It has finally stopped raining. Sod's Law has prevailed. When people have time off from school and work on Saturday and Sunday, it rains. Then the weather clears up for a sunny, warm week. I don't remember this happening when I was a child. Perhaps it doesn't matter to children anyway. Playing in the rain and splashing in puddles can be as much fun as skipping in the sun.
In 1951, when we finally settled into a permanent home, I started at the nearest school which was St Joseph's Catholic School, a primary school for children aged from five years to twelve or thirteen, from whence they moved to St Catherine's College next door, a secondary school, both institutions run by the Dominican nuns. The huge basilica overshadowed both schools - we all spent a lot of time in the basilica - singing and praying. The nuns lived in the adjacent convent and there were about thirty of them. Boys went to St Joseph's until they turned seven, then they went to the Marist Brothers' School, boys only. St Joseph's was ten minutes walk (or half an hour's dawdle) from home and all children walked to school. As we left our respective homes in a trickle, so as we got closer to the school the trickle turned into a stream of children, then a flood, then a veritable deluge. Four extra classrooms were built whilst I was there which now are unused, as is the whole primary school. St Catherine's has been turned into both primary and secondary and caters for both boys and girls. The school I attended for seven years is now derelict. The Marist Brothers' school disappeared twenty years ago.
The street we lived in had thirty houses with ten of them holding forty children. At least ten houses were inhabited by older people whose children had grown up and moved away. The other ten I cannot remember. Possibly they held some more children but older, in their teens and of no interest to me at six. Now I live in a street of thirty houses where there are six children. Three of these children belong to a single mother and this little family arrived lately, so they could move on again at any time. This is population control observed in microcosm, a phenomenon I can see and measure within my own little area. I am not saying it is a bad thing, this not having too many children. Being Catholic and having witnessed the end result of uninterrupted breeding by order of the Pope and his 'celibate' minions and also being a woman, I am wholeheartedly in favour of a woman deciding how many children her health (mental and physical) can bear. I went to school with children who had built up boots, leg irons, health problems from a bread and jam diet, cleft palates and hare lips, sickly (or dead) mothers, children who slept three to a bed, who coughed throughout the year, (as I did), and children who, when I look back with the knowledge, were obviously suffering from sheer neglect, having been lost in the crowd of other siblings.
Nevertheless, the Dominican nuns did their best. They were wonderful women. They wore the same garments they had worn in the 18th century. A starched head dress with flaring wings each side of their faces, a veil attached which flowed down past their shoulders, a full length habit with sleeves loose enough at the wrists to put their hands into, and a huge set of rosary beads attached to a broad leather belt at their waists. They were immaculate and smelt always of soap. The classrooms were always polished and clean with flowers in vases (you could always get a smile and genuine pleasure by taking a bunch of flowers to the teacher, at the risk of the other kids nudging each other and hissing at you) and all children at the convent changed from street shoes into slippers for wear in the classrooms. This was quite a good idea - it made the place quieter.
My first teacher when I was six was a fat old nun named Sister Hoffbar. I thought she was about a hundred, but she was probably just on the right side of sixty. She had the five and six year olds (the primers) and taught the alphabet and printing. We had to come out literate but not much else as the real hard grind would begin at seven years of age. Anyway, there was an enormous amount of religion to be got through in the form of stories, praying (prayers to be learned) and attendance at the basilica which we could all see out the window - the House of God! In the middle of the classroom was a huge potbellied oven with a square fire guard around it and every morning when we arrived this was red hot. This was the only classroom to be so equipped, but primers were considered just out of babyhood and were a privileged little lot. We put on our slippers and warmed ourselves as we wished. Sister Hoffbar was rather like a black and white version of Mrs Santa and the children were cuddled and smiled at quite a lot. Every one of us was made to feel we were her special little child, no mean feat when there must have been thirty of us. There was never a raised voice, never impatience, never anger from her. The end result was that we were all, without exception, happier to be at school than to be at home and this delight lasted most of us until puberty.
But, ah well, we must all grow older and at seven years of age we moved into a more academic environment. The boys disappeared thank goodness. They were inclined to be loose cannons on the deck. Colin Klein wet his pants one day and disgusted and horrified all the little girls. Simon and Richmond Low were Chinese brothers. Simon was the older but a bit slow, and he had been kept back a year. They sat together. Simon always had the runny nose, (two great, thick candles which stopped at his upper lip and which he never seemed to notice, not even to sniff them back in) and Richmond always had the handkerchief. John Horan showing off got stuck in the lift up seat of the double desk and Sister Hoffbar had to call in Old Frank to unscrew the seat. Old Frank was the handyman around the school, a somewhat daft old pensioner but still capable of doing little jobs, including lighting the big fat stove in the primers room every morning at about seven a.m. I can still see him in my mind's eye, as I saw him when I was six and seven, and I remember how I dismissed him completely as being anything other than - well - something like a slave. What little autocrats small children can be. Old Frank moved like a ghost around and through the school doing the menial tasks until he disappears from my memory when I was about ten.
Now the nuns did something which most pupils in schools will not see. I have heard of 'Renaissance Men', but every one of my teachers was a'Renaissance Woman'. They were educated (some of them had two degrees and a vocational qualification), spoke Latin as a matter of course, possibly French, knew about diet, art, literature, current affairs, music, and handcrafts - most of them embroidered, gardened, or sang.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Friday, January 19, 2007
Letter to Erp - Timmy the Pony
Dear Erp:
It is still raining here, but warm and still. The garden is like a tropical forest. I would dearly have loved to see the comet in the southern skies this week, but the clouds have prevented this. Never mind, let me go back in time and see if I can amuse you with more prosaic and earthly things, like the story of Timmy the Pony.
In 1951, when I was six years of age, my parents finally stopped their peripatetic wanderings and settled in a villa in Invercargill, a town of about 40,000 souls. My two sisters had been born by then, and the family was complete.
Somewhere along the line a Shetland pony named Timmy arrived in town with us. I think he may have been my pony whilst my father worked on a farm but cannot remember. All I can remember is that Tim lived in a paddock about five minutes bike ride from our house, and it was my job to visit him every day after school to check on him, give him water, and have a ride - if I could ever get the bridle and pony pad on him. He was a pony with all the vices a Shetland (a notoriously cunning equine breed) could possibly have. He bucked, bit, threw his head up hoping to connect with mine if I was leaning forward trying to urge the lazy little sod into a trot,(or down, if there was a chance I was standing underneath him trying to haul his hoof off my foot) and kicked. Tim was one of those ponies which come with a warning - DO NOT WALK BEHIND ME! My father must have got him for free because I can't imagine anyone paying good money for such a shaggy little menace. He wasn't even good company, as some horses are, coming up to rest their head on one's shoulder and blowing sweet air out of their nostrils, nickering with pleasure to see their little owner arrive to give some company - not Tim! He looked at me with Scottish disdain and went back to eating. I got my exercise in vain attempts to get near enough to him with the bridle. Taking a piece of carrot or apple was pointless. Tim would eat it then present his hind quarters to me, a warning that I should skip smartly out of kicking range. Around the paddock we went several times, Tim keeping about one yard away from me at all times. If I did catch him and bridle him, it was only because he was bored with the paddock and wanted to get out to cause somebody grief.
He must have let me catch him at least once. I remember riding him home and letting one little girl about my age from down the street hop up on his back. Tim, of course, bucked, she wasn't ready, came off, and went home crying with a broken arm. Her mother came down and had a talk with my mother, who had a talk with my father, and Tim quickly and mysteriously disappeared after that. I made a couple of enquiries about him next day and was told he had been sold to another family who wanted a pony for their little girl and this had been agreed to as I had not been looking after him well enough. I believed my parents and felt bad for a couple of hours about my neglect of Tim, but not bad enough to regret his disappearance, then forgot all about him during a skipping contest.
I suppose the hairy little menace had somewhat of a conscience because he could easily have killed me with a kick, but they always seemed to miss. His bites, although immediately painful, did not leave bruises. He helped me strengthen my upper arms for a later first class serve in tennis with much fruitless hauling of his foreleg when he stood on my foot - that never really hurt either. He didn't care though that I could have broken something important when I got bucked off - although that never happened either and I can only think that, being a Shetland, Tim was so close to the ground there wasn't far enough to fall. I don't know how the little girl from down the road broke her arm. Not used to it I suppose. The most hurt I suffered through visiting Tim was when I trod on a nail sticking up out of a piece of wood lying in the long grass in the pony paddock. I had to pull my foot off the nail and by the time I got home my canvas shoe was red with blood. New Zealand is rich in tetanus, especially around horses, so my mother put a bread poultice on the wound but I expect the copious bleeding had flushed out any germs because I didn't get tetanus.
When I look back, I guess I lived pretty dangerously for a six year old. My mode of transport, my bike, was full sized - I had to reach up to grasp the handlebars, and my father had put wooden blocks on the pedals and lowered the seat as far as it would go so it was a bit like an aeroplane where the most dicey part was the take-off. Getting off was no problem to someone who had been thrown by Tim as often as I had. Until I got bigger I would brake to almost stopping point then jump, leaving the bike to fall where it would - something a pilot would recognise as bailing out (without a parachute). I didn't ride the bike to school but I went everywhere else within a half mile or so on it and remember distinctly practising riding with no hands, a skill much admired in those balmy days. After regular run-ins with Tim a bike was my preferred mode of transport - no feeding, no watering, no curry combs, no tack, no hurtie bits, just the beginning of my affection for a technological form of transport over the organic and I don't care how romantic some people find horses - I think they are expensive, time consuming, and dangerous.
Yours unrepentedly,
Jude
It is still raining here, but warm and still. The garden is like a tropical forest. I would dearly have loved to see the comet in the southern skies this week, but the clouds have prevented this. Never mind, let me go back in time and see if I can amuse you with more prosaic and earthly things, like the story of Timmy the Pony.
In 1951, when I was six years of age, my parents finally stopped their peripatetic wanderings and settled in a villa in Invercargill, a town of about 40,000 souls. My two sisters had been born by then, and the family was complete.
Somewhere along the line a Shetland pony named Timmy arrived in town with us. I think he may have been my pony whilst my father worked on a farm but cannot remember. All I can remember is that Tim lived in a paddock about five minutes bike ride from our house, and it was my job to visit him every day after school to check on him, give him water, and have a ride - if I could ever get the bridle and pony pad on him. He was a pony with all the vices a Shetland (a notoriously cunning equine breed) could possibly have. He bucked, bit, threw his head up hoping to connect with mine if I was leaning forward trying to urge the lazy little sod into a trot,(or down, if there was a chance I was standing underneath him trying to haul his hoof off my foot) and kicked. Tim was one of those ponies which come with a warning - DO NOT WALK BEHIND ME! My father must have got him for free because I can't imagine anyone paying good money for such a shaggy little menace. He wasn't even good company, as some horses are, coming up to rest their head on one's shoulder and blowing sweet air out of their nostrils, nickering with pleasure to see their little owner arrive to give some company - not Tim! He looked at me with Scottish disdain and went back to eating. I got my exercise in vain attempts to get near enough to him with the bridle. Taking a piece of carrot or apple was pointless. Tim would eat it then present his hind quarters to me, a warning that I should skip smartly out of kicking range. Around the paddock we went several times, Tim keeping about one yard away from me at all times. If I did catch him and bridle him, it was only because he was bored with the paddock and wanted to get out to cause somebody grief.
He must have let me catch him at least once. I remember riding him home and letting one little girl about my age from down the street hop up on his back. Tim, of course, bucked, she wasn't ready, came off, and went home crying with a broken arm. Her mother came down and had a talk with my mother, who had a talk with my father, and Tim quickly and mysteriously disappeared after that. I made a couple of enquiries about him next day and was told he had been sold to another family who wanted a pony for their little girl and this had been agreed to as I had not been looking after him well enough. I believed my parents and felt bad for a couple of hours about my neglect of Tim, but not bad enough to regret his disappearance, then forgot all about him during a skipping contest.
I suppose the hairy little menace had somewhat of a conscience because he could easily have killed me with a kick, but they always seemed to miss. His bites, although immediately painful, did not leave bruises. He helped me strengthen my upper arms for a later first class serve in tennis with much fruitless hauling of his foreleg when he stood on my foot - that never really hurt either. He didn't care though that I could have broken something important when I got bucked off - although that never happened either and I can only think that, being a Shetland, Tim was so close to the ground there wasn't far enough to fall. I don't know how the little girl from down the road broke her arm. Not used to it I suppose. The most hurt I suffered through visiting Tim was when I trod on a nail sticking up out of a piece of wood lying in the long grass in the pony paddock. I had to pull my foot off the nail and by the time I got home my canvas shoe was red with blood. New Zealand is rich in tetanus, especially around horses, so my mother put a bread poultice on the wound but I expect the copious bleeding had flushed out any germs because I didn't get tetanus.
When I look back, I guess I lived pretty dangerously for a six year old. My mode of transport, my bike, was full sized - I had to reach up to grasp the handlebars, and my father had put wooden blocks on the pedals and lowered the seat as far as it would go so it was a bit like an aeroplane where the most dicey part was the take-off. Getting off was no problem to someone who had been thrown by Tim as often as I had. Until I got bigger I would brake to almost stopping point then jump, leaving the bike to fall where it would - something a pilot would recognise as bailing out (without a parachute). I didn't ride the bike to school but I went everywhere else within a half mile or so on it and remember distinctly practising riding with no hands, a skill much admired in those balmy days. After regular run-ins with Tim a bike was my preferred mode of transport - no feeding, no watering, no curry combs, no tack, no hurtie bits, just the beginning of my affection for a technological form of transport over the organic and I don't care how romantic some people find horses - I think they are expensive, time consuming, and dangerous.
Yours unrepentedly,
Jude
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Letter to Erp
Dear Erp:
It is raining here today, but humid. I knew it would rain. I watered my garden yesterday.
I have just returned from the library. I am a member of eight libraries - i.e. Invercargill, Gore, Dunedin, Otago University, Chinchilla (Aust), Brisbane, Lane Cove (Sydney) and Toowoomba (Aust). When I was seven years of age, my old Scottish grandmother took me to the library (she was on her way to the pub where she spent her Friday afternoons drinking gin and water) and enrolled me. After that I went three times a week and got three books each time until I turned twelve, when I moved to the adult library and began to step up my reading. I don't know what I would do without a public library. It is my first port of call wherever I am in the English speaking world. Today I got The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, (recommended by yourself, Erp), The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I have read before but need to re-read) plus three videos - Finian's Rainbow, I Claudius, and Agnes Browne.
My old Scottish grandmother therefore has a lot to answer for if it is true, as my father said many times, that sitting on one's backside reading is sheer laziness. My grandmother's name was Martha and her parents owned a dairy farm in the days when cows were milked by hand and Martha had worked hard until the time she was sent at 18 to look after her recently dead elder sister's six children. (She married her brother-in-law and eventually had six children to him herself.) She brought up 12 children, working on the farm as well, then eventually bought and ran a hotel, which hotel catered for up to forty paying guests. She nursed her husband, a daughter-in-law who died, a grandaughter who also died (aged eight), and then, old and useless, came to live with my family. She had the front room and I promptly assumed proprietal rights and moved in with her. She stayed two years, when I was aged seven and eight. Then she moved out again and went to look after her widowed son and Faye, his fourteen year old daughter. I was furious and performed beautifully, crying and screaming for her until threats of 'getting something to really cry for' quietened me. I never really liked my parents after that.
