Disagreement is Gay

There are only two things wrong with Britain’s Liberal Democrat Party – everything it says and everything it does.  In the past I never really paid that much attention to it, a sort of political version of Buridan’s Ass, a refuge for people who have neither the wit nor character to decide between the left and the right, forever locked in a mushy middle.  If I thought of them at all it was as the original purveyors of the European ‘ideal’, sufficient reason to dismiss them with condescension and contempt.

But now they are in government, a devil’s bargain sealed between David Cameron and Nick ‘the schoolboy’ Clegg.  Actually to refer to our benighted coalition government as a ‘devil’s bargain’ makes it sound far too exciting.  No, it’s the gay government, the Brokeback Coalition, as David Davis once referred to this particular civil partnership, after Brokeback Mountain, the movie about two cowboys who have a homosexual flirtation. 

A homosexual flirtation really describes part of our political culture at the moment, the pink tone being set by the Limp Dumbs, with gay marriage as one of their most cherished objectives.  As I wrote previously, it’s not an issue I can get worked up over, though I do consider it to be born of the worst kind of patronising gesture politics.  What I can get worked up over is the loud-mouthed, ugly and vociferous constituency that gay marriage has conjured into existence, people I would be glad to see back in the closet, the cottage, the tea room or wherever other habitat these types prefer. 

The gay lobby has a right to air its view but seemingly nobody else has, certainly if they express any disquiet at all over homosexual marriage.  A lot of Christians have because they consider it to be morally wrong, a caricature of genuine marriage as conceived for generations past.  The opponents include Dr John Sentamu, the black Archbishop of York. The colour of his skin is relevant because when he dared express his disapproval recently he received a number of racially abusive emails. 

Abuse as a mood of discourse; it’s rather the fashion in the internet age.  I stopped reading the comments section that newspapers allow to follow from articles because of the sheer malevolent stupidity of a great many people, people who simply drip venom.  I dare say the gay cowards who attacked Sentamu did so behind a cloak of anonymity, something else the internet allows for.  That’s right; read the Pink News and the Red Guardian at one turn; go online to call a man a Black Bastard at the next. 

The flash mob rose up again recently.  Yes, there they were, brandishing pitchforks and torches.  This time their outrage was directed against Rhys and Esther Curnow, a couple who have become the public face of the Coalition for Marriage campaign.  Committed Christians, they were recently seen in Downing Street, handing in a petition opposing same sex marriage to the Prime Minister.

Cue the hate.  Their Facebook details were circulated by, among others, one Kevin Peel, a Labour councillor in Manchester.  After receiving more than a hundred direct messages they were obliged to change their security settings.  Councillor Peel, when questioned on the issue, said that they should be prepared to hear the ‘opposite view’ from people who do not agree with them. 

Would you like to hear the ‘opposite view’?  Well, the ‘opposite view’ is that they should rot in hell; that they deserve nothing but sadness; that they should turn out to be infertile and die of cancer, which would be an occasion for celebration.  There were obscene sexual references and a suggestion that the recently married couple should be subject to “compulsory sterilisation.”  Now there’s an idea, clearly coming from the gay Nazi fraction.  Heil, sweetie! 

Poor Rhys and Esther are “shocked and saddened” at the reaction, though I cannot help but think them strikingly naïve, just innocents abroad.  More experienced hands would have been ready for the fallout, ready for the vile mob.  Still, I have to admire them.  Speaking recently Rhys said;

We’re at a loss to understand how people could be so vicious. All we did was hand in a petition at Downing Street. Surely there’s room for people to disagree without resorting this kind of hatred and abuse.  By all means let’s have a debate – especially as the public haven’t had the chance to vote on this issue.  But the bullies are trying to shut down the debate. We’re shaken and upset, but we won’t let them get us down

The thing is these morons do not want a debate; they want silent consensus…or else.  Debate and disagreement is – what’s the best way of putting it?  - , yes, I know: it’s just so gay.  

Penis Power

I do try so hard not to be a ‘cultural relativist.’  I try so hard to be tolerant of others, of the customs and practices of other peoples and other nations.  But, alas, the demon of prejudice snaps even at my tolerant heels.  Where I fall down and fall down badly is over the marriage customs of South Africa’s Zulus. 

Actually I could not care less about the Zulus or how many wives they are allowed to take by tribal custom.  My problem is with Jacob Zuma, the country’s grinningly inane Zulu president, the butt of repeated jokes when he came on a state visit to London two years ago.  More than a few made me laugh. 

