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

NEVER WALK ALONE

A writer, a poet and a singer walk into a bar. In Liverpool (53 degrees North, 2 degrees West). 

This is not a joke. This is the bar of the Rodewald Suite of the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. This is a Liverpool Irish Festival event, organised by Writing on the Wall, entitled Derry-Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West): so good they named it twice.

Walk on, walk on, 

With hope in your heart

And you'll never walk alone

This is Hope Street, which is bookended by cathedrals: The Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King (Roman Catholic) and The Liverpool Anglican Cathedral (Church of England/Anglican). 

Also in the vicinity of Hope Street are a noodle bar, an hotel, a Mexican restaurant, offices, social housing, pubs, the Oratory Public Park, The Blackburne House Women's Technology and Education Centre, The Liverpool Trust for The Performing Arts (LIPA), the former Hahnemann Homoeopathic Hospital, The Everyman Theatre (under reconstruction), The Liverpool Medical Institution and the Victoria Gallery and Museum. 

And, of course, the Philharmonic Hall, with the Rodewald Suite, where the writer, the poet and the singer walk into a bar. To read/perform/sing their work.

Culture is the matter in hand and how it manifests in the first ever UK City of Culture year, 2013, in Derry Londonderry, where the majority of adult citizens vote for Irish nationalist parties.

The programme of events for the UK City of Culture year, 2013, is launched on Thursday 25th October and available at www.cityofculture2013.com/ 

The programme is varied, fascinating, complex and contested. As are all matters in public life.

The citizens of Liverpool have some experience of the hitching of culture to the wagons of economic, social and cultural  development, from the year 2008, when Liverpool was European Capital of Culture.

Derry-Londonderry, as UK City of Culture 2013, manifests very specific experiences.

A successful programme will engage with both the common and the distinctive. ... I expect the UK City of Culture to reflect these identities (Ulsterman, Ulster Scots, British), in what it delivers and I appreciate that other cultural identities that are Irish, Gaelic and many others will be included.

The people in the Rodewald Suite listen to the writer, the poet and the singer present their stories in various forms: literary, dramatic, verse, performance, song. Then they question and debate with each other. And with the writer, the poet and the singer.

What will the future be like for Derry Londonderry? Are we optimistic? Can we put The Troubles behind us? Why are we always negative? Will there be enough hotels? Can't we see the Big Picture?

There is no Big Picture. There is a gallery of pictures: small, medium and large. You need to get up close to see the human factor, in the detail. Viewed from a distance, the picture appears big, yet is inadequate to the actuality of lives lived in particular economic, social and cultural contexts. 

It is rarely a question of either/or. More usefully, and/both questions are faced. 

The beauty and the grime. The violence and the peace. The serenity and the torment. The wealth and the poverty. The turmoil and the quiet. And the many states in between. 

Everything is named twice. And more. Not only the city.

Look closely at the Hillsborough (Liverpool) and the Bloody Sunday (Derry-Londonderry) Families. Up close. In detail. A complex gallery of pictures. 

Vivifying.  Never alone. 

So good the state apologised twice. 

It is impossible - now, at this point in the long journey of human culture – to avoid the sense that pain is a necessity, that it is neither accident, nor malformation, nor malice, nor misunderstanding, that it is integral to the human character both in its inflicting and its suffering. This terrible sense tragedy alone has articulated, and will continue to articulate, and in so doing, make beautiful ...

Hold your head up high

And don't be afraid of the dark.

The News Letter: newspaper; page 8; Gregory Campbell, MP for East Londonderry; Belfast; 20.10.2012 

Death, The One and the Art of Theatre: book: Howard Barker; Routledge; Abingdon; 2005

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma3Nax8yyOE

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

THE WRATH OF CATS

The announcement of over 760 job losses at FG Wilson, an engineering company, originally locally-owned, taken over by The Caterpillar Corporation, in the Larne (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West) area of the north-east of Ireland, shocks citizens.

It does not shock Alastair Hamilton, CEO of Invest NI, the government-funded body charged with promoting investment in Northern Ireland. 

We're shocked at the numbers, but not about the trend. The trend is there right across the board.

John Ford's shocking film of John Steinbeck's great novel The Grapes of Wrath details the experiences of the Joad family of Oklahoma (35 degrees North, 97 degrees West), share-croppers in the early 1930s. They are driven off their meagre holding by the land-owning corporation.

Among the many shocking black and white images in the film are those of the Caterpillar bulldozers. The Cats pulverise crops, fields, roads, machinery and homesteads. 

The Cats pulverise the families that look on, aghast. Shocked to the core.

As are the families of FG Wilson staff. But not the CEO of Invest NI.

Shocked. 

If there was a law, they was workin' with maybe we could take it, but it ain't the law. They're workin' away our spirits, tryin' to make us cringe and crawl, takin' away our decency. 

Alastair Hamilton, the CEO of Invest NI,  is presented by the media as a hard-headed business man. As if this was a good thing to be.

When asked if he would have made the same decision to move some of the manufacturing to China he said: If I was in that job, in all possibility, yes.

The CEO is a free market ideologue, in a well-paid, publicly funded, government job, paid for by taxpayers, including the sacked FG Wilson staff. 

One of his tasks is to 'rebalance' the economy, which is the current euphemism for the shifting of public money into fewer and fewer private hands.

There is pressure to lower corporation tax, which amounts to an award to global corporations like Caterpillar, enabling them to coalesce and repatriate profits from a most-favourable tax environment. 

FG Wilson do exactly what the CEO of Invest NI advises manufacturing companies to do: succeed in export markets. Then Caterpillar comes in and pulverises them. They find a local competitor in FG Wilson, exporting diesel generators to markets in the east, buy them over and close them down.  

Unemployment in Northern Ireland is running at about 8.2%, the highest in the U.K.. It is even higher among young people.

The CEO of Invest NI presents no regard for the human consequences of the actions he advocates from a secure position of power and privilege. His remarks are as heartless as the treads of a Cat bulldozer.

Will there be any FG Wilson aka Caterpillar engineering workers in the north-east of Ireland in five years time?

Resist the wrath of the Cats. Don't buy the boots. Or the bulldozers. 

They trample all over families.

Moreover, these flexions are taking place every where, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:

The Grapes of Wrath: film; John Ford; Twentieth Century Fox; 1940

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-19596343

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

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

AN IRISH BAPTIST TRAGEDY

They were gentlemen, they were hard-working men, they were not perfect but they were genuine, they were best friends. They were godly men; they did not talk about God, they just did God. They were just ordinary, but God made them extraordinary. 

Emma Spence, an artist, living on a working family farm at Drumlough, between Ballynahinch (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West) and Hillsborough (54 degrees North, 6 degrees West), tries to save her father, Noel (58) and her brothers Graham (30) and Nevin (22), when they succumb to deadly hydrogen sulphide fumes. The men are lost in a slurry pit, attempting to save a family pet and then each other.

The farm tragedy, the sporting prowess of the youngest son, Nevin – a star on the provincial and a sterling prospect for the national rugby team – the manly poise of the dead men, the courage and sensibility of Emma Spence, the sister who almost dies in the tragedy, lifts the horror out of the grim ordinariness of farm-accident deaths and onto the high planes of the universally tragic. 

The Spence family loss is of the order of a Greek tragedy, as seen in playwright Howard Benton's affirmation of Terry Eagleton's definition of Tragedy.

'Culture and death are not rivals at all. There is a tragic self-mutilation at the very root of civilisation.' This is what a modern tragedy would own up to: the strange sweetness of an aesthetic spectacle with suffering at its core.

Yet Eagleton notes that his Irishness complicates his view of Tragedy.

I remark that the Irish were put on this earth for other people to feel romantic about. But living in a small contentious island also has its drawbacks, not least if you’re a semi-outsider, like myself; you have to be careful sometimes. I don’t know. I suppose I always knew Ireland too well to feel romantic about it.

The Spence family are people who would pull you out of a ditch. 

Unromantically. Wonderfully. Humanly.

Speaking of her dead father and her dead brothers in turn, in simple, ardent words, Emma Spence, faces the tragedy with a dramatic litany that brings each individual into sharp focus and also links them as humans in a manner that links them to us all.

He’s the one who greeted you with a thump in the arm.

He’s also the one who had about 15 apps on his phone to check the weather forecast.

To me he is the one mum had the organic blueberries and prize-winning steak ready for when he called.

The Spence family find solace in their God. They are members of a small community of Baptists in the north-east of Ireland. Indigenous and incomers. Semi-outsiders.

They are joined in their grief by people all across Ireland. By farmers and sports-people in many different codes. By citizens and politicians of varying views. By people of differing religions and none.

The Spence God, who is achieved by scripture-based living and immersion in baptismal waters, is a God among many Gods. And no God. 

And Emma Spence. Who is God. To her, the robe and crown. And her bothers. Her father. Her mother, her sister and her sister-in-law, her niece and her nephew. 

Immanent and transcendent.

We resonate with their Baptist call: Oh, brothers and father, where art thou?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qw6Hon013E

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0920/1224324200825.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/highereducation.news

http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/an-interview-with-terry-eagleton/

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

THE TOPLESS QUIZ

You may take the quiz in either a public or a private place, though the phrase 'public or private' may be meaningless in an age of mass surveillance, a 24-hour news cycle and integrated communication media using powerful lenses, satellite and digital technologies. 

You may or not remove your upper garments. It is your choice. 

You will be photographed. Many times and by many means. With and without your permission. 

You may use the answers given or, alternatively, you may provide your own. That generally works better. Good luck.

Is the woman, photographed topless in a French magazine, a woman?

