WATCHING 12 YEARS A SLAVE

The watcher sees the film begin with a failed act of writing. All through the film, there are attempts at writing; attempts at getting letters out. Words are vital in the film.

Texts from the Bible are read by a benevolent slave-owner as a black woman howls in desperation. The watcher has seen her separated from her children at a slave auction. The slave-owner's wife, a white woman in full Sunday best, says she cannot abide such depression. The black woman is dragged away.

The watcher senses that these scenes of normalised and ideologically-ratified acts of brutality are among the best in the film.

They add to the sustained sense of the normalisation of slavery, well pictured in the scene of the man keeping himself alive by tip-tapping his toes in the mud, as he hangs by the neck from the bough of a tree in a beautiful pastoral setting.

His fellow slaves come out of their shacks and go about a range of small domestic tasks. They are blinded by the terrifying awfulness in front of them. By its normality. A white overseer, a pistol on his hip, stands on the verandah of the plantation house and scowls. A young black woman, frightened yet brave, comes to the hanging man and gives him a drink of water. The slave owner's wife watches from the house. She does not read the Bible to the hanging man.

The watcher has an acute sense of the powerlessness of the slaves and of their learned helplessness. Their victimhood. It will take more than a century for Martin Luther King, Malcolm X or Angela Davis to arrive.

When Obama was elected president, a prisoner said “one black man in the White House doesn’t make up for one million black men in the Big House.”

The watcher sees that the hanging man is not an agent of his own emancipation. The hanging man is brutalised, duped, beaten, traduced. He survives by keeping his head down. The systemic overwhelm that is the slave economy is such that an individual, even an articulate and educated one such as the hanging man, can do nothing but acquiesce and collude in his own debasement. This is authentically shown.

The watcher wonders if this harsh lesson is the kernel of the film and wonders what hope do the film-makers offer us.

Two nights later, the traffickers turned up at Abdu’s house. They dragged him from his bed by his hair, took him out into the street, and hacked his body to pieces with an axe as he howled.

“The traffickers told his wife they would kill us too,” Adul says. But the villagers refused to be cowed. They set up a neighbourhood watch scheme, to track the traffickers: “We work as a watchdog at night. Who is trafficking? How many girls are being taken? As soon as something is spotted, we are alerted.”

The watcher sees one scene of genuine dramatic conflict. It occurs between the brutal slave owner and the travelling Canadian wood worker. Something of a protagonist-antagonist tension is present as two white men foreshadow the great cataclysm of war that will come to the region in the 1860s, a war ostensibly about freedom, but actually about re-structuring a major economy.

Salvation, as a manifestation of power, is in the hands of the whites. The watcher sees the Canadian wood-worker get a letter through. The watcher sees a shop-keeper friend take the hanging man away from slavery in a scene that is brisk and deflating.

The hanging man returns to his home, where his family welcome him in an emotional final scene. Their dress and furnishings give the watcher the impression that the hanging man's absence has not badly affected them materially.

The watcher knows that trafficking and slavery are as normal in the world today as they were in Georgia in the 1850s.

In the US, the average age of trafficked girls is 12–14 years but growing younger, and boys are 11-13 yrs. (US Health and Human Services)

An estimated 300,000 American youths are at risk of commercial sexual exploitation.(FBI)

The watcher reads the end notes on the screen, which detail the failed efforts of the hanging man to get justice in the courts. The watcher wonders might this have made a more telling film.

The watcher leaves the cinema wondering if Django Unchained, while totally inauthentic, might be a better - more stirring? - film about slavery and emancipation.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intense social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/?ref_=ttqt_qt_tt

http://slaverytoday.org/slaverybites/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/inside-the-slave-trade-795307.html

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5863103.Angela_Y_Davis

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853728/?ref_=nv_sr_1

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

WATCHING AMERICAN HUSTLE

People believe what they want to believe.

America is everywhere. Far away and close at hand. A taxi ride to a complex that houses the American dream. The cultural storm centre we all whizz around. The hustle. The con.

The watcher takes the short taxi ride to a popular culture vortex in a light-industrial zone where quick-fit sheds encase a plethora of entertainments: an arcade of play machines; a ten-pin bowling alley; a restaurant; a diner, where drinks are regular or large, never small or irregular; and a seven screen cinema.

