Talking 'bout our generations

It could happen to any of us. Your son or daughter asks if they can have some friends round for a ‘gathering’. Thrilled that he/she has taken you into their confidence and considers you ‘cool’, you acquiesce. Wanting to seem even cooler you buy them some beer and arrange to go out for a couple of hours, leaving them the run of the house.
Nine times out of ten that would be the end of the story. But for Brian Dodgeon it was the beginning of a nightmare, one that, to judge by the report in yesterday’s Times, could end in a ten-year prison sentence for the University of London lecturer. I have no idea what went on in Mr Dodgeon’s home in North Kensington last weekend, but the death of 15-year-old Isobel Reilly from an apparent drug cocktail at a party given by his daughter in the early hours of Saturday morning should be a wake up call for every parent.

I did not know Isobel well. In all, ‘Issy’, as she was known to my son and his friends, visited our home on four occasions. My son was dating a girl from Chiswick and Issy was her best friend and we accepted her as part of the package. Now and again Issy would pop downstairs to use the loo or get a drink, and on occasion she would wander into my study and quiz me about my work – she seemed intrigued that I was a journalist and from later exchanges I realised that she had Googled me. I liked her. She had personality and pizzazz.

My son seemed to like having Issy around too so when, one evening, he asked if he could host a gathering we were happy to oblige. We even bought him a few beers and went out for a couple of hours, leaving him and his friends the run of the house. After all, wasn’t that the ‘cool’ thing to do?

In our case, I am happy to report that when we returned there were no irate neighbours standing on our doorstep. Nor were there any breakages or pools of vomit on the kitchen floor. The party, in other words, would not make headline news. But should we have provided alcohol at all? After all, these were 15-year-olds and below the legal drinking age? And as appears to have been the case on the night of Issy’s death, there were no adults around to supervise proceedings should anything have gone wrong – although, in our case, we had only gone out for a couple of hours and had been back well before midnight.

Another difference was that in our house, unlike, if the Independent is to be believed, in Mr Dodgeon’s, there was no drug stash waiting to be discovered. But what if, unbeknownst to us, someone had introduced drugs to the mix and someone had overdosed? Would we then too have risked charges of child abandonment and/or reckless endangerment?

At the impromptu memorial service held for Issy on Chiswick Green yesterday, these were the questions at the forefront of many parents’ minds. As one might expect, there was a wide disavowal of drugs, but the alcohol issue was less clear cut. From what I could gather the prohibitionists were in the minority. As one dad put it: ‘Better they drink at home than on the streets’. Curfews proved an equally thorny issue, with some parents favouring a lights out at 11pm policy and others opting for midnight or later. Whatever the policy in one’s own home, however, there was widespread recognition that there was little we could do to control what went on in other parents’ homes. And there was the rub. None of us wants to play bad cop. We all want to be the parents your son or daughter is happy to introduce to his/her friends. But in fostering a climate of accommodation are we guilty of blurring the boundaries between the generations? Would it not be better to act our age and demand that our children do the same?
These are not new issues. My parents faced the same dilemmas in the 1970s when I was a teenager. The difference then was the drugs that we might bring or ‘discover’ at a party were far less likely to cause catastrophic toxic reactions, though I can recall plenty of friends turning a lighter shade of pale, most usually as a result of drinking to excess and inhaling on unfiltered joints laced with hash and nicotine-rich tobacco.

No doubt Issy’s death will provoke the usual laments from right-wing moralists about our ‘overly’ promiscuous society and the steady decline in ‘family values’. Then there is the very modern delusion, as one teacher from Issy’s school suggested yesterday, that it is all the fault of internet and that were it not for Google and SMS text messaging we could somehow keep children ignorant of the temptations waiting to snare them out there in the ‘adult’ world. But children have always been adept at discovering society’s hidden vices and you cannot reverse half a century of social and technological change.

The challenge for all of us, children and adults alike, is to live in the present, in the world as it is, not as we wish or imagine it should be. Doing that will require a franker dialogue between the generations than, as far as I can discern, has been the case hitherto. It is a dialogue I would have liked to have had with Issy. Next time I will not be so cool.

Some very brief reflections on celebrity

Is celebrity an appropriate topic for academic discourse? Can an analysis of the ways in which celebrity is ‘produced and consumed’ – to use the jargon of cultural studies departments - deepen our understanding of social and political processes, or does it risk trivializing our engagement with history? In short, can historians talk about celebrity and still be taken seriously?

I only ask because issue two of a new journal, Celebrity Studies, has just arrived in my in-tray. The brainchild of two media studies academics, the journal’s entries this month include  ‘hypertrophic celebrity in Victoria Beckham’ and  ‘Gordon Brown and the work of emotion.’

