Life Is What Happens When You’re Making Other Plans

Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. — EM Forster

Lammy Says – Bring Back the Smack

Conservative MP for Tottenham David Lammy has put forth a suggestion of A Modest Proposal-level brilliance: cut frustrated parents some slack by allowing them to use their children as punching bags. Lammy’s bold solution to the “real pressures of raising children… on the 15th floor of a tower block with knives, gangs and the dangers of violent crime [and] the realities of the typical single mum…” is to repeal the smacking law passed in 2004. “There’s a big difference between abuse and parenting,” Lammy notes, though making it legal for parents to inflict “bruising, swelling, cuts, grazes or scratches” would blur the line.

This might not appeal to well-fed liberals but what do they know about being a poverty-stricken single parent? Lammy instinctively grasps that something’s got to give, and since the Tories aren’t for changing, and unemployment is climbing, people need an outlet. Smacking the kids up is a time-honoured form of stress relief, as evidenced by the strong correlation between male unemployment and child abuse, so why tamper with a fine British tradition?

More fun with Tory Policy

Disqualifying criminals from working with children is just so negative.

Unemployment and Tory Benefit Reform

Falkland War 30th Anniversary Prompts Unprecedented British Morality

The Argentine government has requested discussions on the future of the Falkland Islands but the BBC reports that “the UK government has said it is ‘not prepared to discuss the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands against the wishes of the Falkland people.’”

How convenient the British didn’t stumble on this patch of moral high ground while they were overrunning India. Or, more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Murder City: Death and Drugs in Mexico

I just finished Charles Bowden’s Murder City, possibly the most disturbing book I’ve ever read. The horrifying death toll in Mexico due to the “War on Drugs” is an international catastrophe that nobody in the world seems to give a damn about. Articles headlined the ‘Drug War Death Toll’ say maybe 47-odd thousand have died since Felipe Calderon declared war in 2006. Or maybe it’s closer to 70,000. Depends on whose counting, or if anyone is counting at all.

Murder City is the story of 2008 in Ciudad Juarez, ‘the global economy’s new killing fields’, the subtitle announces. It is terrifying. Angry, hallucinogenic, fragmented, the writing is as surreal and horror-laden as the world it describes. Near the end, after describing how eight addicts were executed in a rehab centre while the army was parked down the block, Bowden’s orchestral prose bursts into a furious crescendo:

Yes, we will have the performance here at the abandoned rehab center. Surely, ghosts can’t take up that much space… We will not allow anyone with answers to be present. Explanations will be killed on sight. Theories strangled by my own hands…. there are a few ground rules. If you say, the killings make you sad, well, you will be killed — a bullet right into your head. If you say, it is terrible how people live in Juarez, how the poverty is awful, well, you will be killed — a bullet right into your head. If you say, it is all caused by American imperialism, you will be killed — a bullet right into your head. If you say, it is really an issue of femicide, you will be killed — a bullet right into your head. If you say, it is the result of NAFTA, you will be killed — a bullet right into your head. If you blame American drug consumers, you will be killed — a bullet right into your head. If you say, it is all because of a war between cartels, you will be killed — a bullet right into your head.

What do you say to that? I want to think there’s a reason, a cause to the effect that can — even if only hypothetically — be reversed. If no one is to blame, because everyone is to blame, then how will it ever stop?

Before Murder City I thought there must be something I could do — protests ended the war in Vietnam, right? After finishing the book that line of thinking feels naive, but the only alternative I can see is admitting there is nothing to be done and forgetting about it. That can’t be right though. There is a holocaust happening on the US border and it chokes me to think there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. I don’t have any bright ideas but if anyone does, I want to know.

This is the Amnesty International Mexico report.
Here is an article by Bowden in the High Country News.

Bald Absurdities

Over dinner my mother started talking about ‘donating’ her hair. When I chuckled at this bizarre joke she looked blank. Eventually we got the communication knot untangled and it transpires there is a charity industry dedicated to soliciting donations of hair to make wigs for child cancer patients and underage alopecia sufferers. Midway through mom’s explanation my jaw muscles gave way. “You’re kidding, right?”

Uh-uh.

The American government spends $15 billion a year fighting a breathtakingly pointless “war on drug” and hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out idiot banks. But kids with cancer have to hustle for hair. Seriously. And the USA calls itself a superpower.

A country that invests more in murdering the citizens of other nations than it does in caring for its own children isn’t a civilisation, it’s an embarrassment.

Locks of Love
Wigs for Kids

George Orwell – Why I Write

One of my all-time favourite essays is George Orwell’s Why I Write. He says there are four great motives for writing and, with characteristic honesty, puts this at the top of his list:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

Optimisim vs Realism

One of my the things I’ve been weighing as I work on my book is how ‘self-help’ it is, or should be. Is it possible to inspire without tipping into woolly thinking? Can we love life yet acknowledge its problems and challenges? Barbara Ehrenreich, in her excellent book Bright-Sided, argues we can:

Vigilant realism does not foreclose the pursuit of happiness; in fact, it makes it possible. How can we expect to improve our situation without addressing the actual circumstances we find ourselves in?

Support Mary on the Green

High on my list of favourite feminist books is Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Clear, succinct and utterly even-handed, the book – published in 1792 – was a good two centuries ahead of its time. I knew very little about Wollstonecraft, however, until I happened on the news that a charity called Mary On the Green is fund-raising to build a memorial to this illustrious woman in Newington Green, London, where age 25 Mary founded a school. Please check out Mary On The Green and Tweet, ‘Like’ or otherwise support the project. For more info check out the terrificly informative A Vindication of the Rights of Mary.

This bio excerpt from the Mary On The Green site explains what the fuss is about:

When she was 25, Mary set up a boarding school in Newington Green, then a village a couple of miles north of the City, now part of London itself. This enterprise allowed her to rent a house and make a home with her best friend and with two sisters, one of whom she rescued from an abusive marriage. It also allowed her to mix with a group of Rational Dissenters, high-minded non-conformists who stretched her spiritual and mental frontiers. The Green itself remains, as does Newington Green Unitarian Church, still radical, where Mary heard sermons that changed her life. The people who gathered around its minister, Dr Richard Price, contributed to the intellectual milieu that shaped Mary: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley, and the second president of the United States, John Adams, and his wife Abigail.

The experiences during Mary’s years at Newington Green led her to write her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. She was an inspiring teacher and an innovative educationalist, arguing for equal education for girls and boys, drawing out children’s spirit and curiosity without stifling them. Later, building on the contacts she had made through the Dissenters, she created a career for herself as a writer, one of the first women to do so, starting off with reviews and translations.

When Edmund Burke attacked her mentor Dr Price, she responded quickly with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in support of what we would now call human rights, in the context of the French Revolution. This work made her an intellectual celebrity, and a year later she followed this up with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the earliest works arguing the essential equality of the sexes.

Poll: How Important Is Creativity?

Quote of the Day – Raina Casarez

If you’re too lazy to do your own thinking, someone will do it for you.

- Raina Casarez, MindBody Fitness