America is immersive, loud, brash and colourful.

American Hustle is showing on Screen 4.

The watcher alights from the taxi and readies for bamboozlement.

The watcher sees a fetishised 1978. American Hustle is a nexus of necessity, survival, corruption amidst biff/bash politics and religion.

Always take a favour over money. I think Jesus said that as well.

There are leggy women with canyon-like cleavages, a bald man with a comb-over, wigs and curlers galore and an era-defining soundtrack.

The watcher sees Roslyn Rosenfeld, played expertly by Jennifer Lawrence, collapse into the arms of a Mafia mobster and sob that she can't handle change. She speaks the American fear.

The watcher is not surprised when this charming American hustler moves to Miami, to join her new mobster lover. As a reader of Elmore Leonard's glorious crime novels, the watcher knows this Miami.

Flowers! But with garbage.

The watcher and the entire audience laugh during the stand-out scene involving a science oven (microwave) and Roslyn Rosenfeld's Mametesque riff.

Bring something into this house that's gonna take all the nutrition out of our food and then light our house on fire? Thank God for me.

The watcher is in the film. The watcher is in America and in the hustle. America and the hustle are everywhere.

Did you ever have to find a way to survive and you knew your choices were bad, but you had to survive?

Survival is a life's work.

Those who survive in the arts in Ireland are tough, intelligent, highly organised and relentlessly entrepreneurial.

The watcher leaves the complex and climbs into another taxi, which pulls out of the parking rank as iRadio plays

I've been through the desert on a horse with no name,

It felt good to be out of the rain.

America.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1800241/?ref_=nv_sr_1

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/the-idea-that-art-and-culture-are-about-rebranding-is-an-insult-to-artists-1.1646155

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/a/america/a+horse+with+no+name_20007105.html

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MANDELA WIRED TO THE MOON IN TRANSLATION

Standing alongside world dignitaries, including Barack Obama, was a rounded black man in formal attire, an interpreter for the deaf and mute, translating the service into sign language. Those versed in sign language gradually became aware that something strange was going on: the man was a fake; he was making up his own signs; he was flapping his hands around, but there was no meaning in it.

Nelson Mandela, country lad, lawyer, freedom fighter, amateur boxer, womaniser, political prisoner, President, rugby supporter and peace celeb becomes a saint and goes to the Moon on a Chinese space-ship.

This version of events is no more meaningless than the reports on television in which a part-filled football stadium hosts a wake, during which powerful people laugh and joke and take photos of themselves.

The need to sing the song 'Free Nelson Mandela' continues.

For he is not free. The song is not about one man. Not even about one saint. It is not even about one moon. It is about one world.

Only one man in a large army

You're so blind that you cannot see

You're so deaf that you cannot hear

What we see and what we hear depends on who's telling us the story. Who is interpreting.

Thamsanqa Jantjie, 34, was a qualified interpreter hired by the African National Congress from his firm South African Interpreters

Nelson Mandela is the man in the moon now, taken there by the Chinese lunar mission, itself an echo of previous Starship-Empire voyages by the USA and the USSR, out of which come such boons as teflon-coated frying pans.

A science correspondent on BBC Foyle says that the Chinese lunar landing on the moon is more about politics than it is about science.

Will we see another space race, as the one in the 1960s and 70s that steered human progress down hubristic blind alleys of Empire building, when research into cures for cancer and safe means for women to control their fertility would have been more beneficial?

Jantjie's performance was not meaningless – precisely because it delivered no particular meaning (the gestures were meaningless), it directly rendered meaning as such – the pretence of meaning.

Everything is open to interpretation, fake or fair, and we see and hear the stories most trumpeted at us. By media of all kinds.

All the crocodile tears of the dignitaries were a self-congratulatory exercise, and Jangtjie translated them into what they effectively were: nonsense. What the world leaders were celebrating was the successful postponement of the true crisis which will explode when poor, black South Africans effectively become a collective political agent. They were the Absent One to whom Jantjie was signalling, and his message was: the dignitaries really don't care about you. Through his fake translation, Jantjie rendered palpable the fake of the entire ceremony.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/16/fake-mandela-memorial-interpreter-schizophrenia-signing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgcTvoWjZJU1:23:00 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03lshf9/Breakfast_16_12_2013/

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BLOGPOST SPECIAL: KNOWLEDGE OVER? KNOWLEDGE WITH?

