It's late and I should be getting to bed, but I'm too riled up. I downloaded a couple or programmes from the BBC that I missed and have just been watching them - the first episode of the Diary of Anne Frank (a very good, low key adaptation) and in the same vein, a short documentary about another 14 year old diarist, but Polish, called Rutka Laskier who died in Auschwitz. Both bright, vivid, dark haired and dark eyed writers who chafed against the constraints of their lives, their foreshortened possibilities. Where Anne was stuck in a small hell of other people, Rutka lived with Nazi round ups and murders on the streeet, was pushed into the local ghetto and may or may not have died the day of her arrival in the camp - one witness left an account of her succumbing, like Anne, to disease, but being taken alive to a crematorium. It's a hideous story, only come to light though a local Polish official publishing, with Yad Vashem, her slim school book diary and her Israeli half-sister's delight in finding out about a sibling she only heard about in her own teens.
And all the way through both programmes, as I watched the Franks in their crowded, fearful annexe and listened to Rutka's sister discuss the dehumanisation programme that her sister and her fellow Polish Jews went through -"loss of dignity, of hope, of freedom" - all the other pretty, bright, vibrant dark haired teenage girls of Gaza seemed to echo through the black and white photographs of those lost Jewish girls. When Anne and Rutka railed against the incessant greyness of their surroundings, the fear, the incarceration, the pictures of the five little Palestinian sisters killed last week haunted the screen, who won't grow up to know if they could write well, or fancy their classmates or dream of escape. No, I am not drawing exact historial parallels of scale, but I am drawing human ones.
Beyond the appalling carnage of each individual life that has been lost in the last weeks, the terror and rage and despair that would be equally despicable whether it were done by Finns to Lapps or Mexicans to Guatamalans, the Israeli action in Gaza is haunted by a second, ghost laden layer of horror that it should be Israelis of all people now meting out a punishment far beyond deserving. What is Gaza but a huge ghetto, walled off, starved out and now burnt and bombed? Who are the Palestinians in the Israeli media but Other vermin who should not be? How can anyone sit in Israel knowing their history and say that this is what they should have come to? There was a time when such actions were called reprisal killings. When Heydrich, the architect of Wannsee, was all but assassinated, hundreds of Czechs died for it. No one in Israel had been killed in the latest round of rocket attacks until after they launched their shock and awe strategy that will do nothing but solidify the hatred for another generation.
There is far more expert and in-depth analysis of everything behind what has been going on and this is just a visceral reaction. I'm not advocating turning the other cheek entirely, but as one (Israeli) commentator I read earlier put it, the Israeli action is more an eye for an eyelash. And for all the monuments, money and rhetoric that goes towards memorialising the Holocaust, towards the mantra of 'never again', what kind of people chooses to honour their brutalised dead with the blood of their historical heirs?
Psalm 137 starts with the words made famous by Boney M:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and yea we wept when we remembered Zion.
The last two lines are these:
O daughters of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou has served us;
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
For Anne, and for Rutka, and the small bodies in new graves in Gaza, I hope the happy they have unending nightmares.
Update:
Since writing this, I've heard about the accusations by the Red Cross of that four children had been found with the bodies of their mothers, amongst many others, in the wreck of an attacked house and that Israeli soldiers nearby had done nothing to help the surviving and wounded of the attack on Monday. The image of those traumatised kids is hard to face. As is the idea that anyone could have left them in a charnel house. No one people's childen have greater value than another's - a child is a child. I add these four to my list above.
Thursday 8 January 2009
Monday 8 December 2008
Perils of Christmas 1 - The Tree
1. Drag tree home from local, overpriced yet convenient, under the railway bridge tree emporium and realise you need to rearrange furniture to put it up.
2. Rearrange furniture.
3. Get ladder to open frozen loft space and find stand and decorations.
4. Remember you have two stands and neither is really right, plus one is actually broken. Ditch broken one.
5. Attempt to hold up tree with one hand while tightening stand screws with the other until tree vaguely wedged in and doesn't topple over completely.