Yes, and she is a wealthy aristocrat, a symbol of a country and a media celebrity in a line connecting with her late mother-in-law.

Are we shocked that a photograph of a woman wearing no clothes on her upper body appears in a magazine? 

No, we are not shocked. Many such images appear in magazines, websites, newspapers and in broadcast media every day, all across the globe, including in London (51 degrees North, 0 degrees West) tabloids.

Do the women who appear topless in London tabloids do so of their own volition?

Depends on how that is judged. Economic necessity is a strong force.

Why the uproar?

Hard to say.

Did the photographer and the owner of the French magazine break the law?

Yes, they broke French privacy laws.

Why?

Money.

Who owns the French magazine?

Follow the money. Far.

What is the context in which this occurs?

Wealth, privilege, media-courting, power, inequality, national symbolism, race/national/ethnic strain between England and France, threatened identities, a woman angry and upset, the battle between 'old' money and 'new' money, media-hating.

Why will the woman sue the French magazine?

To keep the London media at heel.

Will England and France go to war over this?

It is to be hoped not, as they are both grotesquely armed,  belligerent nations, with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction and a long history of warmongering. There are, however, historical precedents for aristocrats leading citizens to their deaths in battles over land, chattels and women.

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint  Crispin's day.

Did the citizens photographed by surveillance cameras, whose images appeared in The Derry Journal, give their permission for the photographs to be taken?

No.

When was the last time your photograph was taken without your permission and circulated on private and public media?

I don't know.

Does all this matter?

Yes, though aspects act as a diversion, a money-maker and a media sideshow.

How will it end?

Not without effort. And a significant lessening of double-standards.

Thank you for taking the quiz. Do not send your answers to St. James Palace. The Palace is busy considering offers from  magazines for photographs of the likely christening of the woman's future child.  

Do not send your photo, topless or otherwise, to a tabloid of your choice.

The prize of a luxury house in Provence, France, has already been awarded to the young woman who appeared on the front page of The Derry Journal in a story about sleeping on the sofa in her paternal grandfather's home, with her two children, because she is homeless. She is advised to give up her job to better her chances of getting a house. A house in the south of France, even though it is near a public road, suits her and her children well.

Henry V; stage-play; William Shakespeare; 1599

www.derryjournal.com/

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

THE TUTU SNUB

Find your mark, look the other fellow in the eye and tell the truth.

(James Cagney, actor)

A new action has entered the lexicon of performance on the stages of world affairs. It is coined by a top-ranking religious leader. In its first presentation it is targeted at a globe-trotting uber-politician and deal-smoother, one of a class of world figures who greases the levers of politics and commerce.

This new act is christened The Tutu Snub.

A long-time critic of the Iraq war, the archbishop pulled out of a South African conference on leadership last week because Blair, who was paid 2m rand (£150,000) for his time, was attending. It is understood that Tutu had agreed to speak without a fee.

'Christened' because it is first performed by a Christian Church leader long associated with human endeavours for race emancipation in The Anti-Apartheid Movement.

'Snub' because it involves an individual refusing to meet with, sit with, join with, support, collude or engage with another individual. 

It is widely practised informally, and for millennia, in private and domestic spheres.

'Tutu' because this commonplace private act has been integrated into the world theatre of public life by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The target of the first performance of The Tutu Snub is Tony Blair, recently on the public stage as the broker of a hugely beneficial deal for the global corporation Glencore with the government of Qatar. 

It is reasonable to assume that Tony Blair did not involve himself in that production without consideration of indirect and direct recompense. 

His startling position as a peace envoy in the Middle East positions him to benefit himself and his corporate associates.

If Tony Blair's cameo proves to be a deciding factor in winning support from Qatar for a Swiss commodity trader's $36 billion (22.5 billion pounds) bid for a giant mining firm, the former British prime minister could become a sought-after fixer in global finance.

'Startling' given Tony Blair's track record as a duplicitous war-monger in Iraq, cited as the motivation for Archbishop Tutu's act.

The originator of The Tutu Snub is to be commended for bringing this much-used private act into public life. It is to be hoped that others will apply it to Tony Blair in the future. And that instances of its use may also be directed at George Bush, though he rarely travels outside his enclave, limiting opportunities for The Tutu Snub to American actors in public life.

For to you, to the actor, it is not the words which carry the meaning – it is the actions.

Give yourself a simple goal on-stage, and accomplish it bravely.

A role for a latter-day James Cagney?

Citizens of the world, the audience for these performances in the theatre of public affairs, wait avidly.

Theatre is the act of resistance against all odds.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/sep/02/tony-blair-iraq-war-desmond-tutu 

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/09/11/uk-glencoreblairidUKLNE88A00G20120911

True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor: book; David Mamet; Faber and Faber; London; 1998

A Director Prepares: book; Anne Bogart; Routledge; London; 2001

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter