Well, nearly midsummer and as I told you the
last time, I'm just getting into spring. Why does time move
too fast? Discuss the theory of relativity and its implications
for perceptions of time in not more than 100,000 words. But
part of it is being busy. Slow down, you move too fast, got
to make the Mourne-ing last, or something like that.
Meanwhile the Headitor asked me to mention that
Nonviolent News is celebrating (if that's the right word)
ten years of continuous monthly production (well, of ten issues
a year or occasionally eleven) - before 1994 it had been on
an occasional basis, the first ever issue was in May 1990.
Or, as reminded by a junk e-mail received purporting to be
an undeliverable message to insane@ntlworld.com
, you don't have to be stark staring mad to work here (with
no office, no money, no nothing) but it helps.
Every Dogville have its day
Lars von Trier is not everyone's cup of your
favourite brew when it comes to film directors. I don't review
cultural events or films as a matter of course, only when
it sparks off something I wanted to say (e.g. Bush and Blair
'starring' in Synge's Playboy of the Western World, see NN
107). In the case of Dogville, a pedestrian paced film (there's
a lot of walking up and down the town's 'street') still packs
quite a punch, though the answer to the question of whether
every dog will have its day is probably true given the end
of the film.
An elegantly dressed young woman (played by
Nicole Kidman) arrives at a small, deadend (literally) US
town or village, seemingly fleeing gangster gunfire. Who she
is or what she has done we don't know. Her cause adopted by
the local philosopher-king, a young man who becomes her boyfriend,
the locals agree that she can stay in return for some help
about the place. When the danger of shielding her seems to
get higher, they demand more and more work so that an arrangement
which initially was a fair deal for both sides becomes out
and out exploitation - economic and sexual, as the local folks
take advantage of the danger she is in and her naïve
idealism. She always and inexplicably seems to put the best
face on people's conduct.
In the end she is almost less than a slave.
Finally subdued and after a failed and doomed escape attempt
she is grossly betrayed by her erstwhile boyfriend, who eventually
contacts the number given by gangsters who came looking for
her early on. The towns people have finally decided to get
rid of her, no matter what it means for her, but in expectation
of a reward. When the gangsters arrive it turns out she is
the mob boss's daughter though the two had fallen out; in
her idealism she rejected the way of crime, corruption, violence
and power which he represented.
Which way would she turn now? The choice was
hers. It may be that blood proved thicker than water but in
the end she decided to back her Da, with cataclysmic results
for Dogville. What sense can you make out of this, beyond
the 'blood is thicker than water' explanation? But her response
does make some sense following her betrayal by her one seeming
ally, her boyfriend.
My understanding of the change would be that
it was because she was totally naïve in her idealism.
There was good and bad in the towns people but her lack of
resistance at crucial points, compounded greatly by her weak-willed
boyfriend, meant that her idealism was unsustainable in the
long term. Action earlier on through a minimal comprehension
of the spirit behind trade unionism or nonviolent action could
have made the town people aware of her exploitation, but that
is outside the plot. No one could sustain such idealism and
passivity in the face of such oppression. And she turns, with
a vengeance.
Idealism needs realism, and vice versa. How
you hold these two values in tension is a difficult act but
for is for me the concluding point of my thoughts on the film.
Idealism without realism is unsustainable. Realism without
idealism is just brutality. It is up to the individual conscience
how these two values are held in tension. I can't tell you
how you should do it even though I might agree or disagree
with your analysis, in general or for yourself; in the end
it is a question for everyone to answer in the quiet of our
own hearts and minds. But I would like to end these short
thoughts on the topic by quoting from the Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda, who sums up the matter much better than I ever could:
I love you, idealism and realism
like water and stone
you are
parts of the world
light and root of the tree of life.
Creation
I am a creationist. By this I mean that everyone
has creativity inside them of all sorts, including artistic
creativity, but our education system often makes us feel the
opposite. I was never into art at school, only doing it to
13 or so anyway, and was made to feel it was esoteric and
not 'mine'; it is only as my life has progressed that I could
say "yes, I am visually creative" or "yes,
I am an artist". By that I don't mean I am going to make
a living from it but rather that I take pleasure from it,
and some other people take pleasure from seeing or being given
pieces I have created.
For me it's a bit like nonviolence. I believe
there is that of nonviolence in everyone but this is ignored
because we are so surrounded with images and examples of violence
(more from governments and states I would argue than from
anyone else, though ordinary citizens don't do too bad a job
sometimes at exhorting it by ideas or example). There are
many images of nonviolence or non-violence but these are usually
only looked up to in the case of gurus such as Gandhi and
Martin Luther King who we feel we can't emulate. Don't get
me wrong, I'm all for emulating the Mahatma and ML King (well,
in some things, however I'll skip their sexual practices!),
but gurudom can again make an idea seem unobtainable. Art
is somewhat similar; we see great artists whose skill and
vision we could not match and we feel in awe but also artistically
useless.
What occasions me to make these thoughts on
paper is a weekend workshop I was on recently with Annabel
Langrish near Knockvicar in Co Roscommon (though she may move
to Co Cork in the near future). I was given a 'creative weekend'
there with her as a present and I would challenge anyone who
doubts their own creative/artistic abilities to try it. Using
a variety of techniques to decorate pottery and paper, and
with an amiable and able teacher in a very small group, we
came away with products of which we could be proud. If we
had been paying Annabel for similar products which she had
made it would have cost us more than the fee for the 'creative
weekend', so learning to do it was very good value.
The key was using techniques which anyone could
use (e.g. pressed, dried leaves and flowers, or free-flowing
inks), and approaches which made us feel at home with giving
it our best go. I learnt a lot in a couple of days and hope
that it will inspire me to develop some of my own artistic
techniques in interesting directions. If anyone else wants
to try their creativity in a similar fashion I would recommend
it. Take, learn, and go and do your own thing. The e-mail
address is annabelc@eircom.net and her current address is
Corrigeenroe, Boyle, Co Roscommon, phone 071 - 9666093 (as
indicated above, she may be moving though the e-mail will
probably stay the same).
One of the most pleasant parts of the weekend
was a stroll down an early summer lane to pick leaves and
flowers from the hedgerow for pressing, a fascinating combination
of what was both botany and visual art in one, being helped
to identify what was what and how it would look when pressed
and dried. It is great to be in the countryside at this time
of year and Lough Key Forest Park, where I went cycling in
the early morning, was beautiful. The facilities in Lough
Key Forest Park are due to have a major upgrading, and the
ugly, modern multi-storey concrete tower where Rockingham
House once stood (burnt down 1957) is due to get an external
lift and glass viewing gallery at the top; one suggestion
was that it could more suitably be knocked down. You might
get a beautiful view from the top of the concrete tower but
if the structure itself is an eyesore, what is the point?
Making everyone's view suffer for the sake of those who choose
to get the view at the top seems somewhat counter-productive
Carbon dating
Got that holiday booked? Good, because I'm now
going to try and make you (and me) feel exceedingly guilty.
The global warming catastrophe which no serious world effort
has yet been made to avert is human made. And a prime cause
of that is transport. But much travel is 'unnecessary' as
in the sense of it being for pleasure, entertainment, holiday-making....and
air travel is the worst offender in that pollution up there
disperses much more slowly than pollution down here at ground
level.
If you look on the web various websites offer
you the opportunity to calculate the carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases emitted by your mode of transport. Basically
a weekend in Barcelona by air is likely to use up what Friends
of the Earth would call a reasonable year's emission per person
(1100 kg per person per year)....and that is before you heat
your house, your office, run your car, or go for a longer
holiday or trip. We are living way, way beyond our carbon
means, and that means disaster for low-lying countries and,
through weather changes, for the rest of us.
In her useful recent article on the topic ('Irish
Times' 4th June 2004) Iva Pocock quotes the figure of 1.3
tons of carbon dioxide per passenger for a Dublin to New York
flight. That's one hell (sic) of a lot of a contribution to
global warning. Anyway, to work it out for your holliers or
next trip, you can do a web search for something like 'travel
carbon dioxide calculator'; there are a lot of sites there
and some that look interesting include www.bestfootforward.com/carbonlife.htm
(which includes general calculations as well as travel) and
for calculations and possible remedies (e.g. by planting trees
to assuage your guilty conscience) see for example www.co2.org
(Climate Care) or www.futureforests.com
(Future Forests). For general purposes in calculating your
carbon consumption you can visit www.carboncalculator.org
(British site on general carbon use) or www.csgnetwork.com/carboncalc.html
(US site).
But drastic remedies will have to be taken.
Instead of planning more airport terminals we should be closing
them down. And instead of aviation fuel being tax free it
should be heavily taxed. But the only fair system in the long
run is realistic carbon consumption quotas per head which
will put the pressure on the rich world to get its act together.
I'm afraid this is a topic which I will be returning to [by
bicycle or plane? - Ed] [In the natural cycle of things -
Billy].
Papa Doc Paisley and the Pursuit of Truth
Recently I wrote about 'Papa Doc' Ian Paisley
Senior and attempts to project him as a rosy, cosy elder statesman
and all round loveable granddad. The mellowing we will wait
to see. But I am revisiting the topic here because I was just
shocked by something he said and wrote. You would expect the
leader of a church and political party to be reasonably informed
and while, like the rest of us, he would have his opinions
and might bend the truth slightly to fit, his facts would
still be a recognisable version of the truth, the whole truth,
and something like the truth. Not a bit of it. If we go back
four years he preached a sermon which also appeared in the
official organ of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster,
the Revivalist (July/August 2000 edition). This contains evidence
of blatant lies and total ignorance to a shocking degree.
Let's start with what he had to say in this
about Portadown. "A man said to me the other day, "Mr
Paisley, why have we had all this trouble in what is the Protestant
capital of the County of Armagh, Protestant Portadown."
I said, "Because the Pope of Rome ordained Jesuits to
go there and cause the trouble." Some years ago two Jesuit
priests were brought into Portadown and slowly and surely
and deliberately they worked up the situation that has come
about which forbids Orangemen to walk home from their place
of worship after worshipping God in the Church of Ireland
Church at Drumcree. They have done it for over a hundred years
but when Jesuits did their work and did it well they found
a soil and a seed that could arise the tempers of the nationalist
community and show them a way that they could effectively
block the Protestants from worshipping in their own church."
Where could you begin? Firstly, Portadown is
not 'Protestant'; the majority may be Protestant but it has
a very substantial Catholic minority, to talk about 'Protestant
Portadown' as if the whole town was Protestant is highly inaccurate
as well as insulting, sectarian, and dangerous for anyone
not Protestant in that town (because they obviously have no
right to exist there). Secondly, anyone who knows anything
about the Catholic Church in reality knows that the Pope and
Jesuits are more likely to be at loggerheads or at truce than
in cahoots in some conspiracy about Portadown; the idea that
the Pope deliberately directed Jesuits there to cause trouble
beggars belief. Thirdly, anyone who knows anything about Portadown
knows that inter-community problems pre-date the presence
of the Jesuit community by a long, long way. Fourthly, anyone
who knows anything about Orange marches knows that there have
always been contentious marches - so much so that there was
a whole period in the mid-nineteenth century when all Orange
marches were banned by the British government (most marches
both then and now are non-contentious and pass off quietly).
Fifthly, anyone who has had any contact with the Jesuit community
in Portadown will know that they have had a developing and
moderating influence (including trying to deal with issues
nonviolently at a community level) on the situation and have
been involved continuously on a cross-community basis in Portadown
itself. Finally, his last clause quoted above is simply nonsense;
no one was stopping or trying to stop Protestants worshipping
in their own church, the problem was with Orangemen attending
one (Orange) service in the year coming marching back through
a Catholic area. In essence, the quote above is a whole pack
of lies.
Incidentally, the Protestant mythology about
the Jesuits, as exemplified by Paisley's ignorance quoted
above, has practical, and dangerous implications, as with
all sectarian lies in Northern Ireland. During the visit of
Jean and Hildegard Goss-Mayr, renowned nonviolence teachers
and activists, in November 1988, a visit to Portadown by them
revealed the fact that Protestant/loyalist paramilitaries
had been dispatched to shoot and kill the couple of Jesuits
when they arrived in the town. The Jesuits may only have been
saved by the fact that the paramilitaries involved could not
find the house in the estate where they lived.
There are other lies in the piece from which
the paragraph above comes. Paisley still targets the Presbyterian
Church in Ireland to try to poach members so any attack he
can make on it, he does. The article quoted above is entitled
"Irish Presbyterian Church re-enters WCC by the back
door" (WCC being World Council of Churches). More cobblers
here, and I have checked it out. He claims the World Council
of Churches is prophetically indicted in the Bible; well,
not in my version it isn't, and not even in the King James
version beloved of the Rev Ian, his claim is another example
of wish-fulfilment. A couple of decades ago the Irish Presbyterian
Church withdrew from the WCC in an argument which was more
to do with the politics of Norn Iron than anything else (humanitarian
aid to African liberation movements was equated with supporting
the IRA).