6. Cut away spiderweb of nylon and realise tree is bushier than you thought, so drag stand out from the corner, triggering immediate topple effect.
7. Crouch under branches, holding main tree stem with one hand and rectify topple to reasonable degree.
8. Unloop lights from box. Realise that to get to plug to turn on lights will require snake-like belly crawl underneath tree and arm's length reach with prickles in your head.
9. Put lights problem to one side and unwrap baubles and decorations. Realise that you quite like most of them and have three camels, a skunk and a glittery pink-lipped frog amongst many others. Resign yourself that your tree will not be especially sophisticated and refuse to draw conclusions as to what this says about you.
10. Attempt to disperse lights around tree without increase in topple effect.
11. Position decorations decoratively.
12. For the final touch, attach metal star to top branch and watch it bend gently sideways with the excess weight.
13. Perform snake-like belly crawl under tree to turn on lights.
14. Step back to admire and realise you have constructed the leaning tower of Pisa with bells on.
15. Leave for 24 hours. As list towards the floor increases, realise you should have attached guy ropes to secure more fully.
16. Unearth picture hooks and string for tree improvement scheme.
17. Construct guy rope system by hammering picture hooks into underside of shelves (first losing a hook for half an hour and finding it in the bin) and running string around tree.
18. Perform snake-like belly crawl to plug in extension cord for lights, thus obviating need for futher crawling.
19. Realign tree in stand and ultimately adjust Pisa list from front topple to a backwards lean. Decide this is the best you can do.
20. Stand back and admire. Pour large drink.
Sunday 23 November 2008
Bizarre channel hopping incident
So just flipping around, as you do, and stumbled on some black and white footage of a large man singing in Russian on one of those old studio variety shows, complete with full fur hat and belted tunic. I recognised the voice immediately, since my parents played his records when I was a kid. Ivan Rebroff was a big thing in popularising Russian folk songs in the 60s and 70s. Of course, he was actually German. When you think of the context, it was all pretty odd. His claim to fame was a voice that spanned four octaves, from deep bass to high counter tenor. I watched him finish the song, one of the show-off pieces that covers the whole voice. And then, very bizarrely, once Rebroff had done his bows in his beaver hat looking like Peter Ustinov's younger brother, the camera cut to a very young Rolf Harris, in massive Buddy Holly glasses, as host of whatever weird variety show it was. 'Thanks Ivan.'
Weird blast from the past on the music for me, and just plain weird otherwise.
Weird blast from the past on the music for me, and just plain weird otherwise.
Sunday 9 November 2008
Outrage
Now I'm good and mad. Really, really furious. While the euphoria over Obama's victory on Tuesday is still widespread and apparently keeping most of the world on a high, the degree of the challenge he and his administration face domestically couldn't be more starkly illustrated than by this article from the Washington Post highlighting the lack of medical care in the poorest communities. It's beyond outrageous. There are more difficult problems in the world, more serious decisions that need to be made about the wars we are fighting and their horrible cost in lives around the world, but this is indicative of the callousness with so many people have been treated within America while the Republicans played political power games with wealthy health care donors. Why should they care about rural Afghans or refugee Iraqis when they have so little interest in their own?
Over the summer for the past nine years, an organisation called the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps has set up a giant field station for dentistry, eye clinics and other medical care for three days a year in Appalachia, Virginia, trying to treat the thousands of people who drive and sleep all night in their cars to get treatment they and their families cannot otherwise afford. They were set up to work in Africa and South America, but have extended to rural America. Read the article and then watch the videos. The statistics on diabetes are terrifying, while people go to the three day event for cancer screening, unable to get scans in any other way. Think about it: your only chance to afford treatment, screening, dental work, glasses for you or your children is three days a year with thousands of other people. It is upsetting and disgraceful and enraging that in the eight years of the Bush administration, any attempt to provide some kind of state health care has been greeted with the kind of 'socialist' label thrown at Obama in the closing stages of the campaign when he dared to mention that perhaps some redistribution of the spoils in America might be necessary.
