Two legs good, four legs bad...
When you are viewing the World Cup in Ghana as an ardent football supporter, the phrase ‘opiate of the masses’ returns to thought, often and enough. Last night was very wild here. Horns. Singing. Dogs barking. Chickens cackling and crowing. Goats bleating. Speakers blasting. Euphoria as the goals went in. Skill beats brawn. And the silky skills were Ghanaian and the brawn was the Imperialistic US!
Since this is my adopted country, it was a tense but rewarding affair. There were many eulogies banded about in the televisual media such as ‘All Africa is behind Ghana’. In the mean time, one of the ads on tv has leading African footballers packing bags in grainy black and white. A ‘profound poetic voice’ speaks over the images, saying, “Football called us. We answered the call’. To riches and fame far away from their African roots. The success of Ghana so far has been gained despite the poverty of the infrastructure here. I’m glad that they beat the US because that country insists on handouts (they call it aid) and prohibits free trade. Dependency rather than independence. Slavery by other means. Another version of Orwell's Animal Farm. Thus it is that everyone from footballers to nurses and doctors fills the holes in the UK and American football league teams or health services rather than building their country’s own infrastructure. Thus it also is that Ghana, like many other African States, never tackle corruption because their leaderships channel aid into the pockets of the elite. Thus it is that wherever you go, everyone seeks to ‘chop’ and take bribes. (Chop means to slice off money for yourself from whatever aid or investment there may be). It is endemic because at the heart of things, the elite in these countries are self-serving rather than seeking to serve their people.
For a few ecstatic days, Ghana is Africa. It is learning about national identity (in itself a miracle given the tribal divisions which tend to procreate political parties) and it feels very proud of its achievement. Would that this translated into a government that truly looked after its own people and built its putative democracy to such an extent that the western and now Oriental capitalist megastructures were forced to treat it as a partner, not a poodle running on a lead over its mineral-laden territory.
And what a football force it would be. The Brazil of the African continent.
Homos have rights too...!
This was the headline on the front page of the Daily Graphic in Ghana yesterday.
I remember a couple of science fiction novels based upon the premise that, among the infinite number of parallel universes, it must be that each of us has infinite possibilities of playing out our existence. Take what is happening here. I am writing and you are reading. Everything I write could be exactly the same in another universe, save for a full stop...or a different word...or a typo...or I didn’t write it at all. All the possibilities lie within infinity. My life and yours are being played out in parallel, infinite variations. We could be evil, we could be good, we could be philanderers, we could be bisexual, we could be nuns and monks, we could be presidents and we could be killed at birth. On and on. And in parallel universes, time can move backwards and forwards, denying us the certainty of the progressive arrow arcing to the furthest edge of existence.
In some of these science fiction tales, the heroine or hero goes back in time and then returns to exactly the same point at which she or he left. Everything seems the same but then... a different party is in power, adverts are different and friends are not, somehow, the same. There are some scientists who say it is possible that ghosts are our other selves in parallel universes. Universes touch and we see through, momentarily.
All this is a roundabout, literary affectation to bring you back to the headline that begins this piece. Maybe you would have seen it in a red top newspaper in the sixties in Britain before there were changes in public attitudes which led to the repealing of laws on homosexuality but it underlines the difference in cultural norms between Ghana and the UK. Bodies resulting from macabre rituals, photographed in situ at the murder scene, are routinely published. Accounts of sexual acts are graphically described. There is less observance of what the British call ‘decency’ in coverage, less gloss, less euphemism. As a result, the truth – or at least the evidence upon which truth may rest – is less varnished.
I have been here for two years and will be happy to remain here until I am jettisoned into a new life in a parallel universe after death – or some quirk in fate thrusts me elsewhere. Anyway, it will take me twenty to thirty years to fathom the subtle differences between Ghana and the UK, so headlines such as in the Daily Graphic yesterday don’t make it seem that, unbeknownst to my current self, I have flipped through time or across universes but am solidly rooted in a culture I understand.