There he was with one of his four spouses, a more ridiculous sight is difficult to imagine.  Apparently they take turns deciding who is to travel with the polygamist president.  How do they do it, I wonder?  Is it a case of eeny, meeny, miny, moe; one wife, two wife, three wife four?  Just imagine the arguments over exactly who is the country’s first, second, third or fourth lady! 

Yes, I find him ridiculous but I’m not alone here: a lot of South Africans also think that he is ridiculous, even within the African National Congress, the corrupt ruling party.  Objections have been raised over the tax-funded support Zuma receives for his wifely quartet.  This is hardly surprising considering what’s officially referred to as ‘spousal support’ amounts to $1.6million.  Enough is enough, the cry has gone up; we are not funding this man’s sex life! 

His sexuality is rather the topic at the moment, raising other issues of concern in the tawdry ‘rainbow nation.’  The thing is, you see, South African’s have recently been regaled with something only Mrs Zuma One, Two, Three and Four normally see – the presidential penis!  Yes, they have, in the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, where a painting called The Spear was recently on display.  There he is, Mr President, in a Lenin-like pose with the, ahem, spear in question on prominent display. 

Poor man; he is not best pleased by this insult to his dignity.  He’s applied to the courts to have it removed, a challenge to the country’s liberal constitution which guarantees freedom of expression.  ANC thugs have already forced the gallery to close.  Though Brett Murray, the artist, has impeccable credentials as an anti-apartheid activist his work has been denounced as ‘racist’ on the grounds that he is white.  Some, though, have the wit to understand what it’s really about, including Mondi Makhanya of the South African Sunday Times.  Of Zuma he wrote;

It will be his sexual legacy that we will remember more than anything else. His sexual endeavours are therefore fair game for artists, cartoonists, comedians, radio DJs and tavern jokers.

I personally think he will be remembered for more than his spear; I think he will be remembered for presiding over the final degeneracy of the Mandela legacy.  My, oh, my, how far this nation has sunk in a bog of corruption, how far the ANC has embraced a culture of ‘bling’ in the most vulgar and rapacious forms imaginable. 

It’s gone beyond satire when they can’t even recognise it themselves.  Let me give you one tiny illustration.  At the end of a jamboree in January, called to mark the ANC’s hundredth birthday, Kgalema Motlanthe, Zuma’s deputy, proposed a toast to the plebs in the stadium below – “The leaders will now enjoy the champagne, and of course they do so on your behalf through their lips.” 

Vicarious luxury wine, vicarious jobs, vicarious opportunities and vicarious homes is the reality of the Rainbow Nation.  People of all colours unite; you have the sight of the nomenclature going past in luxury cars to witness.  The simple truth is that politics in South Africa is a racket, with the pigs of the ANC vying with one another to get their snouts in the trough.  I do not believe that this country has a happy future.  All the gold has gone from the end of the rainbow into the coffers of Zuma and his kindred.

Let me leave you on a slightly lighter note.  Let me leave you with another picture of the Spear in action, this time dancing at his nuptials to wife number four.  There he is, all kitted out in traditional Zulu costume, even so far as his traditional Zulu trainers.  

Voices of the Past

Do you have a British coin in your purse or pocket?  If so take it out and have a look at the abbreviations around the Queen’s head.  Just before the date you will see the letters FD.  It’s a Latin abbreviation for Fidei defensor in the male and Fidei defensatrix in the female form.  It means Defender of the Faith, a title originally accorded to Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521 after the publication of Assertio Septem Sacramentorum – Defence of the Seven Sacraments -, a treatise rejecting the reformist teachings of Martin Luther. 

Eamon Duffy, professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge, mentions it in the opening paragraph of a polemic published by the Telegraph at the weekend (The Story of the Reformation needs reforming).  Since 1558, he writes, it has meant defender of the Protestant faith. 

What he neglects to mention is that the original title was revoked by Pope Paul III in 1530 after Henry’s break with Rome.  It made no practical difference, as the style continued to be used in official documents, and was formally ratified by Act of Parliament in 1544.  Rather ironically, though she never used the title, even Bloody Mary was FD by parliamentary grant! 

That seems to me to be the whole point of the English Reformation – it was about empowerment and national sovereignty, a contention I advanced in previous articles touching on the subject.  Above all it was about breaking free from the authority of Rome, as much a temporal as a spiritual power at the time.  It really is worth stressing that Henry never abandoned Catholic orthodoxy as a personal standard of faith.  His Reformation was based wholly on the rejection of papal tutelage.

Duffy proceeds, as polemicists are wont to do, with a one-sided and historically unbalanced argument.  He is quite right to point out some of the tragic consequences of the English Reformation, a lengthy process rather than a single event.  He is right to lament the cultural vandalism that accompanied the religious and social upheaval, in the course of which so much of England’s Catholic and medieval heritage was lost. 

But he is wrong to see a process which shaped a new and greater nation as a wholly negative event.  In my own polemical style I have no hesitation at all in saying that the Reformation was a great and necessary metamorphosis.  In the place of medieval mystery plays came the dramas of Shakespeare.  In the place of Latin bibles, read and interpreted by priests, came the vernacular translations of William Tyndale followed by the King James Version, great well-springs of our language and literature.  In the place of controlled thought came free thought, the greatest legacy of all.  As the sun set on Galileo and the Catholic south it was to rise on Newton and the Protestant north. 

There was nothing inevitable about the Reformation, Duffy contends.  True; for nothing in history is truly inevitable.  That does not mean to say that there was nothing necessary about a process that swept virtually the whole of northern Europe, a process that freed the imagination from the straightjacket of traditional dogmas, a process that transformed England from an outpost of the Roman-focused medieval world to a great outward looking imperial and seafaring power. 

The professor touches on past injustices.  He touches on the anti-Catholic narratives of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, which turned the faith into the malevolent doctrine of an obscurantist and foreign power, a view entrenched in popular consciousness after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  Gilbert Burnet, the seventeenth centaury divine, earns his animus as the ‘chief propagandist’ of this event, the author of the History of the Reformation, in which he describe Catholicism as tyranny.  “They hate us”, Burnet wrote, “because we dare to be freemen and Protestants.”

‘They’, in a general sense, is certainly a bit sweeping.  There were many English Catholics who may have taken spiritual solace from Rome but whose secular loyalty was to the land of their birth.  But always, always, we have to consider the context of the times.  Louis XIV certainly hated freemen and Protestants, as the Huguenot refugees who flooded into London prior to the Glorious Revolution would have testified.  His imperial ambitions, moreover, were a serious threat to the integrity of Protestant Europe.  This was no imagined danger. 

The professor concludes his piece by saying that the slaughtered Popish martyrs look less like an alien fifth column than “the voices of a history that England was not allowed to have.”  Would the ‘slaughtered Popish martyrs’, I wonder, include the conspirators behind the Gunpowder Plot?   I think it best to let that pass.  What I cannot let pass, though, is an earlier suggestion that John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, detailing the horrors of Mary Tudor’s Catholic reaction, simply served as propaganda against Catholicism at home and abroad.  So far as Duffy is concerned it would appear that some martyrs are more equal than other martyrs, some voices more essential, some narratives more valid and some histories more complete.   

The Falklands for the Falklanders

The Botox Princess 

In the year that marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands War, Argentina, rather than reflecting on its former folly, is being more than usually ridiculous.  Best not to recall past aggressions and past humiliations, no; instead let’s have a lot of childish gestures.  Let’s have part of our Olympic team train on the islands, an event recorded in a video ad, which concluded with the slogan “To compete on English soil, we train on Argentine soil.”

Yes, it is no more than a stupid and childish stunt, the sort of thing I would expect from this immature and petulant nation.  Here we have a propaganda jamboree in advance of the Olympics, a clear contradiction of the government’s claim that it would not seek to make political gains from the London games. 

Actually I’m not being entirely fair.  It isn’t so much that Argentina is immature and petulant but in Cristina Kirchner, the altogether ridiculous Madame Botox, it certainly has an immature and petulant president.  Who could possibly take this woman seriously?  Even La Nacion, a leading Buenos Aries newspaper, criticised the fatuous stupidity of the Falklands video, advancing nothing and getting nowhere. 

It’s been a season for farcical gestures.  Recently at the G20 summit in Mexico Madame Botox tried to hand a package marked ‘UN – Malvinas’ to David Cameron, the British Prime Minister.  There she was, a silly schoolgirl, reprimanded by the head prefect.  Not only did Cameron decline to accept the package but he told her that she should respect the wishes of the Falkland Islanders themselves, who next year will be holding a referendum on their own future. 

That’s the thing that Kirchner and the patsies of her Olympic squad will never understand.  They will never understand that the whole question is not about real estate but people.  Buenos Aries can bleat all it likes about ‘Las Malvinas.’  Kirchner and her crew can bleat all they like about nefarious English ‘colonialism’, another favoured tune in this anniversary year.  The simple fact is that these islands belong not to England or Argentina but to the people who live there, people whose antecedents have lived there for generations.  No matter how many lessons one gives a monkey in democracy and self-determination it will simply never understand.

Not long after Cameron snubbed Argentina’s fatuous president, Hector Timerman, the country’s foreign secretary, called an impromptu press conference in which he accused England of avoiding the opportunity to discuss the issue before a recent meeting of the UN decolonisation committee.  When challenged why the Argentine government would not accept the outcome of the Falklands War he said;

Thirty years ago there was a war.  One hundred and eighty years ago there was an invasion by the British of Argentina.  Great Britain invaded Argentina four times because the ones who are famous around the world for being colonialists are the British, not the Argentines.  Argentina has always opposed colonialism and it fought against it and won. 

I for one would like to know exactly where, when and how Argentina fought against colonialism and won! But never mind that.  Rather imagine returning all present political geography to 1832 or thereabouts.  Imagine the colonialists of Buenos Aeries deprived of Patagonia, the territory they stole from the indigenous inhabitants in the so-called War of the Desert that wasn’t a desert at all.  Maybe that’s an issue that should be placed before the UN committee on decolonisation.  Not something, I imagine, Cristina and Hector would be terribly keen on. 

Dreaming on a Midsummer Night

This has always seemed like a magical time of year to me, Midsummer, the Solstice, Litha, whatever one wishes to call it; it has ever since I saw a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream when I was eight years old. The Sun is now in the sign of Cancer, my birth sign, the sign of the Moon. The magical forces are now at the height, and Robin Goodfellow puts a girdle round the Earth!

Midsummer Eve itself, St John's Eve, is a major holiday for witches and all who love them, all who love the old power and the ancient ways. Traditionally it was a fire and water festival, a central feature of which was ritual baths and bonfires. The bonfires themselves were closely linked with water, lit as they were on the shores of streams, lakes, rivers and oceans.

Midsummer marks the convergence of the Sun and the Moon. The Sun, now at its height, has entered Cancer, the great water sign, the only sign ruled by the Moon, the only sign ruled by Artemis, Diana and Hecate, the lunar goddesses. All those who share the sign of Cancer with me are collectively the Children of the Moon, hunters, witches, flyers and lovers.

This was a time when witch-hunters of the past claimed that witches rode out to meet Satan, whereas the real witches, not the monsters of imagination, simply gathered to renew their sacred bond with the earth, to celebrate its bounty and fertility. It was a time also for gathering magical plants, a time when they were at their most potent. Russian witches use to harvest those which grew on the top of Bald Mountain, considering them to be the most powerful on Earth.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is by far my favourite Shakespearean comedy, light of touch and light of heart, rich in all sorts of magic, a world of fairy visions.  And it just so happens that one of favourite paintings touches on the very same themes.  It’s The Fairy Raid: Carrying off a Changeling on Midsummer’s Eve by Joseph Noel Paton, a nineteenth century Scottish artist who painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style.  He is better known for The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania but for me The Fairy Raid is just sublime.  The technical proficiency is astounding but there is far more here.  This is a vision that could only have come of a true love of the Realm of Faerie. 

Magic, love and fruitfulness, these are the things Midsummer Eve and the Solstice are about; this is what they will always be about. All hail to thee, Children of the Moon.

Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

Greeks Bearing Gifts

There is a wonderful, almost divine irony in the fact that Greece, of all places, turned out to be the Achilles’ heel of the European Union, the weak spot that may in the end lead to the death of the whole mad project of a one-size-fits-all currency.  So much nonsense has been written about the Greek debacle that is easy to lose sight of some basic facts.  To begin with it had nothing to do with international currency speculation and everything to do with Greeks bearing gifts…to themselves. 

It’s easy to understand the anger of the Germans, now faced with paying the bill for the way in which the Greeks have pampered themselves, effectively at their expense.  Greece created one of the most madly extravagant welfare and benefits systems in the whole Continent.  The working day often finishes at 2.30pm.  Retirement provisions are absurdly generous, with some people able to stop working at the age of fifty-three.  Add to that a culture of corruption, symbolised in the words “fakelaki”, meaning envelopes containing bribes, and “rousfeti”, meaning political favours, then a bad situation became cancerous.