No, I don’t know what ‘hypertrophic celebrity’ is either, nor how it came to be embodied in Victorian Beckham and, on a cursory reading, its easy to see how this stuff can earn academics a bad name. Certainly, that was the line the Independent took when Routledge launched the title, accusing the editors of ‘pseudo-academic mumbo jumbo’ and of taking the subject of celebrity too seriously.

Until last week, I would probably have been inclined to agree. Celebrities already take themselves seriously enough, thank you. The last thing they need is canonisation by academics too.

Following the latest revelations in the News Of The World phone-hacking saga, however, I am no longer so sure. For future political historians may well see January 28^th, 2011 as the day when Rupert Murdoch’s grip on power suffered a fatal blow – all thanks to an obscure interior designer who also happens to be Sienna Miller’s step-mother. Yes, dear reader, like you (I hope) until last week I had never heard of Kelly Hoppen, but she’s certainly got my attention now.

If, as Hoppen’s lawyers’ allege, it turns out that NOTW was hacking her phone as recently as last March and that executives higher up the food chain knew about it, then News International’s claim that the phone-hacking was the work of one or two rogue reporters begins to wear increasingly thin, jeopardizing not just former executives on the paper but Murdoch’s strategy for taking majority control of Sky too. It’s a big if, of course. Murdoch may yet see off Hoppen and the other celebtoids nipping at his heels, but it will be a delicious irony should Hoppen – a product of today’s media obsession with celebrities – eventually prove to be Murdoch’s undoing. Murdoch’s papers have been able to make – and break – celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic for more than two decades now, but if the phone-hacking scandal demonstrates anything it’s that in the same period there’s been a slow but steady shift of power away from the media towards its Frankenstein-like creations.

Without coming over all ‘cultural studies’ about it, Hoppen et al are no longer just  tame products to be consumed and discarded by an ‘omnipotent’ media, they are now themselves laying claim to that power by challenging the media’s right to intrude upon their lives and dictate their public identities.

Of course, the media isn’t the only field in which celebrities increasingly call the shots. From Hollywood, where ‘star’ actors get to green-light movies, to the catwalks of Milan and Paris where Victoria Beckham gets to decide which designers are ‘in’ this season, to charitable causes in Africa fronted by pop stars like Bono toting Louis Vuitton bags, the power of celebs is now everywhere on show.
As we have seen in California with the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger and, arguably, in London with Boris Johnson’s elevation to the mayoralty off the back of his comic turn on Have I Got News For You,  it is also increasingly a short-cut to high political office.

There is nothing particularly new about this, of course. As Fred Inglis makes clear in his fascinating A Short History of Celebrity (if you’re going to write about celebrity and still want to be taken seriously as a historian ‘short’ is definitely the way to go) the modern production of celebrity can be traced back to the Enlightenment. Today, we have Katie Price and Damien Hirst. The 18^th century equivalents were Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Lord Byron. The democratisation of society in the Victorian period sealed the deal, turning celebrity into a commodity with mass appeal and making Florence Nightingale and Annie Oakley, the star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, household names.

Similarly, in my own period – the 1890s – I have been struck by how the Graphic and the Illustrated London News prefigured the productions of Heat and Hello, pioneering the use of photo-spreads celebrating the lives of Victorian actresses and minor members of the royal family. More than any other publication, it was, of course, the Daily Mail, launched in 1896, that ushered-in the era in which newspapers sought to confer celebrity on everyone from politicians to pantry maids, with Alfred Harmsworth playing the role of self-appointed puppet master-in-chief. The difference was that in 1920’s Harmsworth (by then Lord Northcliffe and also the proprietor of The Times)  truly had a lock on the means of celebrity production, controlling 40 percent of the British newspaper market. That is a power that, today, Murdoch can only dream of.

History of the Present

As a PhD student of un certain age it’s sometimes easy to feel that history is passing you by. Then there are days when the present comes vividly alive. I am too young to have been a soixante-huitard and was in Paris for the poll tax riots in 1990, but there was definitely a whiff of revolution in the air today as I rounded the corner of Malet Street on my way to a seminar at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and found my path blocked by a phalanx of police in Day-Glo jackets. It was midday and a little further up the road, a boisterous crowd had already been kettled outside Senate House. By the late afternoon, as darkness fell on Parliament Square, the TV news would be full of images of bonfires and swinging batons, but in Malet Street five hours earlier there had been something of a carnival spirit, a desire to burst the ConDem balloon with barbs not bombs.

‘Vince Cable can’t decide whether to get into bed with Cameron or cower under the duvet,’ mocked one speaker. ‘Pinocchio Clegg didn’t pay to go to university so why should we?’ demanded another.

Amidst the predictable mass-produced Cameron Pig signs reminiscent of the Class War placards of the early 80’s there were also stabs at homemade humour. My favourite read: ‘If I have learned anything from these protests it’s that spellcheck doesn’t work on cardboard.’ I’m pleased to report the sign was correctly spelt, so obviously a university degree still has some uses.

So now the government has got its majority, will the student demonstrations fizzle out or morph into a genuine mass protest movement? To listen to some of the speakers gathered in Malet Street it already has: ‘You’ve already shown your solidarity with the Greek protestors and forged links with the unions. Whatever happens today, this isn’t over until you kick the bankers and their stooges out of office.’

Certainly, this generation of students has already shown impressive organisational skills, but the hotheads are rapidly giving the movement a bad name and it is hard to see the centre holding during what promises to be a long ConDem winter. I have no doubt the anger on the streets is genuine, but I fear it has less to do with the scale of the fee hikes than the sense of betrayal at the Liberals’ broken promises. After all, it is not the 20-year-olds on the streets of London today who are going to be saddled with upwards of £30,000 of debt, but the 16-year-olds coming up behind them. They face a stark choice: to accept the tuition fees as a fait accompli and knuckle down to the task of scaling the corporate ladder so that one day they may have the means to repay them, or to take up where previous generations left off. The 68’ers weren’t just fighting for themselves but for a different kind of society and a different model of historical progress, one in which capital and free markets were not the only measure of value. During the neo-conservative boom years that followed the collapse of communism we heard a lot about the ‘end of history.’ Perhaps December 9, 2010 was the day that ‘history’ finally spluttered back to life.

A Grave Business

Driving south along the coastal highway from Da Nang to the Vietnamese honeymoon capital at Hoi An one’s eye is drawn to a series of fenced in plots surmounted by giant billboards attesting to a bygone era. ‘Paradise in Water and Marble’ declares a sign for a new luxury beach resort overlooking the South China Sea. ‘The Shark Strikes Again’ boasts another for Montgomerie Links, an eighteen-hole golf course complete with rippled fairways and a club house designed by the Scottish golfing legend.

   With the support of the Vietnamese national tourist board and international property developers, the Quang Nam authorities have poured millions into redeveloping this 30 km stretch of coastline. In their eagerness to ‘beautify’ the area they even bribed the villagers to disinter their long-dead relatives and relocate them to new cemeteries in the nearby hills. Given the fact that in Vietnam it is not uncommon for several generations of one family to be buried in the same grave, this must have been a heartbreaking - not to mention gruesome - business. Wandering among the shattered marble gravestones mined from the nearby hills, it also struck me as senseless. Here and there,  I came across a low wall with a security guard posted at the gate, but there was little sign of construction and with buy-to-let market in freefall I couldn’t help wondering if they would ever be built now.

   Vietnam’s rush to give the ‘Heritage Coast’ a Western-friendly makeover just as global capitalism is in meltdown seems even more incongruous when you consider Da Nang’s iconic status in the history of the Vietcong struggle. Lying just south of the demilitarized zone, it was here that in March 1965 American marines first touched Vietnamese soil, massing at China Beach to defend the nearby US airbase, and it was here that a few months later at Cam Ne, a village ten kilometres inland, marines opened fire on innocent Vietnamese villagers for the first time, presaging the later and more infamous massacre at Mai Lai. As Lyndon Johnson ordered the strafing of Vietcong positions, Da Nang soon became synonymous with everything that was wrong with the American prosecution of the war. ‘Da Nang, me, Da Nang, me, why don’t they get a rope and hang me?’ mocked Adrian Cronaeur, the acid-tongued disc-jockey portrayed by Robin Williams in the film Good Morning Vietnam. However, the image I will forever associate with Da Nang is the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ scene from Apocalypse Now where Robert Duvall’s surf-mad Colonel Kilgore orders a squadron of helicopters to blitz the tree line at China Beach, before stepping onto the sand to utter the immortal line, ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning.’

   In fact, except for the months of September and October, when this stretch of coast gets the tail end of the southern typhoons, the surf at China Beach and nearby Non Nouc is pretty lacklustre. If you want to know what Da Nang looked like before it caught the eye of the golf-and-sun lounger brigade then Hoa’s Place, a backpacker hangout 100 yards from the break at Non Nuoc, is a pretty good place to start. A slight man with an easy-going manner, Hoa opened his lodge 15 years ago and likes nothing better than to hang out at the bar with a cold beer exchanging pleasantries with his gap-year guests. A room is between $5-9 a night, the beers are on the honesty system, and on the rare days when the surf’s up, Hoa will even rent you a battered foam board. ‘Thanks for the best welcome in Vietnam,’ reads a typical entry in Hoa’s guestbook. ‘It’s so great to be around people who are genuinely interested in you and not just those dollars,’ reads another. Or as third puts it rather more succinctly: ‘Paradise.’

