FIXED LAWS OF SUFFERING AS TWO STATES

Palestine becomes a non-member, observer state in the United Nations by an overwhelming majority of 138 'Yes' votes to nine 'No' votes and 41 abstentions.

Ireland votes for the resolution. Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore says

Ireland has long championed the cause of Palestinian statehood, as well as the vital importance for the entire Middle East region of a comprehensive peace settlement based on two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.

Two states? Peace? Security? Is that possible?

Israeli writer Amos Oz acknowledges it is complex.

It is the only possible solution. There is no other possible solution. And I would say more than that. Down below, the majority of Israeli Jews and the majority of Palestinian Arabs know that at the end of the day there will be two states. Are they happy about it? No, they are not. Will they be dancing in the streets in Israel and in Palestine when the two-state solution is implemented? No, they will not. 

We suffer the gods to determine our futures by fixed laws of unhappiness, fear and suffering?

For it was Zeus who set

men on the path to wisdom

when he decreed the fixed 

law that suffering

alone shall be their teacher.

The world looks on. Askance.

Votes at the UN. Marches and protests. Purchases and boycotts. Rockets and missiles.

The two states are the front-line of our times. 

The world is troubled

with a lack of looking.

Into the future?

I urge my people to follow and revere

neither tyranny nor anarchy,

and to hold fear close, never to cast it out

entirely from the city. For what man 

who feels no fear is able to be just?

Two states: the state of fear and the state of justice?

A poet's conundrum. We reach for Fadwa Tuqan.

When the Tree rises up, the branches

shall flourish green and fresh in the sun

the laughter of the Tree shall leaf

beneath the sun

and birds shall return

Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.

The birds shall return.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1130/breaking2.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/feb/14/amos-oz-interview

Agamemnon: stage play; Aeschylus; line 200 (chorus); translated by Alan Shapiro and Peter Burian; Oxford University Press; Oxford; 2004

Images (Cyprus 1961); poem; George Tardios; The Way to Write; book; John Fairfax and John Moat; St. Martin's Press; New York; 1981

Eumenides: stage play; Aeschylus; line 813; translated by Alan Shapiro and Peter Burian; Oxford University Press; Oxford; 2004

The Deluge and the Tree; poem; Fadwa Tuqan;

http://www.sakakini.org/literature/ftuqan.htm

www.facebook.com/DaveDuggan/Writer

POPPY PRESSURE

Men marched asleep. 

Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod.  

All went lame, all blind; 

James McClean (23) is a well-paid, professional soccer player, earning his living in The English Premiership, as an employee of Sunderland (54 degrees North, 1 degree West) Association Football Club. On Saturday last, the majority of his professional colleagues wore special team shirts, their working uniforms as designated by their employers, with a red poppy embedded on the front.

The red poppy is a symbol promoted by The Royal British Legion to coincide with Remembrance Sunday in early November to honour the members of The British Armed Forces who were killed in wars and conflicts in the 20th century and today. The symbol evokes particular memories of the horrors of World War 1 French and Belgian battlefields, on which blood-red poppies flourish.

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

James McClean chose not to wear the special shirt. His employers issued a statement affirming his right to make this choice.

An outpouring of vitriol directed against the soccer player followed, in print, broadcast and, in particular, social media.

James McClean grew up in the Creggan Estate in Derry Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West). It is a locale of mass unemployment and social deprivation all through its fifty plus years of existence. It is a site of great blood-letting in the period from the mid-nineteen sixties to the mid-nineteen nineties during which the British state, as represented by the army and the police force, engaged in violent conflict with residents of the estate, the majority of whom are Irish nationalists and a number of whom support the Irish Republican Army (IRA), in its various manifestations.

James McClean went to school in the estate, showed early athletic promise, excelled and developed in amateur ranks and went on to star for his city's professional team, Derry City Football Club, before making the dream move to Sunderland AFC. His life's journey so far is the classic fable of many young men from housing estates such as Creggan, who achieve economic salvation through their feet (footballers) or their fists (boxers).

The particular circumstances of James McClean's home place in the context of wars involving the British Army makes the wearing of a poppy a complex choice for him. Any pragmatic approach can only work if James McClean's sophisticated negotiation of his new circumstances in relation to his parents' circumstances are embedded in the complexities of that home place.

He is from streets where the British Army, as well as losing members to the IRA, perpetrated numerous killings.

Would you wear a poppy at your work if it meant your parents' home getting attacked?

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues

Ironically young men like James McClean are the very victims of the immolations in wars that the wearing of the poppy symbol seeks to recall to mind. Had James McClean grown up in Sunderland, he might now be in military rather than in sporting uniform, killing and being killed in Afghanistan.

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

He is better off in the red and white striped uniform of Sunderland AFC, blazing down the left wing, swinging over fierce crosses, exciting fans who have taken James McClean to their hearts. Among them are many who served in the British Army or who have ancestors and relatives who served. They understand the complexity of these matters and know only to well that no one should be under pressure to do anything, including wearing a poppy.

The lesson to be learned is that freedom of choice only functions if a complex network of legal, educational, ethical, economic and other conditions is present as the invisible background to the exercise of our freedom.

Dulce et Decorum Est: poem; Wilfred Owen; from Scanning the Century; The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Poetry; book; Peter Forbes (ed.); Penguin; London; 2000

Why Obama is more than Bush with a human face: article; Slavoj Zizek; The Guardian; London; 13.11.2012 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/13/obama-ground-floor-thinking?INTCMP=SRCH

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

WAR, BY ALL MEANS, WAR

Look at that, gentlemen. Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavour shrink to insignificance. 

