Thursday, January 29, 2009
Headers in footer and the intellectually challenged
I was running along the inside left channel, hardly able to see. The rain, lashing down, was turning my spectacle lenses into something approaching the patterned glass of the bathroom door. The ground under my feet squelched and I am sure that my private parts had withdrawn to warmer climes inside my body. Football on the school field circa 1957. I remember the ball coming over as I reached the penalty area and, in an act of sheer bravado, I rose to meet it, despite its sodden leather weight and clumsily tied cord lace. By some miracle, it turns out, my team’s centre forward, Norman, noted for his massive thighs and obdurate head, barged me aside and headed the ball into the net.
The miracle is this. On the BBCs website today it is revealed that concussion sustained in adolescence can have effects that last for thirty or more years. In tests, those that achieved prowess in contact sports, or who simply fell on their heads in odd acts of carelessness, were outscored consistently in maths and problem solving, when compared with those, like myself, who either ducked cranial contact or were too inept to manage it.
It seemed to me, on reading this, that here was an explanation of how women appear to get better, intellectually, with age and many men seem to stand still. After all that sport, followed by regular banging of their heads against the wall because they can’t get right answers in their jobs or in the home, some men seem to give up and start reaching for their slippers at the age of forty or so while women (apart from those intent on shattering the glass ceiling by leaping upwards) rise to new challenges and responsibilities.
Then again, thinking about my increasing lack of control over the simplest operations of memory, I may have suffered some blow to the head of which I am now unaware. Perhaps I blacked out and the details of the event never came back to me. As, for example, when the maths teacher, one J. A. Brown, or JAB for short, went round the class with a blackboard T square, thumping heads that couldn’t manage equations, heads that had just come off a wintry sports field. I have no notion as to whether I was one of his victims but I am pretty certain all the other boys suffered near decapitation. And I wasn’t that good at equations.
It’s an interesting fact of this new research, is it not, that those that had knowledge beaten into them at school, are, in their later years, unlikely now to manage more than SATs Stage One, if I’ve got the right name for it. I can’t quite remember.
I was running along the inside left channel, hardly able to see. The rain, lashing down, was turning my spectacle lenses into something approaching the patterned glass of the bathroom door. The ground under my feet squelched and I am sure that my private parts had withdrawn to warmer climes inside my body. Football on the school field circa 1957. I remember the ball coming over as I reached the penalty area and, in an act of sheer bravado, I rose to meet it, despite its sodden leather weight and clumsily tied cord lace. By some miracle, it turns out, my team’s centre forward, Norman, noted for his massive thighs and obdurate head, barged me aside and headed the ball into the net.
The miracle is this. On the BBCs website today it is revealed that concussion sustained in adolescence can have effects that last for thirty or more years. In tests, those that achieved prowess in contact sports, or who simply fell on their heads in odd acts of carelessness, were outscored consistently in maths and problem solving, when compared with those, like myself, who either ducked cranial contact or were too inept to manage it.
It seemed to me, on reading this, that here was an explanation of how women appear to get better, intellectually, with age and many men seem to stand still. After all that sport, followed by regular banging of their heads against the wall because they can’t get right answers in their jobs or in the home, some men seem to give up and start reaching for their slippers at the age of forty or so while women (apart from those intent on shattering the glass ceiling by leaping upwards) rise to new challenges and responsibilities.
Then again, thinking about my increasing lack of control over the simplest operations of memory, I may have suffered some blow to the head of which I am now unaware. Perhaps I blacked out and the details of the event never came back to me. As, for example, when the maths teacher, one J. A. Brown, or JAB for short, went round the class with a blackboard T square, thumping heads that couldn’t manage equations, heads that had just come off a wintry sports field. I have no notion as to whether I was one of his victims but I am pretty certain all the other boys suffered near decapitation. And I wasn’t that good at equations.
It’s an interesting fact of this new research, is it not, that those that had knowledge beaten into them at school, are, in their later years, unlikely now to manage more than SATs Stage One, if I’ve got the right name for it. I can’t quite remember.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Stories without words
When media presenters and reporters talk about stories ‘breaking’, they are referring to the crude refinery that is a news room. It is like a well gushing. They take the crude oil or data with all its impurities and makes a sharp, clean, narrative from it, thereby excluding the dross (ie that which doesn’t fit or add anything to the story). We watch and listen to it attentively, blearily accepting the authenticity and moral stance of the service, tut tutting here and there, wondering why such and such a fiend has not been assassinated YET, annoyed at the prominence of this or that, irritated by the amusing tales they insert so that we don’t reach for the Stanley knife at the litany of bad news. Sometimes we focus a little more and argue aloud at the tv set, because the party line of the programme OBVIOUSLY doesn’t confirm our own ideals or philosophy. I do this quite a lot with Sky News. Recently, one of the royal brats showed his blue blood colours on video, when using offensive terms to his non WASP brother soldiers (all in the spirit of friendship, of course) and Sky prefaced the news item with “some of you might find what the prince had to say, offensive”, as though there were any doubt about the matter. Getting your news unprocessed and comprehensive is a search that the faint hearted may as well resist. Most news is propaganda, one way or another. Some of it is in your face but most is hidden in the sub-clauses of polite and glossily dispassionate rhetoric. In hope I watch CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC World to try to extract another view, another perception, even one depending on an alien ideology.
