than Iraq, because the people in Iraq had no control over what happened to them. We've got control. We re-elected a mass murderer. We are now legitimate targets because we exercised the vote." And this from a man who has seen what bombs do.
One last story, by way of explanation. In 1945, McGovern's father fought to liberate Paris. The French capital was left intact, while his home town was ruined. Sixty years later, only recently in fact, his son had a drunken argument over this with Irish republicans who happened to mention the beauty of Paris, on the contentious historical basis that many Dubliners left their lights on to help guide German bombers over to Liverpool.
"I worked out so much about meself that night," says Jimmy McGovern. "I learned I'm a scouser first and foremost, and I'm also an English patriot. I can't help it. I instinctively love my country. But if you instinctively love your country, then you criticise it. You expect it to be worthy of your love."
Published November 4 2007, The Sunday Herald
From Brookside to the street, Jimmy Mcgovern has been on a 25-year tv journey. But he’s never left Liverpool far behind
By Stephen Phelan
THE STREET where Jimmy McGovern lives is not like The Street he writes about. His house is surrounded by tall trees. They look best, he thinks, at this time of year, most of them having turned to gold. Leafiness is not the only difference between this side of Liverpool and the postwar dockside where he grew up. But from his perspective, McGovern hasn't moved far, or changed much. Today, the imminence of Bonfire Night reminds him that when he was a boy, his city had its own name for November 5.
"The wood for our bonfires came from houses that had been bombed by the Germans," says McGovern. "So we always called it bommy wood'. There was enough of it to last us right through the 1950s, along with the stuff we raided from the slums that were falling to bits around us. It made the whole night a slightly different thing in Liverpool. Bommy night'."
The programmes McGovern has written over the past 25 years - first Brookside, which was Britain's only social-realist soap opera back when Channel 4 was young, then Cracker for ITV, and most recently The Street on BBC One - have established him as the best known, loved, and respected TV dramatist in the UK, with the possible exception of Stephen Poliakoff, CBE. (Who is, according to McGovern, exempt from the BBC's rules on swearing, which allow for a maximum of four "f***s" per script. "But no c***s'", he claims, in passing, and presumably in jest, "unless you're Poliakoff.") A second series of The Street begins next week, with an episode in which David Thewlis plays a housing benefit officer who can barely afford to keep a roof over his own family's heads. "At least we earn our poverty," he screams at a recalcitrant client. Writing like this has made McGovern so wealthy that his circumstances no longer resemble those of his characters.
He invites me inside the workroom in his garden, which he calls "the big hut". He thought he could claim back the cost of its construction as a tax break - only afterwards did his accountant tell him that the requisite clause does not apply to buildings. "I should have put it on bloody wheels," he says, having written it off as a funny story instead.
The big hut is carpeted, kitted out with a bookshelf and soft chairs, and heated to a soporific temperature. It doesn't seem the sort of room where a working-class man writes working-class dramas, but that must be what happens in here, although McGovern does admit that comfort has made him less productive. Another story: not long ago, the wife of popular Liverpool playwright Willy Russell told McGovern that her husband was finding it hard to come up with new ideas lately. His (joking) advice was for Russell to give away all his money.
"You'll write if you have to," he says, seriously. In his own case, he now works mostly for the sake of working. His career and reputation are founded on the increasingly unfashionable belief that television is an industrial process, and each programme is, or should be, a product of intensive labour.
"Why isn't TV better than it is? Primarily because the writers don't work hard enough. There are people in the Writers Guild who despise me for saying this. I'm in the guild myself, because I'm a trade unionist, and I feel I need to be in a union to speak. But every week I want to resign, because most writers are so f***ing lazy. The Street is only good - and I can tell you that it's very f***ing good indeed - because a group of experienced people got together and worked their bollocks off."
Not all of them were so experienced. The full, official title of the show is The Street By Jimmy McGovern, but as with the first series, he hand-picked scripts from a select team of relative novices and veterans.
Episode one, in which Thewlis's character assumes the identity of his wealthier twin brother after he chokes to death on a sherbet lemon, was written by former plumber Arthur Ellison, a childhood friend of McGovern's. That premise could be reverse-engineered into an ancient parable, or adapted, as McGovern admits, into a "blacker than black Hollywood comedy".
Instead, like the five episodes that follow - each of which visits a different domestic crisis along the same row of terraced houses in an unnamed Lancashire satellite town - it imagines what might actually happen. "The only way to approach these stories is real," says McGovern. "A real working-class man does this, and these are the real consequences. That's why it works. We get away with it because we keep it so true."
Episode two, or "ep two", as he calls it, was co-written with the longer established professional Andy Lynch. Ep five is the debut screenplay of Alice Nutter, former singer and agitator with the shouty pro-anarchist pop group Chumbawamba. "They all do a first draft," says McGovern. "Then we criticise it.
"Then we make them do a second, or a third, or a fourth. And then, when they're totally knackered, I'll come along and do a big rewrite. I won't insult the more experienced writers, but anything in there that I wouldn't have written meself, I'll change it. And I know the less experienced ones will learn so much from that, because I learned the same way."
As a result, The Street is ruled by his voice and signature. He has previously said of working-class communities that there are few things wrong with them money couldn't fix, and he tends toward stories that bear this out. "Yeah yeah," says McGovern, "that's always a factor. If you're writing a working-class drama, you have to question the economic consequences, which lots of other dramas don't do. If you sit and watch what happens in the third ep, you'll be thinking, The wife must leave the husband'. But then he approaches her and says, We can't divorce'. They can't afford to live under one roof, so how could they afford to live under two? It's just a fundamental consideration."
Another thread common to these stories is the narrative circuit through which characters are driven to folly by the fear that a partner does not love them, only to conclude, after a chain of mistakes, that love was the one thing they could be certain of. This is so old-fashioned that it seems bold on the modern screen. In the second episode of The Street, a taxi driver (Timothy Spall) launches into a fugue of helpless spending while his wife (Ger Ryan) forms a mental block against telling him about the lump in her breast.
"There's a lot of my life in that one," says McGovern. "I've been married for 36 years, and nobody knows better than me how easy it is to forget that you love someone. Well, my wife might know more about it, but if you ask her you'll get the same response. It's amazing when something reminds you that you do. That thing about the health scare, Irene and I have been through that, and fortunately it was OK. But the shock of your partner experiencing pain and distress, it reminds you, Oh my god I love this woman. This is the most important person in my life, and I forgot that I love her.' Ep two, I think, captures long-term marriage beautifully well."
Almost as soon as he mentions her, his wife approaches the big hut to offer us ham butties and soup. "Thanks love," he says. McGovern considers himself living proof of certain truisms about his nationality, gender and class, particularly the one about northern English working men being the least emotive and communicative in the UK, if not the world. "Ask Irene. She'll tell you. I'm hopeless." His programmes are eloquent and compassionate enough to be admitted as evidence to the contrary. In Cracker, Dr Edward "Fitz" Fitzgerald, the police psychologist played by Robbie Coltrane, engaged in a moral battle with murderers by means of language alone. "Often, I give the insane people beautiful lines," said McGovern of the show during its prime in the mid-1990s (Cracker returned last year for a one-off special episode). "But they have killed people, and they will suffer for it." In retrospect, he defines the difference between himself and Fitz, which is also the difference between the writer and the actor, as a matter of two separate facilities for words. "It was interesting to work with Coltrane," he says. "Fascinating. I'd watch him, and admire the way he could sit down and charm the pants of anyone. He's so witty, so quick. I have a stammer, and I could never even attempt to do what he does. But give us both a piece of paper, and I'd leave him for dead."
The stammer is audible today, as, occasionally, is the hesitance and diffidence that presumably come with it. He is also, despite this supposed handicap, as personable in conversation as anyone I've ever met.
"Here's Arthur," he says suddenly. "You must meet Arthur. This guy is great." Arthur Ellison, his old friend and collaborator on The Street, has called round unannounced, not at all unlike a kid wondering if his mate can come out to play. He comes into the big hut for a cup of tea.
"Do you want to tell the story?" asks McGovern.
"Which story?" asks Ellison. Between them, they have many, one of which ends with McGovern putting Ellison in a drunken headlock after the US launch party for The Street on BBC America last year, shouting, "We're going to bed, you c***" in front of "all these LA trendies".
The story McGovern meant was the one about how Arthur finished his first script - he had always been too busy working as a plumber, but then he had his jaw broken in a fight, and that gave him three months off work to sit down and write it. Ellison's wife advised him to show it to his friend Jimmy, who flung it to the ground and said: "F*** off."
