MCLAUGHLINS 100 BY DAVE DUGGAN: FILM OF A LIVE THEATRE EVENT

BLOGPOST SPECIAL: FILM OF A LIVE THEATRE EVENT

https://vimeo.com/80373323

McLaughlins 100 by Dave Duggan is the film of a site-specific theatre event, created for McLaughlins Hardware shop, William Street, Derry, to celebrate100 years of the family business.

Film production by Dave Duggan and Dearcán Media.

McLaughlins 100 by Dave Duggan, produced by Fiona McGonagle (Bluebell Arts Project) and supported by Arts Council of Northern Ireland Small Grants Programme.

Watch it 'live' (depending on how good your broadband is) or download and save it. 

Treat it like butter, melting on toast – spread it.

BETTING ON THE NEXT TYPHOON

Today, betting on the lives of strangers is no longer an isolated parlour game but a major industry.

Following the devastation wrought by Typhoon Haiyan in The Philippines and the increasing likelihood of further such catastrophic storms, will the peddlers in the death-prediction industry, known as futures, now turn their attentions to such events as a further instance of the intrusion of market-orientated thinking into public life?

When markets in death become familiar and routine, the moral opprobrium is not easy to retain.

There already exists a huge international market in financial products based on predicting - and hoping for - the death of individuals. Insurance, as we experience it, began in the London Coffee house Lloyds when wealthy ship owners sought to cover their risks, but then also sought to make money by gambling on the likely success of a ship returning to port.

As today's massive market in life and death attests, the hard-fought efforts to disentangle insurance from gambling has come undone.

The counter-impulse among people is the solidarity that is evoked by cataclysms such as Typhoon Haiyan.

Altruism, generosity and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise.

The increasing penetration of market-orientated thinking and practice into our daily lives is unfair and corrupt. It requires opposition, in order to avoid further public costs in the pursuit of private profit.

One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. To renew our public life we need to exercise them more strenuously.

As often is the case, Shakespeare had a metaphorical handle on this threat some time ago.

I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds 


Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen 


The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam, 


To be exalted with the threatening clouds: 


But never till to-night, never till now,

Did I go through a tempest dropping fire. 


Either there is a civil strife in heaven, 


Or else the world, too saucy with the gods, 


Incenses them to send destruction.

The destruction is sent to our social life. The civil strife is caused by an overpowering market-orientated and financial discourse that sells itself as neutral, while it is traducing public morals and damning citizens to poverty and death.

While gambling on their deaths.

What Money Can't Buy - The Moral Limits of Markets: Michael Sandel; book; Allen Lane; London; 2012

Julius Caesar: William Shakespeare; play; London; 1599

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PLAYING DICE OR SPINNING COINS?

A Simon Carswell front-page story in The Irish Times, dated 17^th October 2013, is accompanied by a photograph of religious leaders, holding books, appearing to lay hands on a government building. The leaders are seen side-ways on. Some of them have their eyes closed.

The government building, sitting back across a lawn, is tall and white, with lofty towers, rows of columns and lighted galleries. It is not in Kabul, Lahore or Riyadh. It is in Washington. It is The Capitol.

The religious leaders, women and men, one of then in a Salvation Army uniform, others in suits, are attempting to influence the deliberations of the politicians inside the building, as they wrestle with a debate about the budget for the country. At the core of this debate is a thorough-going, ideological difference of opinion on how a very wealthy country covers the costs of health care for its citizens.

Most of the politicians at loggerheads hold strongly-held religious views, mainly Christian. Many of them end speeches with phrases invoking their God's name and seeking their God's blessing on their country and their fellows.

The debate inside The Capitol is rancorous.

The pressing of the hands of religious leaders towards the building, as seen in the press photo by Doug Mills of The New York Times, gives the impression that the religious leaders are laying hands on the building in order to influence the politicians in their debate so that they might arrive at an agreement. They wish to end the political logjam, which they know is further alienating the political class from the general population.

Is God working in mysterious ways here?

There are strong links, in many societies, between political and religious professionals. These links are rooted in ancient history and they tighten and loosen over time. A sense of loosening of such links exists in Ireland, at present. They remain taut in America and Iran, two countries on the brink of a major rapprochement on the issue of nuclear weapons.

Is God working in mysterious ways here also?

The dynamic, tensile relationship between politics and religion, two of the major stories we tell ourselves, is described in Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka's Reith Lecture (2004) observation that politics and religion are two sides of the spinning coin of power.

Is God spinning this coin?

Politics and religion are two encyclopaedia of mythical discourse and narrative we use to explain ourselves to ourselves; to operate the world in various favours as we construct them; to create morality and to reconcile ourselves to mortality.

The press photo shows religion attempting to spin the coin of power by giving politics a hand.

Is God playing dice by tossing coins?

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/us-government-shutdown-ends-as-senate-strikes-deal-to-avert-debt-crisis-1.1563511

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2004/lecturer.shtml

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