Will the Bomber always get through?

In November 1932  the then-British prime Minister Stanley Baldwin delivered a speech to the Houses of Parliament that became known as “Fear of the Future.”  Faced with the growing menace of Hitler and the coming war, Baldwin was musing on one single idea that today has terrible resonance for our own times: “The bomber will always get through.”

In Baldwin’s day, the bomber was an aircraft piloted by airmen loyal to a sovereign state and operating under the rules of war. In our own time, the bomber is, too often, an explosive vest with  legs, loyal to none but those who brain-washed him into thinking he does Allah’s work. Or, in the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev  and his brother Dzhokhar, rucksacks toting  pressure cookers with ball-bearings ready for detonation  at the Boston Marathon.

Back in an other age, Baldwin told a skeptical and war-averse parliament: “I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through, The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves…If the conscience of the young men should ever come to feel, with regard to this one instrument [bombing] that it is evil and should go, the thing will be done; but if they do not feel like that – well, as I say, the future is in their hands.”

Without knowing it (for he was still thinking in terms of conventional war and would have been unable to conceive the idea that the bomber might be “amongst us”), Baldwin had set out the terrifying dilemma that has plagued intelligence agencies  ever since, and has come into ever-sharper focus with the development of pilotless drone technology on one side, and IEDs on the other. Baldwin was thinking of what Hitler perfected as the Blitzkrieg, and which London would experience just eight years later.

But eighty years later the idea of “defence is in offence” has prospered and become the  guiding spirit of the drone campaign  in Afghanistan or the Horn of Africa. Will the pre-emptive strike using drones — as the Obama administration clearly believes — kill more troublemakers than it creates new militants?

If, as Baldwin maintained, “the bomber will always get through,” how can drone attacks ever hope to stamp out this evil? Won’t they simply  promote  growth of new terrorists like a Hydra? But if we accept his gloomy prognosis, then what is left for us is surely the title of the almost-forgotten British premier’s speech: “Fear of the Future.”

Because of this fear, we need closed circuit TV cameras to watch our streets. We need intrusive searches to protect us before we get on airplanes. We need monitoring of our emails, our cellphones, our landlines, our internet usage, our bank accounts,  and we need to be profiled every time we stand in line at the  supermarket. But we feel no safer. So what if, despite all these things (and Boston certainly makes it look like Baldwin was right in this regard) “the bomber will always get through”?

What if all the drones, all the Homeland Security initiatives, the intelligence operatives, the scans, the swipes, the oversight, the centralisation of data and power and yet more data, are in the end impotent?

These days, it’s not a question of penetrating our airspace to “get through.” The Tsarnaevs – just like the British Muslims responsible for the earlier London 7/7 bombings – are right here among us. These disaffected citizens intent on becoming non-citizens, are like the sand at our feet. They’ve never been to West Point or Sandhurst to learn strategy, yet their action is invisible, unending, grinding away so effectively at established power structures.

During World War II (Baldwin was gone by then and Winston Churchill was in charge)  the huge  fixed guns that defended Singapore against attack by any enemy flotilla sailing into  the harbour for the south , proved totally useless. Instead, the Japanese army chose to come by bicycle down from the north along the Malay peninsula, and met a near-defenceless city. We have to ask: are the “fixed guns” of today’s war on terror just as badly-placed?

Perhaps it’s something to do with the rather exotic names of the  two brothers who perpetrated this outrage. But because of their central Asian origins, and because of their   grim achievement in rendering the US agencies powerlessness to stop them,  I am reminded of Shelley’s great poem Ozymandias. It remains a sober and timely  reflection on the futility of power in the face of the billions of grains of sand we might also call the scouring force of disaffected ordinary people with hearts full of hate.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

There has to come a moment when we realise that the steps being taken to increase our security may be counter-productive. And if we are to consign “Fear of the Future” to the 1930s where it belongs,  we need a new approach to disarming the bombers who come and go freely amongst us. We can’t stop them “getting through” because there is no  border between them and us. Iraq, Afghanistan and a dozen other  modern wars showed us that preemptive violence doesn’t stop violence. We have to disarm the bombers in our midst.

Richard House

“I come to Bury Thatcher, Not to Praise her.”

In Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony is only allowed to take the tribune to deliver the funeral oration for the recently-murdered emperor, because it is believed he will attack Caesar’s achievements and besmirch his memory, so justifying the killing. In fact, Mark Anthony’s oratory reverses the situation when he praises the dead emperor, and this inflames the mob into civil rage against Caesar’s killers — thereby hoisting Mark Anthony into a power-sharing agreement in ancient Rome.

It seems much the same has been going on since the death of Margaret Thatcher. While alive, she famously said “there is no such thing as society.” Now dead, society can say “there is no such thing as Margaret Thatcher.” And yet, there plainly is. The quasi-state funeral held 17th April attracted jeers and tears, as well as leaders from around the world.

Both sides of the political aisle continue fighting for a piece of the legacy of this most divisive of all Anglo-Saxon politicians. Like any seminal figure, she has been both lionised and cast as the devil incarnate.

The truth, of course, lies somewhere between the two extremes. Like any Brit born in the mid 50s, her time and mine coincided. When they say Britain was a dump before she came to power, they were absolutely right: I left university in 1976 and the place was in ruins. I’m old enough to remember the tweedy, patrician noodle-headedness of Sir Alec Douglas Home and the Tories who preceded Margaret Thatcher. Ted Heath was a dolt and she was right to slide a dagger into his ribs just as Brutus had done with Julius Caesar (and later on, just as Geoffrey Howe would do with her). I headed out to East Asia three years before she came to power in 1979.

But I was back just after she came to power. I stayed until January 1982, working the London journalism beat, which meant I had a ringside seat at some of the most abrasive struggles of her early years. It was huge fun.

I watched the Molotov cocktails being lit on the Railton Road at the Brixton Riots; I interviewed the “Women at the Wire” at Greenham Common protesting at the installation of cruise missiles to oppose the Soviets’ SS20s.

I covered the Northern Ireland struggle and the Bobby Sands hunger strike, leading to his death.

I watched her dodge a full-on conflict with Britain’s coal miners (that was to come later, when she had more power). While at the BBC, I saw Britain’s cosy arms sales to the Shah hit the fan when the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran.

I was on the Afghan border at the Khyber Pass when the Mujihadeen began battling the Soviet Empire in Kabul. I was in Washington at the Republican HQ in November 1980, the night Ronald Reagan got elected and the “special relationship” with Maggie came alive.

But at the beginning of 1982 I bailed out and went to South America, thinking I would be far away from her influence. What a joke. The Falklands war soon caught up with me. In fact, I stayed away from the UK until 1991, so I missed the most abrasive period of the Poll Tax riots, the Miners’ Strike, and, of course, the fights over Europe and the “Cheque Britanique” or EU financial rebate that she won in her handbag-winging battles with Brussels patriarch Jacques Delors.

The truth is that this period was richer, more vibrant, more creative and more filled with strong emotions than today. Heroine or hate figure, Margaret Thatcher bestrode the world of my early 30s like a Colossus. I was against her. I never met her, although I did come across a couple of her ministers, and bumped into Bernard Ingham, her press secretary, at the urinals one evening where we exchanged a brief but acerbic conversation.

Friends of mine who interviewed her, confessed to an almost sexual thrill in the contact. One reporter was a bit drunk. She turned off the tape recorder when she’d finished and put it into his pocket after his time was done, making certain she would get her precious airtime.

Around me there was post-Punk, New Romantics, Bowie, a plethora of creative urges and surges that make today’s self-referential, galerista-driven art productions and auditorium TV show wannabes look like what they are — a crude form of ‘me capitalism’ that would have given Thackeray a nose-bleed.

Once I had dinner in a private room at Rules, a traditional London restaurant where the Thatcher Cabinet would also have its private political dinners. There was a sideboard upon which stood an array of single malt whisky bottles, each with a label for its presiding (male) cabinet minister. In the middle stood a single decanter, with a Victorian silver label around its neck. Upon it was engraved in italic letters: “Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher MP, Mother of the Nation.” That about said it all. Downstairs, the decor still reflects the Thatcher era.

And today I recognise she was great. That recitation of the Prayer of St Francis of Assisi on the doorstep of Downing Street on the morning in 1979 that she took office was a masterstroke (even though her eye strayed downward to consulted her notes and she still got it wrong).

Thatcher was played many times on stage and on screen — most lately by Meryl Streep. The portrait of a has-been ravaged by Alzheimers was moving, although this was hardly a definitive political study. Most memorable for me, however, was the speech on character and destiny. Maggie certainly had character, and she used it to shape collective destinies.

What was greatest of all about Margaret Thatcher, however, was her ability to make large sections of the population of Britain suspend their disbelief. She made us feel good, even when there were scant reasons to be in such a state. She raised our spirits with magnificent gestures we have spent over a quarter of a century paying for.

I did write a blog in 2012 about the way in which Thatcher’s economic guru — the combative refugee Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek who was taken in by Britain when he fled Hitler’s growing political turmoil — would by now have been either forgotten or discredited if Thatcher had not lionised the (then obscure) academic in parliament. She used him as a brush to sweep away lingering ideological homage to John Maynard Keynes, In fact, the battle between these two long-dead economists is far from over and still dominates the economic stage. Had Thatcher not championed Hayek, the world would be a different place.

Let’s not forget that in cold, macro-economic terms, Thatcherism was completely loopy doctrine. Converting Britain’s North Sea petrodollars and privatisation receipts into unemployment benefits as the coal-mines and factories were closed down, might have delivered a political victory. But economically, it was a zero-sum game that saw Britain squander somewhere in excess of £150 billion on — well, on nothing really. In the name of political principle, a substantial part of the nation’s productive capacity was rendered unproductive. Viewed through the contemporary lens of sustainability or resource optimisation, it was bonkers.

But in the end, it was worth it because the exercise worked as a confidence trick, and the capitalist and shopkeeper classes felt unshackled and free get their mojo working again. That these favoured citizens never quite got around paying enough taxes on their new wealth to balance the budget and make the whole transformation worthwhile, was evidenced by the fact that state spending continued to rise under Thatcherism. But, like any good card trick, it garnered the oohs and aahs.

For the truth is that in war (and this was the most exciting war of ideas we had had in a generation) the truth is the first casualty. Thatcher’s regime was in many ways not radical at all: she didn’t shrink the state; she only took on trade unions when she was sure of victory; her privatisation and capital markets deregulation was the grandfather and mother of today’s global crisis of Capitalism. Until hubris got to her, she was cautious and canny.

But none of this matters, She was great — and nowhere more than in my own adopted backyard, Latin America. Her brisk ouster of Gen. Galtieri through the Falklands War began the great domino process that has benefitted hundreds of millions of people. Out of this evil, came much, much good. There, I’ve said it.

She helped clear out the noxious military dictatorships. First went Argentina; then Paraguay, Brazil, even Chile (despite her friendship with Pinochet). Peru, Bolivia, Uruguay. With a little poetic licence you could add Somoza, Noriega, and a handful of Central American hoodlums.

As a boy around in 1970, I was driven along the Iron Curtain in (then) West Germany. I was told, and believed, it would remain an immovable barrier through my lifetime. It all changed, in part because Margaret Thatcher later embraced, turned, and ultimately helped to disempower Mikhail Gorbachev. If Latin Americans owe her a debt of gratitude, so too do Eastern Europeans, freed from the yoke of Communism.

If you like, Margaret Thatcher was the ultimate Machiavellian: the ends that she achieved justified the means she deployed.

So, just like Mark Anthony, I climbed the steps of the tribune to damn Thatcher, yet I find that I can do no more than praise her as a transformative force in the years that I lived through. I must end by praising her as a polemicist, a warrior, an orator, and above all a personality who could communicate with true charisma.

Maggie is dead, and I’m glad to say that I was alive when she was in power. She might not have been right even sometimes, but I believed she hugely enriched our times. To say otherwise would be mean-minded and untruthful. I salute her.

The Storyteller’s Chain of Being

A single story has more lives than its narrator. And a fictional narrator, inside the story, has more lives than the storyteller who created him. And the storyteller, of course, has more lives than the ordinary man. So those who create stories have more lives.

For example, we remember the story of War and Peace through the life of Pierre – rather than through Tolstoy. We remember the escapades of Madame Bovary through the central fictional character, more than we remember the real life of Flaubert.

Ask somebody the significance of “Reader: I married him” and they will  in the first place recall Jane Eyre, the fictional narrator of  Charlotte Bronte’s famous book – and only in second place the writer herself.

Conversely, when the writer becomes more known and celebrated than the personalities in his or her stories, something has likely gone wrong, and he is less of a writer. Think of Hemingway, or Scott Fitzgerald in his more desperate period.

So here is some “Chain of Being” that reflects itself in modern storytelling. The writer has his own life. He or she creates a  narrator who tells the story created by that writer,  and the narrator has several lives. And the story itself told  by this narrator, has many thousands of lives. So the life of the narrator  can thereby  touch thousands, perhaps millions of lives. This is the mechanism for transmitting experiences by means of a chain of storytelling.

The French writer Jean Genet said that we live for the sole purpose of launching something  onto the eternal sea of human memory. One more legend, one more story that will sail through those wide seas and – perhaps – land on a distant unknown shore to bring a form of eternity to the life of the writer. Everything we live through deserves to be told: legends; difficult stories of pain, poems, songs, family histories, memories – all that we are made up of,  before we pass into that  great darkness that a Stoic  prepares for with dignity and without regret.

So a life is not measured by ‘Did I do well?” But also “ Did I tell the story  of  my life in such a way  that my insights and experiences, my loves and losses, have been passed on so that they can sail the seas on which float humanity’s accumulated  stories? Will my message in a bottle wash up on some strange and unknown beach and find a reader – perhaps just one reader – and so keep all that I am from oblivion?”

From Forest to Face: Beauty seeking sustainable supply-chains

Flowers of Candeia tree containing natural skin anti-irritant

For decades Brazil has been the butt of international criticism for its aggressive and often illegal deforestation of the Amazon forest.

But the nation is now turning the page on this smoke-wreathed past by emphasizing its new credentials as the guardian of around 20% of global biodiversity – and a sustainable provider of some of the world’s most desirable natural products for enhancing health, beauty and wellness.

A recent article in the Journal of Natural Products cited the development of a  database from the biodiversity of Brazil, as proof the country was coming of age as a major product source. The database,  designed  by the universities of  Sao Paulo (USP) and Sao Paulo state (UNESP), contains an index of 640 natural compounds,  compiled by researchers  Vanderlan Bolzani and Adriano Defini Andricopulo. Eventually, researchers say, the database will contain all Brazilian natural compounds with pharmaceutical  or wellness characteristics.

This  scholarly article, in a publication sponsored by  the American Chemical Society and the American Society of Pharmacognosy, shows how Brazilian academics are getting behind the new commercial impetus of bringing forest products to world  notice. The University of California’s ZINC database of  natural pharmaceuticals, is also carrying the Brazilian data. You can examine the new database (still in test phase) by clicking here.

In more commercial terms, Brazil is giving itself the mother of all cosmetic makeovers.

For centuries, the extraction of forest products followed chaotic and often-destructive patterns. Thousands of products including rubber, Brazil nuts, Açaí berries, hearts of palm, guarana energy additive, urucum food dye, cupuaçu pulp for ice-cream still make their way to export markets without proper certification.

Urucum natural food dye

But now, when talk turns to exploiting the forest, charm has replaced chainsaws and slash-and-burn is out. Beauty is in, and beauty is big business. Already, Brazil is the world’s third largest market for health and beauty products – and its potential has only barely been tapped.

From superfood fruit formulas charged with antioxidants, to subtle tropical fragrances, or those deep moisturizing oils that magic away wrinkles without relying on hidden chemicals, this is a natural beauty industry on a roll.

Thanks to its diverse climatic habitats, still-untapped flora, and rich community plant lore, Brazil looks like a beauty cream formulator’s paradise. What’s yet to be proven, however, is just how sustainable or robust are the supply chains for each one of these exciting new essences.

Brazil’s emerging talent for discovering, producing and delivering supplies of natural ingredients that are friendly to both face, physique and forest, is creating a new generation of eco-entrepreneurs who are building a sophisticated new industry.

No wonder then that L’Occitane, the French cosmetic brand, has played a pioneering role by singling out Brazil for plush spa treatment, as the source of its new global line of biodiversity-based products to be launched by 2014.

Mandacaru cactus and blossom

L’Occitane’s perfumiers spent two years scouting Brazil’s backlands to come up with a novel range of natural essences including creams based on the mandacaru cactus of the dry Northeast, and the fragrance of the jenipapo fruit. None of the products L’Occitane gathered from six distinct bio-zones, had ever been used before by the Brazilian natural cosmetics industry.

