Miscellany

Ryanair leads the way.

The Tories berated the government for its ‘slow’ handling of the problem of repatriating British tourists stranded by the Icelandic eruption. Though God knows what Brown could have done other than he did. However we can comfort ourselves that, once the Cameroons have taken over, the market place will handle things so much better than ‘big government’. As a foretaste we have RyanAir initially refusing to reimburse stranded passengers for their living expenses and only backing down because there is an EU law which requires them to honour their commitments. A pity Nick Clegg didn’t raise this during Thursday’s leaders’ debate in Bristol, rather than going along with the eurosceptics' twisted view of Europe and trotting out a story about how long it took the ‘bureaucrats’ to define chocolate. Given that most people loathe Ryanair even more than they do the EU, pointing out this example of EU legislation standing up for the rights of the ordinary person might have won some converts. But I think Ron Liddle has said all that needs to be about the LibDems’ boy wonder.
And it’s not only Ryanair showing the compassionate and caring side of the airline industry. Rather than putting stranded passengers on the first available flight BA is flogging off any spare capacity at hugely inflated prices. Their ‘explanation’ of this extraordinarily callous behaviour was laughable. Yet, to its eternal shame, Radio 4 reported it without comment.

Fictional selves.

In the days when I was paid to bore people about the English novel, I read an interesting article on the relation between real life and fiction. It suggested that novels were popular because we all try to create novels out of our lives: give them a shape, pattern and significance which they lack in reality.
At the time, Walter Mitty wannabes aside, fictionalising one’s life was largely for self-consumption. You told yourself that you were much, nicer, cleverer etc than other people appreciated. In other words you played the implied author - as distinct from either the actual author or the narrator - to the novel of your life. The advent of the net has greatly increased the scope for this activity. Some people create on-line avatars, others write blogs, and some restrict themselves to on-line reviews. The problem is that putting something on-line doesn’t feel real. You’re not speaking to someone face-to-face, there’s no one to argue back. It’s not even like publishing a book which involves meetings with publishers and editors. If you’re writing a blog you’re fairly safe: it’s the twenty-first century equivalent of vanity publishing. Apart from those forming part of an on-line edition of a newspaper or magazine they’re largely unread. On-line reviews, though, as Orlando Figes has discovered to his cost are a different matter. Interestingly he chose the pseudonym ‘Orlando-Birbeck ’ when writing his reviews. Hardly the most cunning way of preserving your anonymity if you’re a professor at Birbeck College. But I don’t think he realised that this was an issue. After all he was writing for the web: and that’s not like writing for the TLS. It’s merely an extension of a private conversation with yourself, part of creating your implied author. As a high-powered academic Figes probably doesn’t read Science Fiction. If he did he’d know that there are certain points where it’s possibly to cross unwittingly from one parallel universe to another. Unfortunately for Orlando he’d stumbled upon just such a point. Unlike Ariosto and Woolf’s eponymous protagonists his creation straddled both the real and the virtual worlds.

Gordon's Ashes

We were due to go to the UK last Saturday, returning today. Thanks to Iceland not only helping to bugger up our banking system but disrupting our travel arrangements, we didn’t. So our daughter was unable to go out with her friends on Saturday evening, have lunch with us and her aunt on Sunday, or a birthday dinner with us and her brother and his wife on Monday.
And, if we’re to believe the Tory shadow minister for transport, it was all Gordon Brown’s fault. A line which will no doubt be taken up by the Sun and the Daily Mail and purveyed to and swallowed by the half-wits who imagine that the Tories - even ‘eccentric’ ones like Samantha Cameron who went to day school - have the common people’s interests at heart.
While the volcanic eruption wasn’t Gordon’s fault, the length of the disruption may have been avoidable. If it were, though, we should look somewhere other than No. 10 for those responsible. To those same airline bosses - the repulsive Willy Walsh pre-eminent amongst them - who have successfully clamoured for the skies to be re-opened. Since 2008 the ICAO has been trying to get the airlines and the manufacturers to agree to what constitutes a safe level of volcanic ash. They wouldn’t because airlines were afraid of the potential damage to their reputation and finances in the event of one of their planes being lost due to dust after an all-clear had been announced, with a fear of legal actions arising from the deaths of all those who had been on board. As one source at the ICAO put it: "The bottom line is that there is a huge liability issue for the industry here, so they have been super cautious on providing information. If they say it is safe, and there is an accident, they will get slaughtered." However, faced with losses running into hundreds of millions as the effect of Eyjafjallajokull spread and lingered into a sixth day, it was the airlines who began to call for the regulators to determine and set such a safe threshold, to avert the severe financial consequences of planes idle across Europe and passengers claiming refunds for cancelled journeys.
In other words, the airlines are interested in passenger safety if a threat to it could affect their profits. If it threatens those profits, they’re not. And fair enough, one might say: they’re commercial enterprises not charities. What sticks in the craw, though, is their hypocrisy, pretending that they’re motivated by concern for their stranded passengers rather than their balance sheets. That the prolonging of the crisis was caused not by that self-same greed, but by the Labour government.
And it’s not just the airlines who peddle a phoney concern for their customers’ well-being. This morning - the 21st April, the day flights are resumed - I received an email from Hertz which, inter alia, read:

Hertz Special Measures to Help Customers Affected by Volcanic Ash Crisis.

As a member of Hertz #1 Club we want to give you an update on the specific
measures we have put in to place to support our customers who are trying to get
home following the closure of air space due to the volcanic ash situation. …

… 100% refund on prepaid rates if customers cancel online or by telephone at
any point prior to the pick-up date, if their travel has been affected by the
volcanic ash disruption (up to 27th April).

However, when I went on to their site last Friday, when the crisis was in full swing, to cancel the car I’d booked I found it would cost me £45 to do so! So when the ban was there and people would have been glad of the saving it wasn’t on offer, now that the emergency’s over and hardly anyone qualifies for the concession it’s available.
But they’ll be able to parade their compassion, and show how they were doing something. Unlike that incompetent in No. 10 who had to be pushed by good old Willy Walsh to get us airborne again.

The Ranter's Guide to Avoiding Jail

Like King Lear, Victor Meldrew and many other men of my age I’m much given to ranting. Until yesterday, when I read about the case of Martin Solomon, I’d considered it a fairly harmless occupation. Not so: this poor chap’s tirades at political programmes on the telly led to a four month jail sentence.
Unfortunately for Mr Solomon he lacked his namesake’s wisdom. For although, to adopt the words of the Penny Catechism of my childhood, television sets, like relics and graven images, ‘can neither see, nor hear, nor help us’, your neighbours can. And having heard Mr Solomon’s tirades, instead of helping him they reported him to the police.
A pity, for there are alternatives - tailored to various levels of education and intelligence - which would have not only spared the neighbours’ eardrums, and Mr Solomon an enforced absence from the comforts of his home, but also saved the taxpayer money.
If this unfortunate man has only received a rudimentary education, he should be advised to contribute ‘comments’ to on-line versions of newspapers. The ability to spell, avoid malapropisms, or employ the rules of grammar is not required. Nor is any knowledge of the subject on which you are holding forth. All that is required is the ability to rant. However, for all I know Mr Solomon may be able to string several sentences together with only the occasional orthographical or syntactical error. In that case, may I recommend he writes a blog. Nobody reads them, so there is no one to upset and accordingly no danger of serving a prison sentence.
There is a third possibility. Mr Solomon may be a genuinely gifted man, who has aroused his neighbours’ ire not merely by the volume of his voice but through his cutting insights which undermine their dearly held political prejudices. If such be the case, fame and fortune await him. I’ve just finished reading James Hamilton Patterson’s third novel about Gerald Samper, a character whose whole existence is an endless rant. And an excellent read it is. One which I imagine has made Hamilton Patterson a great deal of money. So when Mr Solomon emerges from custody I would suggest that his neighbours bring this post to his attention, if it were not for the fact that being a blog they will be completely unaware of its existence.

