tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86974739088231439122024-03-05T04:10:22.012+00:00Donkeyshott & XuitlacocheLeft wing commentary from the heart and the headUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger992125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-1105047028119352452011-11-13T10:13:00.007+00:002023-09-03T10:24:31.978+01:00Visiting Carmen in Manchester<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B3N0rnvYfM0/Tr-bTHUGCCI/AAAAAAAADXM/1ZfxdE8mMiY/s1600/valette-rooftops-manchester.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="481" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B3N0rnvYfM0/Tr-bTHUGCCI/AAAAAAAADXM/1ZfxdE8mMiY/s640/valette-rooftops-manchester.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The rooftops of </span>Manchester<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, Valette</span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span>When her mother brought Carmen to Manchester in September she packed a suitcase containing everything she might need. However, in contrast to the other girls in residential halls, Carmen didn't bring much. Other mothers piled their cars high with spatulas and teddy bears. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'Why have you so few things?' Carmen's neighbours asked her when they visited her room.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">To make up for this, when I went to Manchester to visit her, I brought Carmen: a ship-to-ship, butane-powered foghorn (and warned her not to use it near a naked flame); a red kitchen timer with a silver dial to help her manage time (softly ticking, and with a short, pleasant ring); a large non-stick kitchen knife with holes punched along its blade and a round tip; 50 blue-ink ball point pens (in five colours); plastic folders. multicoloured Post-it notes; flourescent sticky-backed blazes; a smoke alarm and, finally, glasses to allow her to see who was sneaking up behind. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">She looked at my purchases, said: 'Thank you Dad'; then ignored what I had bought and immediately tried on the white, form-fitting, quilted jacket which her mother had sent. 'Do you like it,' she asked?' Posing, studying herself in the mirror. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In my haste to fill the sports bag up with useful items, I forgot the matching blue wolly hat, scarf and gloves Teresa had also asked me to take to Carmen. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'Never mind,' I thought, 'at least she has a foghorn.' </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">On my way to Manchester on a narrow carriaged Virgin train - the compartment like the cabin of a budget jet - I sat opposite a man in his thirties in a grotty suit and white shirt who coughed. He scribbled in pencil on a large slim black notebook and, provocatively, put his coffee cup right up against the imaginary line that divided his table space from mine. </span><br />
<br />
Following him into Manchester<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> I overheard him on the phone, : </span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'Yes, well we need to do this across the board in all 11 prisons.' </span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Outside the station at first it was as I remembered it. Dark.To paraphrase the children's book:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In a dark dark country there’s a dark dark town</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In the dark dark town there’s a dark dark street</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In the dark dark street there’s a dark dark accomodation block</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And in the accomodation block there is a box room.</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I hoped Carmen’s room was cheerful. The impression of darkness was momentary; coming out of the station I saw that most of the people who were about were student-all-sorts, Manchester looks like a student town. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The sound track began. Quality music on every corner. Carmen, accepted it naturally, nodded her head saying: 'I like this song.' or 'I hate this song.' </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I walked past a sign at a church entrance advertising: 'Mass in Swaheli.' Found my way to a launderette with an Internet service, emailed Carmen my address, travelled in a bus past Curry Mile, past the International Student Association. I got off near Platte Fields Park. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">A young student with a large beard bounced along the pavement. I stopped him in mid bounce. He took off his headphones. 'Brighton Grove?' I asked. 'No sorry.' he said. Earphones back on, bouncing away again. </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In the gloom I had to walk right up to the road sign to read: 'Brighton Grove.' Turned left into a darkening tree lined road, and I find Luther King House. </span></span></div><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Carmen, is waiting for me. 'You chose well,' she said, 'I’m only three minutes away.' My room, which was comfortable and clean, was in an annex up a flight of stairs, next to the periodicals section of the theology library. 'The right place for you then,' said Carmen. </span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'I love my politics lectures,' she said. But the lecturer has a rule. If anyone's mobile phone rings she must stand up and sing a song from the film Titanic. So the mobile phone of this extremely shy small Chinese girl rang; she was sitting right at the front. She had to stand up and sang in a quavering voice with the politics lecturer conducting:</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">Every night in my dreams</span><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">I see you, I feel you</span><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">That is how I know you </span><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">go on</span></i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">Far across the distance</span><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">And spaces Between us</span><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">You have come to show you </span><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">go on</span><br style="background-color: white;" /><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">Near, far, wherever you are</span><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">I believe that the heart does go on</span><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">Once more you open the door</span><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">And you're here in my heart and</span><br style="background-color: white;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">My heart will go on and on</span></i></span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'She got a big round of applause.'</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'Was she traumatised?' I asked. You can get into trouble for doing that sort of thing. </span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'I couldn't see her face,' said Carmen, 'I don't know.'</span></span><br />
<br />
We went to a tapas bar run by latin Americans for diner. Coriander and fresh tomatoes with the papas bravas, tasty, but overcooked, seafood, incessant salsa music - irritating. Then for a coffee at a smart restaurant with fairy lights '..trying to be London,' said Carmen. As we walked in a customer was complaining that he had just swallowed a piece of glass. The manager was apologising.<br />
<br />
'The Chef must have banged the pan down too hard and a bit of the glass lid must have chipped off. They have to bang the pan to loosen the pasta you see.'<br />
<br />
'A likely story.' I thought.<br />
<br />
We watched TV in my warm room and Carmen left reluctantly. We agreed to meet at 9 am. I met up with her at 10 am. In this respect she is a chip off the old block.<br />
<br />
'My friends liked your presents.' said Carmen. 'They want to meet you.' <br />
<br />
'Forget that.' <br />
<br />
'Yes, forget that.' said Carmen. <br />
<br />
'And Lucy?' <br />
<br />
Carmen texted Lucy. 'She's in the library working on her dissertation. I'm proud of her.' said Carmen. She's been so nice to me. She lives in a nice house down that street. I visit her often. <br />
<br />
'I asked her to spy on you,' I said. 'Invite her to lunch.'<br />
<br />
It's 11/11/11. I'll tell you the meaning of 11/11/11. I said to Carmen. It has no meaning, of course. It's Armistice day, but otherwise numbers only have intrinsic meaning in the mathematical sense.<br />
<br />
Think of it like this. If your grandparents had done nothing with their lives then they too would have been looking back at past generations and lionising the people who went before them. But they kept busy.<br />
<br />
When I went to Pretoria to the funeral of one of Dad's cousins I knew almost no one. I went with Eve at the suggestion of Colin Hall, (management Svengali and former CEO and Chairmen of companies). One of Dad's cousins spoke of Arthur Hall, our illustrious, shared, forebear. I mentioned I would be writing about him and the wife of Dad's cousin piqued, said.<br />
<br />
'No, Alan - I think it was Alan - will be writing about him. What do you know of him. What's your connection?'<br />
<br />
'And I said. "'Don't worry. I don't have that much to say about Arthur. I have a lot more to say about Eve and Tony."'<br />
<br />
'You see the Pretoria family just carried on with their lives during Apartheid and so have to look far back for solace.<br />
<br />
'But this date, 11/11/11 is the reset button for us. Now you can look forward. What you do, and what your peers and your brother and sister and cousins do will matter even more. What you think matters.'<br />
<br />
I ignored Carmen's murmered interruptions. <br />
<br />
'You are a bit too much of the teacher, sometimes.'she said. <br />
<br />
'But I am becoming more of a feminist as I get older.' <br />
<br />
'You are a sexist' said Carmen. 'naturally so. You aren't even aware of it.' <br />
<br />
'Oh I am,' I said. 'I do it to please your mother. Mexican women lose their bearings when they aren't dealing with a modicum of sexism.' <br />
<br />
'Just don't do it,' said Carmen.<br />
<br />
'Look, my friend Rose.' Carmen exclaimed. From the bus I caught sight of a girl in jeans with red hair walking up a flight of steps.<br />
<br />
We bought peri peri kebabs in Piccadilly gardens and got a lecture on zoning restrictions from the owner. A whiskered, unkempt man standing to one side watching two young Polish people serve the public. <br />
<br />
'My Mum bought me a plant for a pound Carmen said.' Laughing. 'It didn't look like much. It was wilted. Mum said: "Just water it and it will be alright." So I did. It's very green and healthy now.' <br />
<br />
In town Carmen lead me from place to place, cafe to cafe, shop to shop and my eyes grew rounder and rounder. Manchester is wonderful. It's so lively and interetsing. We walked into an Indie record shop. I hadn't heard of most of the bands. We went to a vegan cafe and we drank coffee. Then through the centre talking privately of family matters in Spanish. In fact, I am ashamed to say for a while I lectured her on Bauhaus and Garden Cities and our family connection with both.<br />
<br />
Many of the dignified buildings seemed to have been converted into shops or pizza parlours. The massive Portico Library, converted into a high class chippy. We took a short cut through a big mall. Carmen took me to the Geiger shoe shop. <br />
<br />
'Everyone's talking about this shoe shop.' <br />
<br />
Past the football museum shaped like a glass trainer, to the Manchester Art Gallery. And in the museum there was a picture of a family in mourning. The dead wife's big head rested on two plump goose-down pillows. The dead woman's husband, her children all dressed in black velvet, stared out, intensely at us. The family crest was painted at the top. <br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yxX2yRjqNmY/Tr_qSyt0S5I/AAAAAAAADXU/DSnrk6eOH3Q/s1600/SirThomasAstonAtWife%2527sDeathbed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="381" nda="true" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yxX2yRjqNmY/Tr_qSyt0S5I/AAAAAAAADXU/DSnrk6eOH3Q/s400/SirThomasAstonAtWife%2527sDeathbed.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<br />
The man was wearing a pair of Geiger high heeled shoes. His wife's perhaps. Stilletoes made from a black velvet material with a black velvet rose on the instep of each shoe. He leaned back in his chair, occupying most of the painting, his daughter pale, in the bottom right hand corner, his son occupying the space to the left. <br />
<br />
There was Lowry of course and Valette.Then there was Grayson Perry: with his supperating penis flowers, gorillas and girls, in different poses and all in a pretty pass, beatifully painted and glazed onto what looked like Ming vases. And Perry's auto icon. 'It's not an auto icon', said Carmen. Jeremy Bentham didn't inspire Perry. Not everything is a copy, not everything is created referring to something else.<br />
<br />
Carmen has a cool looking plastic bottle which advertises tap water. She refills it. 'It's a good idea,' she says. <br />
<br />
'Yes,' I smell the water. 'It smells a bit of swimming pool.' <br />
<br />
'Don't spoil it for me.' said Carmen. <br />
<br />
'Would you drink Johnny Depp's swimming pool water? Angelina Jolie's?' Carmen laughed.<br />
<br />
When we left the buidling it was getting dark. We reached Albert square. A huge geometric Father Christmas had been built over the entrance to the imposing buildings of the Manchester Metropolitan Council. <br />
<br />
'That's disgusting.' said Carmen, looking up at it. 'How could they desecrate a beautiful building like that?'<br />
<br />
We went inside. There were interesting stairways. The busts of Manchester's famous men had been placed in a chatty circle in what was now a large cafe, by one of the Windows. The dignified men that built manchester, mocked.<br />
<br />
<strong><span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">Manchester's self mockery</span></strong><br />
<br />
In the 1980s we took Yosser, in Boys from the Black Stuff seriously, Yosser tipped over a cliff.<br />
<br />
'Giss a job. I can do that.' he says, following the linesman along a football pitch with his three small children trailing behind him. <br />
<br />
We shared Yosser's mood sometimes. Sitting in the dole queue; hapless.<br />
<br />
But then something happened. There are always periods of thermidor. Napoleon disappoints, Louise Philippe makes you despair. Russian revolutionaries committed suicide in exile, after 1905. <br />
<br />
And then the world stops. And miraculously it restarts and we stop despairing. <br />
<br />
11/11/11. Manchester mocks its working class roots. It mocks its former dignity. It mocks its family values, manliness and the work ethic, and so it resets the dial.<br />
<br />
The symbol of Manchester is not the old Canal, it is the podium set up in front of the famous painting in the Manchester Art Gallery. <br />
<br />
In the painting a climber tears at his hair as he looks over the abyss. presumably a comrade has just fallen to his death. The podium invites you to pose and tear at your hair in mockery of the climber and his fallen comrade. <br />
<br />
* * * * * *<br />
<br />
Where are you going? my colleagues asked me before I flew to the UK. 'To see my family and to visit my daughter in Manchester, Carmen.' <br />
<br />
I bought her a turquoise pastel rucksack in a shop in the centre and then, after a meal of pie chips and mushy peas (which she didn't finish) she took me to the bus station, waited for the bus to leave, waved me goodbye. I love my daughter.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-27621757411483694392011-10-21T00:41:00.000+01:002023-09-03T10:24:59.630+01:00<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">Don’t argue with
Arthur, your geologist great grandfather.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Africa was </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">really</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 18px;"> alongside America.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Believe in the
best bits <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Of British boys
and girls and brothers</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Don’t try to change
your children’s class and culture <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And confine them to a country.</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">I'm Still dazed that, Dad, the free thinking socialist, died;</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Still amazed
that Mom, Eve, was someone for everyone. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">She gave us love
and set an example. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">I eat enough and
provide English education here.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Now they are far
away, but my family is established.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Some of us even
found France again, Carmen was in Paris,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">But we have no French
friends.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And who gave God
back to the Germans? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Who gave them
good government? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">This was not the
experience of Granny and Grandpa in the 30s.</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">No God, no good government
then.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">The Halls were
always half hard-heads and half home-help <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And they always had
one foot in human history.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Isidor, standing on the Sarajevo steps in 1914, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">I would have
liked to have meet him</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">But now I have my son John </span></span><span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">to talk to. </span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">I write of the life
lines of love letters, for Lisa and from Lisa.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">I was made a man
when I married a Mexican </span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">What’s the name
of tonight’s nation? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">It is Saudi
Arabia.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">My parents were
party people. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">They
played in the p.m.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And they had such poetic sensibilities<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And pointed
directly at political power,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And at the need
for public property;</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Quite an important question
really.</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">I read everything and
really want to remember right,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And remember
rights</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">To make sense of
myself too in the South.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">This memoir is not only a Steinhardt sob story<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">It’s about how 2 people supported a socialist system that would</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">They hoped, ensure human rights.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And I did think
things through <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">With the help of
dad.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">And he taught me to drive to the top of the town.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Together we took
the turns, stalling <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">I haven't taught my son to drive.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">I understand
that universalism and the inotic is useful.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Who were the key players? </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">What did they sacrifice?</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">These are our heroes.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Let’s visit, let’s walk.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">He said: 'They wanted the coastline and the resources <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And so they organised a war.'<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And what we wanted,</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">My father and brothers and I,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Were whole women from wonderful worlds <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And women with wonderful words.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Women and men work</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"> the world I am writing </span></span><span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">about</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">They make it work.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">I write</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"> the years </span></span><span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">back, young</span></span><span class="wrd"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-50528701527894650252011-10-13T18:20:00.018+01:002023-09-03T10:25:28.880+01:00I pushed the red button<div style="color: #990000;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b> Be against forced marriage not immigrants.</b></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XgfmEkCIbc4/TpcTFftnMiI/AAAAAAAADWU/DGqB_8KRTFk/s1600/AztecsHumanSacrifice.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XgfmEkCIbc4/TpcTFftnMiI/AAAAAAAADWU/DGqB_8KRTFk/s640/AztecsHumanSacrifice.gif" height="640" width="444" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b> <span style="color: #990000;">Human sacrifice, forced marriage and clitorectomy; unacceptable in Surbiton.</span></b></i></div>
<br />
If an Aztec, an Ancient Roman or a member of the Golden Horde was transported in time to Britain circa 2011-2, he might want to continue practicing his beliefs, however, and rightly so, there would be limits. It might be a little difficult for him at first, but it would be easier for his children.<br />
<br />
Fights to the death, human sacrifice, pillage, murder, clitorectomies, forced marriages and explosive martyrdom are definitely 'no nos' in the UK.<br />
<br />
Early this year I had an 17 year old student who confided in me that her mother and father wanted her to marry her cousin, her mother's brother. The girl didn't want to, whereupon the mother took away her phone and computer. She told me that she was afraid she might get up one day and be told she would be on a flight out to Sri Lanka - suffering extraordinary rendition.<br />
<br />
On the walls of the college I was teaching at (I am working elsewhere now.). are signs that say that forced marriage is rape and illegal, and the poster gives the numbers of the people to contact within the college. I worked closely with two of the people concerned, one of whom was my line manager. I alerted him, and convinced the girl to talk to him.<br />
<br />
He talked to her and from then on I was out of the equation.<br />
<br />
He came to me afterwards and said. <i>We've been working on this all afternoon, and we can't do anything, but all I can say is that if anything happens there is a big red button we can push. </i>He looked tired and I knew neither he nor my other colleague were getting paid for doing this extra work. British civil servants can be the salt of the earth.<br />
<br />
Two days later the girl's younger sister came to see me. Just to say:t <i>My sister won't be coming to your class today because she is flying off to Sri Lanka. </i><br />