That’s not to say that Brazil’s own home-grown national champions are slouches. Local  retail giants Natura and O Boticário have both grasped the ethos pioneered by the UK’s Body Shop and taken it further, exploiting the engagement and enthusiasm of urban Brazilians for all things natural.

Jenipapo fruit

Founded in 1969, Natura is regularly voted the nation’s most admired brand, while its door-to-door, Avon-style army of female sales representatives totals almost 1.3 million across the length and breadth of Latin America.

Natura’s 2011 sales topped R$6.3 billion.  Leading a range of 1,000 products, Natura’s  Ekos cosmetic and fragrance lines based on Brazilian fruits, oils  and herbs, including Buriti palm, Brazil nuts,  passion fruit, cocoa butter and maté tea, have become national favorites.

In its home market, Natura is pushing at an open door. Recently, a market survey of 6,000 consumers worldwide (Re:Thinking Consumption: Consumers and the Future of Sustainability) found Brazilians to be the most idealistic andcause-based of all shoppers for natural products, so much so they were labelled as “advocates.” Radically different to pragmatic Americans or status-conscious Chinese, Brazilian women say they buy cosmetics “to make a difference” to the world and the environment.

Against this seemingly-smiling backdrop, it’s perhaps surprising to find some puzzled and frustrated voices inside the world of Brazilian natural cosmetics, especially for those working hard to produce truly certifiable natural ingredients that benefit local communities and the environment.

What’s happening is that the country’s bad old reputation for all things ecological is taking quite some time to shake off.  However squeaky-clean some of its supply chains may be, and however robust its sustainability regulators, from the foreign perspective a single rogue farmer busy with a matchbox during Amazonia’s dry season, can drag the country’s reputation back years.

Brazil is working hard to become fully sustainable, but not everyone’s quite there yet, and so the country remains an easy target. Why? Not surprisingly, this brash young newcomer on the global beauty scene is inciting some jealous commercial rivalry from those players it is beginning to displace.

On one side of the battle-line stand the international beauty industry’s traditional providers of artificial, petrochemical-based ingredients — that for years have discreetly formed the mainstay of “natural” cosmetics and beauty aids. On the other side stand Brazilians, with their natural, forest-based products. Once the supply chains for all these products are 100% proven sustainable, consumers will demand what’s truly natural.

Take the case of Brazil’s home-grown answer to the age-old problem of skin irritation.  For centuries, European herbalists have known that oil of the camomile flower contains a natural soothing ingredient. Widely used in concentrations of 1% after-shave creams, after-sun lotions and cosmetics, it acts as a powerful anti-irritant.

However, a kilo of the oil requires two hectare’s worth of flowering plants, and when refined to contain 100% Alpha-Bisabolol, this amount of active ingredient costs around US$4,500.

Camomile produces costly Alpha-Bisabolol

In the 1970s Brazilian chemists discovered that Candeia, a tree commonly found at the margins of the Atlantic rainforest, could produce oil containing 95% pure Alpha -Bisabolol at a cost today of just EUR 150 a kilo.

Demand for the Brazilian product grew steadily, as trade customers were channeled through a single buying agent, a German multinational named Symrise AG.  The world’s fourth largest supplier of cosmetic ingredients, Symrise had sales of EUR 1.58 billion in 2011.

The industry had grown to export an annual 100 tonnes of the refined oil, when European NGOs began raising questions about the role Symrise indirectly played in spurring Brazilian deforestation, although it had said the product was 100% sustainable.

Oil-bearing Candeia tree in Brazil’s Atlantic coastal region

Local sources say Symrise at first made efforts to encourage its Brazilian producers to develop more sustainable practices. But then, fearful for its own reputation, the German company opted to expand its existing sales of artificial Alpha Bisabolol alternatives.

It funded the development of Dragosantol, an new synthetic compound.  Then, in late 2011, Symrise informed markets that had stopped harvesting oil from Brazilian Candeia trees, as production of natural Alpha Bisabolol was not sustainable.

It recommended customers switch to its Dragosantol product, even though this contained only 50% of the active ingredient in the natural formulation, gram for gram. Furthermore, earlier synthetic formulations contained farnesol, a substance that can provoke adverse skin reactions.

After the switch, Brazil’s export volumes shrank dramatically and export volumes for the EUR 100 million industry collapsed, leaving local producers of Bisabolol smarting. Without ongoing sales to Brazil’s own Natura, the industry would have ceased to function.