Pardons and Millstones Part 2

Last week, in my Pardons and Millstones post, I commented on our common humanity. I’d like to expand the point.
Although only American evangelists with stomachs for brains take Genesis literally, the doctrine of original sin has put its finger on a fundamental aspect of the human psyche: the conflict between reason and desire. At its most trivial it's reflected in my continuing to smoke though I know it may well give me an agonising death. As Swift said, people are not rational animals, but animals capable of reason. We are not houynhynms but yahoos and if we try to deny this fundamental truth we'll end up as crazy as Gulliver at the end of his travels. Unlike other eastern cults, Christianity stresses we've bodies as well as souls: Gulliver craps. So beautiful though Milton's description of paradise undeniably is:

So hand in hand they passd, the lovliest pair 

That ever since in loves imbraces met, 

ADAM the goodliest man of men since borne 

His Sons, the fairest of her Daughters EVE. 

Under a tuft of shade that on a green 

Stood whispering soft, by a fresh Fountain side 

They sat them down, and after no more toil 

Of thir sweet Gardning labour then suffic'd 

To recommend coole ZEPHYR, and made ease 

More easie, wholsom thirst and appetite 

More grateful, to thir Supper Fruits they fell, 

Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughes 

Yeilded them, side-long as they sat recline 

On the soft downie Bank damaskt with flours: 

The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde 

Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream; 

Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles 

Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems 

Fair couple, linkt in happie nuptial League, 

Alone as they. About them frisking playd 

All Beasts of th' Earth, since wilde, and of all chase 

In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den; 

Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw 

Dandl'd the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards 

Gambold before them, th' unwieldy Elephant 

To make them mirth us'd all his might, & wreathd 

His Lithe Proboscis;

it's only after the Fall that you feel you’re in the company of human beings rather than some impossibly noble extraterrestial beings dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter:

Why comes not Death, 

Said hee, with one thrice acceptable stroke 

To end me? Shall Truth fail to keep her word, 

Justice Divine not hast'n to be just? 

But Death comes not at call, Justice Divine 

Mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries. 

O Woods, O Fountains, Hillocks, Dales and Bowrs, 

VVith other echo farr I taught your Shades 

To answer, and resound farr other Song. 

VVhom thus afflicted when sad EVE beheld, 

Desolate where she sate, approaching nigh, 

Soft words to his fierce passion she assay'd: 