Two recent experiences seem worth relating in this regard. The first was on Euronews. It’s a programme I watch in France and it is available here in Ghana, too. It runs an extremely hypnotic section every hour which is labelled underneath: “No Comment”. There is no voice over, just a series of images taken from some event from war torn Gaza to Chinese children in school. Well, before you rail at this blog, I know that images can be selected to imply or underwrite the subjectivity of the camera-wielder but the long panoramic sweeps, the tight focus on details, the minutes-long takes, allow me to look around and not be chased into a particular view by the commentary. Thus it was that, after seeing Obama being inaugurated on one channel, I switched to Euronews and was spellbound by tracking shots of the presidential limo with its inches thick metal and glass, heading for the White House. It took forever and made it feel as though you were in a Godfather film. The car inched along flanked on four corners by Agents-Smith from The Matrix and further State security guards hanging out of the doors of accompanying cars. When the camera swept upwards, there were the snipers on roofs. When the camera panned the crowd, herded behind rails I was like the guy in Jaws, watching for the shark to leap and take someone. Not another JFK my mind muttered.
Speaking of sharks (I don’t need to mention them again!), the notion of animal as killing machine came to the fore last night when probably the most riveting natural narrative to come out of a camera lens was documented on National Geographic. Eight and a half minutes of being in the right place at the right time and with a loaded zoom movie camera. This was the ‘plot’. Tourists, cameras flashing, watching a herd of buffalo, A pride of lions attack and cut off a buffalo offspring, forcing it into the water. Suddenly there are five or so lions mauling it. It screams. At this moment there is a ferocious geyser of water and at its head flies a big crocodile. The lions are bemused like the cat in your house when presented with something alien. It snaps and shows its teeth, then grasps the baby victim. There is a tug of war and the croc is pulled out of the water. Too much. He lets go and the lions prepare themselves for the feast with much purring and gnashing of teeth. The baby continues screaming. Then, out of the left side-frame of the image comes the herd, again. They come close to the lions, indecisive at first because of their apparent ages-old enmity. But one – a Darwinian change agent – suddenly transcends fear and charges, forcing a lion away from the pack and chasing it off. Another (was it the same beast returning?), charged again and lifted a lion into mid air with its horns. Then the calf was miraculously free and melting into the herd to be replaced by rows of lowered horns. The lions ran, ignominiously, though that’s my word and terrible anthropomorphism! Eight and a half minutes of pure gold camera work. No cutting room. No voice over, except for yells of shock, disbelief and triumph from the tourists.
It’s on YouTube and millions have watched it so far. Will you?
When media presenters and reporters talk about stories ‘breaking’, they are referring to the crude refinery that is a news room. It is like a well gushing. They take the crude oil or data with all its impurities and makes a sharp, clean, narrative from it, thereby excluding the dross (ie that which doesn’t fit or add anything to the story). We watch and listen to it attentively, blearily accepting the authenticity and moral stance of the service, tut tutting here and there, wondering why such and such a fiend has not been assassinated YET, annoyed at the prominence of this or that, irritated by the amusing tales they insert so that we don’t reach for the Stanley knife at the litany of bad news. Sometimes we focus a little more and argue aloud at the tv set, because the party line of the programme OBVIOUSLY doesn’t confirm our own ideals or philosophy. I do this quite a lot with Sky News. Recently, one of the royal brats showed his blue blood colours on video, when using offensive terms to his non WASP brother soldiers (all in the spirit of friendship, of course) and Sky prefaced the news item with “some of you might find what the prince had to say, offensive”, as though there were any doubt about the matter. Getting your news unprocessed and comprehensive is a search that the faint hearted may as well resist. Most news is propaganda, one way or another. Some of it is in your face but most is hidden in the sub-clauses of polite and glossily dispassionate rhetoric. In hope I watch CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC World to try to extract another view, another perception, even one depending on an alien ideology.
Two recent experiences seem worth relating in this regard. The first was on Euronews. It’s a programme I watch in France and it is available here in Ghana, too. It runs an extremely hypnotic section every hour which is labelled underneath: “No Comment”. There is no voice over, just a series of images taken from some event from war torn Gaza to Chinese children in school. Well, before you rail at this blog, I know that images can be selected to imply or underwrite the subjectivity of the camera-wielder but the long panoramic sweeps, the tight focus on details, the minutes-long takes, allow me to look around and not be chased into a particular view by the commentary. Thus it was that, after seeing Obama being inaugurated on one channel, I switched to Euronews and was spellbound by tracking shots of the presidential limo with its inches thick metal and glass, heading for the White House. It took forever and made it feel as though you were in a Godfather film. The car inched along flanked on four corners by Agents-Smith from The Matrix and further State security guards hanging out of the doors of accompanying cars. When the camera swept upwards, there were the snipers on roofs. When the camera panned the crowd, herded behind rails I was like the guy in Jaws, watching for the shark to leap and take someone. Not another JFK my mind muttered.
Speaking of sharks (I don’t need to mention them again!), the notion of animal as killing machine came to the fore last night when probably the most riveting natural narrative to come out of a camera lens was documented on National Geographic. Eight and a half minutes of being in the right place at the right time and with a loaded zoom movie camera. This was the ‘plot’. Tourists, cameras flashing, watching a herd of buffalo, A pride of lions attack and cut off a buffalo offspring, forcing it into the water. Suddenly there are five or so lions mauling it. It screams. At this moment there is a ferocious geyser of water and at its head flies a big crocodile. The lions are bemused like the cat in your house when presented with something alien. It snaps and shows its teeth, then grasps the baby victim. There is a tug of war and the croc is pulled out of the water. Too much. He lets go and the lions prepare themselves for the feast with much purring and gnashing of teeth. The baby continues screaming. Then, out of the left side-frame of the image comes the herd, again. They come close to the lions, indecisive at first because of their apparent ages-old enmity. But one – a Darwinian change agent – suddenly transcends fear and charges, forcing a lion away from the pack and chasing it off. Another (was it the same beast returning?), charged again and lifted a lion into mid air with its horns. Then the calf was miraculously free and melting into the herd to be replaced by rows of lowered horns. The lions ran, ignominiously, though that’s my word and terrible anthropomorphism! Eight and a half minutes of pure gold camera work. No cutting room. No voice over, except for yells of shock, disbelief and triumph from the tourists.
It’s on YouTube and millions have watched it so far. Will you?
Labels: buffalo and lions. telling the news., Obama. Crocodiles
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Fitting in to the scheme of things
Having had something of a Christian upbringing – at least until the age of 8 or 9, I have a certain grounding in biblical matters. Given the seasonal cycles of church offerings, every year the lessons and sermons and readings would come round again and again. And these were then repeated in school. By the time I became a teacher, I had immersed myself in the ocean of agnosticism. But that doesn’t stop phrases being quoted by my brain, whether I decree it or not. The extraordinary New Testament lines from John did this the other day: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God. And the word was God.”
It happened like this. I was reclining on the sofa, watching DSTV’s The History Channel, one of a clutch of programmes under the title, Space Sunday. Now, for any science and science fiction fan and proclaimed agnostic, the day was filled with goodies. Not that I watched them end to end but in recordings, like a string of pearls over a week. Anyway, the one I was worm-holing into was called something like The End of the Universe. Rather in the style of a holiday programme, it took the viewer from a camp fire in the American desert to the beginnings of time. On the way we met planets, stars, galaxies, super novae, hyper novae, wombs of stars, black holes, quasars, searching for the furthest point from which light has emanated. The Big Bang. At the end we were there. (The static snow flakes of your television, when waiting to be tuned to a station, are receiving this earliest broadcast from the beginning of time). And what WAS there? It all started with a singularity so small and so dense that when it exploded, the entire universe was formed as a result.
“In the beginning was the word and the word was with Jack. And the word was sub-atomic particle.”
That everything that we know (or imagine) was concentrated in this initial spark, whether we regard it as the wilful act of the Divine or an implacable law of a disinterested Nature we cannot comprehend, is probably the greatest paradox in our consciousness. Infinitely small and infinitely dense, containing neither space nor time but giving rise to both – and mass. It is hard to wrap one’s brain around it except as an utterly testing metaphor. To know, too, that we have atoms in our body that have travelled across galaxies from this initial detonation, is stupefying. We are, as the New Agers and Buddhists will aver, at one with the universe. Well, we would be, if we bothered to meditate on it.
Maybe Richard Dawkins is right and there is no God to be found in The Big Bang’s unrolling (after all, the end of space and time is now posited to be an icy nothingness with every atom that once constituted it at its most grand and architectural, dissipated into solitary aloneness, unable to interact with any other because of the vast distances between them). Whatever, I have exchanged the stained glass windows of a very rigid ecclesiastical building in my childhood for the colour enhanced wonders of space and time. It is more reassuring to imagine the atoms in my body heading off on their strange pilgrimages into the infinite when I finally succumb to the dissolution of the flesh, than visions of Paradise, whether with angels or virgins or the souls of the Good.
Religions seem incapable of stopping their adherents from visiting destruction on each other. They are all so earthbound, despite their protestations to the contrary. But look into the space time continuum and life down here seems a bit of a sideshow and not worth getting too excited about.
I want to end up like those early savants who wrote The Egyptian Book of the Dead (1240 BC). But instead of spending my remaining existence preparing myself and my boat for the trip across the river to the Afterlife, I’ll be giving a final service to my atoms so that they can continue on their fateful, onward journey.
Having had something of a Christian upbringing – at least until the age of 8 or 9, I have a certain grounding in biblical matters. Given the seasonal cycles of church offerings, every year the lessons and sermons and readings would come round again and again. And these were then repeated in school. By the time I became a teacher, I had immersed myself in the ocean of agnosticism. But that doesn’t stop phrases being quoted by my brain, whether I decree it or not. The extraordinary New Testament lines from John did this the other day: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God. And the word was God.”
It happened like this. I was reclining on the sofa, watching DSTV’s The History Channel, one of a clutch of programmes under the title, Space Sunday. Now, for any science and science fiction fan and proclaimed agnostic, the day was filled with goodies. Not that I watched them end to end but in recordings, like a string of pearls over a week. Anyway, the one I was worm-holing into was called something like The End of the Universe. Rather in the style of a holiday programme, it took the viewer from a camp fire in the American desert to the beginnings of time. On the way we met planets, stars, galaxies, super novae, hyper novae, wombs of stars, black holes, quasars, searching for the furthest point from which light has emanated. The Big Bang. At the end we were there. (The static snow flakes of your television, when waiting to be tuned to a station, are receiving this earliest broadcast from the beginning of time). And what WAS there? It all started with a singularity so small and so dense that when it exploded, the entire universe was formed as a result.
“In the beginning was the word and the word was with Jack. And the word was sub-atomic particle.”
That everything that we know (or imagine) was concentrated in this initial spark, whether we regard it as the wilful act of the Divine or an implacable law of a disinterested Nature we cannot comprehend, is probably the greatest paradox in our consciousness. Infinitely small and infinitely dense, containing neither space nor time but giving rise to both – and mass. It is hard to wrap one’s brain around it except as an utterly testing metaphor. To know, too, that we have atoms in our body that have travelled across galaxies from this initial detonation, is stupefying. We are, as the New Agers and Buddhists will aver, at one with the universe. Well, we would be, if we bothered to meditate on it.
Maybe Richard Dawkins is right and there is no God to be found in The Big Bang’s unrolling (after all, the end of space and time is now posited to be an icy nothingness with every atom that once constituted it at its most grand and architectural, dissipated into solitary aloneness, unable to interact with any other because of the vast distances between them). Whatever, I have exchanged the stained glass windows of a very rigid ecclesiastical building in my childhood for the colour enhanced wonders of space and time. It is more reassuring to imagine the atoms in my body heading off on their strange pilgrimages into the infinite when I finally succumb to the dissolution of the flesh, than visions of Paradise, whether with angels or virgins or the souls of the Good.
Religions seem incapable of stopping their adherents from visiting destruction on each other. They are all so earthbound, despite their protestations to the contrary. But look into the space time continuum and life down here seems a bit of a sideshow and not worth getting too excited about.
I want to end up like those early savants who wrote The Egyptian Book of the Dead (1240 BC). But instead of spending my remaining existence preparing myself and my boat for the trip across the river to the Afterlife, I’ll be giving a final service to my atoms so that they can continue on their fateful, onward journey.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
MacBush: that play
Macbeth points out at some stage in his journey to destruction that he is too much in blood to retreat again to any moral position. Shakespeare’s point being that once an individual or nation embarks on a murderous course, only the intervention of external or occult powers, can halt it. There is something in the nature of our species that becomes gorged on the flesh of our enemies so that the belly expands and must be kept fed by more deaths. We are beyond helping ourselves and need someone else to step in and halt the crimson fountains and pools, to put us in prison or out of our crazed misery. The United Nations ought to fulfil this macro role but its lip-serving members won’t make unanimous decisions that inhibit their own capacity to inflict war crimes or go after the mineral wealth of theose unable to defend themselves.
I was thinking this as I watched President Bush make a goodbye speech to the people of the United States. In a sense he paraphrased Sinatra’s (and Sid’s) rendition of My Way. All that he had done had been the result of interrogating his own conscience, he said. Everything from the Middle East to Guantanamo, from the deregulation of the banking sector to the pursuit of enforced democracy worldwide. His regret was not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and plastering victory notices after initially downing Sadam. It was a fittingly unheroic, miserable presentation from a man at sea, never waving, always drowning.
What is difficult to swallow is that the eight years or so of his presidency limped bloodily by as he conducted foreign and national policy and all we or his own people could do was sit it out. As if we were all bit players or extras in MacBush, the play, and were never given meaningful lines that might change the dialogue’s imperatives. Rather like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, we sat at our dinner parties or around pub tables, discussing our impotence, conspiracy theories, the evils of capitalism and trying to make sense of being in the dark, so far away were we from the shadowy doings in the Oval Office. That’s the thing about democracy. Those that are elected have a term of office or two to impose their ideology on their people. Now that the US has had their eight years of neocon liberalism, the global markets are drowning in the effluent that is still coming in sewer loads from their excesses and the economy is on its knees. Will the US head back to some kind of social democracy, where people can afford health care and housing? It is doubtful. They revile any sense of socialism there because they see it as a constraint on an individual’s freedom to ‘screw thy neighbour’. Even Obama will be hard put to soften the inbred adage of the survival of the fittest.
Bush and his lieutenants were a nasty lot and they did very nasty things. The world did not take one step towards being a safer or better place for its inhabitants as a result of their tenure and the United States is not an emblem of democracy but of capitalist greed and imperialism. Let us hope its people deserve Obama and begin the long haul towards international sensitivity and internal and external social justice.
Macbeth points out at some stage in his journey to destruction that he is too much in blood to retreat again to any moral position. Shakespeare’s point being that once an individual or nation embarks on a murderous course, only the intervention of external or occult powers, can halt it. There is something in the nature of our species that becomes gorged on the flesh of our enemies so that the belly expands and must be kept fed by more deaths. We are beyond helping ourselves and need someone else to step in and halt the crimson fountains and pools, to put us in prison or out of our crazed misery. The United Nations ought to fulfil this macro role but its lip-serving members won’t make unanimous decisions that inhibit their own capacity to inflict war crimes or go after the mineral wealth of theose unable to defend themselves.
I was thinking this as I watched President Bush make a goodbye speech to the people of the United States. In a sense he paraphrased Sinatra’s (and Sid’s) rendition of My Way. All that he had done had been the result of interrogating his own conscience, he said. Everything from the Middle East to Guantanamo, from the deregulation of the banking sector to the pursuit of enforced democracy worldwide. His regret was not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and plastering victory notices after initially downing Sadam. It was a fittingly unheroic, miserable presentation from a man at sea, never waving, always drowning.
What is difficult to swallow is that the eight years or so of his presidency limped bloodily by as he conducted foreign and national policy and all we or his own people could do was sit it out. As if we were all bit players or extras in MacBush, the play, and were never given meaningful lines that might change the dialogue’s imperatives. Rather like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, we sat at our dinner parties or around pub tables, discussing our impotence, conspiracy theories, the evils of capitalism and trying to make sense of being in the dark, so far away were we from the shadowy doings in the Oval Office. That’s the thing about democracy. Those that are elected have a term of office or two to impose their ideology on their people. Now that the US has had their eight years of neocon liberalism, the global markets are drowning in the effluent that is still coming in sewer loads from their excesses and the economy is on its knees. Will the US head back to some kind of social democracy, where people can afford health care and housing? It is doubtful. They revile any sense of socialism there because they see it as a constraint on an individual’s freedom to ‘screw thy neighbour’. Even Obama will be hard put to soften the inbred adage of the survival of the fittest.
Bush and his lieutenants were a nasty lot and they did very nasty things. The world did not take one step towards being a safer or better place for its inhabitants as a result of their tenure and the United States is not an emblem of democracy but of capitalist greed and imperialism. Let us hope its people deserve Obama and begin the long haul towards international sensitivity and internal and external social justice.
Labels: Bush. Neocons. MacBeth. Obama.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Babes in Arms: Israeli Spokeswomen
Scanning the internet and You Tube, in particular, I see there are swathes of criticism being directed at Israel for her inhumane war on the Gaza people. Enough for me not to reiterate. However, atrocities cannot pass without a blog such as this adding its small voice to the debate because every discourse about morality should be enriched and deepened in whatever way possible. Freedom can be gauged in the number of voices that are allowed to take part in the assessment of political and social acts. From a Jungian perspective, even what we think adds to the universal pool of understanding. To write, if we have the means, makes it more concrete, more manifest. To talk publicly is even more powerful. I believe it was Roland Barthes (memory?) who suggested that speech is superordinate to writing because in writing there is always the possibility of erasure, whereas you cannot unsay anything.
Which brings me to this lateral perspective on the Gaza atrocities. Having learned from the debacle in Lebanon two and a half years ago, Israel prepared very carefully for the assault on that overcrowded strip of land. Not just with its sophisticated weaponry but with its spokespersons. Hearing them, night after night, handwringing over civilian casualties, swearing they are on wonderful terms with aid agencies such as the Red Cross and constantly referring to their victimhood under the barrage of Hamas’ rockets, I have the palpable feeling that the scripts were written months ago. Scripts for exactly the eventuality we are now seeing. At the same time they effected a news blackout on independent observers by keeping journalists as far from the action as logistics allowed. No doubt the media trainers that worked with the oh so suave Prime Minister’s spokesman, the female foreign minister and the blonde female military spokeswoman, coached them in adopting the same calm, personable, almost warm, reasonable, open-eyed candour. Phrases such as “All we want is a bit of peace and quiet for our population in the north”, as though they were discussing an ASBO on an unruly neighbour. Or, “…surgical air strikes” just prior to the bombing of the United Nations school. But how these attempts to control the spin of a war’s trajectory come unstuck. The dissonance between the Foreign Minister in her fashionable white jacket and the ravages of civilian life in Gaza sinks deeply into the emotional unconscious of any viewer. As does the good looking blonde woman in battle fatigues, speaking for the military offensive. Isn't she a heroine? You can see the reasoning behind this. If women are speaking for Israel, then they are truly not the offenders here. Perhaps I belong to such a bygone era that the foregoing analysis needs squashing in the age of equality but I always felt that it was men who went to war, who perpetrated the worst evils, and that the hopes of humanity rested mainly with women, for don’t they bring children into the world and nurture them? Haven’t they a monopoly on mercy? I know it’s not cut and dried as a concept and that there are plenty of nasty females who will commit horrific crimes or goad their fathers, sons and husbands to do the same, but overall…
Whatever, I would guess that this logic lies behind the choice of spokeswomen in war. Females, generally, would not inflict horror on other women and children in the way men will always do, so listen and empathise.
Scanning the internet and You Tube, in particular, I see there are swathes of criticism being directed at Israel for her inhumane war on the Gaza people. Enough for me not to reiterate. However, atrocities cannot pass without a blog such as this adding its small voice to the debate because every discourse about morality should be enriched and deepened in whatever way possible. Freedom can be gauged in the number of voices that are allowed to take part in the assessment of political and social acts. From a Jungian perspective, even what we think adds to the universal pool of understanding. To write, if we have the means, makes it more concrete, more manifest. To talk publicly is even more powerful. I believe it was Roland Barthes (memory?) who suggested that speech is superordinate to writing because in writing there is always the possibility of erasure, whereas you cannot unsay anything.
Which brings me to this lateral perspective on the Gaza atrocities. Having learned from the debacle in Lebanon two and a half years ago, Israel prepared very carefully for the assault on that overcrowded strip of land. Not just with its sophisticated weaponry but with its spokespersons. Hearing them, night after night, handwringing over civilian casualties, swearing they are on wonderful terms with aid agencies such as the Red Cross and constantly referring to their victimhood under the barrage of Hamas’ rockets, I have the palpable feeling that the scripts were written months ago. Scripts for exactly the eventuality we are now seeing. At the same time they effected a news blackout on independent observers by keeping journalists as far from the action as logistics allowed. No doubt the media trainers that worked with the oh so suave Prime Minister’s spokesman, the female foreign minister and the blonde female military spokeswoman, coached them in adopting the same calm, personable, almost warm, reasonable, open-eyed candour. Phrases such as “All we want is a bit of peace and quiet for our population in the north”, as though they were discussing an ASBO on an unruly neighbour. Or, “…surgical air strikes” just prior to the bombing of the United Nations school. But how these attempts to control the spin of a war’s trajectory come unstuck. The dissonance between the Foreign Minister in her fashionable white jacket and the ravages of civilian life in Gaza sinks deeply into the emotional unconscious of any viewer. As does the good looking blonde woman in battle fatigues, speaking for the military offensive. Isn't she a heroine? You can see the reasoning behind this. If women are speaking for Israel, then they are truly not the offenders here. Perhaps I belong to such a bygone era that the foregoing analysis needs squashing in the age of equality but I always felt that it was men who went to war, who perpetrated the worst evils, and that the hopes of humanity rested mainly with women, for don’t they bring children into the world and nurture them? Haven’t they a monopoly on mercy? I know it’s not cut and dried as a concept and that there are plenty of nasty females who will commit horrific crimes or goad their fathers, sons and husbands to do the same, but overall…
Whatever, I would guess that this logic lies behind the choice of spokeswomen in war. Females, generally, would not inflict horror on other women and children in the way men will always do, so listen and empathise.