<br />
I pushed the red button.<br />
<br />
My line manager nodded. Disappeared and I knew nothing more, except that two days later he popped by and said. <i>She'll be coming to school tomorrow. </i><br />
<br />
She did. She was pale - for a Sri Lankan - and looked exhausted, but I sensed happiness and relief. <i>You look a little tired</i>. I said and smiled. <i>Anything happen last week?' No, nothing.</i> she said. <i>I am sure you'll do really well in your exams, see you in class. </i>She went off.<br />
<br />
My line manager never told me what happened story because of confidentiality and privacy. But when I asked: <i>Did they go round to her house and talk to her parents?</i> He casually said. It was a little more dramatic than that.She was actually on the plane. It was a very complex multiagency operation. Everyone was involved, and don't worry, the parents don't know it was us, they think it was the airline. He couldn't say more.<br />
<br />
Forced or coerced marriage is simply unacceptable here. It should be unacceptable everywhere. Ignore the argument that appeal to cultural relativism. Take young Bangladeshi girls and boys, plop them into <b>Tomas Tallis</b>; when they are older send them off to <b>Tower Hamlets College,</b> and you will get little Londoners. Nothing more.<br />
<br />
Chain migration is a problem in Britain, it's true. You force your daughter to marry her cousin so that you can reunite your family in the UK and see your brother again. The family's well being is important of course. People migrate and make their contribution to the place they live in. The Sri Lankans have a hard time of it. When the Tamils came to the UK escaping a very real war and persecution they helped each other and built up little communities. In those closed communities the way women and children are treated might be seen to be a little problematic. But they adapt. Many Koreans for example, are accustomed to giving their children, especially boys,beatings, but in the UK they can no longer do this. Do they do it? Probably, Again the front line here is usually the school who alert the relevant authorities.<br />
<br />
We all want to live in a fair society. Young people more so Let's call this ideal <b>The City of God</b>. We want to live in a place where each child is born equal and has the help they need to flourish equally and become a productive, well-adapted member of a productive, well-adapted nation, in a productive and well-adapted region of a productive and well-adapted world.<br />
<br />
That's the ideal, anyway. Of course Britain is not that place: we have a two layer educational cake and all the icing is on the upper crust; the public schools have the resources. We do not really live in a meritocracy but a managed democracy. But still, many of us have been working to create a more human society a more politically correct equal opportunities meritocracy. Sometimes it shows. My former Tamil student can complete her course.<br />
<br />
Luckily for her parents the courts in Britain are relatively tolerant of people who are still adapting to life in the UK. They have committed a crime, kidnapping and aiding and abetting attempted rape and slavery, but will not be going to prison. A social worker will come round and visit to check that the young woman and her sisters and check that they are alright. <br />
<br />
In their mid to late teens, and in their early twenties, the drive of young people is social adaptation. Ask people who have come to this country as immigrants and asylum seekers if they want to marry young. Unless they are deeply in love or very vulnerable and in the power of their parents, they will say they want to stay single until their mid-to-late twenties, or their thirties. Some of them might not even want to marry. Some of them might be gay, God forbid. Young people adapt to British social expectations.<br />
<br />
It is, frankly, beautiful to see how quickly most Arab, Sri Lankan, Muslim, Korean, Chinese West African, Polish, Chinese ... children and young people see the benefits of the system of social equality in Britain almost immediately, a system that so many people in Britain, socialists, liberals and even enlightened Tories, have worked hard to make an important part of daily life. These young people seize the idea that they can achieve what they want to, probably, if they work very hard and many of them do engage. This is so inspiring. There is something so valuable in the social fabric of Britain so precious, and it isn't broken. It's the product of the work of teachers, civil servants, conscientious people from every walk of life who have a sense of fairness. <br />
<br />
However, though we may have a comparatively egalitarian society, the immigration system doesn’t reflect this. It is shockingly unfair and irrational. A despicable system. I have had people say to me. We are not going to visit you because we have to fill in too many immigration forms. Now I am talking about people of means. The barriers for foreign students to come and study in the UK are too high. The barriers that the current and last UK government put up to people wanting to come and visit the UK from poorer countries. And when they get here, for every ten British border guards who are alright, there is one who is a brute. Civil servants we should not admire.<br />
<br />
In the The US, for example, the border control system is equally alienating, it has lost the US more friends and goodwill than all its recent wars combined. Everyone from the whole of Latin America, no matter how educated or patriotic or well off is frisked and treated like a criminal at the US border posts by very dumb and aggressive border guards.<br />
<br />
Yes, stop forced marriages, but perhaps then reconsider the application to emigrate to the UK of the brother and family of the student whose story I told. Make it easier for people with family here to apply, but who live there, to apply. That would be human. <br />
<br />
<b style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-size: large;">We don't hate British racists, we just want to stop them.</span></b><span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<br />
We don't hate British racists. We hate their ideas. The police in the US have a policy however. When they shoot someone about to carry out a crime they are not actually shooting them, they say they are stopping them from doing something bad. They are stopping the action. <br />
<br />
When we jail and tag extremists we are just stopping them. When we act against British fascists we are confronting their ideas and their influence, we shouldn't hate them. Woody Guthrie's guitar said: <b>This machine kills fascists</b>. But fascism is just an idea in people's minds. Instead he should have written:<b> This machine stops fascists</b>. or <b>This machine kills fascism.</b><br />
<br />
The central concern of the British government should obviously not be for the well being of immigrants. It should be concern for the fully paid up, participating, tax paying citizens of Britain. However, <i><b>it is a false dichotomy</b></i> to say that the rights of immigrants detract from the rights of citizens. that is a false argument. That is the argument of racist scape-goaters. It is a discredited argument. It was discredited at the time of <b>Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech.</b><br />
<br />
The rights of citizens and immigrants are not directly in conflict. There are problematic elements there, but benefits too. To juxtapose them is to create an artificial argument just as Hitler did with the Jews.<br />
<br />
Especially when often racists are not talking of foreigners at all but of people who are now British. Whether British people are of immigrant origin or not doesn't make them other, They are as British in law as you or I or <i>Eels and Mash.</i> When you attack British people of a different ethnic origin from your own you are still attacking British people and not foreigners. The point is that immigrants are British people once they have lived here long enough and once they arrive and adapt. The attacks on immigrant communities are attacks on British people that some other racist British people are defining as non British for their own purposes.<br />
<br />
<i>Hitler </i>said that the Jews had what the Germans deserved, except that the Jews were Germans. But he took their property and persecuted them and killed them all the same. Most of the Jews made no distinction. They saw themselves as Germans or Austrians. <br />
<br />
Remember that so many of our doctors now are the children of the Kenyan <b>Gujarati refugees</b> from <b>Idi Amin's Uganda </b>and<b> Kenyatta's Kenya.</b> Many of our mathematicians and scientists will come from the Sri Lankan community in future, they place such a high value on maths and science. Look at some of the people who write for newspapers in the UK or work for the BBC: children of immigrants. Sparky focused people doing very well in journalism because they deserve to be doing well. Now look at the media in France, Gernany, Italy and Spain. Yes, there is a lot of quality there but they lack a dimension our media has because we are - whether the racists like it or not - a fairer society.<br />
<br />
The prototypical arguments of bigots are transparent. Here is an example of one such:<br />
<br />
<i>“A staggering 68% of all children born in Tower Hamlets are born to foreign mothers.That’s a lot of babies born into households where English is not the first (or even spoken) language. Subsequently, we have 448 000 children (according to the BBC) who go to primary school unable to speak English.”</i><br />
<br />
Interpreting what the person here is saying, essentially he or she doesn't want any more 'foreign' babies. And that foreigners are reproducing like rabbits? And that the women who have the babies are not British. And that there are 448,000 babies born of foreign Bangladeshi women in Tower hamlets, few who will learn English.<br />
<br />
Of course these racist arguments are cobblers. <br />
<br />
When times get tough then people look for scapegoats because they are powerless to confront the real causes of our condition, of our situation. What is the real cause of unemployment and relative poverty and inequality? It ain't the fault of the Bangladeshi baby, mate!<br />
<br />
If I were ever presented with this false choice, I would choose to support the foreign baby before the bitter and twisted racist. I support the young people trying to live well and trustingly and adapt to a dynamic modern society, thank you very much and I detest Britain’s narrow minded racism. I detest the ideas of the racists who grew up in the 60s and 70s. The Pinky’s, the Skinheads and the Suedeheads. I know them. I grew up with some of them. But society has chosen anyway. Just look around you. The racist ideas of certain old men and women aren't exactly the flavour of the month, the year or the last three decades.They have been unfriended, deselected.<br />
<br />
The conflict between citizens who are and aren't of immigrant origin is an artificial conflict. We are all British and we are all in the same boat. blaming the immigrants is a stupid game. I agree with people who say: The problem is segregation. We should do everything we can to overcome it.<br />
<br />
Never underestimate people. Never underestimate the young. The young haven't quite been completely socialized into all the unfairness in their own culture, though they are probably blind to some of it. They are wild and riot, but at the same time they haven't quite joined the society they attack, and with good reason.<br />
<br />
Before you join society you stand on the edge and look in and you may not like what you see. This could cause you to do a number of things. Step back into some personal abstraction of religion. Become a counter culture radical like the wonderful young Spanish indignados dancing in the main squares. Go out on marches like the British school children who were kettled and deprived of lavatory facilities and forced to stand on their feet for hours without water - standard torture techniques by the way.<br />
<br />
Children and young people have a heightened sense of justice and fairness. <b>The Lord of the Flies</b> is about the corruption of innocence, not innocence itself. Thank God for young people who can step back and look before they leap or step into adulthood and society and say. I don't like what I see. I want to opt out of what I see. Or best of all, I want to change what I see.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-36238026242560537732011-10-12T01:24:00.013+01:002023-09-03T10:25:08.644+01:00A letter to Fuchsia, editorial writer at the Guardian<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9TMBg2dhwf0/TpTXU2U1qUI/AAAAAAAADWE/L0UE-gOw85E/s1600/0106.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640px" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9TMBg2dhwf0/TpTXU2U1qUI/AAAAAAAADWE/L0UE-gOw85E/s640/0106.jpg" width="475px" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Fuchsia, editorial writer at the Guardian</i></b></div>
<br />
I remember reading<b> the Whole Earth Catalogue</b> and the writing of feminists in the 70s, as a teen, and loving the idea of a building not as a penis, but a vulva. A scallop shell, a Nautilus following the Fibonacci sequence. Of course it was Theano who discovered the golden mean, more beautiful, even, than Pythagoras's' floating triangles.<br />
<br />
<div class="comment-body">
A valley not a mountain. If the Pharaohs had been women, would they have built inverted pyramids<b>? Catal Hayuk and Minos</b> were rather feminine towns. You passed from one hole into another, one house layered onto another; labyrinths. Perhaps a labyrinth can be more impressive than a skyscraper. A labyrinth is complex enough to get lost in, but a tall building is stupidly linear even when it leans. You go up. You go down. A monkey climbing up a ladder.<br />
<br />
After all, humanity came from the caves, the most feminine dwellings of all.</div>
<br />
Fuchsia's is an editorial in praise of flawed capitalism. Towers that do not fall, but lean, quaintly. And it also speaks of the social class of the writer. Her concern is collapse. Her faith that, for all the talk, 'capitalism' will not collapse. <br />
<br />
The towers referred to are old, and she asks us to look at the mercantile roots of capitalism. The beautiful flawed Italian craftsmanship, a by product of human excess, cruelty and of enabling corruption.<br />
<br />
On one level the piece is trite, stubby; the shabby product of literal dreaming, not lucidity. You had to wash the dishes, didn't you? And so, at night you dreamed of washing dishes. Articles on Adam Smith are wedged forcibly into an ongoing debate about the viability of our economic system; we write of leaning towers. <br />
<br />
The reference to impotence and capitalism is intentional. The problem is the inhabitants of Fuchsia's British Gormanghast, privileged and public schooled, assume that this is normality. They smile at Buckingham Palace and Alice, without defeasement. Instead, imagining diffusing, imagining, like Werner Herzog, that she builds bridges by writing of the symbol of the leaning tower. She thinks her readership is unconscious, and thinks she whispers to them in their 21st century big asleep. <br />
<br />
A few years ago, after the financial crisis began a politician said said to me:<br />
<br />
<i>'Listen, we don't care if it's right or wrong, we just have to kick start lending again, people's lives depend on it.'</i><br />
<br />
Around the leaning towers of British Gormanghast,is a shanty town. Fuchsia, writing in the Guardian, does not praise shanty towns. In her mind's eye, the people in the British Favella depend on the establishment, on Whitehall, on the City. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wjGj9W-Ikvc/TpTeHJGdNtI/AAAAAAAADWM/owSQOpOzLGQ/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wjGj9W-Ikvc/TpTeHJGdNtI/AAAAAAAADWM/owSQOpOzLGQ/s1600/images.jpg" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>Buildings like a scallop shell </b></i></div>
<br />
How did Peake describe the people who lived in the town around the castle? They were short-lived, violent and followed their own traditions and customs. They suffered in poverty, but understood that their welfare depended on the castle. They were very short and thin, flowered early, aged quickly, were primal, good with their hands, but not intelligent. Mervyn Peake gives the early 20th century middle class view of the ordinary people. Fuchsia's view of ordinary people.<br />
<br />
There is nothing so much denies the humanity and equality of another human being as charity. The charity of a white European, for example, for a poor African. It embeds paternalism and a sense of superiority. The acceptance of dancing gratitude - revolting! The people of the town say thank you to the people in Gormanghast.<br />
<br />
Nothing so unseemly as the attitude of a British bourgeois towards a working class handyman, the embarrassment of false camaraderie between classes. How that must have tottered after 1917.<br />
<div class="comment-body">
<br />
It comes down to this:<br />
<br />
Cameron and Osbourne will put the market at the centre of education and health. They will restructure the state so that the private sector controls almost all of it. The tower will seem to totter. But then along will come Ed Miliband. He will pour in the social cement. He will work out a hundred ways to make the Tory changes, that seemed so threatening initially, palatable. <br />
<br />
Ed Miliband will cement the leaning tower in place. He will conserve all the deeply reactionary policies and marketization of education and health. He will do so just as Blair did so with Thatcher. Ameliorating here. Subsidizing here. <br />
<br />
That is the political meaning of the editorial written by Fuchsia, an editorial on the subject of leaning towers.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-80057682287156720382011-10-06T04:04:00.033+01:002023-09-03T10:26:03.596+01:00Swallowing Melancholia 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><br />
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<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">At<b> <a href="http://www.aytonoldscholars.org/index.html">a boarding school</a></b> in the North East of England, three boys of ordinary charm, formed a cabal at the centre of a class and successfully invoked the powers of a ragamuffin demon who was fond of tearing people. The music teacher did his best to exorcise it. He tried playing Beethoven’s 9th loudly to the boys in class. He tried trust exercises. He stood up in every Quaker school meeting murmuring imprecations and spells. But nothing helped.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The art teacher asked the children to draw a beautiful country scene, but one of the boys, seeing the demon, drew the hidden landscape of its home instead: a red sun in a dirty sky; the moon too close; a tall metal mast curving upwards, standing on a promontory by an evaporated sea; the sea bed stretching into the distance. The art teacher, puzzled announced:<i> </i><i>'I would have like to have given this more marks, however, I can't. </i>This is a pebble on the shore.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzD0U841LRM">Melancholia</a></b> is a film embedded with healthy irreverence and honest despair spoken in the language of <b><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zENPuEqgT4U&feature=related">Andrei Tarkovsky</a>,</b> <b><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5DSlhGrafg&feature=related">Ingmar Bergmann</a></b> and<b><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92-LPtzRfTQ"> Peter Greenaway.</a></b> It looks and feels like a poetic philosophical summation. It has this texture to it. It even uses the same opening sequence as Solaris and then burns the <a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bruegel/hunters.jpg"><b>Bruegel</b></a> Even the gently seething planet approaching is <b><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_0UPh5FELg">Solaris. </a></b></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In the western tradition of occultism, Lars conceals by revealing. Hiding from the critics behind the art of cinema itself, behind the history of Europe<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/lars-von-triers-latest-shock-statement-a-vow-to-remain-silent-2366166.html"><b> refusing to explain</b>.</a> But if we listen to the advice of Jacobus Swart we can easily escape the referential traps. Touch the warm skin and feel the living creature under the duvet, the wedding dress, the tight suit. That's enough.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">There is one period of human history <b><a href="http://www.warsaw-life.com/poland/warsaw-ghetto-uprising">that is very hard to look at or even properly acknowledge.</a></b> The events of almost seventy years ago. That which it is difficult to name. The metaphor for this difficulty is perfectly expressed in the moment Claire looks up for the second time to see the planet Melancholia swelling overhead.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In a reference to<b> the Draughtmen's Contract</b> at the key moment of property transfer in the bridal chamber Justine hops out of the bathroom window, finds the guest assigned to trail her at the wedding, and mounts him with no ceremony.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Claire's husband: controlling, confident, responsible, powerful, patronising, kind, competent: a family man and a success, looks through the telescope and at Melancholia and sees that it will not fly by at all, it will hit. Comically, he freezes in fear. Then steals his wife's sleeping pills, and dies in the stables, in so doing quietening the horses and abandoning his wife and child without thought. His manliness and luster punctured immediately by his inability to deal with despair.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">There is a self-help book. I think the woman's name is<b> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9cnF3Egc0w&feature=related">Brandon Bays</a>.</b> She recommends that you go within to find the source of pain by sensing it. Once you locate the pain go deeper within it and you will discover a black portal. Go through the black portal. Magicians <b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abyss_(Thelema)">have a name for this action</a></b>. They have mapped this better, but their knowledge is taboo and no longer salient, it is woven into an old dusty carpet hidden in the attic. The falsely discredited weave of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYMTAZrKLcM"><b>the old internal - external science of the west.</b></a> Made to disappear.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/oct/02/melancholia-lars-von-trier-review">Lars von Triers film is too complex</a></b> for some the film critics, like Philip French to bother, perhaps. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">"sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" says French; he couldn't be bothered.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"> </span>Von Triers refuses to explain himself. 'You've gotta wanna know.' And the film critics done wanna. Why should they? When you approach Tarkovsky you do so with care. Have the critics who reviewed Melancholia stepped through any dark portals recently? Kirsten Dunst had, before she took the part. It's a useful pre-requisite to have been in a sanatorium, to have been treated for depression.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">One of the key moment in all of Tarkovsky's films is the watering of a dead tree. Lars von Triers ends his film with his women and child sheltered in a skeletal Tepee made from the dead wood cut from living trees. Von Triers has no faith. Instead he has resignation.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In Lars Von Triers film Melancholia, Justine says.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'Life on this planet is evil and no one will miss it.'</span></i></b><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The boy in Melancholia waits, as so many other children have waited before in wars, for it all to end. He waits in a small magic circle, holding hands tightly with his mother and his aunt.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesser_ritual_of_the_pentagram"><b> From this circle the tearing demons are banished.</b></a></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Rightfully, Lars von Triers is not sure. He thought he was a descendant of the victims, but says he is heir to the persecutors and their collaborators. This is the confusion of a European inheritance. It is more honourable to accept it whole. To look up and see the proximity of WW2. How low and close it still hangs in the sky. How rarely do we face up to it, as rarely as we face up to our own death.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">* * *</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In my own case, should I look back at our own little man:<b><a href="http://xuitlacoche.blogspot.com/2011/01/uncle-wilhelm-gobel-feldwebel.html"> Great Uncle Wilhelm</a></b>? The widows pension was not enough to pay for his education in Frankfurt so he joined the Hitler Youth and subsequently the Luftwaffe, rising to the rank of technical sergeant. His job was to make sure ordinance was neatly packed into German bombers ready for dispatch. Or, instead, should I look back at<b><a href="http://xuitlacoche.blogspot.com/2009/09/else-steinhardt-opera-singer-born-on.html"> aunt Else, the opera singer</a></b> banned from the Vienna stage and radio, betrayed in France, taken to Drancy, deported to Auschwitz (in train wagon number 27) and gassed on arrival.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Should I say, and should my English brothers say, that we are the children of the Nazis or the children of their victims? Or is it better to ignore that half and affirm that we are, principally, the children of the British Empire. We were born in the country which filled its coffers with gold; raised in the country which grew its fine tea and Arabica and we came of age in India.</span><br />
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">* * *</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">My mother sang so well that she was required to do so for visiting dignitaries at l<a href="http://xuitlacoche.blogspot.com/2009/09/institution-de-la-porte-du-parc-eve.html" style="font-weight: bold;"><i>’Institution de la Porte du Parc </i>in Paris.</a> But later on, at <i>Kingsmead School in Johannesburg</i> she sang with gusto and the teacher - perhaps she didn't like the sound of the French 'r' - in a calculated, or a casual, act of cruelty, in front of the rest of the girls said:<i> </i><i>‘Don't sing, dear. Just mouth the words.’</i> From then on, if she sang, she did so breathlessly, with a tremor. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">This is a pebble on the shore.</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'Look at me. Listen to me. Wrench yourself out of your torpor and remember, if you love me. Don't make assumptions.'</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-24867502621733984132011-10-03T00:28:00.003+01:002023-09-03T10:24:56.099+01:00Vote Labour for a Fair Britain<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">The Achilles Heel of the Tories is their unfairness.</span></b><br />
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<br />
<br />
The Tory Party is Hobbsian; elitist and hierarchical by nature, based partly on the tradition of a managed democracy. When people vote for the Tories they vote for the status quo, which they see as British, for little Britain, not Great Britain. They vote for exclusion not inclusion.<br />
<br />
Historically speaking the Labour Party is a democratic bubbling up of people demanding rights and equality not the party of top down control at all, despite its attempts at social engineering. To a Democrat and a Socialist every voting soul has the same value as every other, we are all the prodigal sons and daughters of social democracy.<br />
<br />
Rather than believing in a natural British, organically grown, Duchy Original traditional establishment, Democratic Socialists hold faith with a properly functioning representative democracy and the ideal of a fair society.<br />
<br />
The Tories will lose votes over time. Young people of voting age live in constant, and usually happy, proximity with people of different cultures; they reach out to each other using the Internet, befriending without prejudice and those reactionaries born in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s will soon fade away and die together with the Tory Party.<br />
<br />
The idea of meritocracy is hot with the young people of voting age: the idea of fairness and reward for effort, though favouring meritocracy can lead down reactionary path. The impression is that young voters are also willing to reassess the merits of Democratic Socialism, but don’t take communism seriously. In Britain, occasionally even the most progressive of them go ‘Aaah!’ at a royal wedding. They are often monarchists rather than republicans and, to my dismay, hold fast to this achronicity.<br />
<br />
However, it is far more British to be fair than it is British to be support the monarchy. The Tories have many weaknesses, but their Achilles heel is that they are, at root, at source, by their nature, unfair. They represent the victory of privilege and despite their rhetoric, they are not meritocrats at all. They lack a central quality of what we think of as Britishness. Their support for the dual school system system where children of the elites are streamed into top universities via the public school system illustrates the essential unfairness at the heart of Toryism. For this reason it will not survive.<br />
<br />
However, in the meantime, in the short to medium term, the Conservatives are clever strategists. They read the Art of War by Sun Tzu and write about ‘The Big Society.’ They practice Soft Power. They may not be fair, but recognise now that people are social animals largely motivated by their unconscious. They want to deal with us in new ways. These ways informed by the sinister research into social control carried out in US universities.<br />
<br />
Effective right wing policy over the years has often been an intelligent response to the arguments of socialists and social democrats. The policy to make secret ballots for union leaders compulsory. The policy to sell off social capital - council houses, the appeal to the greed of people by offering them shares in the British Gas.<br />
The Tories practice a form of soft power. They are attempting to co-opt as many people as possible. They recognise that social entrepreneurs are their natural constituency. They aim to transform and harness the social in social democracy for their own purposes and create new ways for their supporters to band together asymmetrically.<br />
<br />
But we can call their bluff. They are unfair - nasty some have said. Of course the word Fair has been done to death. Nevertheless, to defeat the Tories, the Labour Party should adopt this slogan and really mean it.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Vote Labour for a Fair Britain!</b></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-86518642324223915102011-09-27T23:26:00.002+01:002023-09-03T10:26:11.384+01:00Deep wisdom for the young from Dr Seus<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Oh! The Places You’ll Go!</span><br />
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<br />
Congratulations!<br />
<br />
Today is your day.<br />
<br />
You’re off to Great Places!<br />
<br />
You’re off and away!<br />
<br />
You have brains in your head.<br />
<br />
You have feet in your shoes.<br />
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You can steer yourself any direction you choose.<br />
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You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.<br />
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You’ll look up and down streets. Look’em over with care. About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.” With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you’re too smart to go down a not-so-good street.<br />
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And you may not find any you’ll want to go down. In that case, of course, you’ll head straight out of town. It’s opener there in the wide open air.<br />
<br />
Out there things can happen and frequently do to people as brainy and footsy as you.<br />
<br />
And when things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew. Just go right along. You’ll start happening too.<br />
<br />
Oh! The Places You’ll Go!<br />
<br />
You’ll be on your way up!<br />
<br />
You’ll be seeing great sights!<br />
<br />
You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.<br />
<br />
You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed. You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead. Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.<br />
<br />
Except when you don’t.<br />
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Because, sometimes, you won’t.<br />
<br />
I’m sorry to say so but, sadly, it’s true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups can happen to you.<br />
<br />
You can get all hung up in a prickle-ly perch. And your gang will fly on. You’ll be left in a Lurch.<br />
<br />
You’ll come down from the Lurch with an unpleasant bump. And the chances are, then, that you’ll be in a Slump.<br />
<br />
And when you’re in a Slump, you’re not in for much fun. Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.<br />
<br />
You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?<br />
<br />
And if you go in, should you turn left or right…or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? Or go around back and sneak in from behind? Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find, for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.<br />
<br />
You can get so confused that you’ll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.<br />
<br />
The Waiting Place…for people just waiting.<br />
<br />
Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow.<br />
<br />
Everyone is just waiting.<br />
<br />
Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. Everyone is just waiting.<br />
<br />
No! That’s not for you!<br />
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Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing. With banner flip-flapping, once more you’ll ride high! Ready for anything under the sky.<br />
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Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!<br />
<br />
Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all. Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be, with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.<br />
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Except when they don’t. Because, sometimes, they won’t.<br />
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I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you.<br />
<br />
All Alone!<br />
<br />
Whether you like it or not, Alone will be something you’ll be quite a lot.<br />
And when you’re alone, there’s a very good chance you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants. There are some, down the road between hither and yon, that can scare you so much you won’t want to go on.<br />
<br />
But on you will go though the weather be foul. On you will go though your enemies prowl. On you will go though the Hakken-Kraks howl. Onward up many a frightening creek, though your arms may get sore and your sneakers may leak. On and on you will hike. And I know you’ll hike far and face up to your problems whatever they are.<br />
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You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.<br />
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And will you succeed?<br />
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Yes! You will, indeed!<br />
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)<br />
<br />
Kid, you’ll move mountains!<br />
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So…be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ale Van Allen O’Shea, you’re off to Great Places!<br />
<br />
Today is your day!<br />
<br />
Your mountain is waiting.<br />
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So…get on your way!<br />
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</tbody></table>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-2985490705819761312011-09-27T20:32:00.013+01:002023-09-03T10:24:33.453+01:00Breakfast ruined; FreshOrangeJuice banned from Guardian Comment is Free<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4NWsgsXxps8/ToIji_wODeI/AAAAAAAADVI/QnaCJLyDv84/s1600/orange+juice+glass+fresh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="261" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4NWsgsXxps8/ToIji_wODeI/AAAAAAAADVI/QnaCJLyDv84/s320/orange+juice+glass+fresh.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b> Current avatar; banned by the Guardian Comment is Free mafiosi</b></i></div><br />
One of my Avatars - I have many - was<b> <span style="color: orange; font-size: large;">FreshOrangeJuice</span></b>. It has just been banned from the Guardian comment pages. Big deal. Or BFD at they say.<br />
<br />
Now what is interesting is to understand exactly what gets you banned from the comment pages of the 'Voice of Liberalism'.<br />
<br />
This should be understood in context. I am generally supportive of Polly Toynbee's writing, I have corresponded with her. However, I am not welcome on the Guardian comment pages and when they discover I am behind an Avatar they do ban me.<br />
<br />
The points I was making on this thread were not really about Toynbee, they were about the lost soul of the Labour Party and the support of the Guardian for Ed Miliband. Polly was my foil. Moreover, it is only for arguments sake that I describe the party of Wilson and Callaghan as a 'socialist party'. Truth be told it <i>was</i> merely a social democratic party. It was Polly Toynbee's party, but it shouldn't have been.<br />
<br />
If you are interested in understanding the limits to the online debate and how it is framed by a newspaper like the Guardian that is nominally progressive, then perhaps it is worthwhile reading these posts*. In the style of<a href="http://bootless.net/mouse.html"><b> The Mouse's Tale </b></a>from Alice in Wonderland. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Ten steps to a Comment is Free banning</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Post 1</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/FreshOrangeJuice" title="User profile page">FreshOrangeJuice</a></span> <br />
<div class="date"><span style="font-size: large;">Guardian 26 September 2011 9:21PM</span></div><br />
<div class="comment-body">Polly, let me get this straight. <br />
On the last two threads you have stated clearly that you are<b> not a socialist</b> and that you left the Labour Party because it was too socialist. You are a centrist. You are not on the left.<br />
<b>So why do you insist on supporting Miliband?</b><br />
The answer is simple.<br />
Labour is<b> not the party of Labour</b> any more, it is the party of the right wing social Democrats, it is the party of Liberalism and the 'radical centre.'<br />
<b>Your support for Labour amounts to a co-option.</b><br />
Just as at one point, the support of Rupert Murdoch also amounted to a form of co-option.</div><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Post 2</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/FreshOrangeJuice" title="User profile page">FreshOrangeJuice</a> </span><br />
<div class="date"><span style="font-size: large;">Guardian 26 September 2011 9:24PM</span></div><br />
<div class="comment-body">You only supported Labour because it lurched to the right and lost clause 4. <br />
Labour is NOT your party. You and other like you in the haute bourgoisie have made it your party. <br />
But it is not your party. <br />
<b> You are a social democrat not a socialist.</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Post 3</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/FreshOrangeJuice" title="User profile page">FreshOrangeJuice</a> </span><br />
<div class="date"><span style="font-size: large;">26 September 2011 9:28PM</span></div><div class="date"><br />
</div><div class="comment-body">Your support for Labour, like the conditional support of many others on the Guardian, including Rushbridger amounts to an admission that Labour is not Labour in any shape or form any more, but a party of Social Democrats.<br />
The upper middle class, the influential denizens of the private schools force fed for the top two universities, have taken over the Labour party because it was a party with possibilities of achieving power. Blair was one of you. He was an archetypical opportunist.<br />
Blair was a man on the path to power who would flog any horse to get there. You and Blair and others like you, the elite, have helped take the Labour Party away from its roots in the people and you have flogged it like and old nag to get where you want to get <b>and frankly it is very unseemly to hear you supporting Ed Miliband.</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Post 4</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/FreshOrangeJuice" title="User profile page">FreshOrangeJuice</a> </span><br />
<div class="date"><span style="font-size: large;">Guardian 26 September 2011 9:32PM</span></div><div class="date"><br />
</div><div class="comment-body">One of the great deracinations of modern political life has been the taking over of the Labour Party NOT by Militant, or left wing cabals, but by RIGHT wing cabals.<br />
To such an extent that our former Labour Prime Minister is now a spokesperson for the US neo-cons advocating war on Iran.<br />
This is the truth of the matter. Militant didn't take over the party, the right wing social democrats did. People willing to divorce labour from its natural base: ordinary working people joined together to protect their jobs and working conditions and social welfare.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Post 5</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/FreshOrangeJuice" title="User profile page">FreshOrangeJuice</a> </span><br />
<div class="date"><span style="font-size: large;">Guardian 26 September 2011 9:36PM</span></div><div class="date"><br />
</div><div class="comment-body">You, Polly, and people like you on the right have been <b>more responsible</b> than the Murdochs in destroying the Labour Party, of making the word Left into a completely meaningless term, where the left is no longer socialist, but you can say you are left merely by the fact that you are against prejudice of all kinds.<br />
To be against racism and sexism and other forms of prejudice is not left, it can equally be right wing and 'radical' centrist.<br />
In other words identity politics is the screen the right hide behind. Because underneath they do NOT have the same interests at heart as ordinary working people. They are privileged and they protect that privilege in many ways. <br />
They merely call themselves left as a pose as a lifestyle choice.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Post 6 </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/FreshOrangeJuice" title="User profile page">FreshOrangeJuice</a> </span><br />
<div class="date"><span style="font-size: large;">Guardian 26 September 2011 9:41PM</span></div><div class="date"><br />
</div></div><div class="comment-body">You found the Labour Party too left and so you left it. As it should be because you openly state that you are not left at all. You are more of a social democrat like Shirley Williams.<br />
<br />
So why complain about the Labour Party? It was not your party in the first place. It was a party of the ordinary working people. A party with its base in organised Labour.<br />
<br />
What you show in your support for Miliband is two important things:<br />
<br />
<b>1. That Labour has a weak connection with organised Labour. That it is wormy with political careerists. Miliband is one of them.</b><br />
<br />
<b>2. That you feel no compunction, as someone who is a Social Democrat, in supporting a Labour opposition that is not Labour at all.</b><br />
<br />
It is right wing social democrat.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Post 7 </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/FreshOrangeJuice" title="User profile page">FreshOrangeJuice</a> </span><br />
<div class="date"><span style="font-size: large;">Guardian 26 September 2011 9:45PM</span></div><div class="date"><br />
</div><div class="comment-body">It is not a question of socialist ideas being old fashioned. If a Tory or a Liberal or a 'radical' centrist tells me that Socialism is old fashioned then I know they only do it to annoy because they know it teases.<br />
What could be more old fashioned than David Cameron and George Osbourne's Restoration comedy government?<br />
No. What we are really talking about here is a hollow party called the Labour party, with its soul scooped right out. <br />
I would liken the current Labour Party to a spider crab. The former occupant has died and a spider crab has taken over the shell of what was the Labour Party.<br />
<b>And you, Polly, are asking us to give our support to your spider crab. </b><br />
The right wing social democrat - free market party that uses the shell of what was Labour as a disguise.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Post 8 </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/FreshOrangeJuice" title="User profile page">FreshOrangeJuice</a> </span><br />
<div class="date"><span style="font-size: large;">26 September 2011 9:54PM</span></div><div class="date"><br />
</div><div class="comment-body">I'll agree that an alliance between a socialist Labour Party, which is what it always was and what is should be, the party of Shore and Benn and Bevan and Atlee, will form a natural alliance with a social democratic party because they share common ground. But your social democratic party has chosen to go into an alliance with the Tories, the children of Thatcher the milk snatcher.<br />
Don't ask, now that your party has failed you, for Labour to become your party. <br />
Ed Miliband says he is a 'radical centrist' <br />
Indeed. <br />
We all know what that means. It means he will sell his grandmother to get into power. That he is a power seeker, like Blair and that is all.<br />
How else could you explain the fruity voiced Andrew Rawnsley giving Miliband his support.<br />
The support of Rawnsley usually amounts to disguised flattery.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Post 9 </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/FreshOrangeJuice" title="User profile page">FreshOrangeJuice</a> </span><br />
<div class="date"><span style="font-size: large;">Guardian 26 September 2011 10:05PM</span></div><div class="date"><br />
</div><div class="comment-body">One of the uses Rawnsley has, apart from exerting influence through disguised - perhaps even open - flattery is that he is a weather vane. Rawnsley unfailing supports the pillars of British society. The status quo. He perfectly represents the interests of the status quo. His criticism is merely confined to the relative efficacy of the different players in intelligently upholding the status quo. <br />
You and Rawnsley don't seem all that far apart to me.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Post10 </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/user/FreshOrangeJuice" title="User profile page">FreshOrangeJuice</a> </span><br />
<div class="date"><span style="font-size: large;">Guardian 26 September 2011 10:08PM</span></div><div class="date"><br />
</div><div class="comment-body">Actually, that's very unfair. You are more intelligent than Rawnsley and more perceptive and have a far more acute sense of social justice.<br />
The point is that the Labour Party should not be your party. Neither should it be Rawnsleys. Vote for it tactically if you like, but stop trying to keep it in the right of centre. <br />
It is the Party of ordinary people not the fucking establishment. Or at least it should be the party of ordinary people.<br />
<b>. . . . . . </b><br />
<br />
"...Such a <br />
<div class="seven" style="left: 37px; position: relative;">trial,</div><div class="seven" style="left: 27px; position: relative;">dear sir,</div><div class="seven" style="left: 9px; position: relative;">With no</div><div class="seven" style="left: -8px; position: relative;">jury or</div><div class="seven" style="left: -18px; position: relative;">judge,</div><div class="seven" style="left: -6px; position: relative;">would be</div><div class="seven" style="left: 7px; position: relative;">wasting</div><div class="seven" style="left: 25px; position: relative;">our breath.'</div><div class="six" style="left: 30px; position: relative;">'I'll be</div><div class="six" style="left: 24px; position: relative;">judge,</div><div class="six" style="left: 15px; position: relative;">I'll be</div><div class="six" style="left: 2px; position: relative;">jury,'</div><div class="six" style="left: -4px; position: relative;">Said</div><div class="six" style="left: 17px; position: relative;">cunning</div><div class="six" style="left: 29px; position: relative;">old Fury**;</div><div class="six" style="left: 37px; position: relative;">'I'll try</div><div class="six" style="left: 51px; position: relative;">the whole</div><div class="six" style="left: 70px; position: relative;">cause,</div><div class="six" style="left: 65px; position: relative;">and</div><div class="six" style="left: 60px; position: relative;">condemn</div><div class="six" style="left: 60px; position: relative;">you</div><div class="six" style="left: 68px; position: relative;">to</div><div class="six" style="left: 82px; position: relative;">death.' "</div><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<b><i>* I have left out a couple of posts where I correct my spelling.</i></b><br />
<br />
<i><b>** Nick Das</b> </i></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-33926026507744748892011-09-27T15:21:00.001+01:002023-09-03T10:25:06.298+01:00Generous responses to the discussion on the rights and duties of ownership<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kk1oDAic1QE/ToHamX4BrDI/AAAAAAAADVE/Oay64HuUfgk/s1600/Penny+black+stamp+worlds+first+postage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kk1oDAic1QE/ToHamX4BrDI/AAAAAAAADVE/Oay64HuUfgk/s320/Penny+black+stamp+worlds+first+postage.jpg" width="270" /></a></div>
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #20124d; font-family: inherit; font-size: x-large;"><b>Bryan G.</b></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Dear Phil,<br /><br />Thanks for the article and I’m sorry to have taken so long to get back<br />to you. As I read it I heard my own voice echoing the same or similar<br />arguments some years ago when I wrote a series of articles on<br />political, economic and ethical issues for a European journal.<br /><br />The points you make about rights having their complement in<br />responsibilities is a point that needs to made with increasing<br />emphasis. In his famous book, The World we have Lost, a book about the<br />early modern period in English history, Peter Laslet describes how<br />employers in the sixteenth century employed apprentices in just the<br />way you suggest: they accepted all of their broader responsibilities.<br />In effect, the apprentice would become a full member of the family,<br />not just a ‘hand’, to use that most revealing of all metaphors that<br />arose in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.<br /><br />They accepted that when they employed someone they were employing the<br />complete person, not just one aspect of his complex personality. They<br />had responsibility for his emotional, moral and physical well being.<br />This strikes a sharp contrast with modern capitalism and liberal<br />democracy with their innate reductionist logic that sees society as<br />just a loose collection of isolated individuals and individuals as<br />just an abstraction, a ‘hand’.<br /><br />It’s the logic of the free market to emphasise rights in isolation,<br />but it brings with it huge problems that we are ill-equipped to tackle<br />as long as we are in thrall to the nineteenth century ideology of the<br />free market. We have come to believe that this elegant<br />all-encompassing concept is nature’s ultimate self-righting mechanism,<br />that, if left to itself, will bring about the best of all worlds.<br />Unfortunately, politicians’ myopic gaze is so distorted by this<br />ideology that they fail to see the empirical evidence that shows not<br />only that free markets are an ideal concept rarely found in the real<br />world, but that they are driven more often that not by emotion, herd<br />instinct and panic. So, their blind acceptance of it as a regulatory<br />device is an abdication of reason.<br /><br />More important, markets concentrate power into the hands of a few,<br />leaving societies riven by unsustainable social inequality. At<br />beginning of the twenty-first century we are left with problems that<br />were clearly foreseen in the nineteenth century and by many<br />commentators in the twentieth: an unsustainable passion for growth as<br />the natural world struggles to replenish itself (it takes the Earth<br />almost 15 months to regenerate what we use up in 12 months), global<br />warming, which is almost beyond our means to rein in, and rapidly<br />developing social injustice on a global scale, the threat of which can<br />only be held in check with ever greater concentrations of power in the<br />hands of leaders whose instincts are far from democratic.<br /><br />I’m sorry to rant, but you have got me going. Like you, I suspect, I<br />would love to be able to contribute in some way to a movement that<br />raises consciousness of these issues in much the same way that the<br />Arab Spring was brought about. It has to be a bottom-up movement. Only<br />in this way can creative thinking break through the conventional<br />thinking of established ideologies.<br /><br />Thank you for letting me read this. Keep in touch.<br /><br />Best wishes,<br /><br />Bryan G.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">_____________________________________________________</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span style="background-color: #20124d;"></span><span style="color: #20124d;">Juan Carlos Chirgwin</span></b></span><br />
<br />
Philip,<br />
<br />
querido amigo,<br />
<br />
Thank you for your letter and for your invitation to comment on your document.<br />
<br />
But first of all let me apologise for my silence and lack of communication, but I do not have any longer the amount of energy and drive which I used spill daily during my younger days. Fortunately family obligations now take most of my productive time, and with Ximena we are always busy with the grandchildren.<br />
<br />
Let me add though that I did read and much enjoyed documents you sent me months ago about Eve and Tony’s lives and their experiences. Thank you for sharing them.<br />
<br />
Let me turn to your document concerning “property” and to protection values that by “natural law” are attached to such concept, although these have suffered pretty badly from man-made “legal erosion”. And therefore nowadays most of the “social obligations” connected with property appear to be hidden behind imposing walls of legal-paperwork that are in essence “illegitimate”. <br />
<br />
But, the system that presently controls power in all the important political decision making centres, is well pleased with such arrangements and the only changes that might be tolerated are those that will add another turn of the screw of the “garrote vil” choking “public well-being”.<br />
<br />
I feel just like you that our behaviour must we guided by both our individual needs and our responsibilities to other people and to our environment. The delicate balance between them is essential to ensure a stable relationship that allows the strengthening of the bonds among the different participants (beings and non-beings). Thus, from the very beginning we must strive to appreciate cooperation and respect – values that are totally lacking in today’s globalised world of domination and disdain for others.<br />
<br />
In your document you analyse the problem of property from several angles. They include the meaning of property, and here we stumble with the first problem: it appears to have different meanings, and these changes are linked to categories both of people and of type of property.<br />
The confusion of having different meanings for the same “word” is made worse when we learn that “the law” – an institution created by the people to ensure just treatment among them – has produced legal tools which justify some people to enjoy less obligations which are linked to their rights of property.<br />
<br />
Finally confusion is turned to despair when this duplicity becomes the very essence of production and trading system, thus ensuring an economy that leads to concentration of riches and power in the hand of few people while the vast majority becomes responsible for all physical efforts and most of the intellectual input but with very meagre participation in the benefits which are obtained. <br />
<br />
This overall look at the specific problem of property shows us that it is a complex problem. We humans have an uncanny twist to make our own life more difficult. And this is made worse the moment selfish interests creep into the fray. So I believe that we have to study “property” in terms of an idea (its conceptual meaning; its relationship with human values), in terms of its legitimate legal definition, and also as a factor of production and trade. Perhaps other aspects could be added, making it even more complex. But even if we just consider these three, we must be aware that although we might try to be as impartial and scientific as possible, we are –each one of us- in certain ways a product of a system made up not only of knowledge but of feelings. <br />
<br />
As individuals, whether we like it or not, we have been for many years conditioned by “a life system” in which we were born, brought-up, educated and where we have preformed some kind of work and many other activities. Our language, our values, our traditions come as a special imprinting linked to some special culture; and there is no certainty this whole set of tools, that shape our social behaviour, does not have inclinations that play against the common good. Therefore, now that we are old enough to look back and analyse the ups-and-down of our lives, it is not difficult to feel that although each one of us is unique (a very promising trait), it is also true that most likely we could have been better. So most surely we all have a challenge ahead of us, and that is to strive for improvement. In order to strive in this direction we must verify each and every factor that guide our decisions and that condition our feelings, so that we can check all those factors which could affect negatively initiatives that search for the common good. We must be always alert and permanently striving to improve our social behaviour.<br />
<br />
Human groups, throughout history, have shown brave attempts to question “systems of life” in which they lived. And some individuals even organised rebellions against “norms of behaviour” that had been imposed by force through organised structures of power which showed no respect for the common good of the vast majority of peoples. The most important modern political challenges to power structures, with worldwide repercussions, are those of the French Revolution and Bolshevik Revolution. In spite that these “ideas for social change” actually had a terrible cost in human lives, the mass of common people in countries that lived through it never had much opportunity to participate intellectually as individuals, to improve their social behaviour and contribute directly in better ways of government. Similar social tragedies followed independence efforts that eventually overthrew colonial empires during the 19th century and wars of liberation during the 20th century. History shows how, each and every successful uprising, was unable to deal with the legacy of the previous power system which through their ideas, institutions and manpower (their Status Quo), surreptitiously infiltrated the “new power system”.<br />
<br />
From these rebellious efforts we can conclude that “ideas for social change” apparently need a prolonged period to organise masses of people to define by themselves and to practice new form of government; and, another indispensable condition, is that no external interference should occur threatening the good progress of the process of social change. <br />
<br />
And all this longwinded chain of ideas leads me to uncomfortable conclusions. Our historical record seems to show that important events linked to “ideas for social change” have never been accepted by existing power systems. So perhaps the first conclusion is that authentic participation of the people has never come to fruition, at best ignored and most likely repressed. Democracy has never been truly present.<br />
<br />
The second conclusion is that finally injustice can reach limits that are no longer tolerated and out of despair the suffering masses of people have no other way out but to turn to violence.<br />
And an important remark to these conclusions: Up to now social upheaval has never expanded far enough and fast enough – important centres representing the interest of the “old regimes” remained sufficiently intact to pose a threat to the places where “ideas for social change” were in progress. <br />
<br />
Thus it seems to me that the stuff that we are made of – our cultural legacy – is an important factor that plays against the “ideas for social change”. Most people are not willing to question the “system of power” in which they live. And the basic structures of modern social communities are conditioned by values, concepts and institutions that induce and control our thinking, feeling and actions in such a way that each individual “conforms to such norms”. Each individual is well aware of the risks implied by deviations from such norms. <br />
<br />
We are at present living inside a complex system of power that is under the control of institutions<br />
(multinational corporations) and in which virtual economic activities predominate. Furthermore countries and their governments, international institutions and world trade are all, directly or indirectly under their grip. Individuals and well meaning groups with alternative ways of thinking are thus faced with an enormous challenge. But even though they have been traditionally few in number and have limited tools to defend their ideas, they have always been present throughout history. I am sure that this is true today and that this will continue in the future until we change this world for the better.<br />
<br />
Please forgive me for this untidy and obscure contribution but I hope that you might grasp that I am<br />
very sympathetic to your assessment of the problem posed to us by “property”.<br />
Best regards to you and your family. Lots of luck in all your endeavours.<br />
<br />
Un gran abrazo<br />
<br />
Juan Carlos<br />
______________________________________________<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #20124d; font-size: x-large;"><b>Dominic Tweedie</b></span><br />
<br />
Hello Phil,<br />
<br />
Why are you stressing about the rich, qua rich? The act of exploitation happens in the workplace, not on the yacht.<br />
<br />
The new relations of production that will supercede the sale and purchase of commodity labour-power and the consequent extraction of surplus value have to be visualised.<br />
<br />
The new relations of production will equally as much as today be "collaborative projects" insofar as they conform to the basic human social pattern of two or more individuals mediated by a human artefact.<br />
<br />
The problem today is not so much that the mediating social artefacts are property, but rather that they are in the first place commodity, and that for as much as we are in a world of commodities, human beings have been reduced to commodity labour-power.<br />
<br />
The capitalist, acting as a capitalist, must throw his money back into the market, time and again. The capitalist's yacht, on the other hand, is not principally a circulating commodity, but is rather an enormous piece of consumption, and it is in this aspect of consumption that the yacht appears repulsive to you.<br />
<br />
The essence of your criticism is not democracy or socialism. The essence of your criticism is bourgeois puritanism. You do not criticise commodity here. You criticise the rich when they attempt to escape from the world of commodity. <br />
<br />
You criticise the rich when they try to cease behaving as bourgeois, and begin to behave as aristocrats. Of course to move from capitalism to feudalism is a step back. But your remedy is only to call, in effect, for the restoration of the (fantasy) bourgeois values of liberty, fraternity and equality. Such a "revolution" could only achieve the same result as before: the confirmation of bourgeois class rule.<br />
<br />
May I offer you an alternative consolation? Consider that human beings do in fact behave in a largely communistic manner, even in the most bourgeois of societies. Language, the Internet, and daily life are all in practice carried on in the way of ancient society - interaction mediated by artefacts. Human relations are not entirely but only partially regimented by class-division and class domination.<br />
<br />
I wish you would put <a href="http://domza.blogspot.com/">http://domza.blogspot.com/</a> (Communist University) on your blogroll. It would give you support to the extent that you are not the only one kvetching, even if our conclusions may from time to time be different.<br />
_________________________________________ <br />
<br />
<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span style="color: #20124d;">C.A.B. </span></b></span></span><br />
<br />
Phil, last week, I met someone helping to push democracy down to the smallest units of society by developing software tools that make collaborative decision-making as easy as possible. There is a small community in Australia -- Greater Geraldton -- already using these tools. <br />
<br />
So you, for instance, would be shown how to make a specific proposal to do something about your fully justified outrage -- and put it up for debate by your community. <br />
<br />
This is the way I lean -- towards action. I am tired of rhetoric, even of arguments as well thought-out as yours. I want to see more specific outlines of reform that other people help to improve.<br />
<br />
Here's a clip from the website of the organisation CivicEvolution.org ... if the links don't go through, please would you re-post them:<br />
<br />
"Think together to act together<br />
<br />
We believe that meaningful change comes from the grassroots in the form of community written and supported plans to solve community problems.<br />
<br />
How we do it<br />
<br />
We complement traditional face-to-face citizen engagement with the scalability and access of social media and collaborative production. Our goal is to maximize everyone's ability to participate in creative community problem solving by giving them a platform where they can "Think together to act together."<br />
<br />
Anyone can float ideas and aggregate clicks–meaningful change comes from a community written and supported plan to put an idea into action.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://2029.civicevolution.org/">http://2029.civicevolution.org/</a><br />
<a href="http://civicevolution.org/">http://civicevolution.org/</a> ..."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-10003136383584125632011-09-24T13:58:00.029+01:002023-03-07T15:01:30.530+00:00The ultra rich imitate Captain Nemo, not Citizen Kane.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<img border="0" height="419" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-UBY-9FuWK1o/Tn3SS-4djuI/AAAAAAAADVA/XaQNMuwoAqw/s400/Lakshmi.jpg" width="640" /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://blog.jameslist.com/2011/hit-the-high-seas-in-world%E2%80%99s-6th-richest-man%E2%80%99s-megayacht/"><b>Lakshmi Mittal on board his yacht.</b></a></div>
<br />
Rather than imagining they are powerful citizens, the ultra rich prefer to believe that<b> <a href="http://www.neckerisland.virgin.com/">they are naturally unconstrained </a></b>and owe little to individual states. They fantasise that they roam the world like <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Philosophy_of_Captain_Nemo.html?id=UlDMHgAACAAJ"><b>Captain Nemo,</b> </a>and assume they have far more rights than duties.<br />
<br />
At the root of the problem of modern capitalist societies are the concepts governing property rights and duties. There should be limits set to what can be owned and what cannot be owned. Effectively, nothing is ever really fully privately owned, all property is<a href="http://www.michfb.com/ecology/minerals"><b> a lease from the state.</b></a> You may buy your island from a country, but <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/01/barclay-brothers-lose-appeal-sark-constitution"><b>you are not buying a country</b></a>.<br />
<br />
Instead of simply re-nationalisating, though a few re-nationalisations wouldn't go amiss, we should reformulate property law. The problem with nationalisation is the problem of <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html"><i><b>the Tragedy of the Commons.</b> </i></a>In other words, if no one owns something - fishing areas in international waters, for example - then that resource is exploited and exhausted. On a collectivised farm everything goes to pot and no one takes full responsibility for maintenance.<br />
<br />
What is the value of property ownership itself? <b><a href="http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/proudhon/Proudhonarchive.html">Pierre-Joseph Proudhon</a> </b>was wrong when he said <i>'Property is theft.' </i>Property is not just theft. Clearly there is some value to it. Property owners look after their property. Property ownership generates value; call it the value of good husbandry. When you complete a transaction, the good husbandry of property has a price tag. It is called <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goodwill.asp#axzz1Ytie0JCu"><b>Goodwill</b></a> and people will pay well over the odds for it. Good ownership creates identity, cohesiveness and permanence. It is worthwhile. <br />
<br />
But ultimately, all property is merely leasehold from a legitimate national democratic state. At a deep level property is is <i>not</i> an inalienable right, it is a right that depends on the agreement of others. Ownership is tolerated and the only full ownership - in the people's name - can be by a democratic state so long as that state lasts. Property changes hands when the state changes hands. <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qj_MQj9yz28C&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8&dq=transfer+of+property+ownership+from+monarchy+to+republic&source=bl&ots=RNiGxeo4jv&sig=50Tt5o9MWeMJUMiLRoz44gE2Ip4&hl=en&ei=FCl-TseBB6nM0QWeia2MDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false">From a constitutional monarchy to a republic, for example.</a><br />
<br />
The public highway, the coastline, beaches, land held in trust. These are examples of things whose ownership should be by the state and not by individuals or corporations. Individuals and corporate ownership would create privileged access and bottlenecks.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I would like to suggest a new approach.</b></span></div>
<br />
We need to extend the notion of property duties fully. It seems to me that the duties of property owners have somehow been scaled back and in many cases rescinded. There are effective ways of doing this.<br />
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Essentially property ownership is a civil right, like other civil rights. However, contrast the way the rights and duties of property holders are handled with the way other civil rights and duties are handled. The duties of property owners<b> <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8583058/UK-government-offers-tax-break-to-wealthy-non-doms.html">seem far too 'negotiable' and flexible.</a></b> <br />
<br />
Parliament should have more to say on your property duties. Property ownership should be treated as other citizens' rights and duties are treated. In other words, the way the government upholds property duties is more like one of the foundation stones of a society and less like an economic lever to be manipulated as an incentive.<br />