Grandma seemed to have two sets of everything. One set for around home, and one set for going out. That included teeth and rings. She was never idle. She knitted her skirts and tops, and made rag rugs. She smoked Capstan Cork tipped cigarettes until she died at 84. She drank gin and water and got very merry every Friday afternoon with about half a dozen other old pensioners, but the rest of the week she made herself useful (particularly to me, I made sure of that), and taught me to knit and let me play her 78 records on her wind up gramophone and rifle through her belongings. Every night she made Milo for us both (with two malt biscuits) then we climbed into bed together. This was a feather bed, by the way, a rarity today. The only demands she made on me were that I was quiet (I was, sitting there reading) and that I did not move around in the bed (which I did not, knowing I was onto a good thing). I thought I was set for life.
Grandma never seemed to mind my watching her, (with fascination as she prepared to go out on Friday afternoon - first her corsets, then seamed stockings, a knitted suit, going out jewellery. black wide fit shoes, a fur coat, hat, gloves and handbag, and going out teeth) but I watched with admiration, never with a critical eye. I never thought one day she wouldn't come back.
I look at old women today with their grey hair and comfortable clothes - my grandmother was never like that. She had her hair dyed jet black until her final stay in hospital. She was short and broad and walked with the determination of a sumo wrestler. She rarely smiled (except when not sober after an afternoon on gin and water) because everything in life was serious for her. She had a doggedness, a sort of slogging on or battling against the odds, an air of never giving in or giving up, a sort of understanding that no-one wins, death waits for all, but in the meantime you must do the right thing, and keep up standards.
I think living with my grandmother for those two years set the pattern for my old fashioned behaviour, that is to say my love of routine and peace and quiet, from then on. I always think of her when I hear 'Lily of Laguna' or 'At the Balalaika' (big hits in her youth and often played by me on her wind up gramophone), when I see laxative chocolate (I ate a whole block found whilst rifling through her drawers thinking it was real chocolate and it tasted okay as well), when I see a fox fur draped over a woman's shoulder in an old film, when I knit (it wasn't easy for her, me being left handed and her being right handed, she had to reverse things to teach me), and many other things when my grandmother lives again - in my memory. I wish I had her back just long enough to tell her even after over fifty years, I still miss her.
With nostalgia,
Jude
It is raining here today, but humid. I knew it would rain. I watered my garden yesterday.
I have just returned from the library. I am a member of eight libraries - i.e. Invercargill, Gore, Dunedin, Otago University, Chinchilla (Aust), Brisbane, Lane Cove (Sydney) and Toowoomba (Aust). When I was seven years of age, my old Scottish grandmother took me to the library (she was on her way to the pub where she spent her Friday afternoons drinking gin and water) and enrolled me. After that I went three times a week and got three books each time until I turned twelve, when I moved to the adult library and began to step up my reading. I don't know what I would do without a public library. It is my first port of call wherever I am in the English speaking world. Today I got The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, (recommended by yourself, Erp), The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I have read before but need to re-read) plus three videos - Finian's Rainbow, I Claudius, and Agnes Browne.
My old Scottish grandmother therefore has a lot to answer for if it is true, as my father said many times, that sitting on one's backside reading is sheer laziness. My grandmother's name was Martha and her parents owned a dairy farm in the days when cows were milked by hand and Martha had worked hard until the time she was sent at 18 to look after her recently dead elder sister's six children. (She married her brother-in-law and eventually had six children to him herself.) She brought up 12 children, working on the farm as well, then eventually bought and ran a hotel, which hotel catered for up to forty paying guests. She nursed her husband, a daughter-in-law who died, a grandaughter who also died (aged eight), and then, old and useless, came to live with my family. She had the front room and I promptly assumed proprietal rights and moved in with her. She stayed two years, when I was aged seven and eight. Then she moved out again and went to look after her widowed son and Faye, his fourteen year old daughter. I was furious and performed beautifully, crying and screaming for her until threats of 'getting something to really cry for' quietened me. I never really liked my parents after that.
Grandma seemed to have two sets of everything. One set for around home, and one set for going out. That included teeth and rings. She was never idle. She knitted her skirts and tops, and made rag rugs. She smoked Capstan Cork tipped cigarettes until she died at 84. She drank gin and water and got very merry every Friday afternoon with about half a dozen other old pensioners, but the rest of the week she made herself useful (particularly to me, I made sure of that), and taught me to knit and let me play her 78 records on her wind up gramophone and rifle through her belongings. Every night she made Milo for us both (with two malt biscuits) then we climbed into bed together. This was a feather bed, by the way, a rarity today. The only demands she made on me were that I was quiet (I was, sitting there reading) and that I did not move around in the bed (which I did not, knowing I was onto a good thing). I thought I was set for life.
Grandma never seemed to mind my watching her, (with fascination as she prepared to go out on Friday afternoon - first her corsets, then seamed stockings, a knitted suit, going out jewellery. black wide fit shoes, a fur coat, hat, gloves and handbag, and going out teeth) but I watched with admiration, never with a critical eye. I never thought one day she wouldn't come back.
I look at old women today with their grey hair and comfortable clothes - my grandmother was never like that. She had her hair dyed jet black until her final stay in hospital. She was short and broad and walked with the determination of a sumo wrestler. She rarely smiled (except when not sober after an afternoon on gin and water) because everything in life was serious for her. She had a doggedness, a sort of slogging on or battling against the odds, an air of never giving in or giving up, a sort of understanding that no-one wins, death waits for all, but in the meantime you must do the right thing, and keep up standards.
I think living with my grandmother for those two years set the pattern for my old fashioned behaviour, that is to say my love of routine and peace and quiet, from then on. I always think of her when I hear 'Lily of Laguna' or 'At the Balalaika' (big hits in her youth and often played by me on her wind up gramophone), when I see laxative chocolate (I ate a whole block found whilst rifling through her drawers thinking it was real chocolate and it tasted okay as well), when I see a fox fur draped over a woman's shoulder in an old film, when I knit (it wasn't easy for her, me being left handed and her being right handed, she had to reverse things to teach me), and many other things when my grandmother lives again - in my memory. I wish I had her back just long enough to tell her even after over fifty years, I still miss her.
With nostalgia,
Jude
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
The Eastern Bloc Countries
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski are identical twin brothers. They are running Poland. They are hugely popular ultranationalists and they are running all the communists out of the country - not just card carrying communists are for the chop, but collaborators and quislings also.
Although Poland was a member of the Soviet Bloc, Poles are ardent Catholics and they never took to communism. (Read The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz.)
Poland now, Czechoslovakia and Hungary next? It's a Brussels' nightmare.
Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski are identical twin brothers. They are running Poland. They are hugely popular ultranationalists and they are running all the communists out of the country - not just card carrying communists are for the chop, but collaborators and quislings also.
Although Poland was a member of the Soviet Bloc, Poles are ardent Catholics and they never took to communism. (Read The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz.)
Poland now, Czechoslovakia and Hungary next? It's a Brussels' nightmare.
Monday, July 24, 2006
My New Grandson
Asher Benjamin Ghannoum aged two days.
What happened? I come from a family of girls, I had only daughters, and this daughter has now had four sons.
My eldest daughter had two sons.
What happened? I come from a family of girls, I had only daughters, and this daughter has now had four sons.My eldest daughter had two sons.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Marshall McLuhan
Also from The Mid-Atlantic Man
For many years I have observed that the moralist typically substitutes anger for perception. He hopes that many people will take his irritation for insight...The mere moralistic expression of approval or disapproval, preference or detestation, is currently being used in our world as a substitute for observation and a substitute for study. People hope that if they scream loudly enough about 'values' then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming?
Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity. (p 161)
For many years I have observed that the moralist typically substitutes anger for perception. He hopes that many people will take his irritation for insight...The mere moralistic expression of approval or disapproval, preference or detestation, is currently being used in our world as a substitute for observation and a substitute for study. People hope that if they scream loudly enough about 'values' then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming?
Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity. (p 161)
The Behavioural Sink
...all animals, including birds, seem to have a built-in, inherited requirement to have a certain amount of territory, space, to lead their lives in. Even if they have all the food they need, and there are no predatory animals threatening them, they cannot tolerate overcrowding beyond a certain point. No more than two hundred wild Norway rats can survive on a quarter acre of ground, for example, even when they are given all the food they can eat. They just die off.
But why? To find out, ethologists have run experiments on all sorts of animals, from stickleback crabs to Sika deer. In one major experiement, an ethologist named John Calhoun put some domesticated white Norway rats in a pen with four sections to it, connected by ramps. Calhoun knew from previous experiments that the rats tend to split up into groups of ten to twelve and that the pen, therefore, would hold forty to forty eight rats comfortably, assuming they formed four equal groups. He allowed them to reproduce until there were eighty rats, balanced between male and female, but did not let it get any more crowded. He kept them supplied with plenty of food, water and nesting materials. To the human eye the pen did not even look especially crowded, but to the rats, it was crowded beyond endurance.
The entire colony was soon pluged into a profound behavioural sink. "The sink." said Calhoun, "is the outcome of any behavioural process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers. The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental; a behavioural sink does act to aggravate all forms of pathology that can be found within a group."
For a start, long before the rat population reached eighty, a status hierarchy had developed in the pen. Two dominant male rats took over the two end sections, acquired harems of eight to ten females each, and forced the rest of the rats into two middle pens. All the overcrowding took place in the middle pens. That was where the 'sink' hit. The aristocratic rats at the ends grew bigger, sleeker, healthier and more secure all the time.
In the 'sink' meanwhile, nest building, courting, sex behaviour, reproduction, social organisation, health, all of it went to pieces...
No more than three males - the dominant males in the 'sink' - kept up the old customs. The rest tried everything from satyrism to homosexuality or else gave up on sex altogether. Three or four might chase one female at the same time and...
Homosexuality rose sharply. So did bi-sexuality. Some males would mount anything, males, females, babies, senescent rats, anything...
Females in the 'sink' were ravaged physically and psychologically. Pregnant rats had trouble continuing a pregnancy. The rate of miscarriages increased significantly and females started dying from tumours and other disorders of the mammary glands, sex organs, uterus, ovaries and Fallopian tubes.
Child rearing became totally disorganised. The females lost the interest or the stamina to build nests and did not keep them up if they did build them. In the general filth and confusion they would not put themselves out to save offspring they were momentarily separated from. Frantic, even sadistic competitionn was going on all round them and rendering their lives chaotic.
from The Mid-Atlantic Man by Tom Wolfe pp 297 - 300
(condensed somewhat by me.)
Get the book and read the rest yourself.
But why? To find out, ethologists have run experiments on all sorts of animals, from stickleback crabs to Sika deer. In one major experiement, an ethologist named John Calhoun put some domesticated white Norway rats in a pen with four sections to it, connected by ramps. Calhoun knew from previous experiments that the rats tend to split up into groups of ten to twelve and that the pen, therefore, would hold forty to forty eight rats comfortably, assuming they formed four equal groups. He allowed them to reproduce until there were eighty rats, balanced between male and female, but did not let it get any more crowded. He kept them supplied with plenty of food, water and nesting materials. To the human eye the pen did not even look especially crowded, but to the rats, it was crowded beyond endurance.
The entire colony was soon pluged into a profound behavioural sink. "The sink." said Calhoun, "is the outcome of any behavioural process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers. The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental; a behavioural sink does act to aggravate all forms of pathology that can be found within a group."
For a start, long before the rat population reached eighty, a status hierarchy had developed in the pen. Two dominant male rats took over the two end sections, acquired harems of eight to ten females each, and forced the rest of the rats into two middle pens. All the overcrowding took place in the middle pens. That was where the 'sink' hit. The aristocratic rats at the ends grew bigger, sleeker, healthier and more secure all the time.
In the 'sink' meanwhile, nest building, courting, sex behaviour, reproduction, social organisation, health, all of it went to pieces...
No more than three males - the dominant males in the 'sink' - kept up the old customs. The rest tried everything from satyrism to homosexuality or else gave up on sex altogether. Three or four might chase one female at the same time and...
Homosexuality rose sharply. So did bi-sexuality. Some males would mount anything, males, females, babies, senescent rats, anything...
Females in the 'sink' were ravaged physically and psychologically. Pregnant rats had trouble continuing a pregnancy. The rate of miscarriages increased significantly and females started dying from tumours and other disorders of the mammary glands, sex organs, uterus, ovaries and Fallopian tubes.
Child rearing became totally disorganised. The females lost the interest or the stamina to build nests and did not keep them up if they did build them. In the general filth and confusion they would not put themselves out to save offspring they were momentarily separated from. Frantic, even sadistic competitionn was going on all round them and rendering their lives chaotic.
from The Mid-Atlantic Man by Tom Wolfe pp 297 - 300
(condensed somewhat by me.)
Get the book and read the rest yourself.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
From Political Correctness to Dialectics
Dialectic (n) Art of investigating the truth of opinions. Testing of truth by discussion, logical disputation.
Dialectician (n) A person skilled in critical enquiry by discussion.
(Note that a dialectician is skilled in investigating the truth of ‘Opinions’. Not the Truth per se.)
For a description of how dialecticians work I will now lean heavily on the writings of Nobel Prize winner and Polish intellectual Vaclav Havel who experienced dialectics first hand when the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) extended the hammer and sickle into Eastern Europe after World War II.
Now that it is becoming clearer (after forty years) that political correctness is a tool of socialistic control, someone like myself might ask – why is it necessary and where is it leading? Haven’t we got a good life now? Ah yes, we in the West have, but what about all those millions of people who have not? They must also be brought into the socialist fold, and you can go out into the fields to grow grain for them also.
Political correctness leads to dispossessed thinking. But since people cannot rid themselves completely of their former beliefs, they become schizophrenic. They try to hold in their minds two opposing ideas as of equal value. The internal dissonance brought about by these two opposing ideas is the field to be sown by dialecticians. The seeds to be sown are those of socialism.
Socialism: Political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the community as a whole should own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange.
(Note also that Socialism is the first stage to Communism and that Communism must be Totalitarian.)
Communism does not advocate that the community as a whole should own anything. Everything is owned by the State. The State is Totalitarian. A Totalitarian State does not permit any opposing party. A Totalitarian State demands complete subserviance of the individual to the State. End of Democracy.
We have come by easy stages to a lack of a common system of thought. This common system of thought is what holds families, communities and eventually, nations together. In all people there is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical punishment. Religion, which once provided this sense of harmony has been replaced by dialectics and dialectics has strayed into spheres increasingly less accessible to the layman. Out of this lack arises a painful sense of detachment. A sense of the hopelessness of striving for a better life permeates the mind. Why bother? In a Totalitarian State you will be told what to do at every stage of your life. You will eat a diet considered best for you by the dialecticians. Art and Literature there will be, but it will conform to Socialist Realism which will be defined by the dialecticians. You will not travel unless you have permission from the State. Your children will be educated in subjects once again defined by the dialecticians. From the cradle to the grave (does that sound familiar?) you will be monitored by processes developed by socialist dialecticians. You will think thoughts as defined by the dialecticians. The very alienation Marx denounced will take place not where you work, but in your mind.
Dialectician (n) A person skilled in critical enquiry by discussion.
(Note that a dialectician is skilled in investigating the truth of ‘Opinions’. Not the Truth per se.)
For a description of how dialecticians work I will now lean heavily on the writings of Nobel Prize winner and Polish intellectual Vaclav Havel who experienced dialectics first hand when the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) extended the hammer and sickle into Eastern Europe after World War II.
Now that it is becoming clearer (after forty years) that political correctness is a tool of socialistic control, someone like myself might ask – why is it necessary and where is it leading? Haven’t we got a good life now? Ah yes, we in the West have, but what about all those millions of people who have not? They must also be brought into the socialist fold, and you can go out into the fields to grow grain for them also.
Political correctness leads to dispossessed thinking. But since people cannot rid themselves completely of their former beliefs, they become schizophrenic. They try to hold in their minds two opposing ideas as of equal value. The internal dissonance brought about by these two opposing ideas is the field to be sown by dialecticians. The seeds to be sown are those of socialism.
Socialism: Political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the community as a whole should own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange.
(Note also that Socialism is the first stage to Communism and that Communism must be Totalitarian.)
Communism does not advocate that the community as a whole should own anything. Everything is owned by the State. The State is Totalitarian. A Totalitarian State does not permit any opposing party. A Totalitarian State demands complete subserviance of the individual to the State. End of Democracy.
We have come by easy stages to a lack of a common system of thought. This common system of thought is what holds families, communities and eventually, nations together. In all people there is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical punishment. Religion, which once provided this sense of harmony has been replaced by dialectics and dialectics has strayed into spheres increasingly less accessible to the layman. Out of this lack arises a painful sense of detachment. A sense of the hopelessness of striving for a better life permeates the mind. Why bother? In a Totalitarian State you will be told what to do at every stage of your life. You will eat a diet considered best for you by the dialecticians. Art and Literature there will be, but it will conform to Socialist Realism which will be defined by the dialecticians. You will not travel unless you have permission from the State. Your children will be educated in subjects once again defined by the dialecticians. From the cradle to the grave (does that sound familiar?) you will be monitored by processes developed by socialist dialecticians. You will think thoughts as defined by the dialecticians. The very alienation Marx denounced will take place not where you work, but in your mind.
My Analysis of Political Correctness
For me, political correctness made its first appearance around 1976. I don’t think it was called political correctness then. I was working hard. I was studying for a degree which was intended to get me out of the type of work I had been in since I was fifteen, and working, and running a house and raising three daughters. It is surprising I noticed anything, but I was also involved in the Women’s Collective so, when the appellation ‘Ms’ was mooted as an alternative to ‘Miss’ or ‘Missus’ for women it was certainly brought to my attention.
Now the use of ‘Ms’ is not necessarily politically correct, but there were also other uses of language which were under scrutiny by feminists (feminine diminutives, the generic use of ‘he’ for example) and because my attention was caught, I remember mostly this particular appellation. I was in favour of its use.
My second memory at about this time (because I was doing an English degree) was the demand by feminists for greater inclusion (in university courses) of the study of women writers, also the proliferation of crèches (or day nurseries) and a general demand that women be given more respect on the street and in the home. Domestic violence, which was endemic in New Zealand at that time and had been for decades, was being addressed and women’s refuges set up. All of these things I was (and still am) in favour of.
Parallel with feminist demands were demands from people of colour for the same type of linguistic changes. They too wanted rights and respect. Then homosexuals and lesbians wanted rights and respect. And so it went on until practically anyone who wasn’t white and male had a gripe they had to have satisfied within the law.
The problem with liberalism is, by virtue of its name and ideology, it has no boundaries. Once liberalism takes hold nobody seems able to be illiberal. Liberalism snowballs, as it has, into ludicrous situations. Well, we thought it was liberalism, until recently, when it seems all the changes which have taken place in societies since the early 1970’s are not actually liberal at all. We are being choked by change. We are confused and unhappy. We now live in a world which is threatening and uncertain, a world where to tell the truth may lead to a prison sentence, a world where to tell a joke or draw a cartoon may lead to death.
Young people, born since 1970, may not notice too much difference but I do. I once worked (1965) for an engineer boss whose father was a Protestant clergyman. My boss knew I had been convent educated and many were the Protestant/Catholic jokes told in that office. I wouldn’t dare do that now. It is politically incorrect. Even if I worked for the same boss, neither of us would dare laugh about something like that anymore in case ‘someone’ overheard and took offence.
What has happened? Political correctness has morphed into something else. That ‘something else’ has entered every area of life – into schools, hospitals, the workplace, entertainment, everywhere I can think of. It is no longer political correctness, although we think of it as such. It is now dialectics.
to be continued...
Now the use of ‘Ms’ is not necessarily politically correct, but there were also other uses of language which were under scrutiny by feminists (feminine diminutives, the generic use of ‘he’ for example) and because my attention was caught, I remember mostly this particular appellation. I was in favour of its use.
My second memory at about this time (because I was doing an English degree) was the demand by feminists for greater inclusion (in university courses) of the study of women writers, also the proliferation of crèches (or day nurseries) and a general demand that women be given more respect on the street and in the home. Domestic violence, which was endemic in New Zealand at that time and had been for decades, was being addressed and women’s refuges set up. All of these things I was (and still am) in favour of.
Parallel with feminist demands were demands from people of colour for the same type of linguistic changes. They too wanted rights and respect. Then homosexuals and lesbians wanted rights and respect. And so it went on until practically anyone who wasn’t white and male had a gripe they had to have satisfied within the law.
The problem with liberalism is, by virtue of its name and ideology, it has no boundaries. Once liberalism takes hold nobody seems able to be illiberal. Liberalism snowballs, as it has, into ludicrous situations. Well, we thought it was liberalism, until recently, when it seems all the changes which have taken place in societies since the early 1970’s are not actually liberal at all. We are being choked by change. We are confused and unhappy. We now live in a world which is threatening and uncertain, a world where to tell the truth may lead to a prison sentence, a world where to tell a joke or draw a cartoon may lead to death.
Young people, born since 1970, may not notice too much difference but I do. I once worked (1965) for an engineer boss whose father was a Protestant clergyman. My boss knew I had been convent educated and many were the Protestant/Catholic jokes told in that office. I wouldn’t dare do that now. It is politically incorrect. Even if I worked for the same boss, neither of us would dare laugh about something like that anymore in case ‘someone’ overheard and took offence.
What has happened? Political correctness has morphed into something else. That ‘something else’ has entered every area of life – into schools, hospitals, the workplace, entertainment, everywhere I can think of. It is no longer political correctness, although we think of it as such. It is now dialectics.
to be continued...
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Cirrhosis of the Liver
I don't know where the NZ Herald gets their information from. Coffee helps prevent cirrhosis of the liver. Actually, it is eating which helps prevent cirrhosis of the liver. Partway down the article they actually ask themselves - why don't all alcoholics get cirrhosis of the liver? Well, here's the answer dipsticks:
Alcohol is a slow poison, but its excessive consumption of not the cause of cirrhosis of the liver which, incidentally is not the only location this condition can strike. Cirrhosis of the liver is basically a form of acute malnutrition caused by protein deficiency; it is only common among alcoholics when they ignore food in favour of drink. The disease is endemic to famine areas, the inhabitants which drink no alcohol at all.
If anyone drank coffee and didn't eat, they would get cirrhosis of the liver as well.
Alcohol is a slow poison, but its excessive consumption of not the cause of cirrhosis of the liver which, incidentally is not the only location this condition can strike. Cirrhosis of the liver is basically a form of acute malnutrition caused by protein deficiency; it is only common among alcoholics when they ignore food in favour of drink. The disease is endemic to famine areas, the inhabitants which drink no alcohol at all.
If anyone drank coffee and didn't eat, they would get cirrhosis of the liver as well.
Friday, June 09, 2006
The Olympic Flame
The idea of the undying flame of the Olympic torch belongs to Adolph Hitler. He came up with the idea for the 1936 Olympic Games and an impressive array of runners was organised to carry the flame from Athens to Berlin.
Female and Male
Ultimately derived from Latin where it meant 'the suckling one', 'female' is not just the word 'male' with a differentiating prefix. The current spelling came into being as a direct result of that misconception. Originally the word was 'femelle', the second part of the word still alive and well in French where it serves as the pronoun 'she'.
Circumstantial Evidence
In popular parlance the above is used in a way that indicates a widespread misconception as to its real meaning. 'Circumstantial' does not mean weak, flimsy or coincidental, yet time and again one hears thin evidence backing up unsubstantiated accusations being dismissed out of hand as 'purely circumstantial'. Every such use reinforces the myth that 'circumstantial' and 'coincidental' are somehow synonomous in this context.
Any evidence presented in court which is not an eye witness account is properly designated as circumstantial, i.e. arising from the facts and circumstances of the case or crime. If there is one form of evidence that is notoriously contractory and liable to change from day to day with each telling, it is eye witness account, not circumstantial evidence.
The invariably irrefutable forensic evidence that proves the suspect was on the murder scene at the right time, that his skin and blood were found under the victim's fingernails, that the victim was killed with a particular blunt instrument that was later found in the suspect's possession, is properly described as circumstantial evidence. 'Circumstantiate' is still used to mean corroborate and substantiate beyond any reasonable doubt.
Any evidence presented in court which is not an eye witness account is properly designated as circumstantial, i.e. arising from the facts and circumstances of the case or crime. If there is one form of evidence that is notoriously contractory and liable to change from day to day with each telling, it is eye witness account, not circumstantial evidence.
The invariably irrefutable forensic evidence that proves the suspect was on the murder scene at the right time, that his skin and blood were found under the victim's fingernails, that the victim was killed with a particular blunt instrument that was later found in the suspect's possession, is properly described as circumstantial evidence. 'Circumstantiate' is still used to mean corroborate and substantiate beyond any reasonable doubt.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Female Genital Mutilation
Two interesting observations in this article. Firstly, religious beliefs of men override human rights for women. Secondly, Sheik Badri really gets around when he can make a statement that Egyptian woman have bigger clitorises than other women - thus needing to have them 'cut back to normal size'. There are, of course, many more observations which could be made but who wants to fill an already well used brain with yet more male rhetoric about what god wants for women?
This religious claptrap backs up the desire of many inferior males to control and hurt women using (in this case) religious sanctions to do so. Very few women realise how many men are sexually nutty until they come up against a rapist, or a paedophile, or a voyeur, or a coprophiliac, or a sadist in one of his many forms.
The advocates of female genital mutilation (or infibulation) who hide behind religion and cite their god given right to inflict such cruelty on female children must be the craziest, and the most frightened of female sexuality of all those men who lack basic masculinity. That basic masculinity is the desire to mate with (and the confidence of being able to do so) a woman they are able to satisfy sexually. The male fear of another, better male cutting them out, underpins the whole female genital mutilation process. It is a 'well, I can't do anything about my own pathetic self so I'll make sure she doesn't know anything about it.'
Women don't suffer from penis envy - men do.
This religious claptrap backs up the desire of many inferior males to control and hurt women using (in this case) religious sanctions to do so. Very few women realise how many men are sexually nutty until they come up against a rapist, or a paedophile, or a voyeur, or a coprophiliac, or a sadist in one of his many forms.
The advocates of female genital mutilation (or infibulation) who hide behind religion and cite their god given right to inflict such cruelty on female children must be the craziest, and the most frightened of female sexuality of all those men who lack basic masculinity. That basic masculinity is the desire to mate with (and the confidence of being able to do so) a woman they are able to satisfy sexually. The male fear of another, better male cutting them out, underpins the whole female genital mutilation process. It is a 'well, I can't do anything about my own pathetic self so I'll make sure she doesn't know anything about it.'
Women don't suffer from penis envy - men do.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Vaclav Havel 'Living in Truth'
Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality. p 44
If ideology was originally a bridge between the system and the individual, then the moment he or she steps on to this bridge it becomes at the same time a bridge between the system and the individual as a component of the system.
That is, if ideology originally facilitated (by acting outwardly) the constitution of power by serving as a psychological excuse, then from the moment that excuse is accepted, it constitutes power inwardly, becoming an active component of that power. p 46
Yet, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an innner coherence. As this aspect grows in importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself...
Increasingly the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important that the reality hidden behind it...
Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse. Thus power draws closer to ideology that it does to reality; it draws its strength from theory and becomes dependent on it...power begins to serve ideology. p 49
If ideology was originally a bridge between the system and the individual, then the moment he or she steps on to this bridge it becomes at the same time a bridge between the system and the individual as a component of the system.
That is, if ideology originally facilitated (by acting outwardly) the constitution of power by serving as a psychological excuse, then from the moment that excuse is accepted, it constitutes power inwardly, becoming an active component of that power. p 46
Yet, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an innner coherence. As this aspect grows in importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself...
Increasingly the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important that the reality hidden behind it...
Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse. Thus power draws closer to ideology that it does to reality; it draws its strength from theory and becomes dependent on it...power begins to serve ideology. p 49
Excerpts - Vaclav Havel
Seldom in recent times, it seems, has a social system offered scope so openly and so brazenly to people willing to support any thing at any time, as long as it brings them some advantage: to unprincipled and spineless men prepared to do anything in their craving for power and personal gain; to born lackeys, ready for any humiliation and willing at all times to sacrifice their neighbours' and their own honour for a chance to ingratiate themselves with those in power.
In view of this, it is not surprising that so many public and influential positions are occupied, more than ever before, by notorious careerists, opportunists, charlatans and men of dubious record, in short, by typical collaborators, men, that is, with a special gift for persuading themselves that their dirty work is a way of rescuing something, or, at least, of preventing still worse men from stepping into their shoes. p 8
In democratic societies with a traditional parliamentary system of government, political opposition is understood as a political force on the level of actuual power (most frequently a party or coalition of parties) which is not a part of the government.
It offers an alternative political programme, it has ambitions to govern, and it is recognised and respected by the government in power as a natural element in the political life of the country. It seeks to spread its influence by political means, and competes for power on the basis of agree-upon legal regulations.
In addition to this form of opposition, there exists the phenomenon of the 'extra parliamentary opposition', which again consists of forces organised more or less on the level of actual power, but which operate outside the rules created by the system, and which employ different means than are usual within that framework.
In classical dictatorships, the term opposition is understood to mean the political forces which have also come out with an alternative political programme. They operate either legally or on the outer limits of legality, but in any case they cannot compete for power within the limits of some agreed-upon regulations. Or the term opposition may be applied to forces preparing for a violent confrontation with the ruling power, or who feel themselves to be in this state of confrontation already, such as various guerilla groups or liberation movements. pp 72-73
From - Living in Truth Faber and Faber 1986
In view of this, it is not surprising that so many public and influential positions are occupied, more than ever before, by notorious careerists, opportunists, charlatans and men of dubious record, in short, by typical collaborators, men, that is, with a special gift for persuading themselves that their dirty work is a way of rescuing something, or, at least, of preventing still worse men from stepping into their shoes. p 8
In democratic societies with a traditional parliamentary system of government, political opposition is understood as a political force on the level of actuual power (most frequently a party or coalition of parties) which is not a part of the government.
It offers an alternative political programme, it has ambitions to govern, and it is recognised and respected by the government in power as a natural element in the political life of the country. It seeks to spread its influence by political means, and competes for power on the basis of agree-upon legal regulations.
In addition to this form of opposition, there exists the phenomenon of the 'extra parliamentary opposition', which again consists of forces organised more or less on the level of actual power, but which operate outside the rules created by the system, and which employ different means than are usual within that framework.
In classical dictatorships, the term opposition is understood to mean the political forces which have also come out with an alternative political programme. They operate either legally or on the outer limits of legality, but in any case they cannot compete for power within the limits of some agreed-upon regulations. Or the term opposition may be applied to forces preparing for a violent confrontation with the ruling power, or who feel themselves to be in this state of confrontation already, such as various guerilla groups or liberation movements. pp 72-73
From - Living in Truth Faber and Faber 1986
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Are we Surprised? I'm Not.
Books
The Fallaci Code
Oriana Fallaci asks: Is Muslim immigration to Europe a conspiracy?
By BRENDAN BERNHARD
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 - 8:00 pm
Oriana Fallaci Photo by Francesco ScavulloIn The Force of Reason, the controversial Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci illuminates one of the central enigmas of our time. How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades?
How did Islam go from being a virtual non-factor to a religion that threatens the preeminence of Christianity on the Continent? How could the most popular name for a baby boy in Brussels possibly be Mohammed? Can it really be true that Muslims plan to build a mosque in London that will hold 40,000 people? That Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam are close to having Muslim majorities? How was Europe, which was saved by the U.S. in world wars I and II, and whose Muslim Bosnians were rescued by the U.S. as recently as 1999, transformed into a place in which, as Fallaci puts it, “if I hate Americans I go to Heaven and if I hate Muslims I go to Hell?”
In attempting to answer these questions, the author, who is stricken with cancer and has been hounded by death threats and charges of “Islamophobia” (she is due to go on trial in France this June), has combined history with episodes of riveting firsthand reportage into a form that reads like a real-life conspiracy thriller.
If The Force of Reason sells a lot of copies, which it almost certainly will (800,000 were sold in Italy alone, and the book is in the top 100 on Amazon ), it will be not only because of the heat generated by her topic, but also because Fallaci speaks for the ordinary reader. There is no one she despises more than the intellectual “cicadas,” as she calls them — “You see them every day on television; you read them every day in the newspapers” — who deny they are in the midst of a cultural, political and existential war with Islam, of which terrorism is the flashiest, but ultimately least important component. Nonetheless, to give the reader a taste of what Muslim conquest can be like, in her first chapter, Fallaci provides a brief tour of the religion’s bloodiest imperial episodes and later does an amusing job of debunking some of its more exaggerated claims to cultural and scientific greatness.
The book is also animated by a world-class journalist’s dismay that she could have missed the story of her lifetime for as long as she did. In the 1960s and ’70s, when she was a Vietnam War correspondent and a legendarily ferocious interviewer going mano a mano with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat, Fallaci was simply too preoccupied with the events of the moment to notice that an entirely different narrative was rapidly taking shape — namely, the transformation of the West. There were clues, certainly. As when, in 1972, she interviewed the Palestinian terrorist George Habash, who told her (while a bodyguard aimed a submachine gun at her head) that the Palestinian problem was about far more than Israel. The Arab goal, Habash declared, was to wage war “against Europe and America” and to ensure that henceforth “there would be no peace for the West.” The Arabs, he informed her, would “advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet.”
Fallaci thought he was referring simply to terrorism. Only later did she realize that he “also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens … In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism.” It is a low-level but deadly war that extends across the planet, as any newspaper reader can see.
Fallaci is not the first person to ponder the rapidity of the ongoing Muslim transformation of Europe. As the English travel writer Jonathan Raban wrote in Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth (1979), in the mid-1970s Arabs seemed to arrive in London almost overnight. “One day Arabs were a remote people … camping out in tents with camels … the next, they were neighbors.” On the streets of West London appeared black-clad women adorned with beaked masks that made them look “like hooded falcons.” Dressed for the desert (and walking precisely four steps ahead of the women), Arab men bestrode the sidewalks “like a crew of escaped film extras, their headdresses aswirl on the wind of exhaust fumes.”
Writers far better acquainted with the Muslim world than Raban have been equally perplexed. In 1995, the late American novelist Paul Bowles, a longtime resident of Tangier, told me that he could not understand why the French had allowed millions of North African Muslims into their country. Bowles had chosen to live among Muslims for most of his life, yet he obviously considered it highly unlikely that so many of them could be successfully integrated into a modern, secular European state.
Perhaps Bowles would have been interested in this passage from Fallaci’s book: “In 1974 [Algerian President] Houari Boumedienne, the man who ousted Ben Bella three years after Algerian independence, spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations. And without circumlocutions he said: ‘One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.’”
Such a bald statement of purpose by a nation’s president before an international forum seems incredible. Yet even in British journalist Adam LeBor’s A Heart Turned East (1997), a work of profound, almost supine sympathy for the plight of Muslim immigrants in the West, a London-based mullah is quoted as saying, “We cannot conquer these people with tanks and troops, so we have got to overcome them by force of numbers.” In fact, such remarks are commonplace. Just this week, Mullah Krekar, a Muslim supremacist living in Oslo, informed the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that Muslims would change Norway, not the other way around. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes,” he said. “By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim.”
In other words, Europe will be conquered by being turned into “Eurabia,” which is what Fallaci believes it is well on the way to becoming. Leaning heavily on the researches of Bat Ye’or, author of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Fallaci recounts in fascinating detail the actual origin of the word “Eurabia,” which has now entered the popular lexicon. Its first known use, it turns out, was in the mid-1970s, when a journal of that name was printed in Paris (naturally), written in French (naturally), and edited by one Lucien Bitterlin, then president of the Association of Franco-Arab Solidarity and currently the Chairman of the French-Syrian Friendship Association. Eurabia (price, five francs) was jointly published by Middle East International (London), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), the Groupe d’Etudes sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva) and the European Coordinating Committee of the Associations for Friendship with the Arab World, which Fallaci describes as an arm of what was then the European Economic Community, now the European Union. These entities, Fallaci says, not mincing her words, were the official perpetrators “of the biggest conspiracy that modern history has created,” and Eurabia was their house organ.
Briefly put, the alleged plot was an arrangement between European and Arab governments according to which the Europeans, still reeling from the first acts of PLO terrorism and eager for precious Arabian oil made significantly more precious by the 1973 OPEC crisis, agreed to accept Arab “manpower” (i.e., immigrants) along with the oil. They also agreed to disseminate propaganda about the glories of Islamic civilization, provide Arab states with weaponry, side with them against Israel and generally toe the Arab line on all matters political and cultural. Hundreds of meetings and seminars were held as part of the “Euro-Arab Dialogue,” and all, according to the author, were marked by European acquiescence to Arab requests. Fallaci recounts a 1977 seminar in Venice, attended by delegates from 10 Arab nations and eight European ones, concluding with a unanimous resolution calling for “the diffusion of the Arabic language” and affirming “the superiority of Arab culture.”
While the Arabs demanded that Europeans respect the religious, political and human rights of Arabs in the West, not a peep came from the Europeans about the absence of freedom in the Arab world, not to mention the abhorrent treatment of women and other minorities in countries like Saudi Arabia. No demand was made that Muslims should learn about the glories of western civilization as Europeans were and are expected to learn about the greatness of Islamic civilization. In other words, according to Fallaci, a substantial portion of Europe’s cultural and political independence was sold off by a coalition of ex-communists and socialist politicians. Are we surprised? Fallaci isn’t. In 1979, she notes, “the Italian or rather European Left had fallen in love with Khomeini just as now it has fallen in love with Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and Arafat.”
Considerably less intemperate than her last book on the topic of radical Islam, the volcanically angry The Rage and the Pride, The Force of Reason is despairing, but often surprisingly funny. (“The rage and the pride have married and produced a sturdy son: the disdain,” she writes with characteristic wit.) And, Fallaci being Fallaci, it is occasionally over the top and will no doubt be deeply offensive to many, particularly when, in a postscript the book might have been better off without, she claims that there is no such thing as moderate Islam. Nonetheless, the voice and warmth and humor of the author light up its pages, particularly when she takes a leaf out of Saul Bellow’s Herzog by firing off impassioned letters to the famous both living and dead. She is savage about the Left, the “Peace” movement (war is a fundamental, if regrettable, condition of life, she states), the Catholic Church, the media and, of course, Islam itself, which she considers theological totalitarianism and a deadly threat to the world. She is much more optimistic about America than Europe, citing the bravery of New Yorkers who celebrated New Year’s Eve in Times Square despite widely publicized terrorism threats, but here one feels that she is clutching at straws. Though Fallaci now lives in New York, little amity has been extended to her by her peers since the post-9/11 publication of The Rage and the Pride, and she remains almost as much of a media pariah here as she does in Europe. The major difference is that we’re not putting her on trial.
As that Norwegian Mullah told Aftenposten, “Our way of thinking … will prove more powerful than yours.” One hopes he’s wrong, but if he is, it will be ordinary Americans and Europeans, including courageous Arab-Americans like L.A. resident Wafa Sultan and the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali (two women openly challenging Islamist supremacism), who prove him so, and not our intellectual classes (artists, pundits, filmmakers, actors, writers …). Many of the latter, consumed by Bush-hatred and cultural self-loathing, are perilously close to becoming today’s equivalent of the great Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who so hated the British Empire that he sided with the Nazis in World War II, to his everlasting shame. The Force of Reason, at the very least, is a welcome and necessary antidote to the prevailing intellectual atmosphere.
Staff writer Brendan Bernhard is the author of White Muslim: From L.A. to New York to Jihad, a study of converts to Islam in the West (Melville House).
Friday, February 10, 2006
Abortion
Long before the pill or legal abortion was available Marie Stopes tried to educate lower class women about birth control and sexual hygiene and was jailed for it. I remember one Catholic bishop being quoted as saying (I will never find the ref) "if women are given such information men will never know who their children belong to..." ( as though these lower class women who were producing a baby every two years was capable of hunting down illicit love affairs or something equally as silly). As a consequence many illegal abortions were carried out and many deaths ensued. Forbidding abortion has never stopped the wealthy from having access to it, nor has it stopped the poor from procuring it.
If a woman has become pregnant as a result of rape, or if the pregnancy endangers her life or mental health, or if she is mentally retarded so as to be incapable of raising the child, or if the foetus is diagnosed as having no viability as a fully functioning human being, or if the pregnancy is a result of incest, or if the woman is not yet a woman but a child in the eyes of the law, these are now considered to be reasons for medically induced abortion. Here the problem begins. The Vatican solves it by saying there are absolutely no grounds for abortion and that all these women will go through their pregnancy and give birth. In fact, the Vatican goes further and states that if the birth endangers the life of the mother, all efforts will go to save the life of the child. (Hence, before I was twelve years of age, I knew personally two women who had died as a result of this religious interference in secular and sexual matters. One woman left five children, and the other left nine. I may have known another but I could never find out the truth and anyway the newborn was buried with her.)
At the same time New Zealand (pre-pill and pre-legal abortion - I can only write about the country I know about) had four religious charitable organisations set up in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, where 'unmarried mothers' went to have their babies. These organisations could take up to 14 of these women at a time and were full for the 1950s and 1960s. (Do the maths.) The unmarried mothers were usually aged between 12 and 17. The newborn was taken from the mother at birth - although I know one woman who was forced to breastfeed her child for two weeks. By the mid-1970s so many of these 'adopted' children were appearing before the courts in such numbers and in such various stages of mental and physical disintegration that even the judges were aware of a huge social problem. It was deemed a child was better off with its blood mother and so legislation was passed to introduce a benefit which would enable the mother to keep the child. Another social problem ensued when women chose the 'unmarried mother' status as a career choice. DNA testing opened the way to identify the father of the child and to make him pay rather than the taxpayer. This has brought a new sense of responsibility to the male who is now not told to 'sow his wild oats' and that 'boys will be boys' but rather to 'be careful' and although he is still not being careful enough I am optimistic that this will happen.
Herrnstein and Murray (The Bell Curve 1994) state unequivocably that 'white illegitimacy is an overwhelmingly lower class phenomenon' (p. 521). (Herrnstein and Murray did not even touch on the illegitimacy rate in other races because of cultural relativism.) While it has been useful to have such cannon fodder available in previous centuries this is now not the case. Here are some facts from The Bell Curve relating to the increase in population from the segment considered least desirable to breed excessively:
Working class parents are:
*Most concerned about respectability
*Punish more impulsively
*Punish when parents need the relief, not when it is more likely to do the child most good
*Have low education, are more authoritarian and rigid
*Have low levels of reasoning complexity
*Have vague and limited ideas about what children need emotionally and physically
*Are seldom able to see things from the point of view of others
*Cannot take children's need into consideration
*Cannot apply good judgement
*Are incompetent as parents
The problem: Does society press upon these people and make abortion a more favourable option than more and yet more children? Or does society ban abortion and bear the cost of a population explosion in the most unwanted - the results of incest, motherhood in the very young, the mentally retarded? Banning abortion will not affect the more intelligent and better off. There will not be a population explosion among these people.
If it seems I am making a case for eugenics, the case has already been made by in vitro and DNA scientists. My support for legal abortion comes not from religious, nor from idealogical beliefs, but from the misery I have seen caused by human fallibility. If a woman chooses to have an abortion, it should be her choice.
If a woman has become pregnant as a result of rape, or if the pregnancy endangers her life or mental health, or if she is mentally retarded so as to be incapable of raising the child, or if the foetus is diagnosed as having no viability as a fully functioning human being, or if the pregnancy is a result of incest, or if the woman is not yet a woman but a child in the eyes of the law, these are now considered to be reasons for medically induced abortion. Here the problem begins. The Vatican solves it by saying there are absolutely no grounds for abortion and that all these women will go through their pregnancy and give birth. In fact, the Vatican goes further and states that if the birth endangers the life of the mother, all efforts will go to save the life of the child. (Hence, before I was twelve years of age, I knew personally two women who had died as a result of this religious interference in secular and sexual matters. One woman left five children, and the other left nine. I may have known another but I could never find out the truth and anyway the newborn was buried with her.)
At the same time New Zealand (pre-pill and pre-legal abortion - I can only write about the country I know about) had four religious charitable organisations set up in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, where 'unmarried mothers' went to have their babies. These organisations could take up to 14 of these women at a time and were full for the 1950s and 1960s. (Do the maths.) The unmarried mothers were usually aged between 12 and 17. The newborn was taken from the mother at birth - although I know one woman who was forced to breastfeed her child for two weeks. By the mid-1970s so many of these 'adopted' children were appearing before the courts in such numbers and in such various stages of mental and physical disintegration that even the judges were aware of a huge social problem. It was deemed a child was better off with its blood mother and so legislation was passed to introduce a benefit which would enable the mother to keep the child. Another social problem ensued when women chose the 'unmarried mother' status as a career choice. DNA testing opened the way to identify the father of the child and to make him pay rather than the taxpayer. This has brought a new sense of responsibility to the male who is now not told to 'sow his wild oats' and that 'boys will be boys' but rather to 'be careful' and although he is still not being careful enough I am optimistic that this will happen.
Herrnstein and Murray (The Bell Curve 1994) state unequivocably that 'white illegitimacy is an overwhelmingly lower class phenomenon' (p. 521). (Herrnstein and Murray did not even touch on the illegitimacy rate in other races because of cultural relativism.) While it has been useful to have such cannon fodder available in previous centuries this is now not the case. Here are some facts from The Bell Curve relating to the increase in population from the segment considered least desirable to breed excessively:
Working class parents are:
*Most concerned about respectability
*Punish more impulsively
*Punish when parents need the relief, not when it is more likely to do the child most good
*Have low education, are more authoritarian and rigid
*Have low levels of reasoning complexity
*Have vague and limited ideas about what children need emotionally and physically
*Are seldom able to see things from the point of view of others
*Cannot take children's need into consideration
*Cannot apply good judgement
*Are incompetent as parents
The problem: Does society press upon these people and make abortion a more favourable option than more and yet more children? Or does society ban abortion and bear the cost of a population explosion in the most unwanted - the results of incest, motherhood in the very young, the mentally retarded? Banning abortion will not affect the more intelligent and better off. There will not be a population explosion among these people.
If it seems I am making a case for eugenics, the case has already been made by in vitro and DNA scientists. My support for legal abortion comes not from religious, nor from idealogical beliefs, but from the misery I have seen caused by human fallibility. If a woman chooses to have an abortion, it should be her choice.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)