In this acceptance speech he said that Americans need to look after each other. The people volunteering in Virginia do the best they can. But it's a disgrace that a single mother can't get her own teeth treated because by making sure that her daughter has her teeth done first and gets the glasses she needs for school means there isn't time to treat her too. Virginia is not in the Third World. But you wouldn't know it. That a little boy of two has potentially life-threatening abcesses in his mouth that would not otherwise have been diagnosed, less than a few hours drive from the Capitol, should shame everyone in power. I am so enraged for these people. They may not have even voted for Obama, but if he has the courage to take on some powerful interests, then he may be their only hope for a decent, better life.
Over the summer for the past nine years, an organisation called the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps has set up a giant field station for dentistry, eye clinics and other medical care for three days a year in Appalachia, Virginia, trying to treat the thousands of people who drive and sleep all night in their cars to get treatment they and their families cannot otherwise afford. They were set up to work in Africa and South America, but have extended to rural America. Read the article and then watch the videos. The statistics on diabetes are terrifying, while people go to the three day event for cancer screening, unable to get scans in any other way. Think about it: your only chance to afford treatment, screening, dental work, glasses for you or your children is three days a year with thousands of other people. It is upsetting and disgraceful and enraging that in the eight years of the Bush administration, any attempt to provide some kind of state health care has been greeted with the kind of 'socialist' label thrown at Obama in the closing stages of the campaign when he dared to mention that perhaps some redistribution of the spoils in America might be necessary.
In this acceptance speech he said that Americans need to look after each other. The people volunteering in Virginia do the best they can. But it's a disgrace that a single mother can't get her own teeth treated because by making sure that her daughter has her teeth done first and gets the glasses she needs for school means there isn't time to treat her too. Virginia is not in the Third World. But you wouldn't know it. That a little boy of two has potentially life-threatening abcesses in his mouth that would not otherwise have been diagnosed, less than a few hours drive from the Capitol, should shame everyone in power. I am so enraged for these people. They may not have even voted for Obama, but if he has the courage to take on some powerful interests, then he may be their only hope for a decent, better life.
Thursday 6 November 2008
The morning after the night before
So much has been written about the Presidential election all over the net that it hardly seems worth adding my two cents worth, but tonight of all nights I wanted to jot down what it’s meant to have seen the numbers stacking up for Barack Obama last night and finally explode into history with such resounding joy. His speech was worth waiting for and of course it strikes me as both sad and absurd that anyone who heard it could still doubt his sincerity, dedication and ability to be President. But the faces of the crowd at McCain’s concession rally spoke not only of disappointment, but real anger that bodes ill for the enterprise of rescuing the country on which the Democrats have embarked.
Already today the knives are out for their own witchhunt and more worrying, to reform what can only be an even more dangerous and desperate right wing movement. As Joan Walsh on Salon commented on one such outburst, it looks like some kind of Onion spoof, except that it’s real. And here in the UK, I also read a splenetic and vitriolic diatribe by non other than Melanie Phillips in the Spectator which, together with her and others’ inexplicable persistence in believing in a John McCain that never existed, shows how hard it’s going to be to achieve the healing cohesion that Obama set out as one of his aims.
I hope that Obama will gather around him the best and most thoughtful minds in the country and beyond, people who have spent the last 21 months, or four years or eight years questioning, harrying, shouting, persuading, arguing on all the topics on which this election hung – war, healthcare, poverty, education – and that he uses their expertise and experience to help him forge a new blueprint for the country. There are sane, measured, intelligent, compassionate and above all positive voices that need to be heard around and beyond the White House and the new administration.
I should say ‘President Elect Obama’, which sounds clumsy and absurdly formal, but it also sounds good, like a couple beginning to savour the flavour and shape of unfamiliar words - my fiancé, my husband, my wife. Because today feels like the beginning of a real relationship, not a dewy-eyed surrender to some messianic figure, but an engagement between adults, on a level of equality. The kind of relationship between govenors and governed in which the compact can be forged on a basis of mutual respect. I don’t know if President Obama will be the kind of great reformer that some groups and commentators have been hoping for since his candidacy began, or how far he wants to fundamentally change the way we are governed. He could start with how the electorial system itself functions.
