a close escape

I certainly wasn’t expecting to be woken up in the morning by a member of the group telling me that I should leave that very moment, because the group was threatening physical violence against me.

This was the point where I began to wonder if there wasn’t another story underneath the public one, the one about ‘gategate’ and the cultlike behaviour of a group of activists under the purview of a bumptious and irascible politician.

I was thinking of the sort of story that Barbara Vine would do, or Ian McEwen back in his early days before he discovered that he had Things to Tell Us, or maybe Paul Bowles and his cool outlines of complex and painful expatriate fates. The sort of story where a jaunt to teach Rwandan teachers English is merely the early bonding stage in a more serious venture, one which binds its participants together forever through mutual guilty knowledge. One that sees more people go out on a journey than come back. One that sees the survivors look distracted while talking vaguely about what Africa had ‘taught’ them and what they ‘learned’ while they were there. One where this learning consists of the knowledge that while they would deliberately not look at their former tripmates should they see them on the street, they could phone each other up at three in the morning with urgent requests.

Things clearly did not take that turn here and there is nothing to really indicate that they could have, apart from my overactive imagination and the knowledge of how difficult it is to generate cohesion in party politics in a post-ideological age. I’m not sure it is a post-ideological age. But political parties insist that it is and so it is reasonable to assume that they act according to this belief and have found other ways to bind their members together. Does everybody come back when they all go off on trips together? Or is someone missing on return, someone a bit awkward, perhaps, who just didn’t ‘get it’. ‘He was fine one minute and then…’ ‘we warned her about the riptide…’ ‘the truck just came careering round the bend’… ‘it’s the custom to bury people immediately over there…’

Comments

[Alex]

I like the weirdly Soviet way all the responsibility was assigned to the collective. "the group" feels this, "the group" thinks that, "the group" thinks you ought to fuck off or "the group" will break your face.

[dsquared]

I can't help thinking that there's a film in this, in which the Young Tory bonding exercise happens to be up in Plas-y-Brenin at the same time as Mohammed Siddique Khan and his mates were on their own, comparable, whitewater rafting trip.

[dsquared]

Also Imagine a rather strange crew of oddities and Decents, I wonder if you can.

[guthrie]

A lot of people felt let down by a wannabe journalist drafting a non-adulatory story about their trip? Seems to me lots of people are making up their own reality, and that's exactly how the Tories see things as well.

[jamie]

"at the same time as Mohammed Siddique Khan and his mates"

and were very impressed at how conservative people from the inner cities could be.

[johnf]

Rwanda is neo-con central in Africa. It is where the faithful gather.

[Alex]

Jamie, I think you mean very keen on house points, and, ah, multicultural.

[ajay]

It's "Four Lions" meets "Deliverance"!

[ajay]

Actually, rather than Ian McEwen or Barbara Vine, this has the ring of Donna Tartt's "Secret History". A cloistered group of privileged young people get carried away with their own peculiar beliefs and end up committing murder...

[ajay]

Off topic: interesting piece on the Guardian about the Syrian rebels. Lots of quotes from one of the foreign fighters about how hopeless the locals are.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/23/syria-foreign-fighters-joining-war

"They have no leadership and no experience," he said. "Brave people attack, but the men in the lines behind them withdraw, leaving them exposed. It is chaos. This morning the Turkish brothers fought all night and at dawn they went to sleep leaving a line of Syrians behind to protect them. When they woke up the Syrians had left and the army snipers had moved in. Now it's too late. The army has entered the streets and will overrun us."

He sounds like he'd have a lot of common ground with some of the instructors trying to teach the ANA or the Iraqis. I can picture them bitching to each other about their hopeless students...

[Chris Williams]

Cf, veterans of the Thirty Years' War of the Trained Bands at Brentford, Republican regular NCOs of CNT militias in 1936, etc. At least this is making it a lot easier to teach the one about the New Army not being fit for combat until 1916, if then.

[jamie]

'I can picture them bitching to each other about their hopeless students...'

Seminar proposition for RUSI