GUN CRAZY

It tells you everything you need to know about Sarah Palin when you learn that it was only after the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson, Arizona on Saturday that one of Palin’s websites took down its graphic wherein the states of a number of progressive American politicians (including Giffords) were portrayed in the crosshairs of the sights of a rifle. Any mention of this by Democrats (and others justifiably outraged) is being urgently dismissed by Republicans and Tea Partiers as “political point-scoring”. Well, there’s nothing dishonourable about making a political point. It’s certainly not worse than implying that your opponents would benefit from being shot in the head.

Gabrielle Giffords being sworn in last week by the new House Speaker, John Boehner

Assassination is a political weapon much more characteristic of reactionary than of progressive forces and therefore its victims are more apt to be progressives. Whether Lincoln or Kennedy, Gandhi or Mboya, Sadat or Rabin, Popieluszko or Palme, the politicians and activists thus removed have tended to be striving to make the world a better place for all of their fellow citizens. These are not the kind of people that the world can easily spare.

Only last week, the Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer was murdered by one of those hired to protect him. Taseer made himself a target by speaking out against the sentencing to death of a woman under the country’s absurd laws against blasphemy. In the upside-down world of Islam, anyone can be summarily executed if some malcontent alleges that they have made a remark that may be construed as disobliging to the Qur'an, the prophet or the arbitrary tenets of Sharia law. Proof is not required. Yet the so-called guard who killed Taseer is hailed on all sides as a hero.

The website targeting Tea Party enemies

So according to fundamentalist Islam, expressing your opinion or being accused of expressing an opinion that some malevolent mullah considers incorrect deserves death, as does disobeying your husband (however brutish or deranged he may be), declining to marry the dickhead that your parents have picked out for you, being homosexual, having sex outside marriage or not covering yourself from head to foot when you can be seen by others (if you are a woman). But ending the life of someone else on the basis of some unproved claim raises you to heroic status.

Palin gunning for liberals

Do not imagine, however, that this account of Islam is essentially different from the value system of fundamentalist Christians in the south and west of the United States. There will be plenty of people who applaud the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, even if they carefully deplore the “collateral damage” fatally inflicted on six others including a girl of nine who was born, with astonishing resonance, on the very day that the Twin Towers fell. We live in an age when pure hatred is the motivating force behind how millions view the world and their fellows within it. I happened to pass through Fox News during its coverage of the Democratic Party convention that chose Senator John Kerry to run against the incumbent George W Bush in 2004. Interviewing some Republican commentator, the Fox anchor observed: “I’m hearing a lot of hatred at this convention”. This was so a) not true and b) nakedly partisan as to be laughable if it were not so malicious. Well, the followers of Fox are sure doing all the hating now.

Salmaan Taseer

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The weekly arts column in The Guardian’s G2 supplement has a regular on-line poll inviting readers to choose between two simple positions on a topic of arts interest. The only time I ever troubled to register a vote was when we were charged to arbitrate as to whether it might be acceptable to top-slice the BBC licence fee in order to hive off funds for Channel 4. I am glad to report that an overwhelming majority deplored this proposition.

The current vote poses the question “Was Pete Postlethwaite the best actor of his generation?” I find this an appalling notion to survey. It would never have been asked in the present tense and only arises now because of the actor’s death at 64. Postlethwaite’s family must have ruefully regretted that the man was not alive to see the quite remarkable outpouring of admiration and affection that his death engendered. Did he always get such notices? I doubt it.

Of course, if you want a warm send-off, it always helps to die in harness. On hearing of the sudden passing of Truman Capote, Gore Vidal famously quipped: “good career move”. And your legend is apt to be sealed by leaving plenty of work undone. I do not for a moment demur at the extent of the tributes to Postlethwaite, a doughty player, brave and strong and always true to his material. But the best actor of his generation?

The young Pete Postlethwaite (billed as Peter in those days)

Judgments about performance, be it acting or singing or playing an instrument or indeed writing plays or music or novels, are a curious mix of the subjective and the objective. Objectively, of course, there is a chasm between the practised pro and the stumbling amateur and hence there are degrees of rational assessment along that continuum. The notion of a critical consensus around a work or a performance or a career is not without merit. It seems to me to be perfectly acceptable to argue that Keats is a “better” poet than the anonymous providers of doggerel in greetings cards and death announcements in local newspapers; that Jane Austen is a more significant novelist than Barbara Cartland; that Johnny Depp is a more accomplished and prodigious actor than Graham Seed, who has just been killed off in The Archers.