But changing the way we are governed was what the Bush regime has been working on with their shameless and shameful recasting of even the basic meaning of what it means to be an American citizen, what the Constitution means and their perpetual redefining to their own dwarfish and cynical vision of what America, that most specific and elastic of ideas, can be allowed to encompass. With Sarah Palin’s transparent lack of understanding of even the first principle of the first amendment of the Constitution, which does not in fact enshrine her or any individual’s right not to be criticised, any of the apparently respected and responsible people who thought she would be good enough to be second line to the Presidency should be ashamed of attempting to perpetrate such a fraud on the public. Because at heart, that is what it came down to. Sarah Palin was, and unfortunately is, the worst epitome of a creed that decries generosity of spirit as socialism and has elevated ignorance to the status of a virtue. These pernicious lies must be denied loudly and often.
Throughout the campaign but particularly in its closing stages, the Republicans, and their unprincipled candidate, proved that they would rather sow vicious seeds of division, hatred and fear than allow the citizenry to make their own decisions based on whatever personal criteria were important to them. The Christian Right have made a mockery of the first word of their own movement with their utter failure to honour the most basic precept of of their religion – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Pretty fundamental stuff, except that the fundamentalists appear to have long since decided that certain unhelpful ideas can be excised from the bedrock of their faith. While we heard plenty about the former domestic terrorist that Obama knew, no mention was made of the other domestic horror-mongers in the South who murdered and terrorised the black popuiation with impunity. It’s nice to know that even Creationists will indulge in the odd deployment of natural selection when it suits.
As I write this the fireworks are bursting in air for Guy Fawkes – that cheerful bastion of iconoclastic bigotry transformed into harmless clouds of drifting cordite. It sounds like peppered gunfire. And meanwhile in Afghanistan today, an estimated 40 people were killed by real bombs in a US strike. Eleven people were killed in bombings in Baghdad and and Gaza is still a byword for misery. And then there is Congo. The role the United States plays or should play has to be discussed openly and with a maturity that recognises that victory, that glib rallying cry, comes in many guises, one of which may be called defeat. But an honourable defeat, whatever that may be, is worth more than continuing despair and new generations of hatred. The pivot on which we all feel ourselves turning since this morning will, I hope, at least allow this discussion to take place. Instead of building on the fear of others and of ourselves, we need to accept that humility is a virtue that has fallen out of the national lexicon. As a nation, we need to reacquaint ourselves with it.
Ever since I saw Obama’s speech, I haven’t been able to get Jesse Jackson out of my head – the pictures of him so deep in the emotional significance of the sight of the first black President Elect have haunted me all day. The tears that overwhelmed Jackson and swamped his joy in that moment were a reminder of the cost in lives great and small that it took to get here. In California my 17 year old god-daughter danced around the house as the result came in because she and her sister now believe that the world is made anew for them. And although I may more cynically feel that history and experience tells us never to entirely let down our guard, I too have to believe today that now there is a chance for what has been so wrong to be put right.
Already today the knives are out for their own witchhunt and more worrying, to reform what can only be an even more dangerous and desperate right wing movement. As Joan Walsh on Salon commented on one such outburst, it looks like some kind of Onion spoof, except that it’s real. And here in the UK, I also read a splenetic and vitriolic diatribe by non other than Melanie Phillips in the Spectator which, together with her and others’ inexplicable persistence in believing in a John McCain that never existed, shows how hard it’s going to be to achieve the healing cohesion that Obama set out as one of his aims.
I hope that Obama will gather around him the best and most thoughtful minds in the country and beyond, people who have spent the last 21 months, or four years or eight years questioning, harrying, shouting, persuading, arguing on all the topics on which this election hung – war, healthcare, poverty, education – and that he uses their expertise and experience to help him forge a new blueprint for the country. There are sane, measured, intelligent, compassionate and above all positive voices that need to be heard around and beyond the White House and the new administration.