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There are limits to ownership. Ownership carries with it solemn duties so long as the owner is part of a nation state and not outside it like Captain Nemo. If you are going to have a state which permits the ownership of private property, then you had better sort out property rights and make sure the property owners meet their obligations and that, for example, they pay all their taxes and do not pollute.<br />
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The reality of ownership should be more like a software license. For example. If you own a certain number of shares in a company then you you should be licensed to use those shares in a defined set of circumstances, just as a <b><a href="http://www.answers.com/topic/software-license">software license holder</a></b> would be.<br />
<br />
Use this concept of extending a license, for example, in order to limit and regulate speculative activity in the financial and commodity markets. Curtail property rights that are overextended. Link property ownership <i>closely</i> to civic responsibility.This would change perceptions. Extending the idea of the duties of property owners changes our perception of someone like<b> Branson</b>, for example, from a mild mannered philanthropist to a marginally responsible corporate citizen. <b>Branson</b> may support charities and use fuel that is less damaging to the environment, but he also supported Thatcher and got the tax breaks.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Institute a Buffet - Gates Law</span></b></div>
<br />
<b><a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/07/obama-meets-with-buffett-gates-to-discuss-giving-pledge/">The Warren Buffet Pledge</a></b> and <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/tobin-tax"><b>the Tobin Tax</b></a>, are a start. But they lack a systematic underpinning and so they lack force. When the income of an individual has exceeded a certain amount then that individual should not only be taxed to the same extent or more than an ordinary person, but that that individual be required to reinvest an increasing proportion of that income socially productive capital. For example 30% of 10 million. 50% of 50 million. 80% of 100 million. Why? Because property ownership is a civil right and a civil duty.<br />
<br />
Without doubt property ownership raises moral questions, just as many other civil rights and duties raise moral questions.<br />
<br />
Certain levels of ownership cannot be licensed. Capital accumulation should be licensed and paid for through sufficiently high levels of income tax and more, paid for by the active civic participation of property owners.<br />
<br />
Use the concept of leasehold. Make all property leasehold (including shares) with an option for renewal for inheritance purposes. This way accumulation can be controlled.<br />
<br />
I am not surprised that bankers do not understand the limits of property ownership rights or, indeed, that bankers do not understand what constitutes property owning duties: to reinvest, to pay taxes properly, to avoid risk.<br />
<br />
So, in essence, democratically elected governments should adopt a new approach to the rights and duties of property ownership. Treat property ownership more like other citizens’ rights and duties and reformulate them in terms of licenses and leases. After all any property that is owned in Britain is only owned within the laws of a democratic state as a state given right.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-71741043511775559842011-09-22T18:56:00.024+01:002023-09-03T10:25:53.704+01:00Andrew Brown in the Guardian on creationism: Not all creationists are cartoon Americans, Andrew.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WvqEMospCgE/Tnt1_cdOiNI/AAAAAAAADU4/9t5TvQhVy_A/s1600/watch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WvqEMospCgE/Tnt1_cdOiNI/AAAAAAAADU4/9t5TvQhVy_A/s640/watch.jpg" width="505" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i>New Atheists and their agnostic fellow travellers like Andrew Brown </i></b><br />
<b><i>portray believers as cartoon Americans.</i></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div>Andrew Brown's article is cartoonish. Most educated Catholics and Anglicans are indeed creationists. But they are not the Brown caricature of a creationist. If you believe in something infinitely intelligent and subtle, then you are hardly going to second guess it.<br />
<br />
And for this reason most Catholics and Anglicans have absolutely no problem whatsoever with the theory of evolution to the extent that it is an explanatory falsifiable account of what is. To that extent. It is only when the theory of evolution is overextended - extruded - into suppositions, semantic games, theology and the meaning of life that it is partially rejected by religious people. This is reference of course to the deluded who are working in the field of evolutionary psychology, the heirs to phrenology, and their confreres in ancillary fields.<br />
<br />
When Andrew Brown,who is on the agnostic borders of new atheism, and all the other new atheists – let’s lump them all together - direct all their criticism of religion at the stupidly extreme; at the American evangelists, then they become extremely irrelevant.<br />
<br />
An argument like the one Andrew Brown puts forward is just a red herring, a side track into the US religious Badlands. Why do journalists and media people constantly direct their reflections on religion into the Badlands of America? For me the reason is simple. They still have the mentality of servants of empire. The empire is dead, long live the new empire. Their great grandfathers fought in the Punjab and did a damn good job administering it. Now they are on the periphery in the UK, in the New Punjab, concerned with the state of affairs in the glorious metropolis.<br />
<br />
Were I a student who came from a religious family, and not a cartoon religious villain - the kind the new atheists (and their agnostic fellow travellers) imagine they are up against, I would prefer to face someone who was openly hostile and said why they were, to someone who was patronising and superior who never actually gave a clear account of why exactly his arguments were superior.<br />
<br />
Where are these arguments? There is the assumption of elitism which can't rest solely on Darwinism. That would be foolish, Darwinism doesn't encompass all nature and human endeavour. Then why exactly would someone like Andrew Brown think he is in a position where he might advise teachers to patronise and tolerate the belief of a child from a religious family? It's the assumptions behind this article that I think are quite offensive.<br />
<br />
Let's indulge these creationist children, says Andrew Brown. From what high ground do you 'indulge' them Mr Brown? From where exactly do you derive your own puissant sense of intellectual superiority? Your upbringing perhaps? Your education? Your experience? Your achievements? Are you convinced that these give you sufficient license?<br />
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Of course the creationists in question are children. But in my experience the arguments of the children of proselytising atheists betray, not intelligence, but high levels of intolerance. <i>Carte blanche</i> to all the intolerant atheists. And look at them, these atheists. Many of the children who believe in creation also happen to be the children of first second or third generation immigrants, of asylum seekers.<br />
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Isn't it just so convenient to be able turn on them. The right are the new atheists. The social Darwinists. The left are more tolerant. Not in the Nick Cohen sense of the word. We accept the solidarity of our religious brothers and sisters in the fight for social justice. You on the other hand. What are your politics?<br />
<br />
The left who attack religion do so claiming it is the opiate of the people. And yet in the field, in NGOs and on the different battlefronts where the cause is social justice, the left is more tolerant. In another way religion is simply a way of life. It is like a habit, the eating of Marmite soldiers dipped in egg yolk. It is as real as breakfast and singing, birth marriage and death. It is a human response to all these things, the living of them.<br />
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There is no insipid, simplistic, objective-rationalist account of what makes people tick that can very usefully rationalise or deconstruct a religious response to the art of life. But if the claim is that there is such an account, then that rational explanation had better be as complicated and rich and intelligent and thoughtful and full of love and hate and contradiction and humanity as people's religious response, as their religious life. <br />
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The grand theory that is supposed to be able to boil down human experience is a simple evolutionary abacus half understood by graduates from the arts, the classics and media studies. And the biggest joke of all is that you don't need to fully understand it, or have all the evidence for it in order to apply it to absolutely anything.<br />
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'Good' research says Andrew Brown, tells us that children are 'natural creationists? Good research like hell? Define research. Do you know what hard core scientists in the physical sciences think of your 'good' research in the social sciences? They think it is a pretence. They think it merely poses as science. It is subjective insight posing as objectivity. Take all 'good research' in the social sciences with a pinch of cracked salt, as you would a 'scientific' opinion poll.<br />
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You can keep faith with rationality. That's very important. But a lazy, unaccountable, referential, patronising, reductive, dehumanising faith.<br />
<br />
No thank you.<br />
<br />
To me Andrew Brown's article is highly presumptuous because it pre-supposes. Religious children are poor deluded fools and that have, according to research, a 'natural propensity' to be creationists anyway. An example of presupposition is:<br />
<br />
<i>When did you stop beating your wife?</i><br />
<br />
Now, a new one is:<br />
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<i>You should be patient with the deluded children of the religious who believe in creation.</i><br />
<br />
Really, Andrew Brown?<br />
<br />
Well I have neither beaten my wife, nor are my children deluded.<br />
<div><br />
The right in the US is religious, however the right in Britain is not. Here the right direct their criticism of religion in order to attack progressive social causes, not just to defend minorities from the unfairness of some religionists.<br />
<br />
The reason the right in the UK attacks religion is because often the religious align themselves with the poor and argue for social investment in communities and social reform. In Britain it is the right wing and centre-right and the centre-right posing as left, who are the reactionary atheists.<br />
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We have known for a long time here that the same people who viciously attack immigration are often the people who attack religion and all religious belief. It is a displacement activity because by law you can't incite others to racial hatred and so they attack 'religion' instead. It's the same target. What they are attacking is a way of life, the core identity of people. In this case this article constitutes a disguised attack on the children of immigrants. Andrew Brown making Fuja? I’ll explain:<br />
<br />
Here’s a presupposition:<br />
<br />
Most children who are religious come from immigrant backgrounds. The article therefore is directed mainly at people dealing with the children of immigrants. So let's rephrase Mr Brown's premise:<br />
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<i>Don't attack the beliefs of the children of immigrants.</i><br />
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But if we were not thinking of attacking their beliefs then why raise the question? You might say for example:<br />
<br />
<i>Don't think of elephants</i><br />
<br />
Well, I am thinking of elephants now.<br />
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<br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-86234237931163866102011-09-20T22:27:00.026+01:002023-09-03T10:26:11.070+01:00On the edge of the Weald<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YIXAVCyYwE0/TnkE30c9cUI/AAAAAAAADU0/NmfZvGnhW2A/s1600/MVC-041S.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YIXAVCyYwE0/TnkE30c9cUI/AAAAAAAADU0/NmfZvGnhW2A/s400/MVC-041S.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>The ridge above the Weald </b></i></div>
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To live on the edge of a forest is to live by a path into dream, or childhood; when you were small and the legs of adults were like trees and their heads rustled with words, when the sky was oily and flowed and sparkled.<br />
<br />
Just as we can easily conjure up the face of a grimacing wolf, staring at us from a dark window, eyes wide, teeth bared; just as we can sense against our midriff the whispered ripple of a shark in water; we enter a forest.<br />
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What remains of our own Weald was once the scrubby border of the great temperate northern European Forest. Those of us who were brought up in Britain, and who have read enough and completed a Grand Tour will overestimate our imaginative ability, supposing we can picture this Ur forest properly.<br />
<br />
We can't, but what we can do is sense the Weald and its Silesian heart in the stories of the Grimm brothers, in older fairy tales. Forest boys and girls live in a the middle of Europe, in fairy tales. Just ask <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Strange_and_secret_peoples.html?id=YvCwMV7Z24IC">Carole J Silver</a> and she will tell you.<br />
<br />
It is quite difficult to see the Bailowieza, the boreal Taiga, the cloud forest of Nayarit, the Karri eucalypts, the Alpine conifer forests, the moist dipterocarp, the <i>manglares</i> of Tumbes, the Fatu Hiva and the Tilamook.<br />
<br />
However, if you live in south west London you can drive, or take the bus or train to Guildford. It takes less than an hour. You may walk in Chanctbury Wood and look out from St Martha's hill over what was the Weald. Or go to Dorking and head for Box Hill, the ancient Yew grove near Ranmore common and beyond. <br />
<br />
In Surrey the wealthy value their link up to the forest. The rich pay for it as we pay for electricity or water. And when John Clare went mad he did not do so because he was overly sensitive, he went mad because his piped connection to life was severed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-80783987057505605632011-09-10T00:08:00.011+01:002023-09-03T10:26:04.438+01:00The Guardian - Christopher Hitchens on the Arab Spring and 9/11, a response<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5MA-UoMVUKY/TmqWfnWjweI/AAAAAAAADUQ/xtPrKAGto0E/s1600/Christopher+Hitchens2.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="307" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5MA-UoMVUKY/TmqWfnWjweI/AAAAAAAADUQ/xtPrKAGto0E/s320/Christopher+Hitchens2.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Christopher Hitchens, supporter of imperialist wars. Oh the horror, the horror</i></b>.</div>
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In reading Hitchens in the Guardian today (9/11/2011) we read a specious apologia. He is ridiculous, and yet the Guardian, drawing inspiration perhaps from its own Janus faced support for interventionism, exhibits Hitchens vulgar self justification on the anniversary of 9/11 as if his words were pearls.<br />
<br />
Hitchens presents his mental puppetry to us as insight. It isn't. He 'illumines' us, or does he? Atta was a cold hearted loveless zombie. Mohamed Bouazizi was sick of tyranny. We know that zombie does not accurately describe Atta. He was not a zombie. To call him a zombie sheds no light. Sound and electronic letters signifying absolutely nothing. Puppet play.<br />
<br />
In second place we also know that despite the fact that he was a catalyst for the events he sparked off, Mohamed Bouazizi was in fact suicidal long before he decided to politicize his suicide. If he did ever politicize it. Hitchens need not mention this; cavalier with facts and the motivations of his dramatis personae.<br />
<br />
Moreover, to claim that the hodge-podge fighting against tyranny in Tunisia and Libya were fully paid up democrats and that the majority of fighters were people longing for western freedoms is a also a convenient lie. The moral backbone for the rebellions came from Islam. The insurrection in Syria has been catalysed by the story of a soldier slapping a young man around the face and saying to him: 'For you there is only one God and his name is Bashar-al-Assad.' This is the rocket fuel of rebellion, and it is hardly Saul Bellow.<br />
<br />
What over-weaning presumption of Hitchens; presenting his autistic geopolitical puppet play to us as our reality.<br />
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Along come the ridiculous parallels with Czechoslovakia - ridiculous to a Marxist anyway. Ernst Gellner might have drawn some parallels, but no Marxist. Hitchens claims he is 'non totalitarian left'. Apparently this makes him a Blairite. He, like so many Trotskyists and lapsed Trotskyists before him, worked as ideological hit-men against socialism and were paid well for it. He offers no other explanation and simpers in the general direction of the American public. He admires their constitution and their 'variety'. <br />
<br />
Hitchens is 'non-totalitarian' enough to support US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some anti-imperialist! An anti-imperialist lauded and lionized in the liberal and right wing British press; in the US and the UK. If Christopher Hitchens rhetoric held then it would also have justified the Vietnam War and the Korean War and the war against Frelimo and the MPLA.<br />
<br />
He observed the different strands of rebellion and gave them his papal benediction. Without saying so Hitchens implies that he predicted the Arab Spring. Show me the article or speech he gave where he predicts it. Moreover, the 'Arab Spring' is not as he defines it as. <br />
<br />
Hitchens ends with co-option and a not so subtle allusion to his own impending 'martyrdom'. He co-opts Nadine Gordimer. I wonder if Nadine Gordimer took his position on the war in Iraq; on the intervention in Libya; on the continuing war in Afghanistan. We can find out if we ask her.<br />
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Finally, we end, not with an argumentative bang, as Hitchens promises in the title of his book, but with apologetic whimpering. I am going to die, so please believe me. Well I am sorry that you will die. And I am sorry that at least 250,000 Iraqis; men, women and children; had to die in a war that you supported. <br />
<br />
An earlier Christopher Hitchens would have ripped the corrupt, self indulgent roue he became to shreds. He reminds me of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse now, a man troubled by his actions and incoherent. A man who has made bad decisions and is excusing himself to us, expecting that we will go along with his nonsensical, ridiculous, self defense and that we will see things from his point of view.<br />
<br />
Hitchens, in supporting Blair and Bush's wars went into intellectual bankruptcy a long time ago. The only people who see and saw things from his point of view were the are neo-cons and the neo-imperialist liberal interventionists make believing they are 'progressive. The hypocrites who run the Guardian and Fox News, hand in hand with Christopher Hitchens.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-48385404970733404002011-09-08T20:20:00.007+01:002023-09-03T10:25:25.832+01:00Are we living in the New Dark Ages?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2q285hQXx7k/TmkXdma1K-I/AAAAAAAADUM/ra-dBnDnIkk/s1600/holy+grail+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2q285hQXx7k/TmkXdma1K-I/AAAAAAAADUM/ra-dBnDnIkk/s400/holy+grail+4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Philip Blond explaining the Big Society</b></div>
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The answer is that we ARE living in a new Dark Ages. What makes this time a new dark age is that the light of reason is being snuffed out. We have people here who claim to be children of the enlightenment, but they are philosophers and thinkers who actually do not believe in the power of philosophy, in the power of rational thought, or in the ability of humans to act forcefully and rationally upon their environment.<br />
<br />
The philosophers began by imagining what a good society would be like. The 'Good Society' is the objective of most decent political philosophy. The Good Society can make rational decisions about the way society should be run, which is why capitalism opposes it.<br />
<br />
How on Earth can we live in a society that does not believe in the intelligence and capacity of human beings and human societies to solve the problems that confront it?<br />
<br />
In the New Dark Ages theorists are forced to use a religious language of the market, they are forced to accept the basic premise that humans cannot directly govern their own society, that they have to defer to a deity, in this case the market. How can we be said to be living in an age of enlightenment when our rulers abdicate moral responsibility and relegate human welfare in preference to the workings and processes of wealth accumulation?<br />
<br />
It becomes clear in our New Dark Ages our governments are not capable of taking rational and enlightened decisions and seeing them through. They do not have the power to do so. They do not have the power to decide:<br />
<br />
- whether to go to war,<br />
- whether to regulate the banking system,<br />
- whether to mitigate the effects of climate change,<br />
<br />
Our governments are so manipulated and corrupt, so in hoc to the real economic powers in our countries, for example to the Murdochs, to BP, to the Barclay Brothers and to BAE Systems, that they suffer extreme paralysis of the will - aboulia. Obama promised to get the US out of Afghanistan and Iraq - not going to happen. Obama promised to regulate the banking system - not going to happen - Obama promised to take measures to prevent global warming - not going to happen. Obama promised to change the nature of alliances in the Middle East - not going to happen.<br />
<br />
In the dangerous New Dark Ages we abdicate will and reason and decision making, the people are marginalised and ignored and kept in the dark and fed shit. Our governments abdicate reason and instead listen to the soothsayers who speak of market forces. These market forces are up, they are down. The market feels buoyant, it is worried, it is cautious it is positive.<br />
<br />
This weakness of mind is revolting. It is disgusting. It shows a lack of virility of fertility of thought and a lack of intellectual energy.<br />
<br />
The social sciences are corrupt to the core. Successful social scientists are all nearly all co-opted. They work in the ideological skunk works of Capitalism. They produce their own versions of the Kubark Manual. The academic nomenclature have no shame in the pursuit of personal gain and influence. Ideologues are paid directly and indirectly in all the social sciences from Economics, Politics, History, Sociology, Art and Psychology, to help reproduce the conditions to help the money river continue to flow asymmetrically in the direction of the powerful.<br />
<br />
The Nobel Prize giving in Stockholm, for example, has been an embarrassment. Ridiculous ideology disguised as theory is dished out to left wing and right wing governments alike and they swallow it all up..<br />
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There has been a generational failure of the will. A generational failure of western human beings to resist the powerful and use the intellect and act reasonably and forcefully in favour of rational governance.<br />