But whimsical taste and the accidents of what you might have seen come into it too. Many of those who vote on Postlethwaite will not have seen his television roles in The Paradise Run, The Muscle Market, Doris and Doreen and Afternoon Off as I have done (did you know he had so much Alan Bennett in his cv?); nor his stage performances in such plays as Magnificence (38 years ago!), Breezeblock Park, Having a Ball, Cromwell, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, Flying Blind and a great deal of Shakespeare at the RSC. I honour, as who doesn’t, the work he did in later life as a leading player and I am pleased to report that even after all the years of watching him he could still surprise me, especially in Brassed Off and In the Name of the Father.

But the best actor of his generation? If it were refined to “the best screen actor” or “the best stage actor” or “the best British actor”, some of the curse might have been taken off it. And, given The Guardian’s house style commitment to eschewing the term “actress”, perhaps “the best male actor” might also have clarified the matter.

And then how big is a generation? Consider just some of those born the same year as Postlethwaite: Alan Rickman, David Calder, Brian Cox, Tim Curry, Stephen Rea, David Suchet, Tony Robinson, Nicholas Jones, Timothy Dalton, Struan Rodger, Stuart Wilson, Peter Egan, Tim Pigott-Smith, Alun Armstrong, Barrie Rutter, Mike Grady, Richard Heffer, Duncan Preston, Gavin Richards, Roger Sloman, Clive Francis, Roy Holder … not a bad list. The following year brought Jonathan Pryce, Frank Grimes, Miles Anderson, Patrick Barlow, Warren Clarke, Richard Griffiths, Dermot Crowley, George Costigan, David Yelland, Nicholas Le Prevost … you see the competition is fierce. The roll call born in 1948 includes Tom Wilkinson, Niall Buggy, David Hayman, Karl Johnson, Philip Jackson, Jim Carter, Joseph Marcell and Ron Cook.

This is still just the British men. If we look to the women and to other nations, the list starts to burgeon: Cher joins us, as do Liza Minnelli and Mary Beth Hurt and Tyne Daly, Tommy Lee Jones and Bruce Davison, Danny Glover and Ben Vereen, Eugene Levy and Hector Babenco and Joe Spano, Diana Quick and Brenda Blethyn and Alison Steadman, Judy Loe and Stephanie Beacham, Glenn Close, Joe Mantegna, Richard Jenkins. Kevin Kline, John Ratzenberger, Colin Stinton, Sinéad Cusack and Frances Tomelty, Lindsay Crouse, Mercedes Ruehl, Billy Crystal and Samuel L Jackson, Jean Reno and Gérard Depardieu. Oh, and Meryl Streep. If we spread back to 1943 to define this generation, who can deny Robert De Niro? If on to 1950, what about Daniel Auteuil?

Go back seventy years and there’s no difficulty reducing the “best actor of his generation” list to just two, certainly from a London and Stratford perspective, probably in New York’s assessment too. It was either Laurence Oliver or John Gielgud, the one a force of nature, a man who took the stage by storm and presence, the other the greatest speaker of classical language of this or any age, the vessel for the music of the spheres. Around them played a golden generation of actresses and actors but, though they both fell into and out of fashion over their long careers, Gielgud and Olivier were clearly the top dogs.

Harriet Walter, dame to be

What’s striking about the players in my lists above – at least the British ones – is the absence of knights and dames. Olivier was knighted at 40, Gielgud at 49, both were raised to the Order of Merit and Olivier gazetted in the House of Lords. Ralph Richardson was knighted at 45, Michael Redgrave at 51, Alec Guinness and Donald Wolfit at 55, Basil Rathbone at 57, John Clements at 58. Peggy Ashcroft and Sybil Thorndike were made dames at 49, Edith Evans and Flora Robson at 58. Postlethwaite’s generation – in their early 60s – have so far achieved only one knighthood, that of Antony Sher (born three years after Postlethwaite) and two damehoods, for Helen Mirren and, bestowed in this year’s New Year honours list, for Harriet Walter (born four years after Postlethwaite). Walter’s gong is certainly deserved although perhaps surprising. Though six years younger than Walter, Juliet Stevenson might have been expected to precede her in the honours. Postlethwaite’s contemporary Penelope Wilton – my choice for the best actor of this generation – should also be in the running.

But really what does it matter? Why reduce everything to “best of” lists? Just glory in the career that Postlethwaite enjoyed and the work that he got to do. Hug yourself if, like me, you were able to catch a lot of his stage performances. I’m smug that I’m so old that I got to see so much stage work by all the players mentioned in this posting, including even Wolfit and Thorndike. As Chairman Mao said so wisely (though he hardly lived by it): “let a hundred flowers blossom”.

But if you do wish to vote in The Guardian’s poll, you may do so at this address:
www.guardian.co.uk/culture/poll/2011/jan/06/pete-postlethwaite