Ah, the great British game!
We began in North London with a cappuccino from the bagel counter, and settled in to watch Lehmann from Germany, Lauren from Cameroon, Campbell from England, Toure and Eboue from Ivory Coast, Frenchmen Cygan, Pires, Henry and Flamini, Gilberto from Brazil, Fabregas and Reyes from Spain, and Bergkamp from Holland. They played against Ashdown, Griffin, Taylor and O’Brien from England, Priske from Denmark, Vignal from France, Cisse from Senegal, Vukic from Senegal, Todorov from Bulgaria, Viafara from Columbia, Hughes from Scotland, Skopelitis from Greece, LuaLua from the Congo, and Mornar from Croatia.
Despite all this hot international talent, we still froze our bollocks off.
Month: December 2005 (Page 1 of 3)
The Vatican has a good PR department. With half a billion adherents to the Christian brand, one might say this has always been the case. By the looks of certain papal headwear this festive season, a ‘merger’ with Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus logo seems to be on the cards, which could provide a further boost!
Their recent communication strategy may also prove an effective, if sinister ploy. From Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas message:
“Today we have vast material resources available to us,” he said. “The men of this technological age risk becoming victims of the successes of their intelligence and the results of their operative capabilities, if what they obtain is spiritual atrophy and an emptiness of the heart.
First, I think he is wrong to worry. The two largest technological revolutions are those of digital communications, and microbiology. Our capability for genetic engineering is certainly a potent force, but the furore surrounding GM crops is evidence that the scientists, the politicians and the public are acutely aware of the power we hold. Of course we need to take care, but the debate is proceeding slowly, precisely because of our ethical heritage.
I sense that the Pope is in fact referring to the advances in digital communications. In this case, the focus is on more people being able to communicate faster and easier. I would disagree that this will somehow lead to a diminished sense of soul. Indeed, these inventions have fostered entirely new types of community, ones that are not based on the accidents of geography or time. It allows people to maintain relationships with friends and family over long distances, and it allows communities to organise much more efficiently. Later in his address, the Pope emphasised the idea of a global family. Mankind is using these technologies to better itself – where is this threatening spiritual decline?
It is not our spirituality that is threatened, merely the Church and its outdated modus operandi. The Church does not deal in verifiable facts, but in the ideas we let into our minds. In the 21st Century, ideas flow so freely and cheaply that they are rebutted by a choir of voices almost as soon as they are aired. The Internet provides such diversity of thought and opinion, and the institution is particularly vulnerable to dissent and rebuttal. The Heiresarchs can no longer be silenced.
The Pope is free to tell us that our technological advances are threat to human spirituality. It is in fact only the Catholic Church that is under threat, but His Holiness uses his position to equate the two. He may well believe his analysis to be true, but it is a classic piece of propaganda and Christians should not fall for it. Instead, they should celebrate the growth in spirituality that the technology offers. Our new methods of communication allow minority voices to be heard, bringing new concepts of human value, and how people should spend their time. This may not be a new religion, merely an emphasis on (say) creativity and expression. The Catholic Church may “slip from their heart” but that is not to say that some other spiritual element cannot fill that void, even if it is simply concepts of kindness and happiness, which even atheists recognise as being a part of their substance. Who are you calling empty hearted, Joseph?
The casual Luddite attitude adopted by the Pope is designed to assert a superiority over other, competing voices. Paradoxically, it actually becomes a barrier to people attaining their version of spiritual fulfillment. Despite his white baseball caps, the new Pope’s pronouncements before and after his succession to the Papal throne hint at a hostility to the modern world. If this attitude does not change, then the Christian message will begin to wane. This would be a shame, as it is a creed that has so much to offer humanity. It is unfortunate that Christianity in its current form (along with many other religions too, I am sure) is obsessed with homogenising an aspect of life that is, by definition, personal. To do so, it must dismiss the possibility of other paths. Thus they warn us against technology, and the notion that spirituality may be a relative concept. As we use and embrace technology, so we announce that these alternative paths exist. The control that Catholicism exerts over its adherents, and those who happen to live alongside them is undermined.
Of course, it is possible my analysis of Pope Benedict’s strategy may be too complicated. Perhaps he is not as subtle as I give him credit for. He also spoke out against the proliferation of weapons. Perhaps the “operative capabilities” he refers to are in fact those conferred on the Saudi Arabian Air Force, now they have purchased 48 Typhoon fighter jets from the British Government! If it was this transaction that the Pope was talking about, then I can well believe in the spiritual atrophy he speaks of. The Saudi regime has a particularly warped conception of human value – Delivering these expensive killing machines to them will send our moral compass spinning.
The government’s exam regulator declares that the view of history taught by schools is too narrow, with a bias towards the Tudors, and Adolf Hitler. Accompanying these reports comes the inevitable cry from commentators that our children are not being taught properly. Our schools are merely day-centres for the ignorant. We hear that QCA is now developing modules for the DfES that give pupils a broader range.
The array of knowledge we have to cram into the heads of our innocent secondary-school children is vast, and inconveniences such as puberty distract pupils from the task of absorbing even a fraction of it. The problem with human knowledge is that there is an awful lot of it. Many historical facts are disputed, and there are several possible interpretations of those facts we can agree on. Everyone will leave school ignorant of some of the key figures and events that have shaped our world, and there is nothing we can do to change this.
We also hear that children in Key Stage 2 spend vast parts of their time training for tests. This is the most annoying aspect of the report. It is as if exams are an end in themselves, and not a means to an end. Indeed, for an over-worked teacher who is threatened with another Offsted inspect, good test scores for her pupils could be the only thing that matters!