<br />
We are not the same people who warred against fascism in Europe, we are merely their dumb, philistine children, and grandchildren. Our parents and grandparents were, in the main, capable of confronting fascism and the holocaust and Stalinism and dealing with the bastards who wanted to destroy the world. They could face up to their death properly and use their lives to some purpose. Not my generation. Not the generation that preceded it or the one that followed it.<br />
<br />
We should remember the writing on the wall:<br />
<br />
<i>Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin </i>You have been weighed and found wanting.<br />
<br />
I have more hope in the current generation, the people in their teens and 20s who can see the problem of the New Dark Ages laid bare in 2011, yes, even the looters.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-50266579618919092522011-09-03T02:21:00.002+01:002023-09-03T10:25:28.562+01:00My premonition of 9/11 and a small dose of paranoid misanthropy.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;"></span><br />
<div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WRFQxNazUa8/TmGCJWqD3_I/AAAAAAAADUI/qDaLOTrE0ec/s1600/it7729105605.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WRFQxNazUa8/TmGCJWqD3_I/AAAAAAAADUI/qDaLOTrE0ec/s400/it7729105605.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<br />
We arrived in Mexico City in the year 2000 and left it in the year 2002. I've written about it. But I want to write about it again because I want to refine an experience that puzzles me. That really puzzles me.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I know it is real because I phoned my mother and discussed it with her. My mother could not come to see us because she was undergoing an operation for a minor cancer.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The house is a 1930s house or was. It was due for demolition from what I saw on street view. A hotel to be built in its place. It was a beautiful house in its way, but quite dark. On the ground floor the windows opened out onto our privada. The walkway we shared with six other houses, decorated with tiles.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The houses were large with wooden flooring and high. There were three floors but then there was also a long spiral staircase which took you to the roof and a servants' quarters on the roof. </div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">The stairway was dramatic. It swept down to the lounge, and in the lounge there were white pillars. The stairwell was big too, and looking up, at the top there was a skylight. It had a landing big enough to put a sofa, for several closets and a TV.<br />
<br />
Going up the stairs on the left was a large bedroom where Tere and I slept. </div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">One afternoon I went to sleep and dreamed. Then went downstairs and while the dream was fresh in my mind my mother called me on the phone. She always called me when I was really upset. We were connected. She could feel what I felt. I could feel what she felt. I accepted this. I accepted this connection naturally, as you do. Because it is your mother. You should have a connection.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">But she could feel what I felt and once she said to me. 'Phil, you are skating on the dark side.' And I knew what she meant. It started after I read Rimbaud when I was 16. My disordering of the senses. She was at least as intelligent as I am, more. She could understand, but then easily dismissed things that she considered unhelpful or irrelevant.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">It's hard for me to put into words what I thought about my mother or what our bond was because I never reflected on it and I still haven't. At one time we got on each others nerves an lot. When I was a teenager. I have never interrogated myself about my relationship with my mother. I don't have to.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I lay on the cool, quilted covers of the king sized bed. Tere had Elvira come over and give her massages that were supposed to help her lose weight. Elvira massaged Tere with a rubber stick. The stick had blue suction pads on it. I used to look at her poor body afterwards. Elvira put her elbow into her work and Tere was always left with bruises on her waist and thighs.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Elvira did it once to me, but once was enough.<br />
<br />
I could find out when exactly it was. If it was June 2000 or June 2001. Because of the operation my mother and father did not come and instead the rest of the family came and we hosted them. They were very loud when they did come and in the Palacio de Hierro one of the waitors was irritated enough to sprinkle crushed glass into my brother's Margaritta.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I faced him down. I said to him:</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">'Listen you mother fucker. If you are going to kill one of us then take out a fucking gun and do it that way. Don't sprinkle crushed glass into someone's drink you fuck.'</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I was annoyed. But I could see something was up. Mexican people are more well behaved. Something was going to snap. Loud happy children are not universally welcome. The entitlement of children to cause a rumpus in public places is something that annoys me too. </div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">But I'm just being grumpy. And those acres and acres of video, God I can't stand them. The self regard, the preciousness. Stop. Stop it.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">OK.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I lay down on the bed. I thought of where I was. Near us the golden Angel of Independence on its pillar. 600 years ago we would probably still have been on dry land or perhaps in the water between Tenochtitlan and Chapultepec. Walking through Chapultepec with my children we found two kittens. One on each plinth near the run up to the monument to the heroic children who wrapped themselves in the Mexican flag and threw themselves down from the castle rather than give up to the American soldiers. We took the kittens home.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">My daughters were delighted, but my wife was not. We had to get rid of the kittens. They have never had a pet throughout their childhood. I had many pets. Dogs and cats. But what happened to them when we moved. They were put down. Given away. Uncertain fates. To have had an animal then would have been cruel, I suppose. In the end we let them loose in the English hospital on the Advice of Aunt Li. She said they had a kind woman there who picked up the cats and looked after them.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Aunt li was the centre of our social life and a key source of nutrition outside our home in Mexico City; and yet I used to fear her influence on Teresa. When Tere came back from aunt Li she was deeply intolerant. There was something about being with Li that put her against me. I don't know what it was. But a pattern emerged. Which was odd because I like Li - everybody does - and I think she likes me. </div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Hard to explain. But I am a bit of a masochist anyway. Perhaps I wanted Tere to be hard on me. Perhaps I wanted to feel unworthy. I love spurning opportunity. So long as we can live I have constantly ignored betterment. That must get very frustratng for a woman. Very frustrating.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">You give your ideas freely to everyone. She says. You can't keep your mouth shut. Yeah Dad, my children would repeat. Why do you give everyone your ideas. They just copy you and make money out of them and get the credit. Really?</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Tere is not easily impressed by anyone or anything. She was by Marcus when he was against the PRI with his blue eyes, or were they green, and his implacable opposition to the elected dictatorship. But then it became clear he was an idiot. She looks up to her younger brother who became very important in Mexico. Jets and helicopters at his disposal. Black Marias. I am not at liberty to say.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Tere stopped telling me about her family because she said I would blurt it out to the Halls and here I am blurtng. But I am not saying anything really, am I?</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">So let me get back to the moment I want to recast and reflect on. I am lying on the bed. The same bed which I lay on with Dengue fever for a whole week while my family were in Uruapan. It's called the bone breaker. I knew I would get it. There was a student. I don't think she liked me. She had been away for a week with dengue but came in and insisted on having a tutorial. I was worried.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">What if a mosquito bit her, then bit me? Would I get dengue too. A mosquito bit her and then bit me and then I got dengue too. We underestimate how maliscious people really are. How intelligent they are in their small and great unpleasantnesses. How well they conceal their inadvertant acts of spite. I believe she meant it to happen.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I remeber her skin, a bit sallow and her eyes looking at me from across a desk. She really had nothing to ask me and I had nothing to say. She sat opposite me, our knees nearly touching, and I was too polite to bat away the mosquitoes.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I am on the bed. I can hear a faint ruch of traffic and the room is light and in an hour or so I will have to pick my children up from school. Far away in the south of the city. I drive fast. Very fast. Irresponsibaly fast and remember the first time I was in Mexico City as a teacher and a strange girl plucked me out of the staff room and said: Come home with me. She was very thin. She was extraordinary. Armida was her name.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">She took me all the way down to Coyoacan. I don't know why and I met her father, a former politician, and her cousin. Her cousin was young and slimy. He had set his mind on joining the government and was repeating the slogans of the PRI. You could see he had made a conscious decision. He made my skin crawl. I had met people like him in the young communist league in the Ukraine. Stop at nothing psychopaths.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">But I am being harsh.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">It turned out that this strange young woman had had a romantic attachment to an American which he or she had broken off and that he was a Morman and couldn't marry her. Still storming with emotion left from their farewell she chose me. It became clear that who I was was completely irrelevant. She took me back. But she drove very fast and very badly. Weaving from side to side. Travelling at only a meter's length from the car in front. laughing.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">On the bed, my only anxiety was the need to pick my children up in a few hours time and then my wife in Polanco later on. I worked at the same place she did. But as a consultant, so I didn't have an office there. One of my old enemies was working there and she had blocked my appointment to a higher post. her name was Rosalia Valero. She chose her friends and was fircely loyal to them. She chose her enemies and would never make up with them.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Later on I heard that her house burned down with everything in it and it wasn't insured. I didn't know how I felt about that. I asked myself. How do you feel about this. I got no reply from myself. Not sad. Peturbed, perhaps. Another person I disliked, Dr John Wells at UCL suffered something worse. He is gay and lived with his lover on Monserrat and the volcano exploded and drove him off the island.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I remember him humiliating the elderly father of our tutor Bas Arts. Mr F Aarts. At the end of the lecture F Aarts gave, he humiliated him. He did the same to lots of people. In the interests of academic excellence of course.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">So I lay on this bed and it was midday and the room was very light and the house didn't smell very familiar. It smelled of its former occupants. A woman like a governess and an old man with white hair. A troublesome busy body. But they were kind enough. In the room at the top on the roof there were boxes and boxes of surgical spirit. Old rubber gloves, suitcases and lampshades. They were his. Or hers.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px;" /></div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I went to sleep. I dreamed and when I woke up I went downstairs and had a conversation with my mother.</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">.....</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 16px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I'll describe it later. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-15643153550844223232011-09-02T15:03:00.015+01:002023-09-03T10:24:46.965+01:00Geo-engineering, a response to George Monbiot in the Guardian<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K68M4MyX9mI/TmDnNuQLlnI/AAAAAAAADUE/iaEWC7qcQMY/s1600/George-Monbiot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K68M4MyX9mI/TmDnNuQLlnI/AAAAAAAADUE/iaEWC7qcQMY/s400/George-Monbiot.jpg" height="425" width="640" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><b>George Monbiot, a modern Calvinist</b></i></div>
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Global warming is going to happen so we should work out ways of dealing with it, and geo-engineering is one rational way out of the labyrinth. We have to go under the knife and the fact that you, George Monbiot, downplay the importance of geo-engineering is neither here nor there.<br />
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Echoing the author of the Gaia Hypothesis, J. E Lovelock, David Deutsch in his TED talk pointed out that it was already too late to prevent global warming. It is already a disaster. The actions taken to reduce CO2 are not even purported to solve the problem. The lesson seems clear to him. We need a stance of problem fixing not just problem avoidance.<br />
<br />
He goes on to say that the world is buzzing with plans to reduce gas emissions at all costs, but that, instead, it should be buzzing with plans to reduce global temperature, and reduce the higher temperature efficiently and cheaply. He notes that, at the moment, these initiatives are on the fringe, but says they should be central.<br />
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Deutsch says global warming was an issue before we knew it was an issue. It was already too late in the seventies to prevent climate change. If we did not even know we were causing this problem, as Deutsche pointed out, then these problems are not primarily a moral issue.<br />
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It is the moral stance of the climate change prevention activists that I find objectionable. The question is not really a moral one. It is a moral one only to the extent that it is a systemic and political issue. The problem is also a technical one. Like finding the cure for bacterial infection, discovering a way to make crops produce more food, or inventing a form of energy that can be transmitted to every home. Penicillin, chemical fertilizer and AC current respectively.<br />
<br />
I sense the submerged Calvinist instinct in Monbiot's approach and that of his fellow moralists, who use the issue of global warming as a stick to beat people with. Perhaps the corollary for climate change activists raging against over consumption, is the born again Christians raving against homosexual intercourse. Yes, unprotected anal intercourse does lead to the spread of AIDS, but tone it down a notch or ten.<br />
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God and hell-fire no longer apply, but the new crusaders have the same Calvinist aims: Eat less meat. Limit your consumption. Don't use the heater. Don't travel. And you should add. And stop having dirty sex and farting. Geo-engineering is portrayed by Monbiot as a ridiculous distraction. He caricatures one geo-engineering idea as a Heath Robinson device and by extension the whole field. He employs a rhetorical device, a logical fallacy. The ridicule of one idea is his weapon of choice to ridicule all geo-engineering ideas.<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">____________________________________</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Embracing the intellect and science not spurious arguments about morality. The moral bullies don't think much of geo-engineering because it cramps their style, it is a usurper. The whole debate needs to be turned from one of blame into a more technical practical and political one.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">____________________________________</span><br />
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The proponents of global warming remind me of the old saints and martyrs, or of the people who used to be passionate about macrobiotics.They seem slightly derranged in their fervor. We should question the psychology of these people. What is the psychology of a 'moral crusade' against global warming? Guilt about a privileged upbringing? God knows. Or Freud knows.<br />
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Moral crusades allow people to be sanctimonious and and berate. The global warming debate is the perfect arena for moral bullies.But moral bullies are not attracted to the question of dealing with a problem that was created even before humanity knew it existed they are attracted to the question of global warming because it allows them to be sanctimonious moral bullies - they used to chose Trotskiism. While the climate change activists bully, they also portray themselves as victims. Victims, as we know, always have the high ground. Monbiot's telephone is surely tapped.<br />
<br />
David Deutsch hit the nail on the head. Ignore the moral bullies. Problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable. Global warming was out of control before we knew it existed. It's not a personal moral problem. Our energies should not be going into preventing a problem that we could never have prevented anyway, but into understanding the problem and engineering solutions to it.<br />
<br />
The emphasis needs to turn away from blaming and become more technical, practical and political. Embrace the intellect and science not spurious arguments about morality Monbiot. Moral bullies don't think much of geo-engineering because it cramps their style, it usurps their function and vocation. Geo-engineering, in addition to CO2 reduction, is the only way forward.<br />
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Technical solutions would make people like Monbiot irrelevant and that's a good thing. Would he welcome his irrelevance? Would he welcome a battery of technical solutions to this problem of having to cope with life on a warmer planet?<br />
<br />
Of course there are political issues involved, but those are systemic, issues of entrenched power, of the weakness of government legislation in the face of corporations. The weakness of national governments in the face of global problems. Those are serious issues, but they are not reducible to matters of individual choice.<br />
<br />
And as for advocating nuclear power, well that is laughable, isn't it? Laughable after Fukushima but also laughable in the sense that advocating nuclear power means putting more political power into the hands of corporations and making the systemic problem far worse.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-46452926881539519332011-09-01T17:47:00.024+01:002023-09-03T10:25:23.720+01:00Whistling in the wind: a response to Polly Toynbee on the question of class.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1Pl8VLooihU/Tl-6Ua77W6I/AAAAAAAADUA/a3IJAIbLT5A/s1600/polly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1Pl8VLooihU/Tl-6Ua77W6I/AAAAAAAADUA/a3IJAIbLT5A/s320/polly.jpg" height="400" width="640" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Our grand liberal, Polly Toynbee</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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Polly, I am a fan and you have my qualified support for most of the things you say. But let me ask you this. <b>Micheal Rosen</b> said that you, Polly, talk about class at length without once mentioning the word <b><i>capitalism.</i></b> Michael Rosen is right. It doesn't make sense to speak of class without understanding it in terms of the economic system we exist in. If class is a product of capitalism, just as serfdom was a product of feudalism, then can we ameliorate its negative effects in some way?<br />
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Can you stop people accumulating power and wealth? How can you stop them if they are the ones with all the wealth and influence? Isn't it really a win for some, do well for a few others and then a lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose situation for the rest?<br />
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You could legislate of course. But the legislators are not unbiased, they favour the powerful, the ones who can pay good money to work the angles in the legal system in their favour. The ones who can buy out the media that would otherwise investigate them for their underhand dealing with the police and politicians. The ones who can spend money to lobby politicians and offer inducements and directorships to those who play ball. You could always vote. But what good does that do, speaking honestly?<br />
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In the time of Wilson when the government persued a mild social democratic policy and refused to join the US in its war in Vietnam there was a plot to overthrow Wilson. The Prime Minister of Australia, who was left leaning, was actually fired by the governor of Australia. The Queen's representative.<br />
<br />
In 1976 the CIA and their allies were tasked with making sure that the Italian government didn't have a coalition with the Italian Communists. The CIA financed a coup d'etat in Greece that overthrew the socialist government there. The British and the Americans supported the dictatorships in Spain and Portugal to the bitter end. The idea of social democracy is too dangerous for them not in the abstract, but in reality. We don't have the option.<br />
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The truth is you can't change the state through a democracy. If you start to do so the real vested interests in society will oppose you tooth and nail. The police will mount baton charges on horseback against 'the enemy within.'<br />
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____________________________________________________________________<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #2e2b2b; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><i>Unless you can address the ... question [of class] properly, Polly, I think you are whistling in the wind. What can we replace capitalism with? I hear you ask. Well I don't know. But by failing to oppose it we condemn ourselves and billions of others to exploitation, poverty and enslavement.</i></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #2e2b2b; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;">_____________________________________________________________________________</span><br />
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The only reason they caved in in 1945 to the building of the welfare state was because there were nearly three million men with military training in the British Army in 1945 and most of them were working class. When they voted Labour the capitalist state jus rolled over. That's partly why our establishment opted for a professional army, so they could never be held to ransom like that again.<br />