But her with stern regard he thus repell'd. 
 Out of my sight, thou Serpent,

And this is why once we've unfrocked and imprisoned the paedophile priests - which we unquestionably should - and the Pope's resigned - which, given that he seems to be the Goons’ Professor Moriarty inhabiting Kung Fu Panda’s body, would be a relief for us all - we shouldn’t then make the mistake of thinking the Church is still not fit for purpose. Unlike the smugly superior Hitchens and Dawkins, its founder knew that human beings are intrinsically weak and fallible, not weak and fallible as the result of priestly machinations. That an institution composed of the unswervingly righteous is about as likely as an altruistic banker or a self-effacing blogger. So, while, in the words of Swift’s self-composed epitaph, savage indignation should lacerate our hearts at the wickedness we Yahoos can descend to, we must avoid Orwell’s comforting delusion that our job is to watch out for the pigs trying to take over and ruin noble ideals. We are those pigs. The enemy is inside each one of us. The best you can do is to recognise the fact and, in Auden’s words, ‘love your crooked neighbour/With your crooked heart.’
Whilst I would agree with the existentialists that a man is the sum of his actions - after all the notion is merely an elaboration, some might say an obfuscation, of the catholic doctrine that faith without works is dead - I think institutions need to be viewed differently. An institution’s values have a life independent of its members’ behaviour. For example, I deplore the recent tendency to suggest there’s a moral equivalence between National Socialism and Communism. Yes, Hitler and Stalin were both megalomaniac bastards who were responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people. But, and it’s a crucial ‘but’, Stalin perverted a noble ideal - from each according to his ability, to each according to his need - whilst Hitler put into practice the core ideals of nazism: all non-northern europeans are racially inferior, Jews are evil and should be exterminated, and the same goes for gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally disabled. Stalin was in bad faith, Hitler was true to his beliefs. Beliefs repugnant to all but members of the BNP and their fellow-travellers amongst the euro-sceptics. Devoid of talent, charm, and in most cases basic literacy, these sad individuals valorise the only attributes they possess: occasional patches of white skin peeping between the tattoos, and a British passport. In contradistinction, the Church’s fundamental values are sound, although its members’ behaviour is often not.
Pullman, and those who’ve climbed aboard that particular coach, would disagree. They contrast the ‘real’ Jesus, who embodies a set of values corresponding pretty closely to those of the average Guardian reader, with the false Christ set up by the Roman church and worshipped by its deluded followers. Which is really just another way of saying, ‘I’ve decided which bits of the New Testament account of the guy fit in with my personal ideals: all the other bits were obviously made up by superstitious peasants and/or proto-Catholic power-freaks’. The problem is that while it’s perfectly reasonable to say: ‘I like certain aspects of the man’s teachings, but others - e.g. ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes to the Father except by me - suggest a megalomaniac (or God) and repulse me, the Pullman position isn’t. True, it has a long history: Voltaire, and before him a line of protestant ‘reformers’ and mediæval heretics stretching back to New Testament times. But they all betray a monstrous arrogance: ‘I’ve discovered the truth which everyone else has been too stupid or corrupt to notice, and now I’m going to remake the Church in my image.’ And immediately another insightful person jumps up interjecting: ‘No, your ideas are completely wrong. But I’ve got the answer!’ Unfortunately Pullman doesn’t tell us who was behind tricking Peter and the rest of the disciples - no doubt with the kind of con-trick we’re familiar with from Jonathan Creek - into believing their dead leader had dropped in for tea. If we apply the cui bono test we’ve got a problem. The occupying Roman authorities? Hardly. The Jewish religious authorities? You must be kidding. The Catholic Church? A protestant would say the organisation wasn’t around at the time, a catholic would point out that the first pope got himself crucified: hardly a smart move for a con-man. So although the early christians may well have been deluded in thinking Jesus was the Christ it wasn’t as the result of a conspiracy, but merely from believing what their leader claimed about himself.
There are several intellectually respectable positions to hold on catholicism. One can say that it’s the organisation founded by Christ for humans, not Martians, and run by humans with all their failings. Alternatively one can say that it’s a tyrannical institution which feeds off human fears and weaknesses. Finally, there’s the via media: its an organisation which has done some good things, inspiring great architecture and music and helping the poor and the sick; has done even more bad things, burning heretics alive heads a long list; but in the end is pretty irrelevant in this day and age (cliché intended). What you can’t say, and retain your intellectual credibility, is that the Church is some alien body which twisted the teachings of some simple right-on guy for its own nefarious purposes.
But, I hear you cry: What about its fabulous wealth! Didn’t Christ tell his followers to sell all they had and give it to the poor? Yes, and he also rebuked his disciples when Mary Magdalene poured precious ointment over his head and they complained: ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.’ Jesus replied, ‘Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you.’ Again he was stressing that we’re bodies as well as souls. As humans we not only feel things with our minds but give them physical expression. It would be a pretty odd parent who didn’t kiss his children or give them presents on the grounds that the only thing which matters is the way you feel. So building beautiful churches and filling them with precious objects was an entirely natural expression of people’s devotion to their imaginary friend. In the middle ages it went side-by-side with the founding of innumerable charitable institutions. And, alas, side-by side-with the luxurious life-style of the higher clergy. For, if the poor are always with us so is ‘the robber rich man’ always ready to exploit any opportunity that presents itself. Bishoprics were either divvied out amongst themselves by aristocratic families or used by the king to reward his senior civil servants. Just as today the tax-payer or company shareholders have to support the outrageous greed of Sir Fred Goodwin and his like.
So denounce the wickedness done by individual catholics, remember that as a human being you have the potential to act as vilely yourself, and resist subscribing to Dan Brown’s or - for the more literate amongst you - Philip Pullman’s fantasies.

Pardons and Millstones

Early modern heretics finally got their hands on an Exocet with the scandal over indulgences. For, like John Webster, our 16th century forebears were ‘much obsessed with death’.

As anyone with a nodding acquaintance with Chaucer will know, sexual irregularity was rife amongst the mediæval clergy. For example, in 1397 seventy-two clerics from the 281 parishes which comprised the diocese of Hereford were accused of sexual incontinence by the parishioners. The difference between matters then and today is that the misconduct was on a vastly greater scale, that it involved consenting adults, was predominantly heterosexual, and was not considered a big-deal by anyone other than the Church authorities and the pious. Readers of Clochemerle will be aware that things weren’t vastly different in France in the 1930s; readers of The Power and the Glory, that being the priest’s mistress conferred a certain social prestige in rural Mexico.

But if the clergy’s sexual misbehaviour was tolerated, Luther eventually found a lethal weapon to attack the Church: indulgences. They were intended to reduce the time spent in Purgatory to expiate sins which had been confessed and absolved. They did not forgive the sin itself. But this distinction was blurred by the minor church officials responsible for distributing them, encouraging the uneducated to think that they replaced repentance, confession and absolution. And when people were alerted to the con by Luther they were very, very upset. For the average peasant the one consolation for his frequently miserable and harsh life was the hope of a happy afterlife. Where you went after death was the single most important issue in life. And to have coughed up money to buy an indulgence and thereby a place in heaven, only to find that - by the Church’s own teaching - it did no such thing was a step too far.

Today, if people believe in the afterlife at all it’s a vague hope that there’s a heaven. In the Middle Ages people knew there was an afterlife and unless you were very careful it was likely to be very warm and involve demons pushing red-hot pokers up your backside. But if we’ve largely lost a belief in a personal immortality, we know that we live on in our children, our grandchildren and untold generations of descendants. And just as some mediæval clergy betrayed their congregations’ hope of heaven by mis-promoting indulgences, so their successors’ vile behaviour towards defenceless children has defiled what we hold most dear.

If you’d asked Pope Leo X whether an indulgence forgave sin as opposed to remitting time in purgatory he’d have replied, ‘Of course not.’ But he was very happy to let the misconception that it did raise funds to build St Peter’s. If you asked Benedict XVI whether he concurred with Christ’s statement that ‘whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea’ he would reply, ‘Of course’. But he’s presided over a regime where the reputation of the Church was more important than making sure that these unspeakably vile clergy could never have the opportunity to repeat their crimes. The Church paid dearly for Leo X’s dereliction of duty, I fear the consequences of Benedict’s may be terminal.

And that, despite all, would be a pity. It’s not that the Church has suddenly become more wicked: arguably its members' behaviour has improved over the past two millennia. Of the twelve apostles, Peter - the rock upon which Christ built his church - denied him three times; I’m not aware of any subsequent Pope having done so verbally, although their behaviour may sometimes have done so in practice. Judas sold his saviour for thirty pieces of silver, and James and John spent most of the Last Supper arguing about who’d have the more important post in the Kingdom of Heaven. A hanger-on, Simon Magus, offered Peter money to acquire the power to transmit the Holy Spirit. Altogether a pretty unsavoury bunch, far removed from the protestant evangelicals’ mythical primitive church untouched by the wiles of Rome. What we all have in common is that we’re human beings: utopianism as any reader of Swift or Orwell knows is a dangerous delusion, and as Christ said, ‘They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ Also worth recalling is his saying, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone …’, and, as John remarked in an epistle, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’.