Telecasters

Beautiful. Forty years old and almost no design changes. I'm thinking of getting one, as a reward to myself.
Life tends to eddy backwards and forwards, sometimes Unlike tidal predictability, the shifts and harmonics act more as a resonator, facilitating increased momentum. Found myself breaking a silence or two recently, the kind with skeletal fingers that brush so lightly against the fabric of the soul that one forgets that they are there. Just a word in the right quarter unblocks the ship from the ice, allowing some forward movement.
Those who know me are well used to me stumbling around in the half-light most of the time. It's quite a triumph when two or three steps work together.

The Good, the Bad and the Psychopathically Deranged

The British Press is always up for a good one. Especially when the TLO (tight-lipped one) is drawlin' Texan outta the corner of his mouth and threatening to commit billions more of the USA's defence budget into pushing president Ahmadinejad's nuclear cocktail cabinet - were he to possess one - a little further away from Jerusalem. This from the Telegraph: -

Senior officials believe Mr Bush's inner circle has decided he does not want to leave office without first ensuring that Iran is not capable of developing a nuclear weapon.

I do rather wonder how this might be achieved. He could of course rattle his sabre some more. If push came to shove, however, would the Rices and Rumsfeld's carry enough political clout to take Capitol Hill into a wildly unpredictable thunderstorm where an entire Islamic brotherhood from Saudi to Somalia might decide to pitch in? H'm.

The Great Divorce

Blake wrote of the marriage of Heaven and Hell, C S Lewis wrote of its divorce. The brouhaha over the ordination of gays to the bishopric (no pun intended) is set to fragment what George Carey once called a 'big, happy family' - the Anglican communion. Seventeen million Nigerians and the view of their Archbishop is a force to be reckoned with, and they, together with their brethren in Uganda, conservatives all, are set to give poor old ++Rowan a rough ride in the next little while. His only response so far has been to affirm in 2005 that 'any lasting solution...will require people to admit that they were wrong'... Those of you who know me will recall that gentlemen - or indeed ladies - dressed in expensive flummery who are required to hold their hands in particular, sacramentally appropriate ways while dispensing bread and wine excite mild curiosity but little by way of transcendent joy. Similarly, despite my robustly nonconformist background, their evangelical counterparts hold little fascination, except for admiration for a faith which is transparently naive. Few would go quite as far as the gay Bishop of New Hampshire, upon whose saintly head much outrage has descended, when he suggested that Jesus might himself have been homosexual. Deconstructionist spin. Worked for Tony Blair.
A lady priest I know has no objection to gay priests - quite the reverse - reasons given, inter alia, is that they are often pastorally more adept and emotionally intelligent than their straight counterparts. At great depth, in the dungeon of my own soul, where the elevator descends no further, something murky rises against such thinking, although for the life of me I cannot reasonably fault it. The enlightened condescension of the mature thinker who has long since left all such superstition behind, where shadows blur comfortably, leaving few sharp edges, is both enviable and quietly disturbing. I think I must be showing my age. The image is Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin's interpretation, the Tom of Finland lookalikes give the game away nicely.

Ethics, Lies and Harry Potter

Came across this the other day....

"The persistent quest [to find] a non-violent Islamist lies at the origin of the invention of a 'moderate' Islamism. This attitude can be explained by the fearful refusal to confront Islamism, in its global and bellicose reality. The authorities always start out by fighting while in retreat, trying to disarm Islamism by promoting [its] purportedly 'moderate' spokesmen.

The notion that militancy is fuelled by the poor, indigent, hungry and downtrodden may not have exclusive basis in reality. Listening to the imam across the road from me giving it large in Friday prayers, even without a translation to worshippers so large in number that they congregate in the street outside seems indicative. Recent revelation that the educated, articulate and well-travelled have also put their hands to the plow should really come as no surprise. Al-Qaeda's #2 is medically trained, apparently.

From a spokesman in Algeria, earlier this month."…The Western countries are currently reaping [in these terrorists] what they sowed when they flung their doors open wide to every malevolent fundamentalist and failed in putting in place a mechanism for managing and controlling immigration in an appropriate manner…"
I'd dearly love to defend democracy, glasnost, Tony Benn or whomever. But, as Enoch Powell might have said, the Tiber, it seems, has indeed begun to foam with blood. Reading the final Harry Potter asks a similar question...why were the Death Eaters not properly contained before they were able to gain so much momentum? The parallel between Voldemort and OBL struck me as curious. But.. GWB as the Minister for Magic? Oh, no. Veritaserum. Let the truth be told.