Colm Cille Spirals: Creative Convention: The Fold

Verbal Arts Centre, Derry. Saturday 30/11/2013

The Opening Speech ©Dave Duggan 2013

KNOWLEDGE OVER? KNOWLEDGE WITH?

Good afternoon. Tráthnóna maith.

I work as a dramatist and novelist, so you'll not be surprised that my point of departure is a story. It is said that Colm Cille – that's his working name. His mother and father named him Criomhthann and he was born beside a pristine lake at Gartan, a short drive north of here. The story has it that Colm Cille was in Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland, when he realised that a colleague had fallen from a round tower in Durrow, which is in the middle of Ireland and a good deal more than a short drive from Iona. Colm Cille immediately despatched an angel to Durrow, who caught the falling colleague and brought him safely back to earth.

I suggest this – realising as knowing; despatching angels as communicating - this places Colm Cille in the forefront of the knowledge economy of an age of major social transition. We convene today to re-interpret the legacy of this wondrous man, a man who resembles The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as described by Joseph Campbell:

The hero becomes less and less fabulous, until at last, in the final stages of the local traditions, legends open into the common daylight of recorded time.

We need to be wary of 'the great man' theory of history, with its byways of singularity, hierarchy and sexism. Wary, also, of the term 'legacy'. Not for any doubt of Colm Cille. But because of a very public controversy between local government, cultural brokers, social commentators, journalists and politicians about the legacy of the splendid cultural programme of the year 2013.

That legacy is hard to re-interpret. How much harder must it be to re-interpret 'legacy' for a character in the middle of the 6th century?

I propose, instead, that we consider the term 'concrete outcomes' in re-interpreting the life and work of Colm Cille, as they appear in the themes of this creative convention – departure, pilgrimage, land and, in particular, knowledge.

If you depart from this fine building, onto Bishop Street, then turn left, past The Court House, then take a right, up some steps, you'll find a Cathedral named for Colm Cille, in the Latin form of his name, Columb. There are the two villages in Cornwall, that are further concrete outcomes of the life of this wondrous man; they are St. Columb Major and St. Columb Minor. Perhaps Colm Cille sent angels to Cornwall, further evidence of ethereal web connections across time and land, a sort of 6th century internet.

The 21st century internet's website of the nearby Cathedral tells us that its primary purpose is the worship of Almighty God. The stone and mortar, glass and wood that humans shaped manifest a very concrete outcome of the man Colm Cille aka Criomhthann, aka Columb. Not five hundred metres below us, towards the boggy side of this island city, is the beautiful church at the Long Tower called St Columba. Another name. And another concrete outcome and continuation of the work of Colm Cille, the Christian missionary.

He was possessed with new knowledge. This big, new story, a Roman one, was brought by Patrick and other zealots, men fired up by The Good News. An earlier Roman story, when their heroes were Caesar and The Gods, never quite made it to these northerly regions.

But the later Roman story, brought by Patrick and other knowledge economists of his age, had just one God and achieved great purchase in the same regions. So fired up were Colm Cille and others by this new knowledge that they mimicked the heroes of the first version of the new story and departed in bands of 12 single men, led by one special man, such as Colm Cille, who frequently appeared suffused in light.

Such a departure is more than emigration. If there are any Australians present, I thank you, on behalf of the people of Ireland, for welcoming and giving work to our children, when we have failed to. We will want them back, of course, at least some of them. Rather than economic migrants, as the bulk of today's departers are, Colm Cille stood in the prow of a boat-load of pilgrims; voyagers on a proselytising, spiritual mission, with a knowledge purpose, driven by the new-knowledge that burned within them. A magnificent image of this pilgrim departure is seen in the painting above the stage at St. Columb's Hall, opposite Badger's pub on Newmarket Street.

A children’s book I found in Little Acorns bookshop tells the story of the founding of the city of Derry by Colm Cille. Like all foundation stories, it is contested. In this telling, Colm Cille is granted a wonderful wooded island in the middle of a great river by a local king. Try warlord instead of king. Now, the first thing Colm Cille does is burn the great trees down and denude the forested hill. The king is appalled at this wanton destruction of the earth's resources and the land. Colm Cille says he is ridding the hill of pagan spirits. Try evil/bad/lesser/wrong instead of pagan. I put the book down and felt depressed and confused.

These feelings deepened when I read that the publication was supported by The Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA), an educational body charged with advancing knowledge. What is the concrete outcome of a foundation myth based on the dereliction of the environment and the land?

I suggest that, as well as being an early human form of a light sabre and a precursor to our impoverished internet - nowadays we can only send terse emails and receive spam, not angels – Colm Cille was also an early master of the knowledge economy, when he burned the oakgrove, according to The Curriculum Council, and very definitely, when he departed to Iona.

I am delighted to tell you that The Oakgrove still exists. It is now a pub. Instead of turning left at The Courthouse, turn right and leave the walled city, onto Bishop Street Without for about three hundred metres and there it is. The Oakgrove. It features in the print edition of a local satirical magazine, Pure Derry - an ideal stocking filler for the not-so-easily-offended local and the jocular-if-bemused visitor.

Pure Derry reports that St Columb/Colm Cille – Pure Derry treats him as Fathers Ted, Dougal and Jack would - it is an ecumenical matter - using both forms of the name – Pure Derry reports that Colm Cille was arrested by the Police Service of Northern Ireland's Historical Inquiries Team due a battle he started in 561 over a book. The fact that this larger-than-life man can feature in contemporary satire is another concrete outcome. Another re-interpretation. There is a further story in Pure Derry, in which the success of the festival, The Return of Colm Cille, is said to rest upon the marketing ploy of basking the city in an horrendous amount of sunshine.

Together with thousands of fellow citizens, I attended the climax of that festival on the banks of the River Foyle. This was the battle between a metal sculpture of a dragon, spewing fire and smoke and a wee, white-cowled figure, suffused by light. Citizens noted the David and Goliath reference. And the telling use of light and darkness. This display re-interpreted the big story of Colm Cille putting down The Loch Ness monster – described by Colm Cille as dracus magnus deterrimus terribilis. This story is found in the life of Colm Cille, Vita Columbae, written by Adhamhnán, an abbot on Iona at the end of the 7th century. Now, Adhamhnán was a major figure in the knowledge economy of his day. He took the life and work of Colm Cille and wrote it up in banner headlines. He made it news: a focussed, functional and thoroughly edited form of knowledge.

I'm reminded of the newspaperman at the end of John Ford's magnificent film of social transition, The Man who shot Liberty Valance. The newspaperman famously says: This is The West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. Locally, country people round here say This is the west, sur. Give me the legend and thons a fact sur.

I sensed I was in a post-modern west as I stood on the bank of the river Foyle watching the fire-breathing dragon face the cowled Colm Cille. We're Northern Europeans, in the main, tribally Anglo-Americans, thus all cultures, the past and the present are, post-modernly, 'ours'.

Behind me was The Mandarin Palace, not a regal residence, but a family-friendly Chinese restaurant run by Stan Lee, who often performs an Elvis impersonation for delighted diners.

There we stood, in front of The Mandarin Palace, itself an image of the source of the new story – the new knowledge economy - coming from the east, watching a spectacle that mimicked a Chinese dragon in a Chinese water painting.

Many of my fellow citizens strained to see the spectacle and held modern devices above their heads to catch images of the scene. Tablets, notepads, smart phones, androids, iphones and ipads – many of them built by Mandarin-speaking workers in China - all raised on high, as if in votive offering to the images in front of us; a spectacle of fire and war, conflict, victory and defeat.

These are concrete outcomes of the life and times of the marvellous man Colm Cille, manifesting a particular view of conflict and the morality of violence, with definitions of just war, unburdened of ethical irony.

I remember leaving the riverside with the thought that, for dramatic effect, it's hard to beat war and violence. Could we imagine a river spectacle, where a bucketful of rate-payers ten-pound notes are sent up in smoke in a fireworks extravaganza, to the great pleasure of the citizenry, myself included, a great light and dark spectacle, to mark the anniversary of a peace treaty? Or the ending of poverty in our city? Just as The Devil is said to have all the best tunes, the producers of war stories have all the best spectacles, it seems.

Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka, asserts that politics and religion are two sides of the spinning coin of power. A widely-held contemporary notion asserts that knowledge is power; political, religious and economic power. And that there are two manifestations of power: power with, which we know as solidarity and power over, which we know as oppression.

This leads to the vexing problem that arises at all times of transition, such as when Colm Cille and his fellows pilgrimaged their way across these islands. This problem is described by Richard Rorty, as

the problem of how to overcome authority without claiming authority.

By accepting the assertion that equates knowledge with power, it follows that there are two forms of knowledge; knowledge with and knowledge over. Which form of knowledge did Colm Cille manifest in his working life and thus, how might we re-interpret his legacy: what are the concrete outcomes today?

Writing is at the core of this, obviously. And that's not special pleading on my part. The ability of Colm Cille and his colleagues to produce magnificent illustrated texts of their good news story imbued the story with added-value, portability and longevity.

Let me advise you, then, of another possible Christmas present, one that is a legacy of the work of the manuscript illuminators. There is a new edition, just published, of the famous Belgian comic book series, Asterix. I recommend it highly, for its fascinating illustration of the type of social transition that is underway globally at present. The new edition is called Asterix and The Picts, which echoes the era of Colm Cille.

In our current understandings, The Picts were on Iona when Colm Cille landed. Let us consider that another concrete outcome of the life and work of Colm Cille is knowledge over The Picts, who I suggest are 'people before', like the Pagan Celts of Patrick's age in Ireland – people with perfectly serviceable forms of ritual, social organisation, law, economics, cosmic world views, ethics, as well as domestic arrangements.

There's an exhibition of beautiful Iron Age decorative work in gold, called The Broighter Hoard, currently on display at The Tower Museum just off The Guildhall Square, as evidence of organised and self-aware social arrangements among such 'people before'.

The marvellous fire garden in St. Columb's Park as part of this weekend's Lumiére festival is a contemporary re-interpretation of a pagan light and dark story. There, in the middle of the trees and the light, is a marvellous statue of Colm Cille.

When knowledges come into contention, as they did in Iona in Colm Cille's age, the arriviste surely feels

Our knowledge is good. Yours is, well, not great. It's not as good as ours. And that's true of your language, your rituals, your economics, your customs, your laws and your domestic arrangements.

It's only natural, I suggest. Especially if you've made a long and arduous journey – a pilgrimage - across Sruth na Maoile, the Moyle Strait, to land this new knowledge.

In the lore from Colm Cille's time, the Picts are said to be small, sturdy people, with long hair and large feet. There's something runty about them. The Picts are lesser. Thus, is it not proper - necessary - to bring them the good news story, the new knowledge? It is also said of them that their feet were so large that they could shelter themselves from the rain by standing on their heads.

I ask us now to visualise, to envision; I ask us now to imagine a young Pict couple, peering out from the hedgerows that creep close to the shores of Iona, their beloved land. It is not raining, so they are upright and they can see an incoming boat. The young man counts twelve figures in sodden brown cloaks and one luminous figure, cowled in white. He asks:

Do you think the story they have will make our lives better?

The young woman ponders a moment, before replying:

They must think it's good. We'll see.

The rain begins to fall and they stand on their heads.

It is held that the arrival of the new knowledge in Ireland with Patrick, and in Iona with Colm Cille, and the major social changes that ensued, occurred without bloodshed. That this is remarkable is obvious, given the evidence of great blood-letting across Europe within and between Christian communities and with communities holding other forms of knowledge. Montesquieu, the French Enlightenment writer, is quoted in Sam Peckinpah's famous film blood-fest, Straw Dogs, when three characters, one of them a minister of religion, exchange views.

After all, there's never been a kingdom given to so much bloodshed as that of Christ.

That's Montesquieu, isn't it?

Oh, really? Who's he?

Somebody well worth reading.

The arrivistes with the new knowledge and the possessors of the existing knowledge are both in contact and in conflict, not least in terms of cultural violence, as defined by peace researcher Johan Galtung, as any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence.

In the era following Colm Cille, hymns appeared mixing Irish and Latin, illustrating the tension between the existing knowledge and the new knowledge. A famous one is associated with the Donegal monk Maol Íosa Ó Brolcháin, written in the macaronic form Latin, Irish, Irish, Latin.

Deus meus adiuva me

Tabhair dom do shearch, a Mhic ghil Dé

Tabhair dom do shearch, a Mhic ghil Dé

Deus meus adiuva me.

Ironically, in our age, it is the people before, the ones who hold to the story, the good news, broadcast by Colm Cille, who are most threatened by the arrival of the not-so-new knowledge of secularism and the post-modern technological tsunami driving it from the east. The 'people before' are experiencing a major transition as illustrated by the different stories we tell and live regarding birth control and the genders of the people with whom we have sexual congress. And by fundamentalist tellings of the story broadcast by Colm Cille, widespread in the world. Are these forms of re-interpretation, concrete outcomes of the legacy of Colm Cille?

Are we left with the foreshortened horizon offered by another French man, this time mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal?

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Or is it the case that an expansive, pilgrim impulse is required for transition to occur, through a blending of knowledge with and knowledge over?

If contemporary knowledge economists such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckermann had sat quietly in a room, instead of galvanising multi-billion pound operations at Microsoft, Apple and Facebook, would we notice any difference in the fold and flux of the essential lives we lead?

And here I make a personal confession. I have not sat quietly in a room alone. I have travelled and worked, in particular in South-east Asia and in West Africa, in a late nineteen seventies' form of secular pilgrimage known as voluntary service, based on the presumption that my knowledge – my story - was better, and thus desirable, to the peoples I had the good fortune to live among.

I very quickly found that I gained more than I imparted. And that the pilgrimage of solidarity I was engaged in benefitted me more than it did the people I grew to know and cherish. Then, there are my plays and novels, films and other dramas – are they not pilgrimages of knowledge, thrust into the world, as knowledge with and knowledge over?

Let us finally consider two cultural manifestations of knowledge transition underway today, which we could interpret as concrete outcomes of the life and times of Colm Cille and many others.

Following an imperial model developed as The British Council - French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and American instances exist - the Chinese state is bringing a new story - their own good news - all across the world with the establishment of Confucius Institutes. These are contemporary centres of learning, with modern zealots teaching and writing, sharing and advancing the good news they hold to. A number of them are open in Ireland currently, including one in Coleraine. Rooted in the life and work of the sage Confucius – we can readily see parallels with Colm Cille, I suggest – the centres do not offer transcendence but culture, language and, of course, possibilities for trade and enterprise. For pilgrimage read trade mission. This is a new story, coming our way and currently in contest with the stories we already have.

Another instance of the new story, present in a pilgrimage of a sporting character, is the arrival of numerous new owners of British soccer clubs. The contest between the new owners' story of what soccer is - a corporate manifestation of leisure consumerism - and the old story of a locale of social class and regional identity, grounded in participatory sporting rivalries - is most obvious in the case of Cardiff City Football Club.

Traditionally known as The Blue Birds, the new Malaysian Chinese owners, with their new story, changed the club shirt colours to red, a symbol of good fortune in the east. The transition is partial currently. At home games, red club shirts are visible underneath blue jackets as the two stories of Cardiff City Football Club contend in the crowded stands.

I offer these as two contemporary, concrete outcomes of the life and times of Colm Cille. And of many other people who took new knowledge - knowledge with and knowledge over - to distant places and set them with and against existing knowledges – stories – in those places.

Can we now re-interpret Colm Cille's legacy through these lenses, labelled knowledge with and knowledge over? If Colm Cille had stayed in the house, would we be talking about him today?

Would we be seeking concrete outcomes from his life in order to re-interpret them? Would we be different? Better?

I'm back to the pragmatist Richard Rorty again when he says that

modern, literate, secular societies depend on the existence of reasonably concrete, optimistic and plausible political scenarios and that in order to retain social hope, members of such a society need to be able to tell themselves a story about how things might get better.

In wishing you and this convention all good wishes, let me close with a nod to an earlier creative convention, Fairport Convention, fronted by the miraculous Sandy Denny, who sang

Who knows where the time goes, who knows where the time goes.

I am back at the river, as always, the river Foyle; swept up there in the flux and fold of time; past then, present now and future always.

Songwriter Eamon Friel writes

How can the river be where it was

When it's forever running away?

The Pictish couple; the people before; us – we are beside the river, a site of departure and return. We shelter from the rain, share stories we create; and stand on our heads.

Thank you. And good luck. Go raibh maith agaibh agus ádh mór.

©Dave Duggan 2013

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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