Labels: Gaza. Spokeswomen. War. Israel.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Small boy! Where are you going?
Continuing the theme of language from my last blog, I will start by commenting on the blurb sent to me regarding a spring fabric exhibition in Paris. My designer companion and I attended last September and so knew what to expect this time. It bore out what one discovers if one has a particular specialism, whether through work or as a hobby. The world turns out to be full of villages, each stretched across and around it by the nerves and translucent skin of the internet. An internet village is what an academic colleague of mine once called “an intelligence community”, that is, a collection of like-minded people lightly bound together by an obsession or interest. Be it ancient scrolls, garden gnomes, doom-mongering, sexual proclivity or any other of the infinite range of possibilities you might conjure up, the internet enables you to club or cluster. But this is not the end of the story. As you congeal as a virtual group, you develop a village language, sometimes with arcane acronyms, sometimes with exotic nomenclature as a result of the ingrowing nature of your correspondence. Language serves the purpose of denoting who is on the bus and who is off it, as the late Tom Wolfe had it in his trippy Kool-Aid Acid Test. Anyway, back to a quote from the blurb:
The city silhouette is emerging as harmonious and light coloured. Extreme fineness, omnipresent in suitings as in shirtings, is never ethereal. Lightness feeds on consistency to structure clothing with neat or energetically floaty lines.
Now who writes this? Not a failed poet, I’m sure, but someone who regards language as a novel mix of whatever he or she can extract from a battered thesaurus. The words are extracted and randomised, rendered down further in the artful discourse of a cocktail-sipping focus group and spewed on to the page. At the exhibition (a large enough village of several thousand inhabitants, drawn by the lure of fabric to a Paris suburb) the language is cosseted and repeated like some Gnostic text. It then re-emerges on fashion websites, having become the acceptable lingua franca of the trade.
Meanwhile, language flourishes in other vibrant ways, in Ghana, as I have often mentioned. We were returning home yesterday and the smallest taxi I have ever seen, a Daewoo that would take one passenger and a handbag at maximum, slowed our path. Our driver hooted at it unceremoniously and told us that the translation into English for the twi term for the vehicle, is:
Small boy. Where are you going?
Labels: Ghana. Paris fashion. Language.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
On ciggies, race and toilet humour...
I have been reading Simon Gray’s final memoirs, written just before he died in 2008, called, appropriately The Last Cigarette and the last in The Smoking Diaries series. It’s a bitter sweet, funny and dark affair. A sort of extended blog, a stream of consciousness which includes many a vitriolic diatribe against people, events and the forces of the state. It’s unusual in that he was a very liberal grumpy old man and so his targets sit relatively comfily within my own sights. He sometimes homes in on prey which also makes an old socialist like myself uneasy. Particularly when it comes to language and what has become socially unacceptable. For example, some deputy police chief from the London Met stated recently that it was unacceptable to use a sentence that contained both the words, Islam and terrorist. Gray gave a whole list of paradoxical sentences to show the idiocy of this, the best being the policeman’s very own!
“It is unacceptable to use a sentence that contains the words Islam and terrorist.”
Language is a slippery old beast and, as Derrida pointed out, has a habit of leaking meanings that the author desperately tries to curtail. As anyone who has attempted to create a survey questionnaire will know, unambiguous questions and statements are very hard to come by. If a statement is shifted into a new cultural context, then further complications arise. As was discovered by my partner, who, when in London, was talking to some social worker or other and mentioned half-caste friends of hers (she being quarter-caste but seemingly white). She was duly reprimanded for being non pc, whereupon she snapped back that she had every right to use the term since in Ghana it was part of the fabric of language. Ignorant professionals in the UK should research cultural contexts a bit more and pontificate a bit less. On the other hand, a woman once came to her door in England, asking to speak to her mother, ‘the mulatto’. Now this term, being derived from the slave trade is deeply offensive. In Ghana, as in many parts of the world, there is a consciousness of skin colour which defies western attempts to deem what may or may not be acceptable. C. L. R. James, in ”The Black Jacobins” on Haitian culture, suggests that at the time of writing, there were a hundred and forty descriptors covering variations in skin pigmentation, currently in use. So far, in Accra I haven’t felt discrimination against my white skin, at all. But then it is not white-white but a subtle bronzed sallowness that probably originates from my being born in India. I’d call it beech, myself….