I should say ‘President Elect Obama’, which sounds clumsy and absurdly formal, but it also sounds good, like a couple beginning to savour the flavour and shape of unfamiliar words - my fiancé, my husband, my wife. Because today feels like the beginning of a real relationship, not a dewy-eyed surrender to some messianic figure, but an engagement between adults, on a level of equality. The kind of relationship between govenors and governed in which the compact can be forged on a basis of mutual respect. I don’t know if President Obama will be the kind of great reformer that some groups and commentators have been hoping for since his candidacy began, or how far he wants to fundamentally change the way we are governed. He could start with how the electorial system itself functions.
But changing the way we are governed was what the Bush regime has been working on with their shameless and shameful recasting of even the basic meaning of what it means to be an American citizen, what the Constitution means and their perpetual redefining to their own dwarfish and cynical vision of what America, that most specific and elastic of ideas, can be allowed to encompass. With Sarah Palin’s transparent lack of understanding of even the first principle of the first amendment of the Constitution, which does not in fact enshrine her or any individual’s right not to be criticised, any of the apparently respected and responsible people who thought she would be good enough to be second line to the Presidency should be ashamed of attempting to perpetrate such a fraud on the public. Because at heart, that is what it came down to. Sarah Palin was, and unfortunately is, the worst epitome of a creed that decries generosity of spirit as socialism and has elevated ignorance to the status of a virtue. These pernicious lies must be denied loudly and often.
Throughout the campaign but particularly in its closing stages, the Republicans, and their unprincipled candidate, proved that they would rather sow vicious seeds of division, hatred and fear than allow the citizenry to make their own decisions based on whatever personal criteria were important to them. The Christian Right have made a mockery of the first word of their own movement with their utter failure to honour the most basic precept of of their religion – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Pretty fundamental stuff, except that the fundamentalists appear to have long since decided that certain unhelpful ideas can be excised from the bedrock of their faith. While we heard plenty about the former domestic terrorist that Obama knew, no mention was made of the other domestic horror-mongers in the South who murdered and terrorised the black popuiation with impunity. It’s nice to know that even Creationists will indulge in the odd deployment of natural selection when it suits.
As I write this the fireworks are bursting in air for Guy Fawkes – that cheerful bastion of iconoclastic bigotry transformed into harmless clouds of drifting cordite. It sounds like peppered gunfire. And meanwhile in Afghanistan today, an estimated 40 people were killed by real bombs in a US strike. Eleven people were killed in bombings in Baghdad and and Gaza is still a byword for misery. And then there is Congo. The role the United States plays or should play has to be discussed openly and with a maturity that recognises that victory, that glib rallying cry, comes in many guises, one of which may be called defeat. But an honourable defeat, whatever that may be, is worth more than continuing despair and new generations of hatred. The pivot on which we all feel ourselves turning since this morning will, I hope, at least allow this discussion to take place. Instead of building on the fear of others and of ourselves, we need to accept that humility is a virtue that has fallen out of the national lexicon. As a nation, we need to reacquaint ourselves with it.
Ever since I saw Obama’s speech, I haven’t been able to get Jesse Jackson out of my head – the pictures of him so deep in the emotional significance of the sight of the first black President Elect have haunted me all day. The tears that overwhelmed Jackson and swamped his joy in that moment were a reminder of the cost in lives great and small that it took to get here. In California my 17 year old god-daughter danced around the house as the result came in because she and her sister now believe that the world is made anew for them. And although I may more cynically feel that history and experience tells us never to entirely let down our guard, I too have to believe today that now there is a chance for what has been so wrong to be put right.
Thursday 9 October 2008
I have intended to add some thoughts on the US election many times and then found myself either too overwrought or more usually too tired to follow through on the random notes I tend to make. But thinking about how the second debate went and some articles on the reception of Sarah Palin and just what the likes of Jefferson and Adams would think of the level of political discourse, I went looking around for some historical background. And I've found this, which sort of says it all:
"I sincerely wish... we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in and with such an immense patronage may make great progress in corrupting the public mind and principles. This is a subject with which wisdom and patriotism should be occupied." --Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801.
