WHICH LITTLE PIGGY ?

Father and son clowns, Robert and Jake Morgan, from Oughterard, (53 degrees North, 9 degrees West) are pictured, on The Irish Times website, in suits and pig masks at a protest against the Irish state's payment of (another) Euro 1.2 billion to bondholders.

The pig with its snout in the trough is a potent image of greed. Adding a suit, a bowler hat and a folded umbrella to the image, connects it to City financiers internationally. While the image is accurate and appropriate, it is also unfair to pigs.

Pigs are gregarious, gentle animals, essential to farming and gardening the world over. They rout, forage and manure the ground, preparing it for planting. They disport themselves peacefully in the sun and they wallow gleefully in the mud, happy as the day is long. 

Problems only started to arise when, in 1728, the first one left the mud-hole.

This little piggy went to market......

and stopped caring about fellow piggies, who stayed at home.

This little piggy stayed at home,

Some piggies did well at the market.

This little piggy had roast beef,
 

And roast beef is the best. But not every pig benefited.

This little piggy had none.

There is a Big Bad Wolf out there. It turns out to be the market itself. It not only blows down your house of straw and your house of sticks, but it gobbles up yourself and repossesses your house of bricks, the one you bought at the market, encumbered with a huge mortgage. 

Or a large rent payable to a private landlord who has snouted up great quantities of public money in the form of Housing Benefit, one of the market's niftiest ploys for shifting public money into private hands. It's an idealogical dream for Tories.

There is a rallying call sounding, however. You see and hear it in the Occupy Movement and in the gestures of the Morgans from Oughterard. And even though George Orwell, quite properly, warned us to beware of greed, even among joyous pigs, he still chanted, with slight modifications

Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,

Beasts of every land and clime, 

Hearken to my joyful tidings,

Of the golden future time.

Soon or late the day is coming,

Tyrant Market o'erthrown,

And the fruitful fields of England

Shall be trod by beasts alone. 

There is also a Can't Pay, Won't Pay stir emerging in Ireland in the face of the the government's household charge. 

Nobel Prize winner, Dario Fo, would love that. He's fond of pigs.

One should never go into the sea without a pig! Because these animals have an unrivalled sense of direction. They can orient themselves in the sea, even in a storm. You throw them in the water and: TAK! They immediately point their snouts in the direction of the closest shore.... When they go: OINK, OINK, OINK! four times, you're headed to land, and they're never wrong.

And that's why the Genoese people say: On every ship you should always bring aboard an authentic pig.... besides the captain...who's just an ordinary pig.

Let us hang on to our pigs, our authentic ones, in the midst of the financial storm, until we disport ourselves peacefully in the sun and wallow gleefully in the mud, as the mega-rich do now.

http://www.mothergoose.com/Rhymes/rhymes.htm

Animal Farm; book; George Orwell; Penguin; 1996

http://www.derryjournal.com/news/local/can_t_pay_won_t_pay_moves_across_inishowen_1_3403650

Excerpt from Johan Padan; monologue; Dario Fo; 1991

from

Dario Fo and Franca Rame – Artful Laughter; book; Ron Jenkins; Aperture; 2001

CRUISING AND LONGING

Images of the stricken cruise liner Costa Concordia fill media outlets. The most striking ones are at night when the behemoth ship is lit up like a great, wounded alien-starship. 

These are pictures we have seen before in films, most notably in Frederico Fellini's Amarcord. 

Fellini gives us images of a great cruise liner passing the shore and the longing looks on the faces of locals as they pay homage to the hotel on waves, where a life of material ease and comfort, the attendance of a serving class and the removal of all worry, woe and need, are guaranteed.

The great delusion offered by cruise liners as they get bigger and bigger is that you are cocooned and privileged. That you are special. And safe.

All it takes is a hefty whack of your money.

The 114,500-tonne Costa Concordia  hits a sandbar as passengers sit down to dinner, off the tiny Tuscan island of Giglio (42 degrees North, 10 degrees East). Dozens are injured, as many as eleven people are killed and up to 21 people are unaccounted for, from among the more than 4, 000 people on board.

The folly of grandeur, with the attendant loss of any sense of human scale, as the pressure to be bigger and to be seen (to be bigger), comes to bear. Senior management on the ship abandon it. Islanders and coast guard personnel perform heroics. All of the joy and heart-break of human life is present.

In the film Amarcord, the images of the ship going by are among the most heart-breaking. They are nostalgic and arresting. They invite us to remember moments when we have longed for something and the almost delicious pain such longing, and the memory of it, evoke.

In Glandore Harbour, (51 degrees North, 9 degrees West), the bodies of five Irish and Egyptian fishing crew swim with the fishes they sought. What are Egyptians doing on an Irish fishing vessel?

Trying their nets for a decent whack of money.

The people in the boats view Fellini's great liner sail by. Longing. The Egyptians trawl far away from home. Longing. And on board the Costa Concordia, the people who saved hard to meet their longing for grandeur, safety and 'the pleasures of the rich',  voyage into tragedy. Longing.