   Unfortunately, Hoa’s little slice of Eden may soon be going the way of those roadside graveyards. ‘There’s a strong possibility I may not be here next year,’ he told me when I caught up with him on a sunny afternoon in February. A hotel group had been sniffing round the village, he explained, and there were rumours that the authorities were about to issue a compulsory purchase order on his land. How much would he get? Hoa shrugged his shoulders and took another sip of beer. ‘Probably 150 million dong, maybe 200m.’ I did a quick calculation, just $10-15,000, hardly enough to pay for a new car let alone a new hotel. ‘It’s a little bit scary,’ Hoa admitted as his wife emerged from the kitchen to replenish our plates with homemade nam rolls. ‘As you can see, we have a good business here and we’re not young anymore.’

   By now our conversation had caught the attention of Will Gilmore, an ex-marine who’d returned to Vietnam to write his memoirs and was busy tapping away at a laptop at a nearby table. A softly spoken man with grey hair and glasses, Gilmore had, like me, been appalled by the sight of the roadside graves and was shocked to hear how little compensation Hoa and other villagers stood to receive. ‘Those are ancestral burial grounds,’ he said, adding that in America the authorities would never allow the similar destruction of ‘Indian lands’.

   Gilmore explained that after the war he’d taught archaeology in Wisconsin but had never forgotten his experience in Vietnam and had now returned, as he put it, to ‘make amends.’ His first stop had been Hoaxnang, a village a few miles inland where he’d been posted in 1969 as a member of US Marines Civic Action Group with a brief to win the battle for hearts and minds by providing the villagers with medical aid and other forms of support. Unfortunately, the action appeared to have been doomed from day one. ‘We shipped a load of hens over from New Jersey with the idea of providing a supply of eggs for the village,’ Gilmore explained. ‘At first they seemed to be doing well, but one morning I got up to see this bird staggering around and a few days later they were all dead.’

   The rumour quickly went round that the chickens had been poisoned by the Vietcong and that anyone who collaborated with the Americans would suffer a similar fate. In fact, said Gilmore, ‘we simply forgot to vaccinate them.’ The Vietcong, he later learned, had known everything that went on in the village but didn’t consider the CAG unit a threat so let them be. However, Gilmore’s superiors were convinced the area was riddled with collaborators and issued orders for the marines to shoot suspected ‘unfriendlies’ on sight. ‘We did some bad things, some very bad things,’  Gilmore admitted, but was reluctant to elaborate further. Instead, he told me about returning to Hoaxnang where, armed with a book of photographs, he’d succeeding in locating the company’s interpreter, a 12-year-old boy they’d dubbed ‘Cowboy.’ Now aged 59, Cowboy was still being punished by the authorities for being a collaborator and now ekes out a living by collecting scrap metal which he fashions into farm tools.

   Gilmore had been somewhat luckier, being absolved of his sins by a local Buddhist nun. ‘She told me she wanted no part of my Western guilt, that what had happened in Vietnam was the fault of the American government, and that I should go home and get on with my life.’

But staring wistfully towards the surf Gilmore was clearly having trouble letting go. ‘It was so fucked up,’ he muttered. ‘We spent most of the time drinking beer, smoking weed and wrestling in the sand.’ Had he even seen anyone surfing, I asked? Gilmore looked astonished: ‘No, I never so much as laid eyes on a surfboard.’

    Thanking Hoa for his hospitality, I made a mental note to Google the GI surfing story and headed back to the highway (I later discovered that Coppola had shot the Valkyrie scene in the Philippines where the surf is more consistent and the stories of GI ‘surfer dudes’ was almost certainly a myth). Continuing south to Hoi An it wasn’t long before I was passing more giant billboards, including one showing a woman sitting on a deckchair with her back to the viewer looking out on a pristine beach. The caption above her head read simply, ‘My Space.’     On the opposite side of the road female coolies in straw hats were watering a newly laid fairway as a mechanical digger carved a fresh bunker. A little further on there was yet another fenced-in plot and, to the left, a ruined cemetery.

    Parking my motorcycle, I picked my way through the bracken for a closer look. Whereas the other cemeteries had only a few broken gravestones, this one looked as if it had been systematically vandalized. Cracked bricks and the shattered marble remains of grave markers lay strewn across the sandy scrub. Hoping to make out a name or date, I crouched down to take a closer look, but most of the markers were rubble. Finally, I found one that was still intact and began removing the sand and mud that obscured the lettering. It contained the names of five brothers and sisters and the date on which they had died: 1971, the height of the American bombing campaign: Da Nang, me, Da Nang, me, why don’t they get a rope and hang me. 

   I scratched at the stone in the hope of discovering their birth dates or where their bones had been taken, but there was nothing: just a  gaping hole in the ground where their bodies should have been and, behind, retreating into the distance, a line of empty dunes.