The power and the glory, or, I spy with my little eye
(and hundreds of planes, ships, satellites, eaves-dropping devices, yes, those of you who know houses know that they could really drop some eaves on you if they wanted......)

OK, that China/USA dispute over the US spy plane and killed Chinese fighter pilot was aired ad nauseam, during and even after the twelve day stand off. But I'd like to ask a couple of questions or make some comments. The basic question is why the USA felt unable to apologise properly instead of trying to seem to say sorry to the Chinese while trying not to have been seen to say sorry at home. Apologising is something that big boys and girls do in such circumstances; failing to apologise is something that scapegoat-hunting, fear-driven, power-crazy countries do. Even if from the USA perspective you thought the fault was 65% Chinese and 10% US American (math my speciality), would you not apologise to try to get a speedy resolution of the issue knowing that the other side will see it the other way around? Dragging these kinds of scenarios out is woeful for the individuals concerned and for countries it means descending into the worst of xenophobia.

The other, much bigger question I have is - why do the most powerful countries in the world have a totally false impression of their role in the world and how people see them? This power-based perception-alteration happened with Britain, perhaps throughout the nineteenth century (when they were busy doing important good works like imposing the drugs trade on the Chinese) but certainly by the end of that century and the start of the twentieth; they thought they were God's answer (literally) to the troubles of the world when all they were doing was adding to everyone's woes and their own profits. So it is today with the USA. Let's hope the EU isn't headed too far down Superpower Alley.

Biassed against the US state I am but I'll even go so far as saying that 'some of my best friends are US American 'and many of the intellectual ideas (and even jokes!) I grapple with come from that direction. But, as a state, it sucks (to use the appropriate Americanism). Which gives me an excuse to use a story I have from Richard Deats of US FOR. The Jewish rabbi (Don't know any other kind of rabbi other than Jewish except maybe Rabbi Burns - Ed) was approached by a concerned outsider who came to see him in a bit of trepidation. Did he, the rabbi, know that some of his Hebrew congregation were attending Friends (Quaker) Meetings? Indeed he did know, the rabbi reassured his visitor - "Some of my best Jews are Friends"!!!

I'll finish this attack on US imperialism with a joke, from the same source, about the Zen Buddhist who went up to the hot dog vendor in New York and said; "Make me one with everything!"

Music Hall
Yes, I went to a music hall over the Easter holliers. You who have or have had children - or, indeed most of you adults were children yourselves sometime - know that adult and young tastes may be rather divergent which makes choosing 'where to go' rather difficult. Eschewing the higher reaches of culture vultureism which might have bored the younger generation to tears, some of us went to the Hot Press Music Hall of Fame (so really 'Music / Hall of Fame' and not 'Music Hall') in Dublin's Middle Abbey Street. It made an interesting tour of Irish music with the parentage (Hot Press) indicating that it would major on the rock and give some of the rest the hard place - to be fair it did delve into origins and links fairly well but if someone like Christy Moore (there's that name again - Ed) was a rock star rather than a balladeer he'd have had a major entry and not a just-about walk on part.

Most interesting bits for me? Bob Geldof on Van the Man Morrison as musical genius (the panel referring to him as a consummate performer was going a bit far; I would have thought being truculent and diffident was more like him - no encore which I think has been common). Seeing Dana @ Eurovision thirty years on (grim). Sinead O'Connor on music/song as prayer, saying she felt she needed the microphone to communicate to God (portraying God 'out there' rather than God 'in here'; this is theologically unsound from a Christian perspective, but a feeling shared in the beautiful but misplaced Nanci Griffith/Julie Gold song 'From a distance'. Mee-ology rather than thee-ology, or should that be the other way around?). Marks out of ten for the Hot Press effort? 7 - 8. Allow two hours, more if you're a trivialist. If I get to the Ceol Irish Traditional Music Centre in Dublin's Smithfield some time I'll give you a run down on that too.

Don't keep your magazine 'Loaded'
Is that title a joke about a military metaphor, I hear the 'Ed' asking (I haven't said anything - Ed)? But those of you who have been involved in unpaid political or community journalism know that it's certainly a two-edged sword (here we go again - Ed) - if it falls one way you get cut up, and if it falls the other you also get cut up. Endless hours of drudgery slaving over hot typewriters (in the old days) and hot (Hope you don't mean they're stolen - Ed) wordprocessers and DTP packages these days. It's incredible how something that looks like it was put together in an hour actually took a week or even a month to look like it was produced in an hour. In days of yore when it was all cutting and pasting typed columns, you could have various people in the one room all with their tins of Cow Gum (gum, not dung - designers rubber cement ) open, it's the same stuff that substance abusers might put in their plastic bags to inhale from. And seeing you had to cut bits of paper to fit, and you only have 323 bits of paper on your desk, you lose that essential little bit you cut off and spend the next hour searching for it. Oh, fond memories. Meanwhile it's November and you're working on the (last) May issue, and the unsold/undistributed copies of the last issues pile up until you have to move out of where you're living. And your loved ones no longer know the strange character you've become (that's saying it -Ed). It's amazing there's still new people taking up the magazine/newsletter challenge; new technology may have made things a bit easier in some ways but it has added other complications (e.g. the printer can't read your disc for nuts). Oh, by the way, the Editor was wondering if anyone wants to get involved with 'Nonviolent News'…

Whiskey galore
Don't you love international conferences, that opportunity to network with colleagues from many lands about peach education (see Billy King 86) or whatever in some beautiful location which you don't have time to see and in a building which could be anywhere on earth (and may even be hell on earth). Firstly, it takes you a whirlwind week to get ready and do all the things you have set yourself to get finished before you leave (which means you're definitely Finished before you leave); then you're travelling and away a week or more; and when you're back it's another week before your feet are back on terra firma [Ed - That's Latin for the firm terraces where peaches grow, also see Billy King 86]. At the end of which people have forgotten what you look like, and you've forgotten why you went in the first place, and the only thing you've got out of it is the envy of your colleagues and friends who think you were having a Great Time (whayhay, working 9 am - 9 pm is fantastic). Which means it was really, really worth it.

Anyway, here's a wee story about one European conference I went to. My party piece, or at least contribution to the final social event, tends to be Irish coffee, you know, that ancient substance handed down over hundreds of generations since it was first concocted in 1947 or thereabouts. Anyhows, I thought there were going to be too many people at the conference for my one bottle of duty free (those were the days you still got it within the EU) to make enough coffees. I knew there was a Scot going, who I didn't know but I chanced ringing them up and asking 'Do you drink alcoholic substances? Would you be willing to buy some Scotch and we'll make Celtic coffee between the two of us...?' They readily agreed and the deal and deed of buying our respective brews was done (tho as you know the Irish is much superior....). The conference was in full swing when one morning Yon Scot arrived in rather late and looking rather the worse for wear. The Scotch (well, maybe the Scot as well) had been cracked open the night before along with one or two other people and it died a quick death. Oh well, so much for Celtic solidarity! But there was just about enough Irish to make the Irish coffees go around so we all lived happily ever after. But I've been sceptical about the oul concept of Celtic Solidarity ever since.

Getting locked
Isn't it amazing when you look at your own thinking processes! Come on, all you lateral thinkers, political activists, facilitators, trainers, psychologists who are used to helping other people explore their thoughts, admit it, our own thought processes can be quite shocking. Here's a personal example. Where I live has a garden door at the side of the house enabling you to get to the back door; it is currently used quite a bit but the relatively new bolt on the relatively new door had been problematic for the last few months. Somehow part of it had warped and sliding the bolt in and out was hard work and an ongoing nuisance to the various people coming into contact with it. My not very thought out thought was "I'm going to have to replace that bolt and if I get a different shaped one that means more messing around with an awkward door opening, and to find the same bolt may mean traipsing all around the place."

It actually took about 3 minutes total to fix (including fetching the appropriate tool and leaving it back again). With a heavy screwdriver I was able to lever the part that was sticking, away from the bolt, and hey presto (not hey pesto, that's a readymade Italian sauce with basil but if it's made with fresh basil it is much superior). My failings; 1) To feel I couldn't fix it without great difficulty 2) Not taking the time to look at it properly 3) Not breaking down the problem into its constituent parts (one piece sticking rather than a whole bolt being very naughty and needing to be replaced). Sounds like a paradigm for every difficulty we face in life. Which, irrelevantly, reminds me of the one about the guru looking rather sad and one acolyte saying to another - "He has forgotten the secret of the universe again!". PS Now, if I had a horse (which I don't despite my name - not even a grey one) I could bolt the door after the horse has closed it. Altogether it sounds a bit like a bolt out of the blue.

Anarchy in the EU
It really annoys me when people use the term 'anarchy' as a synonym for the word 'chaos'. I'm not an anarchist but I have a lot of respect for that position and particularly for the anarcho-pacifist tradition within anarchism. 'Anarchist' and 'anarchy' is usually used in the sense of something 'descending into anarchy' (and they mean chaos - they don't talk about 'descending into capitalism' do they?). Anarchism is an established (well, you know what I mean!) political philosophy and creed and the derogatory use of it is a bit like during the period of the Cold War labelling people you don't like as 'commies' or 'reds' (these days if you talk about Reds, people will think you're talking about an English football team!). This sort of use of 'anarchy' is slovenly and inaccurate.

Anarchism isn't a well known political tradition within Ireland but it exists (in Belfast the last public face was probably 'Just Books') and has numerous tendencies within it - anarcho-pacifist, anarcho-syndicalist etc., apart altogether from the use of the term within some parts of youth culture over the last few decades more as nihilistic protest. Anarchism literally means without a ruler or government; in terms of anarchism as a political philosophy it also implies cooperative action (in anarcho-syndicalism, with trade unions as the basic unit). So I'm starting a campaign for the restoration of the term as referring to the political philosophy. Next time someone talks about a situation 'descending into anarchy', you can interject - "Don't you mean 'chaos' - 'anarchy' is a political philosophy and some of my best friends are anarchists!' PS There's even an anarchist cartoon character called 'Anarchie Gordon' after the song!

Thank God for secularism
The times they are a changin'. The contrast between the Ireland of fifty or even thirty years ago and today in relation to religion is astounding. One survey a few years ago showed Irish Catholics as more liberal on questions of women priests and married priests, for example, than French or US Catholics; this for a country where the Pope's visit in '79 was to the arguably last bastion of conservative Catholicism in western Europe. Of course inbetween has come the clerical sex abuse scandals which pulled the rug from under a big amount of the moral authority of the Catholic church. And secularism was only really starting to kick in, certainly in the South (weekly mass attendance down from 91% in 1974 to 57% in 1999, but another survey showing mass attendance 3 times a month or more at 73% in 1998). But even in the North the Prod churches, particularly in urban areas, have been declining, admittedly from a lower base - if they want to be significant players in their communities, they have to work imaginatively for it. Decline is certainly the name of the game for most.

But who can lament the passing of the time when you had to be 'in good standing' with one or another church to get a job? Or when the churches acted as moral arbiter of what was possible at a cultural, societal, or sexual level? The church/state connections are not fully broken yet (as witnessed by soldiers carrying the remains of St Therese of Lisieux on arrival in the Republic recently). But the end of the triumphalist and Constantinian church can only be welcomed by Christians; in future Christians may be involved because they believe and want to follow up their belief and not because it's expected / it's good for business / they want to show how good they are. And maybe we could have a bit of a reassessment of the Just War theory now that Constantinianism is on its last legs? That really would be progress.