So speaks Patton, the US general, in the film of the same name. As to Patton, the one hundred year old family construction company from the town of Ballymena (54 degrees North, 6 degrees West), news of moves into receivership, with over 200 persons being made redundant, confirms the truth of the belligerent general's remark.

War is everywhere. In the week the construction company collapses, the British Prime Minister is in The Gulf selling weapons of mass destruction to despotic regimes.

The UK and the world economy are on a permanent war footing.

We do believe countries have a right to defend themselves. And we do believe Britain has important defence industries that employ over 300,000 people and so that sort of business is completely legitimate and right.

The Patton family business survived the Troubles (military war) but now collapses in the recession (economic war.) Such are the perils of globalisation. Would Patton the company be thriving if, instead of building hospitals, schools and houses, it built war jets?

Or speculated with hedge funds and currencies, as banks do? Banks are globalised, so anything banks do anywhere, impacts everywhere, including in the north-east of Ireland.

This is the home region for Ulster-Scots people, many of who's ancestors became US soldiers and presidents. Seventeen of the 44 presidents of the USA can be traced back to sources in the north-east of Ireland, from among 18th and 19th century emigrants.

Will new emigrants leave the region now, perhaps to America, more likely to Australia, and forge new political dynasties there?

Meanwhile, global companies generate wealth using an enslaved class of persons in China. These 21st century slaves experience Modernity as success measured by the possession of an iPad and a car. 

There is a war under-way. A relentless war.

The Northern Ireland Executive announces a new economic initiative to respond to this war. It includes relief on parking charges; schemes for public work by young and long-term unemployed. Small arms? Big guns boom elsewhere.

All parties in The Northern Ireland Executive are in favour of a preferential rate of corporation tax, to lure global companies to the region as Foreign Direct Investment.

Sub-contractors to Patton lose jobs/money/work and face closure, including suppliers of sand and gravel. In no time at all.

..... in the time it took a dolly to travel

along its little track

to the point where two movie stars' heads

had come together smackety-smack

and their kiss filled the whole screen,

those two great towers directly across the road 

at Moy Sand and Gravel

had already washed, at least once, what had flowed 

or been dredged from Blackwater's bed

Following on the recent disembowelling of the FG Wilson engineering plants in the north-east region of Ireland (see Breathingwithalimp: THE WRATH OF CATS; 5/10/2012), the impact of globalisation on regional family firms is evidently tumultuous. 

Are efforts under-way to dismantle regional, productive, economic activity, involving a nexus of indigenous political and economic forces and external economic predators? 

There are casualties. Hypocrisy. Blood. Gore. Slaves. Victims.

The Prime Minister today embarked on a three day visit to the Middle East, as fears grow in the region about Iran's nuclear programme. During the short trip, he hopes to help sell as many as 100 Typhoon jets to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman. It is highly unusual for a Prime Minister to be so open about the need to win defence contracts.

What further grimness may yet be dredged from the black waters of economic war?

Patton: film; Franklin J. Shaffner; Twentieth Century Fox; Los Angeles; 1970

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066206/quotes

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9655254/David-Cameron-defends-legitimate-arms-deals-during-Gulf-states-tour.html

Moy Sand and Gravel: book; Paul Muldoon; Faber and Faber; London 2002

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

YORK OR ORLEANS?

Which 'New' is preferable? New York (40 degrees North, 74 degrees West) or New Orleans (29 degrees North, 90 degrees West)? The Anglo-Dutch or the Anglo-French; the indigenous peoples being long driven out and down by tides of colonialism and immigration?

Which hurricane is preferable?

Sandy or Katrina? 

And which era?

The Obama or the Bush?

If it keeps on rainin, levees goin to break,

If it keeps on rainin, levees goin to break,

When the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay.

So begins the month of the dead, Samhain in Irish. 

Over forty die as Hurricane Sandy lashes the east coast of the United States of America. 

Over 1 800 die in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Survival depends on where you live and who you are, even on the colour of your skin.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
 Lord, 

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan

The Obama era surges from a wave of hope to a deluge of disappointment, which releases a tsunami of Romney-reaction. 

Is this the dawn of a new Bush era, now close within Romney's grasp?

The deluge mounts and the levee breaks. The citizen stands sodden and bereft, voting slip in hand, up to the neck in a nightmare of hanging chads.

How to vote now?

Cryin wont help you, prayin wont do you no good,

Now, cryin wont help you, prayin wont do you no good,

When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.

The storm is dark. The home is threatened. The earth foregoes its leisures and wreaks its wrath.

How to cast that petty, crucial cast into the seas of power and influence?

Upon the leisures of the earth the whole home is lifted before the approach of darkness as a boat 

The citizen asks 'is it safer to face the floods and storms of existence in a new Bush era or in an extended Obama era?'

All last night sat on the levee and moaned,

All last night sat on the levee and moaned

The raging torrents of politics clash and roar, then wash over the citizen. 

There is no hope for civilisation in government by idolised single individuals.

The choices are vital, yet limited. Can change be wrought from a maelstrom?

When the Levee Breaks: song; Led Zeppelin version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbrjRKB586s

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: book; James Agee and Walker Evans; Peter Owen Limited; London; 1965

Everybody's Political What's What: book; George Bernard Shaw; Constable and Company; London; 1944

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter