THE CONTINUING DELUGE

The votes are cast. The seven will become one and Ireland will have a new President. The campaign got dirty at the end as various occurrences in the pasts of the lead candidates flowed in complex torrents in the press and on the television. 

Once, for a dare, 

He filled his heart-shaped swimming pool 

With bank notes, high denomination, 

And fed a pound of caviar to his dog. 

The dog was sick; a chartered plane 

Flew in a replacement for the Persian rug.

Eighteen people were evacuated by boat from their homes in the village of Beragh, County Tyrone (54 degrees north, 7 degrees West) as a river burst its banks. Bailing out the banks (financial, not aqueous) flooded the political boats with Euro zone summits. 

He made a billion yen 

Leap from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, 

Turn somersaults through Brussels, 

New York, Sofia and Johannesburg. 

It cracked the bullion market open wide. 

An off-duty Garda officer was swept away in Wicklow (52 degrees North, 6 degrees West). A nurse was inundated in Dublin (53 degrees North, 6 degrees West). 

Some of them were dreamers 

And some of them were fools 

Who were making plans and thinking of the future 

Citizens drown and NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency in Ireland, agreed incentives, including salaries of  200, 000 euros a year, to encourage property developers to make debt repayments. 

Bailing out banks does not bring liquidity for citizens.

Some of them were angry 

At the way the earth was abused 

By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power 

Parliamentarians in Italy engaged in fisticuffs in a battle for the financial lifeboats. They are going down perhaps, but fighting, even among themselves. 

Flood waters rose in Bangkok (13 degrees North, 100 degrees West). The EU appealed to China for a bail-out. The Tories in London (51 degrees North, 0 degrees East) re-launched their own canoes in Europe.

Water is a god 

That doles its favours by the drop, 

And waiting is a way of life. 

The clocks go back in Ireland.

Governments fell, coalitions cracked 

Insurrection raised its bloody flag 

From north to south. 

Round the decay of that colossal wreck, 

boundless and bare, 

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Before the Deluge; song lyric; Jackson Brown; 1979

After the Deluge; poem; Wole Soyinka; The Guardian; 2002

Ozymandias; poem; Percy Bysshe Shelly; 1792-1822

KILLING GADDAFI

Hallelujah!

It works.

We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right up their own ass

And out their fucking ears.

With Gaddafi dead the opening lines of Harold Pinter's 1991 poem American Football – A reflection on the Gulf War sound in corporate boardrooms across the globe, echo in Western government cabinet rooms and roar through the corridors of NATO and the marketing departments of arms manufacturers worldwide.

Whether you're profiting from  jet bombers or hand guns, it's a good time to be an arms' manufacturer. Wars are raging across the globe. Violence is cool and appropriate. Whether it is 'our' violence delivered by machines acting at a distance, sometimes even without human direct operation as in drones in Afghanistan, or 'their' violence often delivered by small arms or bodies, close up and deadly, there's money to be made.

Under the current world order, war is the prelude to a reconstruction programme that feeds global trade and delivers profits to global, usually  Western based, corporations.  China is in on the act too, especially in Africa.

It works.

We blew the shit out of them.

They suffocated in their own shit.

Hallelujah!

Praise the Lord for all good things.

The jingoism in the London (51 degrees North, 0 degrees West) press following the killing of Gaddafi centres on revenge. The atrocity of the Lockerbie passenger jet bombing and the outrages perpetrated by the IRA using munitions supplied by the Gaddafi regime are cited.

We blew them into fucking shit.

They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

The combination of Christian triumphalism and shit is apposite. Images of Gaddafi's body and the waste pipe in which he was found appear on websites, social media networks and newspapers across the globe.

We blew their balls into shards of dust, 

Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

'Our' violence is good. 'Their' violence is bad. Even though 'we' sold them the weapons.

This is Pinteresque. The poems and the plays. The handgun and the jet.

The summary executions of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and now Gaddafi save 'us' from facing the complex relationships 'our' governments', secret service agencies, corporations and military enjoy with regimes and other political entities 'we' seek to profit from but not get close to. 

Demonisation and racism play a part in keeping 'us' mute in the face of hypocrisy, duplicity, self-serving cant and death-dealing on a global scale.

Keep us, in another memorable phrase from Pinter's poetry, 'playing cricket in the dark.'

Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-1998; Harold Pinter; Faber; 1998

THE DAWKINS' SCHOOL DELUSION

Richard Dawkins, the strident atheist, advocates for and teaches at a new private school, called The New College of Humanities, offering degrees via the University of London (51 degrees North, 0 degrees West). The list of teaching and visiting professors is a who's who of elite academics from elite international academies. The sell is to high-flyers and the offer is commercial and philanthropic.

The New College of Humanities website says: 

NCH is open to all students of high potential, from any background. The generous NCH scholarship fund and the associated Trust ensure that finance should not be a barrier to any UK student of high ability who wants to apply to the College.

The pitch is straight from the film An Education, where the innocent lower middle class girl, Jenny Mellor, with the bright future ahead of her if she only complies, is side-tracked by a trio of uneducated, philistine spivs, living on their wits, including a thief, a blond airhead and a near-paedophile. 

Jenny Mellor has a lucky escape and pleads to be let back on track. Having learnt her lesson, she says : The life I want, there is no short-cut. 

Success and the happy life only come with hard work. Where? At Oxford. Or The New College of Humanities.

Dawkins' trumpeting of this college pegs him and his colleagues in the anti-state, anti-community tradition which underpins the elitism they cherish. All along the delusion Dawkins offers is that his interests are in freedom and education. Religion is the enemy, people of faith (the vast majority of people in the world) are dangerous, Islam and certain Muslims are particularly dangerous. Why? Because they don't comply.

Whatever about the truth of Dawkins' assertions regarding the existence of God, there can be no doubting his belief in an elitist view of education and his capacity for strident battering of public spaces and communities, not only in faith and non-faith settings, but also in education. 

The over-riding impression given by his public work is that the majority is not worthy, because people are stupid. And haven't been to Oxford. Or the 21st Century version, The New College of Humanities.

Dawkins' desire is to be a guru. A leader, basking in the chant 

'Dawkins is our Leader! We are easily led!'

to the tune of 'We shall not be moved!'

That is his tragedy. He is D'amville in Tourneur's play The Atheist's Tragedy when he posits to his companion Borachio:

Borachio, thou art read

In Nature and her large philosophy.

Observ'st thou not the very self same course

Of revolution both in man and beast?

and

Let all men lose, so I increase my gain.

I have no feeling of another's pain.

An Education: film; Lone Scherfig; BBC Films; 2009

The Atheist's Tragedy: stage play; Cyril Torneur; 1611

WHITHER PALESTINE NOW?

The attempt by Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to open another, diplomatic front at the UN in the tense and often violent stand-off with the state of Israel has come and gone.

Outsiders predicted mass upheaval, great cataclysms and castigated the move as dangerous and futile. It came of desperation as the occupation and the repression by the state of Israel intensifies.  

A further 1100 new settler housing units were announced in the illegally occupied East Jerusalem (31 degrees North, 35 degrees East) simultaneously with the debates in the UN.

The initiative at the UN has been parked and the major players, notably the US, have advised that face-to-face bi-partisan talks should get under-way again and be framed by targets and deadlines. 

There is a cogency to the analysis that without such direct negotiations no peaceful outcomes can be achieved. Evidence from Ireland and elsewhere points to that. 

There is also evidence that direct, singular action by entities can lead to new outcomes. Kosovo is a case in point. Unilateral action, supported by the US and NATO, led to a new state and, currently, stable if fragile, relations with other states in the region, notably Serbia and Montenegro. 

That the US and other western powers did not support the non-violent unilateral diplomatic action by Palestine points to dangers in the bi-lateral approach being advocated. In terms of both Palestine and the state of Israel, the bi-lateral approach, proven to be unsuccessful for years, is based on the assumption that the conflict is symmetrical, a conflict between equals. 

It blatantly is not, as evidenced by many measures, including range and degree of military capacity, degree of violence delivered, material wealth, and power of strategic alliances. All are heavily weighted on the side of the state of Israel. There is also a mass of UN resolutions pointing to the illegality of the actions of the state.

Whither Palestine then?

In Orna Akad's play Clouds on a Mountain Road, a Palestinian poet and a suicide bomber debate the way forward.

Fadwa: We mustn't give up! Mustn't destroy the paths towards 

                dialogue, even if this dialogue leads to nothing…

Inshirah: That's what you say. That's not what you write in your      

                poems.

'We've left our sticks and stones far behind. Our honor      

                 has been trampled, our spirit dispossessed, our lands 

                stolen long ago, and the roof over our heads demolished. 

               So what have we left? What have we besides this heap of 

               flesh and bone?'

Fadwa: God forbid! God forbid! It's forbidden, it's a violation of 

               any religion.

Inshirah: The world is deaf to our trouble. We don't exist for 

                anyone.

  

On the ground within Israel, Zochrot, an NGO whose goal is to introduce the Palestinian Nakba to the Israeli-Jewish public in Hebrew, cites The Nakba as the disaster of the Palestinian people: the destruction of the villages and cities, the killing, the expulsion, the erasure of Palestinian culture. And further cites the Nakba as the story of the Jews who live in Israel, who enjoy the privileges of being the ‘winners.’

On Saturday, July 2nd, 2011, Zochrot held an open tour in the Galilee village of al-Birwa (32 degrees North, 35 degrees East), attacked and destroyed in 1948.

Initiatives such as these underpin moves to peaceful outcomes. Unilateral and bi-lateral moves will happen at macro levels but it will be in the fields and towns, among the peoples, the 'losers' and the 'winners', in artistic and community dialogues, that peace is built, determining future paths taken by Palestine.

Clouds on a Mountain Road; stage-play; Orna Akad; 2004

http://www.zochrot.org/en/menu/זוכרות/מי-אנחנו

SEVEN MAGNIFICENT PRESIDENTS FOR IRELAND

Seven magnificent candidates are confirmed for the electoral contest to find the next President of Ireland. Each one bears a myth, a story of themselves drawn from their pasts, manifest in their presents and projected into their futures.

Each myth is the personal story they  tell about themselves in order to describe themselves to themselves and to others. These myths are not lies or occlusions, but they are representations of matters, rather than the matters themselves. They present mythic figures, worthy and heroic enough for high office.

No less an heroic figure than the actor Charles Bronson, playing the character of O'Reilly in the film The Magnificent Seven, advises children (the rest of us?):  

Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery. That's why I never even started anything like that... that's why I never will. 

The varieties of heroism in O' Reilly's speech are reflected in the collective acts of symbolic narration, the myths, each of the presidential candidate bears. And beg the question: do we need heroes and their myths?

Mary Davis advances a myth of national renewal, championing fairness and the restoration self-confidence, by challenging the stigmas surrounding marginalised people.  

Sean Gallagher presents a myth of community, honesty, integrity and hard work, in a presidency that beats with enterprise at its heart. 

Michael D. Higgins envisions a myth of inclusive citizenship, worthy of a real Republic, that is liberal, respectful and internationalist. 

Gay Mitchell promulgates the myth of pro-business government, stressing rights, responsibilities, enterprise and social justice. 

Martin McGuinness offers the myth of gunman turned peace-maker,  independent of Government, promoting an ethos of equality and inclusion and recognising civic participation.

David Norris, the first openly gay candidate, lays out a myth of human rights made central to the presidency.

Dana Rosemary Scallon tells the myth of peace, Christian family values and respect for life. 

Philosopher Richard Kearney opines that 

Every mythology implies a conflict of interpretation. And this conflict is, in the final analysis, an ethical one.

We – observers, citizens, voters – are caught in the middle of the electoral crossfire, together with Charles Bronson.

Yes, that’s right, Bernardo O’Reilly. Mexican on one side, Irish on the other, me caught in the middle.

O'Reilly dies, saving children, caught in lethal crossfire. But the myth lives on. Charles Bronson for president then?

Myth and the Critique of Ideology; Navigations; Richard Kearney; The Lilliput Press; 2006

The Magnificent Seven; film; The Mirisch Company;1960