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The only reason the establishment has to keep the welfare state and to ensure the rights of working people and its citizens is if there is some opposing power. Now that opposing power, with all due respect, is not a journalist with a conscience and strong arguments. It is a trade union movement and organised civil society. Not David Cameron's vigilante neighbourhood watch but joined up civil society capable of really opposing government when it serves the banks.<br />
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Ask yourself this. If democracy is no use and no government is capable of withstanding the demands of bankers and if the bankers can guarantee they will be bailed out then what force can oppose them? Who can really stand up to the search of the powerful for profit and super-profit? Certainly not a group of concerned middle class and upper middle class liberals.<br />
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The problem is this Polly: you liberals present no alternative to capitalism and class difference and allowing the powerful to rule is the very essence of capitalism. But you don't oppose the essence of capitalism. Why do you think companies end up relocating to China? Simply because they can pay people less, they have a dictatorship that will guarantee no organised protest and they can make more money. You know this. I know this. We all know this. Why get involved in a discourse about 'class' if you can never face up to the real cause of the problem of unfairness in society?<br />
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Benevolent capitalism is a myth. When Britain had an empire conditions were atrocious in the factory but they gradually improved. There were reforms. When there were no reforms there was repression, there were Peterloos. Our rich were so rich from exploiting the poor people of the colonies in India and Africa and around the world that they could afford to buy a little security by paying key sections of the British working class a little more money. As you might pay a maid a little more so that she doesn't steal. Or as you pay a security guard to protect your wealth.<br />
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The liberal reforms were the result of the successful endeavours of men and women of conscience, but of the fact that men and women of conscience were allowed to implement reform, for example to the labour laws, because the establishment was investing in its security. It was paying people off. It didn't want revolution.<br />
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But our government in the UK now seems to have made a conscious decision. It seems to believe that, because it has a huge and quite effective security apparatus with CCTV cameras trained on people living in every estate, and data bases and a professional army and practice at repressing populations at home in Northern Ireland and abroad it can use the security apparatus for its political agenda and squeeze a little more out of the British people.<br />
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It can dismantle the welfare state. It can charge us much more for basic services. It can lower the taxes on the rich and allow companies to stay off shore and only pay 20% tax or less because there is nothing we can do about it. The Cameron Clegg coalition is betting on the effectiveness of repression. They have the security service the monitoring and the professional army and the trade unions are weak and all the newspapers back their ideology and so they will do it.<br />
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Your liberalism will always fall on deaf ears. It will do so because the establishment no longer want to or need to buy the consent of the British people. They govern through ideological hegemony, through force. Instead what we should be talking about is getting mass movements organised. Powerful mass movements, just as the Arabs have done. Because we are fooling ourselves if we imagine that there is any morality in the way the real world works. money and power talk. That's it. The rest is window dressing, a smear of icing.<br />
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Who was it who said that the only way out of the Labyrinth is rationality? Well it is irrational to look at the small picture. It is rational to recognize that class is the product of an economic system and that that system is capitalism. It is irrational to discuss class without discussing the nature of capitalism.<br />
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By fooling oneself that we are dealing with moral beings who can act independently and not a group of people acting mainly in their self interest and with nothing to oppose them but the beration of liberals we get absolutely no where. All we do is create the illusion of opposition and salvage our consciences. Isn't that what you are doing Polly - in the end? You appeal to the better instincts of the middle class, of educated people. These people, to the extent that they are in difficult circumstances at the moment, might agree with you. But most of them know what side their bread is buttered on. They serve and are servile. Call hem 'professionals' if you like.<br />
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Now you are probably on the editorial board of the Guardian. You should be. And if you are the you see the assumptions that the Guardian makes about British society. Let's be honest here. What are those assumptions? Let's be truthful.<br />
<br />
1. Does the Guardian support capitalism?<br />
2. Does the Guardian believe that class difference can be overcome?<br />
3. Does the Guardian believe that class differences can be overcome in capitalism?<br />
4. Does the Guardian hold to Blair's endorsement of the Third Way?<br />
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The third question is probably a <i>non sequiitor</i> for you. and I hope the answer to the fourth is not yes because the Third Way has been discredited as capitalism by stealth and ideological entrapment.<br />
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Unless you can address the third question properly, Polly, grand as you are, a modern H. L Menken, I think you are whistling in the wind. What can we replace capitalism with? I hear you ask. Well I don't know. But by failing to oppose it we condemn ourselves and billions of others to exploitation, poverty and enslavement.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-39705758885824204492011-08-30T18:56:00.003+01:002023-09-03T10:25:13.212+01:00The Torta Cubana is only for heroes<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--LtbO7VFgWQ/Tl0iN4EKDrI/AAAAAAAADT4/CZk0lS9MYn4/s1600/cubana.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="246" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--LtbO7VFgWQ/Tl0iN4EKDrI/AAAAAAAADT4/CZk0lS9MYn4/s320/cubana.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;"><i><b>Torta Cubana from <a href="http://ryancbrandt.wordpress.com/">Ryan's blog</a></b></i></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;">When I was single and didn't have time to cook and I was working in Antonio Caso Street in Mexico city, I dared to eat this sandwich on several occasions with the promise to myself that I would not have supper and the excuse that I had not eaten breakfast. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">It is the equivalent not of one meal but of three. </span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">It's hard to eat it with delicacy and you have to approach it from the right angle. Moreover, as it is usually sold in the street and so you have to be a little careful. Only real Chilangos eat this sandwich. The sandwich is hot and weighs about three quarters of a kilo.</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">Between two large elongated baguette-like baps place the following ingredients in succession:</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"></span><br />
<div style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br />
<ul><li>2 slices of fried ham</li>
<li>1 wiener schnitzel </li>
<li>1 fried Egg </li>
<li>Yellow cheese </li>
<li>Avocado slices</li>
<li>1 thin steak </li>
<li>2 slices of tomato </li>
<li>Mayonaise</li>
<li>Rashers of bacon</li>
<li>Leaves of iceberg lettuce </li>
<li>Fried onion</li>
<li>A slice of fresh, white Panela cheese</li>
<li>1 frankfurter sausage split in half</li>
<li>Some chopped up pickled Jalapeno chiles</li>
<li>1 chipotle chile.</li>
</ul></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;"></span><br />
<div style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;"><br />
</span></div><div style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 10px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;"><b>Buen provecho.</b></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-88774545536413245382011-08-27T23:54:00.016+01:002023-09-03T10:26:15.267+01:00Are you conflicted? If you are British, please don't be.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jALwiF20E40/TllxZRSo7OI/AAAAAAAADTo/naWbceO_xBQ/s1600/libya+speech.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="186" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jALwiF20E40/TllxZRSo7OI/AAAAAAAADTo/naWbceO_xBQ/s400/libya+speech.PNG" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Words from Obama's Libya speech.</i></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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</div>Some people think the only good linguist is a descriptive linguist, but they are probably wrong. There should be an official Academy of the English Language The failure to regulate language is abdication, because to ignore what we consciously think and know about the structure of words - to ignore our attitudes to them, is wrong. We can mould language, just as we can alter our DNA. For example:<br />
<br />
<b>Conflicted </b>is a horrible borrowing into British English, d<b>econstruct </b>is a vacuous term, <b>quantum </b>is not understood and misapplied, doors are never <b>alarmed</b>, <b>blogs </b>sounds shitty, <b>Shiites </b>are actually <b>Shias</b>, <b>quality time</b> and<b> me time</b> are shoddy, selfish concepts, <b>substantive </b>is rather insubstantial and the<b> focus group</b> should be penned up in marketing, not left to roam free.<br />
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An academy could rule out the stupid and influential jargon of the half educated young invented on the bus on the way home from school. <b>I'm going gym.</b> They say. The young sods leave out <b>to the</b>.<br />
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An academy would have a riposte to the way advertising and PR corrupt language - and ruin good music - by association. Business also ruins good words and expressions. I used to quite like the words, <b>google </b>and <b>googleplex</b>, until a company with the same name spoiled them both. Now they aren’t even recognised by my spell checker without their capital Gs.<br />
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Certainly, the word <b>Left</b> co-opted by the centre right is a misusage.<br />
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An academy could warn us regularly about the danger of default US spell checkers and the encroachment of Mirriam Wesbster.<br />
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An academy could coin new words, as it does in France and re-mint them. Here's a word which should be included by an academy. It was coined by my father: <b>inotic</b> as the opposite of <b>exotic.</b><br />
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If the academy regulated language it would have to work democratically and representatively, with force of expertise and argument. Let’s look at one example in more detail; the possible regulation of the usage of <b>hoi</b> <b>polloi</b>.<br />
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According to our resident grammarian, <b>hoi polloi </b>already includes the article. David Cameron might say. <b>Hoi polloi </b>were rioting and they are criminals not protesters. But he should not say: <b>The hoi polloi</b> were rioting.<br />
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Think of the meteorological phenomenon called - in English - <b>El Nino</b>. Now would you say: <b>The El Nino </b>started early this year. No you would not. Would you say: <b>The la</b> <b>belle</b> <b>France</b>. No you would not.<br />
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Now ignorance is an interesting argument for lexicalisation, but it is not convincing. The people who originally borrowed the term, probably understood how to use it in the original Greek, or they would not have been able to borrow it. <b>Hoi polloi </b>was not lexicalised as pidgin. Therefore, logically, <b>hoi polloi </b>should be lexicalised from the Greek without using an article in English.<br />
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Crossing paradigms to structural linguistics, watch your step, the borrowing <b>hoi</b> <b>polloi </b>only has a meaning syntagmatically in relation to other words. Semiologically, if you like - if you are literati.<br />
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Another factor is the Principle of Least Effort: the PLE. The phenomena whereby language is simplified. Conjugations are lost from English; subject pronouns dropped from Spanish; consonants from Arabic; word order from Russian, and so on and so on. Over time the meaning of <b>hoi polloi</b> will change. The dropping of <b>the </b>concords with the PLE.<br />
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The process of lexicalisation itself involves reflection. The choice whether to use a word or not. And this is the key and the justification for the formation of a British Academy of the English Language. Language can be regulated and acted upon consciously.<br />
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Words phrases and usages are subject to analysis and reformulation. If I say that Hoi Polloi includes the article, now it becomes a decision to wilfully ignore the etymology of the word.<br />
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If we all got together and decided not to say: <b>'I feel conflicted about this.'</b> then it would indeed go away. There is a decision to make about whether to say <b>the</b> <b>hoi</b> <b>polloi </b>or not. Take the decision. The fact we can take a joint decision is the argument for doing it properly.<br />
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Now let's look at the arguments for laissez faire, letting the language be, and letting words arise 'democratically'. Ask yourself. Do they arise democratically? Clearly they don't. Those people who dominate, those groups who have power in our society have de facto control of the language.<br />
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Even the language of the street is not democratic. It is selectively made visible by corporate media. If there is no thoughtful, decisive intercession then the same people who choose what you will eat and wear and drive, will put new words and usages into your mouth together with your cornflakes.<br />
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Let us imagine you want to talk about Libya. You will describe Libyan '<b>rebels</b>' '<b>liberating</b>' Tripoli. People with the same ideas as some of those <b>rebels </b>have just blown up the British Council offices in Kabul. You can't talk about Libya without referring to the '<b>rebels</b>'. If you call them <b>Jihadists</b> then you aren't playing the political game. Who controls British English?<br />
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<b>Humpty Dumpty </b>said,<i> ''in rather a scornful tone, it [the word glory] means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master that is all.?'</i><br />
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The argument for having no body to regulate language is an argument for laissez faire. It is an argument for letting those who are masters of our public discourse keep their power....That is all.<br />
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It is extremely alienating and claustrophobic to be forced to use language dominated by the corporate media in order to communicate publically. Every word comes with its default usage, a hidden style guide entry. There are <b>rebels</b>, there are <b>terrorists</b>, and you may not use Marxist terminology without irony.<br />
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You may not redefine objects and things and theories and ideas because all of these uses are already conquered and colonised. Soon like water, language will be copyrighted and its uses restricted like software - <b>mindware</b>. They will charge us to use their manufactured words – which stink.<br />
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The question of what words we should and should not use is not a trivial one. Words are concepts. An argument for a state Academy of the English language is an argument for the regulation of English under common democratic representative ownership.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-40622835030714247882011-08-27T16:18:00.014+01:002023-09-03T10:25:15.280+01:00Chimps can't ape humans<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dWFthHV4GKU/TlkJWgIW6PI/AAAAAAAADTk/km4pDWY8YmQ/s1600/Chimp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dWFthHV4GKU/TlkJWgIW6PI/AAAAAAAADTk/km4pDWY8YmQ/s1600/Chimp.jpg" height="640" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b><i>A chimp</i></b></div>
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Language is the defining characteristic of human beings because, mainly through language, we create our representation of the world and act on it: history, art, film making, science, maths, literature, architecture, electronics, and so on, all require us to be capable of modelling the world.<br />
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Modelling the world is closely linked to our feelings about the world.We develop empathy and compassion because one human can represent how another feels in their mind. I feel your pain - I really do - and I share in your hopes and wishes.<br />
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In literature we live vicariously and intensely, and some of our strongest feelings may derive, not from our own experience, but from vicarious experience.<br />
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This does not entitle us to greater freedom from pain and want than an animal. But humans have to be given the opportunity to fully inhabit the world of representation and imagination. People do not live by bread alone. An essential human right is a universal education, not simply the education of a worker bee. To deny any human the right to a universal education is great cruelty. Cruelty that would be lost on an ape.<br />
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If we are<i> fully</i> human then we can imagine what it is like to be a chimp, but the chimp can never imagine accurately what it like to be us. Perhaps this also is how creatures that we may encounter in future that are more complex and interesting than we are may view us. That difference would be inconceivable to us, by definition.<br />
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Nevertheless, you have to be wary of arguments that make us feel too special. These arguments eat themselves: the Nazis – 'Little Men', Reich called them – used Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' to demonstrate Aryan superiority. As more advanced 'Nordics', they argued, the Germans deserved more.<br />
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The death of 3 thousand westerners is a world tragedy because they are more human. They are more like us. The death of 655 thousand Iraqis is subordinate because they are less like us. We see the Vietnam war from the perspective of suffering US soldiers, not the suffering Vietnamese, 2 million of whom died.<br />
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To the supporter of Apartheid in South Africa, the needs of the civilised white man were much greater, and the rest of the population could content itself with the second rate and count themselves lucky. The rest of the population didn't need an education. They didn't and couldn't live in the same complex world. They were less than fully human. This is the way humans treat other humans when they fail to see their reflection, when they play on difference.<br />
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If we have the capacity to imagine that we are Chimpanzees, and we do, and certainly people like the animal rights activists and Peter Singer think they do, then we should be kind and respectful towards them. The same should be true of our treatment of all animals. We should have stewardship over them, which is not the same as the right to exploit animals. This our nature. The imagination inspires more kindness than rationalism. Failures of the imagination lead to cruelty.<br />
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We also need to make clear distinctions between apes and other animals. The similarity of these apes to us, for all our civilization, means that it is disturbing to keep them as pets or use them as workers. We prefer dumber animals like dogs and cats. We didn't domesticate apes, though they might have been useful, we domesticated horses instead - and enslaved other humans. </div>
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The planet of the Apes films are good because they explore the ambiguous relationship humans have with apes. Apes are too human. Apes are not human enough. In rejecting apes as symbiotes we destroy them in evolutionary terms. They do not symbiotically share the biosphere with us. Apes are relegated. Had they been used as symbiotes apes would be in a far better position. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-77915883289420692232011-08-26T00:16:00.015+01:002023-09-03T10:26:00.899+01:00Zeno's atrocities<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm; mso-line-height-alt: 7.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ncAZnwXFC2Y/TlbYeHHFFvI/AAAAAAAADTg/nYaQ3zC-6HM/s1600/Gates+of+Hell.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ncAZnwXFC2Y/TlbYeHHFFvI/AAAAAAAADTg/nYaQ3zC-6HM/s400/Gates+of+Hell.jpg" width="331" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>William Blake, The Gates of Hell</i></b> </span></span></span></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br />