Labels: Ghana newspaper. Homosexuality. Culture. Parallel universes.
Just my cup of tea....
I can’t remember if it was the Goon Show on the walnut caesd wireless but I suspect the sketch came from there. I was intoxicated by the Goons in a way that maybe viewers took to Monty Python later. Catch phrases, surreal plots and resident characters that grew and changed over time, the point about these programmes was that they broke the mould of previous comic structures and actually seduced their audiences into new ways of seeing. They appealed to the young because they were opaque to older audiences who had been brought up on Music Hall and gave the new generation a language and experience much as rock and roll did, which offered personal possession of a whole slice of culture. When I was at school, there was a distinct division between the Goons and the Anti-Goons. The former adopted the voices and endlessly repeated favourite sketches while the latter talked about girls and getting your end away. Maybe the Goon Show represented the beginning of the sexually immature Nerd.
The sketch I alluded to at the beginning of this, possibly infinite set of regressions (!) went something like this:
“We were out in the garden when war was declared (World War 2) and our Mum said, never mind about that, let’s have a nice cup of tea.”
In succeeding programmes, disasters were shelved as the willow pattern cups and saucers appeared with their efficacious brew, dissolving angst, magically. Unlike coffee, the range of recipes of how tea must be drunk is almost infinite. Strength, with or without milk and/or sugar, lemon, blend and (to me very important) colour. I have seen people wave a tea bag over boiled water, allowing it to dip once like a martin, taking in fluids and discolouring the liquid very slightly while others require a pair of scissors to snip off the brew as it reaches the top of the mug. Tea in Britain is a bit like the weather, never predictable and rarely acceptable, even when you make it for yourself.
So, it must be a relief for the reader that I come to my point. Tea, it turns out, does NOT dehydrate. It offers as much as water in rehydration BUT on top of that it is an anti-oxidant, doing wonders for all manner of bodily processes.
In the excruciating aftermath of English goalkeeper Robert Green’s feckless attempt to save a bumbling shot from the United States, I heard myself saying:
“Never mind about that, let’s have a nice cup of tea.”
The New Creationists
A long time ago in the hazy dawn of my memory, aged around eight years, I was for a while in the choir of the local church before being expelled for various bits of nuisance, including questioning God’s status. My mother used to say that Shadforth church was ‘high’. I had no idea what that meant, except that it suggested a notion of altitude. When I became the main tree climber of the village a bit later, I had to take on the dare of climbing a tree by the church and sitting in a nest that was above its main roof. I can still remember the fetid smell of birds’ droppings, musty twigs, asthma inducing feathery refuse and insect larvae. Up there was a different world. Rooks are very gregarious and get annoyed at a boy’s invasion, so it was like being an alien, sitting on the accumulated ledge of ill-formed housing that rooks go in for and being bombed by indignant residents. None of your weaver bird architectural niceties. More like the trolls in Tolkien.
Anyway, before I got thrown out of the high Anglican church with its quasi-catholic tendencies of Latin, gold-edged robes and funny hats, its incense swinging and so on, Canon Tillard told a story about God and scientists. Scientists took a seed of corn and broke it down into its various ingredients (we’re in the mid Fifties) and made a copy. But a priest pointed out that, although the seed was in every obvious way the same as the original, once planted, God’s seed would grow and the new one wouldn’t.
Let us career on to the present day. Canon Tillard would need to revise his well thumbed note book of sermons because this week a scientist named Craig Ventner has produced a synthetic microbe called (scientists are rather bad poets as a whole) Synthia. It is a breakthrough of immense significance, well into the territory of the wheel, the microchip and the atom bomb. The next fifty years will flash past faster than the half-century I have just spanned in this blog and a theological question will become part of everyone’s attempt to understand the nature of existence.
Will these new life forms be godless, since they were created by man? Or will there be a revision by the world’s religions to the effect that God has intended humanity to supplant itself with a species, perfectly formed and equipped to deal with a dying planet and conquering space? A species which will one day extinguish its human antecedents because of their incapacity to tend to their environment and manage a life of peaceful, creative co-existence.
This could be a species that will outlive the Bible, the Koran, the Vedas and any other tracts that lack proper scientific validity and begin to assemble its own manual of existence.
"In the beginning was the Ventner. And He did engineer Synthia. And He was pleased."
Labels: God. Artificial life, Ventner.
As I was born in India, I have a great regard for Ghandi’s peaceful protests in Africa and in his homeland. My father, who trained Indian military during the second world war, saw things differently. Ghandi, as far as he was concerned, was ‘troublesome’. I am sure that the Greek women (as depicted in Lysistrata) who refused their husbands sex unless they stopped fighting, were also called troublesome. However, these days, to be troublesome can be, in some eyes, synonymous with terrorism and it can lead to death.
Non-violent acts are and have, in recent years, been punished by deadly violence in a whole host of countries where the State has felt its authority is in question. Tiananmen Square, Iran, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Russia and in many parts of Africa here, have all seen peaceful, protesting people mown down in the midst of their outpourings of hope for better times.
It is as wholly evil as it is inexcusable.
The latest example was the assault on the humanitarian aid flotilla as it sailed indomitably towards Gaza. Israeli gunboat diplomacy was illegal, it was cynical and it was predictably bloody. However the scales are set in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, they weigh more heavily on the Israeli side which seems to have contempt for lives other than those that, they assume, share their own blood. Gaza has been made a prison, a concentration camp. Hit squads on the sovereign territory of other nations, the killing of non-military medical volunteers and air assaults in cross-border battles with their neighbours, are hardly the work of a humane, peaceful and civilised people. And yet the Israeli Government seems unperturbed by opinions beyond their boundaries, whatever reservations some of its own population might have.
The point is this. Peaceful protest can only be effective in countries where the rule of law and a sense of decency prevents soldiers or police from killing those who are merely voicing their protest. Building a population profile which legitimises peaceful protest takes decades. It involves independent courts, freedom of speech, a democratic education system and a belief that to take from others, whether it be their land, their wealth or their dignity, is unacceptable.
Israel is, therefore, uncivilised. Anyone who says different is troublesome.
The second biggest fear, after cancer, in the United States, is Alzheimer’s. This degeneration of the brain can not only rob you of your memory and clarity of purpose but, seemingly, of your identity; the stuff that, when in conjunction and melded into a composite, makes you who you are. Thus it is that the former elements of decay become disturbingly obvious to the sufferer and the latter, in the later stages, become an ordeal for family and friends.
The notion that our identity is nested in groups of cells firing electrical charges to each other is bizarre, is it not? Somehow, the traditional view of personality is that it is a mysterious non-material part of us, much as believers think of the spirit or the soul. But, as the cells die and holes appear in our brains, we lose even our selves. Oliver Sachs said in one of his books – probably The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat – a book which is surprisingly positive about degenerative conditions, that the last thing to go which is recognisably the person, is his or her signature. Like the Cheshire Cat our identities fade away, leaving only a just legible scrawl, which is our name.
In the interests of your health, wherever you are, I watched a brilliant documentary on this whole area, pulling together the latest scientific developments. There is no doubt that a cure is on the way – an injection which rids the brain of the plaque and tau-tangles that kill cells. But in the mean time, here’s what you must do if all this scares you.
1 Don’t eat processed fats and sugars or go mad on alcohol but take in lots of fruit and veg
2 Take lots of exercise – which makes brain cells work more efficiently
3 Keep a strong social network (isolates die a lot earlier)
4 Profens, normally used to kill pain, protect brain cells against the assault
5 Take up new activities which demand you learn – languages, music, crosswords
Then, even if your brain is showing advanced signs of degeneration, the brain may still function remarkably well.
Whether we have one or a number of identities – the jury is still out! – we’d like it or them to ride to the last sunset, carrying us along, lightly and with grace. So, we must do what we can and follow the rules until the drug arrives on the market that gives us protection.