One company, Atina Natural Assets, a business based at Pouso Alegre in the Candeia tree producing regions, went ahead to secure internationally-recognised organic and sustainability certifications from ECOCERT and the Forestry Stewardship Council. Atina’s field teams ensure the highest level of compliance in harvesting, replanting and responsible management of woodlands.

11 year-old sector market leader Atina, which was producing some 25% of Brazil’s Alpha Bisabolol, believes it has now shown all the rigor necessary to reopen the export market, and that formulators should now listen to other voices besides that of Symrise.

Atina has, its executives claim, completely solved the supply chain problem and is offering a natural product technically superior to the  synthetic one, for a comparable wholesale price.

“Atina is leading the Brazilian industry for natural forest ingredients out of a period of disorganization and uncertainty,” said Juan Piazza, the company’s CEO. “Thanks to our own very high standard-setting on sustainability matters, markets can be sure that our all natural products are truly world class, while our supply chain is robust and reliable.”

Now, said Piazza: “European buyers who had switched to using synthetic Alpha-Bisabolol, can resume using the more effective natural product. We can give absolute confidence to buyers that our product is the best for skin, the best for the environment, and the best for reputation.”

During 2013 Atina plans to start exports of its own certified organic and sustainable natural product, and is actively marketing to cosmetic companies in Europe.  Its executives are touring leading cosmetics and natural beauty fairs, pitching their products – and their arguments – to formulators and buyers for  big companies like L’Oreal, Clarins, Beiersdorf and Body Shop.

As well as the natural anti-irritant, it has a diversified range of essential oils, dry extracts and cold-pressed oils from what it called “natural assets” — fruits, herbs, spices and forest plants.

There’s no doubt the supply chain for Alpha-Bisabolol is highly complex. Nor is there doubt that, when pressed, Brazilians are showing the world’s sustainability watchdogs they are well able to turn the page on centuries of bad old extractivist traditions, in order to deploy world-class rigor in supply chains.

Acai anti-oxidant “superberries” from Amazon palm.

Atina’s experience and the Alpha Bisabolol case has wider implications, suggesting that if Brazil’s natural products industry is to fulfill its promise, the supply chains for every active ingredient being sold overseas will need follow this company’s lead.

End

Brain Chemicals and the Universal Story

Storytelling gurus often say that our human brains are “hard-wired” to receive information coming through established cognitive channels in formats that we all recognize as stories.

This can’t be literally true as we don’t have wiring in our heads. But perhaps we are “soft-wired” through the release patterns of certain brain chemicals that condition our favorable response to information presented as compelling stories.

If our response to story is indeed guided by neurology, how does it work? Do certain anxiety-creating aspects of a narrative (the challenges contained in earlier part of the dramatic arc) trigger the release of cortisol, a focus-the-mind chemical? And do resolutions, denouements or happy endings trigger the release of oxytocins, which create a sense of fulfillment, empathy and completeness?

The interplay between neurology and cognitive aspects of storytelling-as-science is nowhere better expressed than by researcher Paul  Zak.

You can watch a terrific  and profound video on this subject by Paul Zak by clicking here.

The only caveat to the storytelling-as-science movement is that the heavy mob is  already on the case. Some years ago attended an event with Steve Denning (a former World Banker who has carved a substantial personal story arc through the storytelling business.) Alongside him was a researcher who had received funding from the  National Security Agency in the United States  (this was just after 9/11) to undertake mass online scoping of stories in Islamic cultures, to try and predict future terrorist events.

And now we find that another branch of the US military/security apparatus (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is also funding research work on storytelling.

Yes, storytelling deserves adequate  public-sector funding to widen our understanding of the deep cognitive pathways that influence our decisions — and in turn determine our free will and our  social cohesion. But I’m more than a little nervous that the US military seems to be getting there first in a scenario that’s redolent of George Orwell’s 1984. I’d rather it was NSF than NSA unraveling the chemical secrets of story.

In the US, the NRA and the Second Amendment crowd who insist on the public’s right to bear arms in the event that the people need to overthrow a tyrannical government, might consider a fresh amendment upholding the American people’s “right to bear stories” in the event that the federal government’s experimentation with stories ushers in a darker age of control propaganda.