</b></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><b>How do you rough up Wrath, Greed, Pride, Lust, Envy, Sloth and Gluttony? </b></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-size: 15px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-size: 15px;">What do you wallop them with? Blakean rhyme; with <i>‘bows of burning gold, arrows of desire?</i> How about self-flagellation? Equanimity and acceptance? We sit in theatres of cruelty - in our living rooms in front of screens, and then writers, actors and directors serve us up with large portions of evil, for entertainment.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Assuredly, evil is better understood personified. Coppola, Tarantino and the Cohen brothers plagiarised the life of The Iceman, who killed over 200 people for the Mafia. These directors flaunt evil in quixotic, individual packages - they excuse themselves suggesting that they offer explanatory metaphors for capitalism, where Iago the killer is a City boy now, a speculator in futures who short sells country debt. He’s out for himself, for profit. He says:</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">There are those who know the score and fake their respectability and honesty when they are just out for themselves; in it to line their pockets.I am one of them. I am not what I seem. I am not what I am.</span></i></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Greater evils come wholesale. Jung wrote how the failure to come to terms with the unconscious would manifest itself dangerously in European history, projecting the darkest shadows. </span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In the new dark ages evil behaves like a Djin: like the Belgian coloniser, the bombers, those who sprayed Agent Orange in Vietnam. Eichmann alone was banal and pitiable – an uncoiling snake on the guillotined head of a Medusa . </span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Evil perceives that it is put upon: Radio Thousand Hills in Rwanda chanted:</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>"Do not be afraid, know that anyone whose neck you do not cut is the one who will cut your neck...Let them pack their bags, let them get going, so that no one will return here to talk and no one will bring scraps claiming to be flags!"</i> </span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Raj was the victim of the mutiny; Davey Crocket was a victim of the Mexicans. 3,000 New Yorkers trump 655,000 Iraqis. David Starkey blames the Black British community for the recent riots.</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And big evils trump little evils making them temporarily vanish. Those who claim common identity with victims may commit crimes, so long as they are lesser than the crimes perpetrated against them. The Pater Noster in reverse. </span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The Crimes of the KLA are trumped by the massacres carried out by Milosevic's Serbs. In this Zeno's paradox of evil, evil can subdivide within a finite space until finally it reaches its substrate - the individual. And there, there is also evil, the abuse of private and professional power. A teacher destroying the confidence of a young child with a single put down, remembered forever.</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And how about you? Could you avoid the moral contamination that accompanies power? The powerful ignore right and wrong, they act upon the world. Talk to them about good and evil and they will smile. They have their own moral accounting systems which always leave them in the black. </span></span></span></div><div style="font-family: Cambria, serif; font-size: 15px; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><br />
</span></div><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-43204242072469296612011-08-25T09:15:00.001+01:002023-09-03T10:25:18.846+01:00I lined up outside the Western Union offices last night to send my money back home to my family. I haven't set up a regular bank transfer yet. Bilal was driving all day and I was his second to last visit of the day. Just before Id. He'll be back home at 10.30pm. I Skype home and speak to Tere and John and Carmen is packing to go to Manchester and I'm nervous and exited for her. Eve gives me a brief and cheery hello.<br />
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Tere talked to his mother for three hours. They talked and eve said they talked of everything and that they would be calling on her regularly from now on.<br />
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On the first day of walking on the Camino the first person to pass me was a Japanese gentleman wearing a banner, rather affectedly. He had an aura of wealth about him, a soft carapace.he wore his body like a luxury good, stepping carefully, trying not to scuff his feet. He nodded a greeting, a liminal shiver, and walked past.<br />
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It really was quite like walking the North Downs way. As I walked my mind murmured on boringly<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-78255982608389393172011-08-21T00:03:00.001+01:002023-09-03T10:26:01.005+01:00I had not prepared for this physically, I was badly overweight and felt unhealthy. I looked at the signUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-37498089382034619912011-08-19T10:12:00.006+01:002023-09-03T10:25:10.790+01:004. Bolivar doctors my I<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uarZ_78_TzM/Tk4d0FNGxKI/AAAAAAAADTY/szWBPTiQzNc/s1600/footrepair.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uarZ_78_TzM/Tk4d0FNGxKI/AAAAAAAADTY/szWBPTiQzNc/s400/footrepair.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><i>Expert advice on foot care <a href="http://www.brettonstuff.com/index.php/backpacking/5-things-to-know-about-foot-repair/">from a man called Brett</a></i></b></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The walk, for me, started in <i><b>Roncesvalles</b></i>. I saw the bus coming into the underground car park before anyone else and lined up at the bay. The driver, when he got off, seemed to ignore me. One by one he let everyone else on the bus and when it was my turn to get on he sent me to put my little rucksack into the luggage bay.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I was the last on.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">There was only one seat left on the bus, next to an old man with a beard leaning against the window. I wasn't going to talk to him. Just sit. but I had problems adjusting the seat belt and so finally he reached over and pulled it out from behind the seats and said.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'You're rather large. Wouldn't you be more comfortable up front? you could swap seats.'</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>'No, but thanks for being so considerate.' </i>I smiled.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">After a while he broke the silence again.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'I am going to give you some advice for the Camino. He said. I have done it four times. Once with my daughter. Last year. Once when I divorced. This is my fourth time.' </span></i><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>'Thank you, again.'</i> I said.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'You should not go fast. It is not a race. When you feel anything, anything hurting, especially your feet, you should stop right away, and see what's wrong and take off your shoes and socks and let your feet breath. You should do this every three hours, maybe.'</span></i><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>'In the morning'</i> - his 'rs' sounded Scottish, his voice a little sing song -<i> ' get up early, not later than 6 am, and just start walking. You don't need breakfast so early. I don't start feeling hungry until around 10. Then I eat a little bread an this good goats cheese from <b>Roncesvalles</b>. </i>His eyes looked to one side and his lips pursed as he remembered the cheese.<i> It's very strong and very nice.</i></span><br />
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</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'Before you put your shoes on - It's better to have old comfortable shoes -You must put a lot of Vaseline on your feet. All over, everywhere, and then put on your socks.'</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'Vaseline? That sounds a little unpleasant.'</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'No, he said, impatiently. It's necessary. To protect your feet. Every THREE hours .And before you put your shoes on again, you put on more Vaseline.' </span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'In the evening you take off your shoes and socks, let your feet breath. Do this before you eat or relax. This is the first thing you do. Then I put on another cream. An anti-inflamatory, Voltaren. It's very good.'</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The bus was quiet. Only Bolivar's advice could be heard. I could sense some of the people around us tuning in to our conversation.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">He introduced himself.<i> 'I am Bolivar,'</i> he said.<i> 'and I used to be an eye surgeon, I was very successful, I made a lot of money, but 8 years ago, when I wasn't made Chairman of the Rotary Club. </i></span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In Brazil, I interrupted. </span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>No, of the whole organisation, of it's headquarters, in New York. I was so sure I would be offered the job. I had my acceptance speech prepared, I packed for a long stay, but they gave it to an American. I didn't even come in second. I came third. </i>he said.</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And then there was a woman I tried to help. She was diabetic, elderly and overweight. She had high blood pressure and I did the cataract operation for free. It was bound to go wrong, but she insisted and it went wrong she sued me.</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>What happened? </i>I asked.</span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>I won, but </i><i>I was so disgusted that I</i><i> decided to leave everything and try and understand who I really was, not the father or the Rotarian, or the eye doctor. </i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Have you read the death of Ivan Ilych, </i>I asked him.</span><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">No.</span></i><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">You should read it. I said.</span></i><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>When I do the Camino, </i>Bolivar steamrollered on, <i>I do it with one single question in my min</i>d. I ask myself: '<i>Who am I? You should ask yourself as you walk. Who am I? Just that.</i></span><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'I can say now that I am completely happy. If I died tomorrow it would be OK. I've travelled to so many places in the last 8 years in my search. </span></i><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>I was in Egypt, Israel, China, India, Africa. I was at Osho's ashram and meditated Vipassana in the mountains I met the Dalai Lama and told him him:</i> "I am 78 have pity on me, help me." <i>And the Dalai Lama just laughed and gave me the address of a teacher who taught me a special breathing practice.</i></span><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> I've just been on with Leonard Or. He gave me the address of Babaji and after the Camino I shall go and look him up in the Himalayas.'</span></i><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'Give<i> him my regards'</i>, I said. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Have you heard of Paolo Coello?</i> I asked him.<i> 'Oh I know him. I've met him. But he is just a writer. He went on the Camno and wrote about it. That's all. But he's not an adept.'</i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>'Look,</i> Bolivar said,<i> 'what the Camino is really about is joy and celebration,'</i> And he laughed, his bright blue eyes narrowing. Suddenly he didn't seem so old any more.<i> </i></span><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'As you do the walk you will experience four different feelings, each in turn. He chanted each as if someone had taught him: Joy, Compassion, Love and Understanding.</span></i><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'<i>Don't take your emotions seriously he said. Just observe how you react to everything and go deeper. Know that your emotions are not you, so ask yourself. Who am I.'</i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I thought of the movie Zoolander: '<i>Who am I?...</i><i>There must be more to life than just being hopelessly, hopelessly good looking...?</i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">By the time we got to Roncesvalles it was chilly and getting dark. They lead us to a dormitory in an large old pilgrims hostel, the new hostel was already full, and I dumped my rucksack and went to the restaurant which offered</span> deal on a bowl of hot minestrone soup and a glass of red wine.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Later, the man next to my bunk started snoring.<i> </i></span><br />
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</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Inconsiderate bastard,</i> I thought, and it took me 15 minutes to fall asleep.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In the morning I followed Bolivar's advice to the letter.</span><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8697473908823143912.post-58319787895861735152011-08-18T22:21:00.021+01:002023-09-03T10:25:38.591+01:003. Santiago de Compostella in 1987<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"><i><br />
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<i style="font-family: inherit;">'...Las calles están mojadas y parece que llovió,</i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><i><span class="apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Son lágrimas de una niña, de una mujer que lloró.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Triste y sola, sola se queda Fonseca</span><br />
<span class="apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">triste y llorosa queda la universidad</span><br />
<span class="apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">y los libros… y los libros empeñados</span><br />
<span class="apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">en el monte… en el monte de piedad.</span><br />
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<span class="apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">No te acuerdas cuando te decía, a la pálida luz de la luna'</span></i></span> <span class="apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"><i>....</i></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"><i>Yo no puedo querer más que a una y esa una mi vida eres tú</i></span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-f8oA8eUQxE8/Tk1367m4eBI/AAAAAAAADTU/Ee5RtOu1v6Y/s1600/PhilandAileen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-f8oA8eUQxE8/Tk1367m4eBI/AAAAAAAADTU/Ee5RtOu1v6Y/s640/PhilandAileen.jpg" width="406" /></a></div>
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<b><i>Aileen and Philip in Santiago de Compostella in 1987</i></b></div>
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In 1987 I was sent to Santiago de Compostella to teach on an English course. I went with Aileen. An elegant Englishwoman with a small pursed mouth and short hair. She was soft spoken, in control and she knew how to teach children. I did not. <span style="font-family: inherit;">We met in the morning in the cafe next to a small green square and the rain fell softly. It was like mist. So gentle. Together we designed a summer course for the Galician children. It worked. I remember some of our students. They would be in their late twenties or early thirties now. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">After work we were ferried back to town and Aileen would take the lead and we would have a seafood meal and wander. The course was in July, at the height of the pilgrimage. In those days it wasn't as fashionable to walk the Camino as it is now. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In the town students made their money dressing in long black gowns and singing the traditional songs of the Tuna. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">We drank freshly toasted torrefacto coffee. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">Each bar had its own assortment of tapas. We drank so much coffee and ate so many oily dishes that, later on, Aileen had to follow a course of treatment for </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">cholesterol</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">poisoning</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Looking up at the buildings in Santiago, you used to see grassy purple wildflowers growing from the stony cracks constantly irrigated with Gallician rain like sea spray. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I loved the Cathedral. The main gate has pillars at the sides covered in carving. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">Pilgrims used to feel the delicate sculpting, and stroke the entrance, rounding and smoothing its stone into hollows, the noses rubbed off </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">gargoyles</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">, the heads of carved saints warm featureless nubs. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">The bishop of Santiago de Compostella took us onto the rooftop of the cathedral so we could look down, from the vantage point of a small window in the dome above the nave. Through the glass we saw the</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"> burning botafumeiro moving on its chain, spilling </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">frankincense,</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"> until after a while it was travelling at speed over the heads of pilgrims, and, disappearing up into the accumulating smug. </span></span>Above the alter in the cathedral is a jewel encrusted statue of Santiago and pilgrims cross a little bridge and stroke, pat or hug his silver back. Underneath the alter are his bones. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">In one of the bars where we had relaxed and chatted, where we had sipped fresh clouded ribeiro from bowls and ate side dishes - pimientos de padron, pink rounds of soft octopus sprinkled with paprika and salt, baby squid cooked in ink, garlic prawns, and one clawed crayfish - </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">Eileen and I parted company. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">When I met my parents later on in Madrid they took me out to a restaurant in the Plaza Mayor and as we ate I told them about the Camino and invited them to come with me on the walk. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">The second summer in Santiago in 1988, was less successful. Aileen and I were no longer friends. I got up at the end of the course and took the train to Madrid. In Madrid I realised I had left my passport in the drawer of the hotel room. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Never mind. I told myself, and I flew back without a passport and they let me back into London anyway. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">There was a ridiculously low paid job going in Mexico. Chris took me there. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><i>"I'm frightened I am going to accept.",</i> I told Chris. I came out an hour later. Happy and worried. I had accepted the job. But now I had to be there in less than ten days and I didn't have a passport. No time to get a new one. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">I phoned my boss, Steve.<i> </i></span><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">"Have you heard from the hotel where I left my passport?"</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"> I asked him. </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">He said that he had dropped the document into a mailbox.</span><i style="line-height: 20px;"> </i><i style="line-height: 20px;">"Thanks a bunch!"</i><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"> I said.</span><i style="line-height: 20px;"> "I'm coming to Madrid anyway, and slammed down the phone." </i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">I took the next plane and arrived at the office.</span><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"> </i><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">'Try the Ayuntamiento, the town hall.'</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">, the school office said, Steve was hiding from me. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">I did, No luck.</span><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">"Try the main post office."</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">, the council officials said and I did. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">No luck. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Now you would think I'd give in at this point , but there was some force propelling me. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">I carried on. </span><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">'Try our sorting office in this nearby street.'</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"> the post office people said. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">I walked into the sorting office and went up to a thin uniformed man with a moustache at the counter</span><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">. </i><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">'I am looking for a lost passport.'</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">The Clerk looked at me and gestured</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">.<i> </i></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><i>'Do you mean one of those?'</i></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"> </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">Behind the clerk there were what looked like thousands of passports stacked in messy rows. </span><i style="line-height: 20px;">'Do you think I am going to look through them all just for you?' Do you think I have nothing else to do?</i><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">But I didn't go away. I stood there. My flight left for London that evening. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">He looked up again. I smiled, confidently. Silence.</span><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"> </i><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">'Well,'</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"> finally,</span><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"> 'I've just been sent a bundle of passports'. </i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">He glanced at the package near his right arm.</span><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"> '</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"><i>There's probably nothing there.'</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"> silence. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">I kept looking at him</span><i style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;">. </i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"><i>'But let me check anyway.'</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px;"> he said and opened the bundle and there, at the top, I see my passport. </span><i style="line-height: 20px;">'That's mine thank you.'</i><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"> I say, calmly, pointing at it. </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">He handed it to me, struck dumb and I left and walk out into the afternoon sun.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">I drink a cold Horchata, and a take a last coffee at the Cafe de la Opera, and then leave to the airport to catch the evening plane. Back to Clapham, a few days later I fly to Mexico City.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">* * * *</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In Mexico, at work, three months later I am singing a song of the Tuna quietly to myself...</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;"><i><span class="apple-style-span">Triste y sola, sola se queda Fonseca...' </span></i></span>and an elegant Mexican woman turns round in her chair and asks me: '<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Where on earth did you learn that? </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It was Tere. She invited me to tea that Sunday. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And reader, I married her. Tere's birthday is on the 25th of July,</span> the day of Santiago. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">We did a Masters together, had three children, and didn't have enough money or time, but i</span>t was always my plan to walk to Santiago - with Tere and my parents, perhaps even my children. I made plans, but only my father showed any real interest. I do believe he would have walked the Camino with me after my mother died. Perhaps he would have walked it alone. But then he died too, three months later.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Nearly four years on, I lined up summer job options in different universities, finally deciding on Warwick, but I also applied on spec for a job in Saudi Arabia. I did so because my wife took voluntary redundancy and tuition fees are going up. We need the money. To my surprise they accepted me and so, thanks to the Saudis, I found I had a spare month.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I would do the Camino - 23 years after my last time in Santiago, in June 2011.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0