Anyway, he develops his argument by saying that
the Presbyterian Church has rejoined the WCC by the back door;
"I have in my hand the Annual Report of the Irish Council
of Churches of which the Irish Presbyterian Church is a member.
We have discovered hidden away in this document that the Irish
Council of Churches, who have in their membership the Irish
Presbyterian Church, have by the back door rejoined the World
Council of Churches. Because the Irish Council of Churches
themselves have become a member of the World Council of Churches.
No public announcement about that! It was hidden away in the
pages of the document..."
Unlike Ian Paisley I try to check my facts.
The Irish Council of Churches (ICC) is not and has not been
a member of the World Council of Churches. The WCC members
are individual churches though the WCC directory does list
National Councils of Churches, and some of these it recognises
as associate councils who are entitled to send representatives
to WCC assemblies and meetings; the Irish Council of Churches
is not even one of these (the position in this part of the
world being held by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland,
CTBI). The Presbyterian Church is a member of the ICC, that
much is true, but the rest is totally false and the Presbyterian
Church is not, incidentally, a member of CTBI. In addition,
to be a member of one body which is in turn a member of another,
third body, does not make you a member of the last; I may
be a member of my local library, and the library may be a
member of an association of libraries, but I am not thereby
a member of such an association.
And even if it were true, the attempt to imply
'guilt by association' to such a degree is ludicrous. Modern
folk wisdom says we are only seven removes away from anyone
in the world (that you know someone who knows someone.......who,
within seven linkages, knows anyone, anywhere). While this
'seven steps' is probably a bit dubious, you might as well
argue that Ian Paisley and the Pope are buddies because just
one or two linkages between people could connect them (say
someone in the European parliament that Paisley would have
had dealings with) Or, say, I happened to buy a house or a
pint of beer off someone we subsequently discovered had had
'links' with a paramilitary organisation; would I then be
labelled a 'supporter' of the organisation that this person
had links with?
The other interesting thing in the quotation
about the ICC is his allegation that a 'fact' (which is really
a falsehood of Paisley's imagination) is "hidden away.......No
public announcement about that! It was hidden away in the
pages of the document." So here we have the conspiracy
theory about 'facts' being hidden away. The ICC annual report
he refers to is a document available to the public and distributed
widely in church circles. In the same way he makes his allegation,
I could allege Paisley 'hides his lies' in the pages of a
Free Presbyterian publication, the Revivalist. But all I will
allege is that his lies are there for everyone to read.
If this is the standard of 'truth' exercised
by Ian Paisley it is clear that he will distort anything he
can, in any way he can, to make himself whiter than white
and everyone else blacker than black. It is clear the 'Paisley
pattern' is to sling as much mud as he can in the hope that
some will stick but he evidently may not know the old Irish
proverb, 'Flinging mud loses ground'. He has got away with
such lies for a long time and it is well time that his bluff
was called more widely. Any other church or political leader
in Norn Iron who told a quarter of the fibs above would quickly
be called to account by the Rev Ian Paisley. 'The truth shall
set you free' may, in Paisley parlance, refer to the Christian
message, but it would a fine motto for him to take up in everyday
life.
Well, that's that for another month, mid-summer
is a-comin' in and the holliers are not too far away. I must
say I'm looking forward to a break from some things so I can
do other things, well, some of them recreational and vacational.
But there's a load to do before then, including going to lots
of successful meetings [So what's a successful meeting in
your book, Billy? - Ed] [One where I come out carrying less
paper than when I went in - Billy]. And if you're out to make
a point about a prickly and woody herbaceous plant in a valley
(Gorge Bush), do it with style and humour. So brothers, sisters,
cousins, aunts twice removed from the pub for being rowdy,
see you early in July, aye, Billy.
Who
is Billy King? A long, long time ago, in a more
innocent age (just talking about myself you understand),
there were magazines called 'Dawn' and 'Dawn Train'
and I had a back page column in these. Now the Headitor
has asked me to come out from under the carpet to write
a Cyberspace Column 'something people won't be able
to put down' (I hope you're not carrying your monitor
around with you).
Watch this. Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman
pass by (because there'll almost certainly be very little
about horses even if someone with a similar name is
found astride them on gable ends around certain parts
of Norn Iron).