The revealing thing in this is that many Greeks themselves, at least those who are not communists and anarchists, recognise the depths of their own blameworthiness.  Commenting on tax evasion, something of a national sport, one newspaper headline jeered with heavy irony: “No taxes – we’re Greek.”  In public hospitals doctors often refuse to treat patients until the “fakelaki” is forthcoming.  The private sector has all but been destroyed by an ever expanding bureaucracy.  Loukas Tsoukalis, a professor at Athens University, has said that Greece has a capitalist system with a Soviet state.

The fact that Greece was allowed to join the euro at all when it clearly did not meet the preconditions for membership can be put down to what I would call the ‘Byron Illusion.’  When Lord Byron went to fight and die in the nineteenth century Greek War of Independence he went not for a living nation but for a dead idea, an idea nurtured in generations brought up on the classics.  The Greeks continued to play on the romance of the ancient past in their application for euro membership, something that seduced Europe’s leaders, many of them also educated in the classics.

But Greece of the modern age is not the Greece of the ancients, not the Greece of Plato and Pericles.  Writing in the New York Times, Robert D. Kaplan rightly argued that it is far more the child of Byzantine and Turkish despotism.  The EU, preoccupied with balancing France and Germany, ignored not just economic facts in the rush into the euro but far deeper historical fractures between the north and the south.  Greece is not the ‘cradle of democracy,’ a label that is no more than a shallow pretence.  In the modern age it has more often been the nursery of despotism. 

So forget irresponsible bankers and wicked speculators.  The whole of the sovereign debt crisis was based on one simple truth: it’s impossible to overcome centuries of cultural, economic and political differences in the illusion of monetary and political union.  Europe is not one; Europe will never be one.  History is not fooled. 

How Many Camels is Obama Worth?

Al-Shabaab, the Somali offshoot of al-Qaeda, has offered a bounty of ten camels to “whoever reveals the hideout of that idiot Obama.”  It’s their response to the US State Department's recent announcement of a reward of several million dollars for information on the whereabouts of the movement’s leadership. 

I wonder, perhaps, if the Somalis are being a little too generous in their assessment of the beleaguered President’s worth.  Ten camels seems excessive for a man who recently said that the American private sector was “doing fine”, an assessment, I would hazard, not quite in keeping with the experience of most people struggling with the economic realities of Obama World. 

I wonder also what ordinary Americans make of their president’s worth.  While pondering this deep question they may perhaps consider what they themselves are now worth after four less years.  Unfortunately I can’t give the depreciation in round camel figures but the dollar value is alarming enough.  The Federal Reserve report published at the end of last week shows that the net worth of a typical middle class American family has fallen from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 today.  I’m guessing that’s a heck of a lot of camels. 

The Dear Leader, struggling to turn attention away from the dire state of the debt-laden economy, says that America faces a straight choice between him and a return to the policies of George W Bush under Mitt Romney.  What would that involve exactly?  Why, spending trillions of dollars that the country does not have, open-ended, expensive and unwinnable foreign wars, an escalating economic downturn, slow job creation and ever more layoffs.  Wait a moment – I’ve just drawn a picture of the last four years.  Vote Obama and get Bush?  No, vote Obama and get Obama. 

The President’s negative campaigning calls to mind the concluding lines of Hilaire Belloc’s poem Jim.  Do you know it?  If not it goes like this – “And always keep a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.”  Could things get any worse than they are at present?  It hardly seems possible. 

Just think about it, think about the last four years.  Obama’s attempts to stimulate the economy – more trillions in the black hole – stimulated next to nothing.  His health care reforms are of such prodigious complexity that they would even defy the intellect of Einstein.  He was awarded a peace prize for no peace.  His foreign policy initiatives have spluttered and died.  He has alienated Israel, America’s one true friend in a troubled region.  His Afghanistan campaign is creeping towards an ignoble end.  If that’s not bad enough I now understand that America has been covertly arming militants in Syria, seemingly blind to the fact that the Islamists among them have been involved in a murderous pogrom of local Christians. 

But it’s never Obama’s fault, oh no, it’s always somebody else.  His White House motto clearly has to be the buck stops anywhere but here.  Meanwhile on we go.  It’s never mind the economy, stupid - it’s legalising the residency of illegals; it’s gay marriage; it’s a kulturkampf with the Catholic Church; it’s all sorts of trendy liberal causes that are just so meaningful to Americans in the midst of their present presidential woes. 

Al-Shabaab should really devote those camels to better ends.  America, though, may feel it’s got the better of the deal.