"He's a funny, funny fella," says Ellison when McGovern goes to the loo. "But he knows so much as well. Other writers see him as a god, which he is, but it's a bit different for me because I've known him all me life. I helped carry his mam's coffin ... " When McGovern returns, and Ellison leaves, we talk about his parents. He was the fifth of nine children, "three born before the war, the rest of us after". McGovern himself was born in 1949.
"Me dad worked all the hours God sent," he says, "and we were still skint, but you would be with nine bloody kids." His mother, he remembers, was part of a circle of local women who told stories among themselves. His brother Eddie was the tough one, and Joey was the great footballer, but Jimmy was "the dreamer".
"I think it was because I didn't speak. I would watch people all the time, especially these women. I was entranced by the way they would talk. They were as eloquent as anyone else, but they expressed that eloquence in the context of a supportive community. I listened to them for hours, and it sent me into a dream world of me own."
McGovern's core subject has always been the failure of the UK's institutions, and he learned it from experience. He had three children by the age of 23, and worked a series of low-paid jobs to feed them, eventually retraining as a teacher in the 1970s, and writing plays for community theatres. When Channel 4 gave him the chance, he used Brookside - and particularly Ricky Tomlinson's character Bobby Grant - as a means to comment on 1980s Thatcherism. When he left the programme after six years of fighting over dialogue and storylines, it became just another soap, and declined towards cancellation. "I owe everything to Brookside, but when you leave an organisation, you want it to miss you, and fail because you're not there."
Cracker, and Robbie Coltrane, became his 1990s equivalents. "I had a lot to say, and with Fitz I could say it. I found that very cathartic, because I much prefer to hide behind a fictional character. If I say it myself, then I'll say the wrong thing, because I'm physically incapable of saying the right thing."
IN the case of his docu-dramas about the Hillsborough stadium disaster and the events of Bloody Sunday, he was invited to write both screenplays by families of the deceased. He worked hard to supplant his own opinions with facts, and is proud that he kept his mouth shut on the first issue, directing every question he was asked about Hillsborough to the families' support group, after checking every detail of the film with them first. "The process of writing a drama-doc is as important as the drama-doc itself," he has said. "It has to empower the powerless."
McGovern has also claimed that the other film, Sunday, was the most extensively researched programme ever broadcast on British TV, but now regrets saying that Paul Greengrass's screen version of the same events - made and transmitted almost simultaneously in 2002 - was "a film to give comfort to the English". Which is not to say he didn't mean it.
McGovern does not believe the English have earned the right to be comfortable. This view extends from the current prime minister ("I always bang on about Gordon Brown. Most successful chancellor, my arse. Indians and Chinese are beavering away making everything we need at a fraction of what it should cost ... ") to the national broadcaster.
"I love the BBC, but this needs to be said loud and clear: they get away with murder. If I write a BBC hour, like The Street, that's 59 minutes, which is 59 pages. If I do an ITV hour, it's 43 minutes because of time taken out for commercial breaks. But ITV will pay more. Now I'm not supposed to think in these terms. I'm supposed to be an artist. But I'm a working man, and those extra 17 or 18 pages kill me. It's a massive consideration that, more work for less money."
McGovern recognises no contradiction between his feelings for his medium, his city, his country. Each is held to the highest standard. "Iraq ... don't get me started. We deserve bombing more than Iraq, because the people in Iraq had no control over what happened to them. We've got control. We re-elected a mass murderer. We are now legitimate targets because we exercised the vote." And this from a man who has seen what bombs do.
One last story, by way of explanation. In 1945, McGovern's father fought to liberate Paris. The French capital was left intact, while his home town was ruined. Sixty years later, only recently in fact, his son had a drunken argument over this with Irish republicans who happened to mention the beauty of Paris, on the contentious historical basis that many Dubliners left their lights on to help guide German bombers over to Liverpool.
"I worked out so much about meself that night," says Jimmy McGovern. "I learned I'm a scouser first and foremost, and I'm also an English patriot. I can't help it. I instinctively love my country. But if you instinctively love your country, then you criticise it. You expect it to be worthy of your love."
Published November 4 2007, The Sunday Herald
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