Children should be trained to be philosophers. Philo and sophos, a Love of Knowledge. Perhaps it is not important what facts they know, just that they take an interest in the world around them. They will then seek out knowledge for themselves, naturally. I am paradoxically both ashamed and proud that there exist books on my university reading list that I did not read until after I graduated. Whenever I encounter a word or reference I do not recognise, I look it up and plug the gap. With increased access to the internet, this gets easier to do every day. I find the power of Wikipedia to be breath-taking, and surfing through to random articles is a secret, solitary pleasure. Only last week I found myself immersed in an explanation of the Reimann Hypothesis and its place in the history of mathematics. I only read the biography of Field Marshall Karl Dönitz a few days ago, and I have no recollection of how I came to surf to those pages.
We do not know whether Norman Kember is alive or dead, and yet he is a ghost. His face haunts our TV screens. We go about our daily lives, with his image in the background, on TV sets in shops and on an inside page of the Metro newspaper. When we eventually hear something, we will look up for a moment, and think “oh, it’s happened, then” and then carry on with whatever it was we were doing. Whatever the news, we will barely be surprised. We do not an will never know him. He is just a symbol for something indeterminate, and icon that we look at for a while.
Norman’s image is the latest such symbol to hover on the edge of our consciousness. Ken Bigley took on the role before him, another old man. We hear stories of how they are decent normal people, just like us. Anything that does not fit with the stereotype is not mentioned, glossed over. It is Ken’s brothers and father who the media go to for quotes, not his Thai-bride, Sombat. Norman’s mission to Iraq seems eccentric – not the action of a typical, normal bloke – but it is mentioned with pride as if its the sort of thing any of us might have done after picking our kids up from football practice. We use their first names, not their surnames. They symbolise the ‘everyman’ for a little while, and then we switch the channel over.
That other, sadly familiar icon is that of stolen innocence. The narrative of the Soham murders fit neatly into a Brothers Grimm template. The girls become one character, Hollyandjessica. Dressed in their Manchester United replicas, they are modern Red Riding Hoods, skipping off to play, where a Big Bad Wolf eats them. Maxine Carr becomes the wicked witch, with The Sun bizarrely dropping her in the same circle of hell as Myra Hindley. (By the way, this is the same tabloid that also supplied us with images of slighlty more mature girls wearing Man U shirts on Page 3). So persistent is the story that the media seeks out new ways to reinforce it. The girls are always shown together. I’m pretty sure that one of the later images released is a computer composite (the one with Holly – or is it Jessica? – in a blue cap). The light looks wrong.
In other cases, the facts don’t fit with our preconceived narrative, and so we are presented with misleading symbols to crowbar it in. When Jodi Jones was killed near Dalkeith in 2003, it was not the shattering of innocence, but a tragic end to a life already peppered with low self-esteem and grief. And yet the picture of Jodi distributed by the news media had been taken several years earlier, giving the impression that the victim was a primary school petal, and not a pierced, fourteen year old goth. How would we have judged the case if a more recent picture had been released?
Perhaps none of this matters. It will not change the fate of Norman Kember, nor condone the murders of Ken Bigley, Holly Wells, Jessica Chapman or Jodi Jones. But it is worth remembering that we do not know these people, and we do not understand their stories. Their images merely wallpaper our lives for a time, and we will forget them once more, learning nothing.
In the aftermath of the Sydney riots, an speech published in Quadrant Magazine surfaces to chart the rise of Lebanese gangs in Australia. While the gangs battle (and subdue) the police, the suggestion that an immigrant population may be adversely affecting the area is rejected by the politicians, and the problem grows:
The amount of money spent on the multicultural industry beggars belief. It is a lucrative and sustainable position for many. Governments pay huge money to anything that bears the word multicultural. Indeed the police department, like other government departments, spends vast amounts on multicultural issues, multicultural jobs, multicultural consultancies, education packages, legal advice, public relations and the rest. Having expended large amounts of money on multiculturalism, they are hardly likely to criticise it. Those that feed off multiculturalism are not likely to question it.
I get what Tim Priest is saying here, but his definition of multiculturalism seems to burn too many bridges. The social phenomenon he charts in Sydney is clearly undesirable: Communities living side-by-side, not integrating, becoming ghettos, that in turn become no-go areas for the police and ordinary citizens. Cultures and ethnicities living side-by-side without integration or communication is not what I would call multiculturalism… just antagonism. Multiculturalism has to imply a certain degree of integration, assimilation, and above all, a process of change for it to be something to value. I think a great many of the projects Priest vilifies are designed to promote just these things. That some of the programmes may fail can be a fault in design, implementation or personnel – There is no need to dismiss the values and the aspirations as a result.
Indeed, Priest goes on to describe the respect he has for the Vietnamese community of Cabramatta in Sydney, who expressed a desire to live peacefully alongside ordinary Australians (Melanie Phillips thoughtlessly refers to them as ‘indigenous’). Surely this is an example of an immigrant community playing a positive role in Australian national life – the very essence of multiculturalism.
The social problems faced by immigrant communities worldwide are real, but multiculturalism is the word I would use to describe the solution, not the cause of the problem. Immigrant communities can and should integrate with their host culture, but the process of change occurs on both sides. It is the acceptance of this fact, and managing the change in a positive way, which we call ‘multiculturalism’. Ignoring and rejecting it can only lead to further frustration, misunderstandings and conflict.