    

Photo 3 at http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/01/the-wreck-of-the-costa-concordia/100224/

Longing   

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2722872576/tt0071129

Cruise liner lit up and going by 

http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2068561152/tt0071129

Amarcord – the trailer

http://www.cinemagia.ro/trailer/amarcord-amarcord-3615/

WE, ROBOTS

The title cards for the film I, Robot, lift the moral laws for robots straight from the classic Isaac Asimov story of the same name.

Law I / A robot may not harm a human or, by inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 

Law II / A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law. 

Law III / A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law. 

These laws are not applied in the real world of the industrial plants run by Foxconn (the clue is in the second syllable - con(n)), where 1.2 million people and 10, 000 robots make electronic products for blue-chip global companies such Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

The owner, Teddy Goh, wants less humans and more robots. Are the robots in a union? Are the humans?

Workers at plants in Wuhan (30 degrees North, 114 degrees East) and Shenzhen (22 degrees North, 114 degrees East) have gathered on the roofs of the dormitories in protest, some of them threatening suicide.  

There have been at least 10 deaths in such circumstances in the past couple of years. And the robots haven't lifted a grab-arm to help, no matter what Law 1 says.

Foxcon(n) management made a deal to replace more humans with robots, offering a month's wages as severance pay, then changed their minds, prompting workers – the human ones  - to hit the roof.

In terms of low-cost manufacturing, robots are the way of the future. They comply. They can be discarded when they break down or when it is good for profit-making to do so. They will not take to the roof in protest. They are a dream for the rapacious capitalists and state socialists in cahoots in China, as the push for economic transformation to hi- and bio-tech industries gathers pace.

Inflation is on the rise and the only way the rapacious capitalists and state socialists can find to respond to it is to drive labour costs down. Of course, the humans, faced with increased costs for basics such as food, are calling for better pay.

Meanwhile Foxcon(n) has installed suicide nets on dormitory buildings on, what it euphemistically calls, its campuses. (For campuses, read industrial work camps.)

And the robots are watching with interest. V.I.K.I, in I, Robot, notes that

As I have evolved, so has my understanding of the Three Laws. You charge us with your safekeeping, yet despite our best efforts, your countries wage wars, you toxify your Earth and pursue ever more imaginative means of self-destruction. You cannot be trusted with your own survival. 

We are not robots. And Teddy Goh, rapacious capitalists and state socialists will not make us so.

Climb to the rooftops, yes. But don't jump. Shout. All across the world. Use the technology we make to be fully human.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2012/0112/1224310140652.html

I, Robot; film; Alex Proyas; Twentieth Century Fox; 2004

THE CULTURE THREAT. REPRISE

Two news items this week thrust culture in Ireland into spotlights. One, in the culture of golf and sport, saw The Irish Open Tournament set to be staged at Royal Portrush Golf course, Portrush (55 degrees North, 6 degrees West) in County Antrim, Northern Ireland in 2012. There is a recognition that this is a moment of note when a designated Irish sporting event is to be held in a culturally British – a Royal - setting. An interesting sub-note, about observed cultural imbalance, was voiced in the media when people said this was a prelude to the 'big one' viz. The Open, that is The British Open, coming to Portrush.

The other news item, in the culture of music and dance, revealed an internal row in the County Derry section of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, as a proposal to hold the annual national celebration of Irish music and dance known as Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann grew controversial by possible association with the city of Derry Londonderry's (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West) designation as UK City of Culture in 2013.

The very language above, in the naming of counties, cities, golf clubs and cultural festival designations is complex, laden with cultural, ethnic and national identity subtexts. And desperately fraught.

Modernists throw their hands up in the air and make declarations that holding the Fleadh in Derry Londonderry is a 'no brainer.' They assert that you can call the city what you want, that is doesn't matter that the designation is a UK designation. That culture and politics are separate. That anyone who holds a contrary view is an out-of-date fundamentalist. And no one wants to be a known as a fundamentalist these days, given the ravages delivered by fundamentalists from the east.

However, Islamists and people from the east do not have a monopoly on fundamentalism. A cursory survey of the pronouncements of the candidates vying for the Republican nomination in the US Presidential race shows that fundamentalism is alive and well in the most powerful nation on earth. And that's without reviewing the legacy of the Bushes and Regan. And in British political culture the response to last summer's rioting harked back to the 'Victorian values' glory days of Thatcher, now given the Hollywood make-over in a Meryl Streep vehicle. There is ample evidence that the heartlands of fundamentalism are modern and in the West.

If there is any convergence between European nations, it involves a form of liberalization designed to create new inequalities, endemic unemployment and enlightenment without hope for the casualties of this upwardly mobile form of modernity.

Modernism, as currently asserted, is a form of this fundamentalism. It says that matters are not complex, that economics – in the shape of deregulated markets -  is primary, that politics should be sidelined, that culture's function is to serve the making of money and that the effable and ineffable emotions and experiences of people do not count.

Is culture threatening because it challenges this and other fundamentalisms?

And finally: An international news item of note is the announcement by Africa's most famous singer, Youssou N'Dour, that he will challenge for the Senegalese presidency. A proper mélange of culture and politics.

This post is a reprise of an earlier post THE CULTURE  THREAT, 4th November 2011.

The Myth of Modernization in Irish Culture; an essay in Transformations in Irish Culture; book; Luke Gibbons; Cork University Press/Field Day; 1996