A Case of Identity

"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent."
This being the opening sentence from Conan Doyle's third SH story about a father masquerading as a short-sighted suitor to deceive his daughter. Which led me to a few idle thoughts about identity and the wearing of badges which are, it seems, some kind of validation of it. I could bang on about hijabs or barcodes bearing 666 in binary at this point, but others have been there before, so, no.
I myself am contractually obliged to drape an unflattering, laminated photograph plus emblematic logo around my neck to proclaim my identity to anyone curious enough to peer at it. The children I teach do not, yet for security reasons they are the very ones whose identities should be known with more accuracy than mine.

The very act of donning such a tag is a signal of submission. Not of mutual commitment to public safety. To the sceptical, why does no one with actual power wear one? Which chief executive has one on over their suit. In a university, does the chancellor wear one? Hold your breath until the next time Obama appears at a press conference with one on. Of course, the reporters, lower in the food chain, will have them. ID badges, whatever their ostensible purpose, have the effect of segregating those whose dignity is deemed important from those whose is not.
There perhaps exist circumstances in which immediate identification of an unknown person's affiliation outweighs such concerns: in a nuclear weapons facility, perhaps. Or a school playground. Otherwise, do I really wish to know that my waiter's name is Omar? I hardly think we're gonna exchange Christmas greetings.

The image is of king penguins in the Falklands, recently making a comeback. Startlingly similar, there's not an identity tag in sight.

June the First and other incoherencies

No, it's not the Queen of the ancient Sahelian kingdom of Burkina Faso. I only know one person, fortunately, called June and only two called May. It surprised me to learn that there are over nine hundred and twenty-four million Internet possibilities for June the First, however. One wonders what can rivet people so consistently. It seems that a good deal happened in the past on this day, including the birth of Marilyn Monroe, Brigham Young and John Masefield. If any reader knows of any convergences between these three, do let me know....
I am also advised that it's also the first day of National Accordion Awareness Month. How can one not be aware of an accordion? It makes a cacophonous racket and is usually played by fat men with halitosis.

Islam Beheaded

Jerry Falwell, the presidential kingmaker, died recently, his legacy being to raise the profile of the Christian Right with the influence of its large voting bloc in US politics. Jerry put his foot in it more than once, inter alia referring unkindly to Muhammad as a 'terrorist'. It might be argued that he only did for Christianity what many radical imams do for Islam every Friday in London mosques.

Falwell's disastrous legacy does not lie only in American politics. He, like many of his evangelical brethren, took an aggressive and inhospitable view of religions other than Christianity. As a Muslim, I was well aware of his characterizations of Islam, and how they served to divide and set people at odds with one another, rather than to encourage peace and harmonious relationships. His belligerent stance against other religions only facilitates stereotyping and arrogance, both of which enable the kind of ongoing conflict and warfare we see today between America and various Muslim countries.

Clearly, this isn't mine. It is from here

Even a cursory reading of the Quran, which increasing numbers of Westerners have done since 9/11 suggests the concept of Ms Taylor's Muslims for Progressive Values is is a wee bit disingenuous, even oxymoronic. Muslims don't do progressive since doublethink is a prevailing mindset within Islam and its nominal proponents seek to reconcile its barbaric beginnings with appropriately 21st century human rights. There is a chink in the armour, however. Islam dragged its feet when mass printing became available; they continue to do so in the era of Internet communications. In the propaganda war, Islam will lose out ideologically since it is losing the race against time. That’s why Muslims work so hard to curb freedom of religious speech and any “mockery” or even rational criticism targeting Islam in infidel countries. Will Muslims bomb away freedom of speech in the West before we attempt to detonate this unexploded bomb underneath Islam’s feet? Every time there is a terrorist attack, we respond by increasing the volume of criticism of Islam in circulation on the Internet. Some would claim that this isn’t our fight. Yeah. Right. Ernest Renan, the influential French thinker and almost-priest, scourge of both Catholicism and Islam, has said that if there ever was something like a Reformation in the Islamic world, the West should gracefully stay out of it. However, he lived in the 19th century and could not have imagined that we would be naive enough to let millions of Muslims settle in major Western cities. We are implicated now, whether we want to be or not. We are no longer just 'fighting' against Islam but for our own freedom of speech, and thus democracy itself, which some might assert is worth fighting for. Maybe we can't slay the dragon, but we can almost certainly help the people who can.