One or two other bits and pieces that have caught my eye over the last few days. A programme on Ghana TV this morning, advertising ‘style’ showed a happy family around a table and on chairs, all of which were, apparently, modish. On the table there was an array of matched china but, right in the middle there was a small black plastic bag containing something bought for their meal. This ubiquitous bag, which is used to sell everything, except goods in the classier mall shops, has a somewhat amusing, if macabre name here, “head in a bag”.
Meanwhile, the election is finally over after the protracted run off for the Presidency. Ghana is the oldest democracy in Africa and has done its citizens proud. As I write there has been no insurrection. The conservatives are out after eight years and the socialists are in, and the latter are making exactly the right noises about integrated, inclusive government. The new President spoke gravely and well. There will be no victimisation of those who supported the last incumbents. Let us hope not. One amusing incident in this otherwise serious and uplifting set of events, was the ‘vacuous’ question posed by a studio anchor woman to her roving reporter who was at the count in an outlying small town. “There must be a lot of people, media, political and so on there. Have they enough conveniences to cope? He stared back into the camera but could not remain straight faced. “Around here, there is a lot of bush,” he responded, cracking up, “But I am not checking on the coming and going.”
I have been reading Simon Gray’s final memoirs, written just before he died in 2008, called, appropriately The Last Cigarette and the last in The Smoking Diaries series. It’s a bitter sweet, funny and dark affair. A sort of extended blog, a stream of consciousness which includes many a vitriolic diatribe against people, events and the forces of the state. It’s unusual in that he was a very liberal grumpy old man and so his targets sit relatively comfily within my own sights. He sometimes homes in on prey which also makes an old socialist like myself uneasy. Particularly when it comes to language and what has become socially unacceptable. For example, some deputy police chief from the London Met stated recently that it was unacceptable to use a sentence that contained both the words, Islam and terrorist. Gray gave a whole list of paradoxical sentences to show the idiocy of this, the best being the policeman’s very own!
“It is unacceptable to use a sentence that contains the words Islam and terrorist.”
Language is a slippery old beast and, as Derrida pointed out, has a habit of leaking meanings that the author desperately tries to curtail. As anyone who has attempted to create a survey questionnaire will know, unambiguous questions and statements are very hard to come by. If a statement is shifted into a new cultural context, then further complications arise. As was discovered by my partner, who, when in London, was talking to some social worker or other and mentioned half-caste friends of hers (she being quarter-caste but seemingly white). She was duly reprimanded for being non pc, whereupon she snapped back that she had every right to use the term since in Ghana it was part of the fabric of language. Ignorant professionals in the UK should research cultural contexts a bit more and pontificate a bit less. On the other hand, a woman once came to her door in England, asking to speak to her mother, ‘the mulatto’. Now this term, being derived from the slave trade is deeply offensive. In Ghana, as in many parts of the world, there is a consciousness of skin colour which defies western attempts to deem what may or may not be acceptable. C. L. R. James, in ”The Black Jacobins” on Haitian culture, suggests that at the time of writing, there were a hundred and forty descriptors covering variations in skin pigmentation, currently in use. So far, in Accra I haven’t felt discrimination against my white skin, at all. But then it is not white-white but a subtle bronzed sallowness that probably originates from my being born in India. I’d call it beech, myself….
One or two other bits and pieces that have caught my eye over the last few days. A programme on Ghana TV this morning, advertising ‘style’ showed a happy family around a table and on chairs, all of which were, apparently, modish. On the table there was an array of matched china but, right in the middle there was a small black plastic bag containing something bought for their meal. This ubiquitous bag, which is used to sell everything, except goods in the classier mall shops, has a somewhat amusing, if macabre name here, “head in a bag”.
Meanwhile, the election is finally over after the protracted run off for the Presidency. Ghana is the oldest democracy in Africa and has done its citizens proud. As I write there has been no insurrection. The conservatives are out after eight years and the socialists are in, and the latter are making exactly the right noises about integrated, inclusive government. The new President spoke gravely and well. There will be no victimisation of those who supported the last incumbents. Let us hope not. One amusing incident in this otherwise serious and uplifting set of events, was the ‘vacuous’ question posed by a studio anchor woman to her roving reporter who was at the count in an outlying small town. “There must be a lot of people, media, political and so on there. Have they enough conveniences to cope? He stared back into the camera but could not remain straight faced. “Around here, there is a lot of bush,” he responded, cracking up, “But I am not checking on the coming and going.”