Forgotten Heroes From Latin America’s 1980s Culture Wars

Warning: Contains adult material. Don’t read this if you dislike single-syllable anglo-saxon words, or are too young to guess what these might refer to.

If you want to be a witness to Latin America’s lost and cruel decade of military dictatorship and the artistic counter-culture it spawned, then hurry to Madrid. I did, and the journey whirled me backwards 30 years.

It has taken all that time but now, unjustly-forgotten figures from Latin America’s artistic counter-culture who  in the 1980s championed the popular rebellions that helped restore democracy to the continent,  have finally received the billing they deserve in a stunning exhibition at Madrid’s Reina Sofia art center.

The images they created are brought back to us in a vivid show entitled “Perder la Forma Humana.”  It pays tribute to that brave and inspired generation of creatives who took their art into the streets to protest against the military dictatorships of Argentina, Chile,  Brazil, and neighbouring nations where democracy was virtually extinguished. In that time, art and politics mingled and out came experimental theatre,  poetic action, passive resistance, acts of collective memory to bring back the disappeared. And above all, protest.

This show was organised by an international  group of volunteers including  art critics, historians, curators, marxists  and militants called Red Conceptualismos del Sur. Their work is so complete that if there was a catalogue (there isn’t)  it would be submitted as the definitive cultural studies doctoral thesis on the roots of modern Latin America.

As a primer in explaining how  the 1990s ‘Washington Consensus’ opened the doors for today’s neo-liberal, bourgeois cultural orthodoxy that supplanted a quite different view from the 1980s of how the world might have worked once the dictators were overthrown, this show has no equal.

Running until 11th March 2013, it’s a rare and a raw show, forcing into our consciousness images of bodily mutilation, of enforced oblivion or mass forgetfulness, and above the extraordinary courage of those who made their art under the violent gaze of guards and gunships and tanks. What today’s conceptual artists create self-consciously in the safety of their studios, these people did instinctively in the front line.

Indeed, this art show speaks to us across a great gulf, recalling a time when art was about engagement, not celebrity, about expressing community needs, hurts and outrage, rather than individual, self-referential vision. When artists were, quite literally, street fighters.

What thrilled me especially is that, printed onto posters and playbills and manifestoes for forgotten art movements,  I come face-to-face with the names of personal friends, acquaintances and counter-culture icons  from all those years ago when I lived in Latin America. Names that brought a sting to my eyes, just as surely as General Pinochet’s tear-gas had done when I found myself joining the crowds fleeing down the streets of Santiago as his gunships hovered above.

The exhibition reminds us too, how perishable is the art of engagement and street protest. Many still remember iconic groupings from that terrible time as Latin America’s Mothers of the Disappeared. There were Argentina’s “Madres de Plaza de Mayo”; and Chile’s Mujeres por la Vida.”

But what happened to the art created out of those dark days? Perder la Forma Humana brings together screen prints, playbills, newspaper clippings, videos, posters, photos — the ephemera of an almost-forgotten, broad-based campaign to restore basic dignity. You won’t find much of  this material for sale in New York art galleries.  The art “object”  of those days wasn’t  a self-conscious, self-referential product. It was street action.

Volunteers would lie down to have their silhouettes painted on cards, which then became placards bearing the names of the disappeared, to remind the world of their continued existence — as art, if no longer as living persons.

There’s humour too, showing how danger helped spawn an orgy of sexual liberation, political pranks  and counter-culture manifestos that breathe excitement as well as danger. Exuberant sex and socialism stand on one side; repression, religion and military power on the other.

When I arrived to live in Brazil in 1982, it wasn’t then anywhere near the frontline of industrial-scale human rights abuses. Yes, General Galtieri’s officers were still doing horrible things in Argentina, unchecked. Yes, General Pinochet’s officers were still doing horrible things in Chile, unchecked.

I cannot say that then, I stood on the front line alongside these brave artists in Santiago or Buenos Aires to protest those terrible crimes. Later on, as a reporter, I was to travel to Chile and  into the barrios of Santiago to meet with representatives of popular movements,  of the Catholic church, and write about  families of the disappeared and the darkness and loss into which that beautiful country was plunged. I was swept up in the great protests that finally helped nudge Pinochet from power. In Paraguay  I was to meet opponents of General Stroessner, and write about his exit from power. And in Peru I saw signs of the violence wrought by the Sendero Luminoso.

But in 1982 my focus was on Brazil and it was exciting. The counter-culture wars were already raging; with naked happenings on Rio beaches, “art-activist” interventions to wrap up public statuary, and sexual liberation manifestos. Abused women, political prisoners, homosexuals — a whole underground was ready to break out, and let it all hang out.

It would be another three years before the generals handed over the reins of power. Brazil’s mainstream media were too timid to report on all the artistic goings-on and the emergence of a permissive society.

But it was happening, nonetheless, Art movements like “Viajou Sem Passaporte”  (“On a trip with no passport”), AlterArte, Movimento de Arte Pornô and Eduardo Kac’s Pornogram happenings on Rio’s  Ipanema beach, were putting it out there with stencilled or  hand-printed  documents that have been lovingly assembled  in the Reina Sofia show.

In São Paulo the Viajou Sem Passaporte movement — which included some Argentinians who were afterwards expelled, staged a brilliant  guerrilla art “happening”  in which they travelled around the city wrapping up the heads of  the famous figures portrayed in the city’s pompous public statuary. The media lapped it up.

I couldn’t resist photographing  some of the  exhibit’s poetry and graphic  design for inclusion, to give you a flavour of the sexual revolutionary spirit that was in the air.  By the standards of today’s “although we can do anything now, actually we choose to censor ourselves” culture, the language is  full-on. As they say on TV, ‘look away now if you don’t want to know the score.’

Try “The Waste Language“:

If you need translating that says:

ass/cock/cunt/balls

neo-colonialism/national socialism/maxi-devaluation

What’s the measure/what are the rules/to measure obscenity?

How about this one:

That means:

What I want  is an orgy!

I want lust/indecency!

I  leave repression to the church and to the military!

Here’s a 1980 manifesto from  the Movimento de Arte Pornô

It’s all about “literary orgies,” “opening your legs to new ideas” and “art as penetration and orgasm.” You get it.

Here’s another one from  Olinda in Brazil’s northeast, showing the  consciousness was  not confined to the metropolis:

Number 4 says: “The repression that castrates our poetry is the same as that which censors our bodies”

In São Paulo, AlterArte’s manifesto called for a world in which:

“More men are makers of art, and fewer are artists among mankind.”

And for “A revolutionary, independent movement of Latin American artists.”

But the image I loved best  was a poster for a performance session at SESC Pompeia arts centre in July 1982 — six months after I  reached Brazil.  One of the performers was my dear friend Ana Correa, a gypsy queen polymath of modern witchcraft who’s involved in dance, movement, spiritual awareness, healing, fortune-telling and visionary awareness. When on the eve of the 1985 elections that would restore democracy, Ana forecast in a radio interview that neither of the leading candidates would become president, no one believed her. She was right: the elected candidate died in hospital.

The poetry, the videos, the happenings, all speak of a lost world,  the memory of which has been almost entirely suppressed. A world so different it seems impossible that just 30 years ago people  in Argentina and Chile were — quite literally — dying for the right to make the kinds of aesthetic and cultural choices their children now take for granted.

All this counter-culture might have come at least 10 years after America’s Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock, the Yippees, or Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. But when you consider the starting-place, and the repressive political backdrop, the achievement in changing culture was every bit as significant.

In the end, I’d say the measure of success for artists is that their work is so relevant and so expressive of social needs that it disappears into society and becomes one with the culture. You don’t pay to go to museums to see it. Everyone lives it. So by that yardstick much of the work in Perder la Forma Humana is triumphantly successful, even though it features not a single celebrity and nobody got rich.

If course it’s a shock — and a reminder of mortality — when we reach the age where what are our own memories have become public property, to be shown in museums as contemporary history. But, precisely because I know just a little of what it was like, because I saw some of it first-hand,  I’ll take  every chance I can to salute  the brave memory of  Forgotten Heroes From Latin America’s 1980s Culture Wars.

Richard House

With the Brazilians on the international science circuit

Over the last few weeks I’ve been spending increasing amounts of time on the science circuit, working alongside Brazilian scientists who are trying to increase the range of cooperation their country has with the rest of the world.

You can find out more  by visiting www.scienceforbrazil.com, or just click the link.

In case you want to find out more before navigating away from this page, you can always check out the infographic below, to find out what you you really know. Maybe it’s worth finding out some more.