Bad men and their patronage have got America where it is today, internationally reviled, economically defunct and with the likes of Sarah Palin in the running for Vice-President at the hands of cynical opportunists, intellectually paralysed. Democrats have allowed the Republicans to steal the concept of patriotism and redefine it in their own image, throwing in the flag for good measure to create a religion of nationalism which is as close to idolatry as any secular belief system I can think of. That version of patriotism cannot question what is done in its name, nor seek for explanations about why the country has become a byword for hatred, deceit and selfishness, nor look to the horizon and beyond for some humility as to its place amongst nations. As for wisdom, apparently John McCain is meant to be what passes for it now, according to his campaign.
Jefferson just wouldn't get elected today.
"I sincerely wish... we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in and with such an immense patronage may make great progress in corrupting the public mind and principles. This is a subject with which wisdom and patriotism should be occupied." --Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801.
Bad men and their patronage have got America where it is today, internationally reviled, economically defunct and with the likes of Sarah Palin in the running for Vice-President at the hands of cynical opportunists, intellectually paralysed. Democrats have allowed the Republicans to steal the concept of patriotism and redefine it in their own image, throwing in the flag for good measure to create a religion of nationalism which is as close to idolatry as any secular belief system I can think of. That version of patriotism cannot question what is done in its name, nor seek for explanations about why the country has become a byword for hatred, deceit and selfishness, nor look to the horizon and beyond for some humility as to its place amongst nations. As for wisdom, apparently John McCain is meant to be what passes for it now, according to his campaign.
Jefferson just wouldn't get elected today.
Monday 25 August 2008
So that's that
Saw some of the Olympic closing ceremony. Insanely spectacular in a fairly repetitive way, but:
1. What's the deal with on the UK bus with the gold lame for Leona Lewis, the artfully mixed race violinist-cellist combo in sports kit and David Beckham in his uttelry dull track suit? Bonkers.
2. Nothing staged about the crowds out in the Mall in front of picturesque Buckingham Palace. Nothing at all.
3. What was Placido Domingo doing there?
4. How many toilets do you need to have for 91,000 people in that stadium?
5. Is it not actually possible for Boris Johnson to do up his jacket? And how badly was he longing to shove his hands in his pockets, only to quickly remember that, in front of several billion people, maybe he really shouldn't?
6. Jacques Rogge seemed best able to handle the flag waving bit, though presumably he's had more pratice than most.
7. The Memory Tower - freakily beautiful. Since one of the artistic directors is on record as saying that he doesn't think such things are achievable in the West because of the different work ethic and human rights, does this mean that only totalitarian regimes can do proper spectacle?
8. Were any of the fireworks seeming in and around the stadium actually real?
Ah well. I hardly watched any of it. Slightly scary to think that it's over and now over to London. Saints preserve us.
PS This article by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker from Beijing is great. "And thus the attempt to keep politics out of sport, which is as futile as trying to keep the sweat out of sex, began to falter once more."
1. What's the deal with on the UK bus with the gold lame for Leona Lewis, the artfully mixed race violinist-cellist combo in sports kit and David Beckham in his uttelry dull track suit? Bonkers.
2. Nothing staged about the crowds out in the Mall in front of picturesque Buckingham Palace. Nothing at all.
3. What was Placido Domingo doing there?
4. How many toilets do you need to have for 91,000 people in that stadium?
5. Is it not actually possible for Boris Johnson to do up his jacket? And how badly was he longing to shove his hands in his pockets, only to quickly remember that, in front of several billion people, maybe he really shouldn't?
6. Jacques Rogge seemed best able to handle the flag waving bit, though presumably he's had more pratice than most.
7. The Memory Tower - freakily beautiful. Since one of the artistic directors is on record as saying that he doesn't think such things are achievable in the West because of the different work ethic and human rights, does this mean that only totalitarian regimes can do proper spectacle?
8. Were any of the fireworks seeming in and around the stadium actually real?
Ah well. I hardly watched any of it. Slightly scary to think that it's over and now over to London. Saints preserve us.
PS This article by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker from Beijing is great. "And thus the attempt to keep politics out of sport, which is as futile as trying to keep the sweat out of sex, began to falter once more."
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