Once upon a time, o best beloved, the Man lived in the jungle – next door to the Elephant. They went about their daily business together as friends. The Elephant would pull up trees for The Man to make a shelter. Sometimes, he would allow the Man, weary from a long walk, to ride upon his back. The Man allowed the Elephant to eat the rice he cultivated in the fields, and would make a fire for the Elephant to warm himself beside. They would sit together around the flames, and the Elephant would tell the man the long stories of the jungle.
Of all the animals in the jungle, only the Man felt shame. He would weave himself clothing from banana leaves, so that his body was shielded from the gaze of the other animals.
One day, the Elephant happened upon the man, down where the river becomes wide and splashes over the rocks. The man was bathing in a shallow pool, and thus was not wearing his woven clothes as usual.
“Good Morning,” said the Elephant to the Naked Man.
The man stopped splashing water on his back, and turned slowly to face the Elephant. “Hello,” he replied.
There was a short pause. The Elephant sensed that he should make conversation. So he stared at the Naked Man and said: “How do you breathe through that?”
The Man did not reply. Furious, he stomped off out of the forest. He never spoke to the Elephant again, and the Elephant never understood why.
After that, Man forgot the language of the Elephants. He lived by himself on the edge of the jungle, and ate his rice alone.
Page 306 of 328
Between them, Unity at Talk Politics and CuriousHamster at A Big Stick and a Small Carrot have done a fine tag-team job of dissecting today’s debate and votes on terror legislation, and the appalling news coverage that has let some rather sickening abuses to our civil liberties slip by without proper account.
From CuriousHamster:
The politicisation of the threat of terrorism is one of the worst things the Blairbrown government has ever done. Playing politics with such an issue is deeply irresponsible….
Laws. Are. Not. A Signalling. Device.
By declaring that we must send a signal to the terrorists, Tony Blair once again proves that the terrorists have indeed succeeded in changing our values and way of life, and for the worse. What a signal, Tony!
The argument that I find most sickening is that which holds that since the current government is trustworthy and ethical, it follows that no future governments will abuse the powers they inherit. Never mind that I have no respect for the ethics of this government – Blair’s argument is a nonsense on its own terms. He cannot predict what future governments (or future police forces for that matter) will be like. Nor can he fortell the events that might give them cause to abuse their powers further. Therefore, he cannot guarantee against the abuse of these new powers.
Funny how laws that were introduced apparently in the public interest, have the effect of making me feel less safe. Thank goodness I have a full decade of biometrics/ID register/fingerprint-free passportness ahead of me. Thank goodness I am leaving the country tomorrow. Should I bother returning?
These are my hurried notes from the end of a long day, 14th February 2005, after witnessing some horrible things.
Walk through the old city of Jerusalem, from Jaffa Gate to Damascus Gate, and you walk from the first world to the third world. Only on the other side of the old city can you find a bus that will take you into the West Bank.
We take a car from Jerusalem to Hebron, to the south. The geography of the region is surprisingly small. In ten minutes we are outside the city, and passing Bethlehem. Not long after and the outskirts of Hebron appear on the horizon.
We meet G, a Norwegian, and D from Italy. Both work for an international NGO in the city. The peace process is like an ailing phoenix, which rises from ashes and then decends into flames on a regular basis. Back in 1994, a Jewish settler massacred 29 people in the Ibrahim Mosque in the centre of Hebron. The NGO’s mandate is to act as observers and report on the interactions – and conflicts – between the Israelis and the Palestinians here. They operate by trust alone. They are unarmed and can only provide an independent account of the events that transpire here. They hope that their presence has a calming effect on the settlers and Palestinians alike.
We descend into the centre of town. Modern, squat skyscrapers hold apartments and shops selling the light industrial goods that are made around the city. Textiles, shoes, jewelry. Taxis and minibuses clog the streets. We see old men in grey blazers and the old traditional Khafir scarves in red or black, a mirror of their dead leader Arafat, now a poster-boy who adorns the walls of the city, alongside his colleague and successor Abu Mazen. Other election posters are half visible too.
Into the old city. Past a road-block first of all, followed by a checkpoint with a nonchalant and bored IDF sentry lurking alongside it. We take a turning down an alley, and in the half-light we can see more old men outside their stalls – fleeces, food, metal work, and a barbers. G and D say “Salam Aleikum” and so do we. Soon I become confident and say it to everyone who passes, and they respond with a smile and a squint.
Halfway down the alley, we look up to see a Israeli settlement that has been built over the old town. A wire mesh has been stretched over the of the alley to catch the rubbish that falls from the settlement into the souq below.
At the other end of the alley, the souq, we encounter another sentry post. Inside I see the soldier playing a game on his mobile phone. We have arrived at the Ibrahami Mosque, the scene of the massacre a few years ago. While G says that they will wait outside because they are wearing a uniform, we are free to wander into the holy place. Although, we cannot wander straight inside. We must first have our bags searched, and pass through a metal detector. Confronted by the IDF solider who is manning the checkpoint, I am struck first of all by the fact that she is a She… and then by the fact that she is a spotty, plump eighteen year old. Our assertion that we are without religion seems to annoy her, but nevertheless she and her two cohorts (lanky boys, also acne-riddled, also with guns slung over their chests) do their duty and check our bags.
Inside the mosque, all is quiet. Three men with the traditional headdresses sit and read, while a couple of young boys lounge against a pillar. At the back of the chamber we can see the tomb of Abraham, enclosed behind bars. Across the crypt though, we can see some young Jewish men, also standing behind bars, praying at the tomb. After the massacre the tomb was enclosed and split in two, so that the two communities would be able to pray separately at the same place. When we go outside again, we see the Jewish entrace to the same building.
In the plaza in front of the temple I can see more IDF solidiers. A pretty girl stands admonishing her friends lightheartedly. If it were not for their green fatigues, I mght think they were just about to go and hang out in the mall together.
We amble up to higher ground to get a good look at the city from above. We can see the white buildings that coat the hillside like molluscs and barnacles on an upturned fishing boat. A few men are rebuilding a wall that has been bulldozed for some reason. G says that these building are many hundreds of years old.
As we talk about the architecture, the lunchtime silence is shattered by an ambulance that speeds down the road behind us. At the same moment, D’s radio tactlessly blurts out the reason why the ambulance was there. The IDF have just shot dead a twelve year old boy, down at the checkpoints near the Ibrahami Mosque. It is difficult to imagine what possible threat he could have posed that required such lethal force. Down in the city we know a mother will be soon be crying. We know one young man will never send a Valentine card, or feel the rush of his first soft kiss. And we know that another boy or a girl with a gun has become a killer. An eighteen year old has killed a twelve year old. This will not make the morning papers.
Wary of what may happen next, we avoid the mosque and take a back route down into the souq again. There seem to be so many children on the street, teenage girls in groups of three or four, gossiping about the strangers walking through their town. I consider saying Salam Aliekum to them, but now it seems inappropriate. Do they know what has just happened less than two hundred yards away?
If they were unaware of any incident, a grenade goes off, and the explosion echoes around the city. As we descend and retreat to the new town, a voice begins to rant over the mosque speakers. Emerging from the same dark alley at the old town boundary, I see that the IDF sentry has become more alert. No longer playing on his mobile phone, he is leaning against his concrete barricade, and his rifle is aimed directly at us. From this angle it is hard to make out the shape of the gun. I can just see a hole at the top of the barrel. There is nothing to do but ignore the soldier, and find the car that we came in. The local residents seem to ignore him too – an old man steers his donkey and cart past us and the gun, into the souq and towards the Ibrahmi mosque.
Once again, I see for myself the capacity of people on this planet to dehumanise one another. Another glimpse into the eyes of the only devil I believe in.
I don’t feel sick. I feel nothing. G and D take their leave of us, and go to collect information for their report of the incident they could not predict, and did not prevent. We on the otherhand, go back to the new town. We get a cup of sweet Arabic coffee, then buy a couple of beautiful woven shawls in red and green. Pure lambswool, you know.
We were wrong, it was not a twelve year old boy. It was Sabri Fayez Al Rjoub, aged 15.
www.rememberthesechildren.org/remember2005.html
Intifada Fatalities 2000-2005 (Source: B’Tselem)
Now I realise the zeitgeist of the Mohammed Cartoon Controversy was a couple of weeks ago now. However, there seems to be a lot of meat left on this particular bone, with bloggers all over the world breaking their promises to talk about something else almost as soon as they are made.
I have just finished reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Set in a monastery in the Thirteenth Century, one of the monks hides a book by Aristotle on comedy. He believes that comedy and laughter will undermine Christianity:
“Laughter, for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God… [Aristotle’s] book, considering comedy a wondrous medicine, with its satire and mime, which would produce the purification of the passions through the enactment of defect, fault, weakness – would induce false scholars to try and redeem the lofty with a diabolical reversal: through the acceptance of the base. This book could prompt tyhe idea that man can wish to have on earth … the abundance of the land of Cockaigne [a land of easy living]”
By laughing and enjoying the here and now, we might lose our fear of God and suppose that we can find happiness not in heaven, but on earth. Jorge the monk is correct: Laughter is indeed a threat to a religion, especially one which depends on a fear of the afterlife for its power.
While the Abrahamic scriptures contain many lofty ideas on ethics and how we should live our life, they are short on wit. True, the Old Testament does declare “Eat, drink and be merry,” but even when Jesus spikes the water with wine at the teetotal wedding at Cana (John 2:9), he does so earnestly. I suppose that “suffer the little children who come unto me” (Luke 18:16) could be delivered with a smirk, and the passage about paying tax to Caesar (Matthew 22:21) shows a quick mind… but there is no irony to be found, and if the Prophets and Messiahs turn criticism on themselves at all, it is through po-faced self-flagellation, rather than self-depreciation of someone who appreciates the funny side of humanity.
When it comes to discussing their faith, true believers are totally without humour. Not for them the chuckle as they consider some contradiction in their position. If dogma is the inability to imagine how you might be wrong, then it is also the inability to imagine how others might consider you funny. Are there any Christians who laugh at Jerry Springer: The Opera? It it possible that we could create a cartoon of Mohammed that muslims would laugh at? If you can only see one side of an issue, then you cannot see the funny side.
The real battle is not over what we say or how we say it, but about how people react when they hear it. A world in which everyone is free to offend does not interest me. I would rather a world in which criticism does not cause offence… but laughter instead.
I’ve been reading A Defense of Nonsense, a rich essay by the fantastic G.K. Chesterton. Forgive me if I quote at length:
There are times when we are almost crushed, not so much with the load of evil as with the load of goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the interiors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown from a boy’s bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is ‘the heir of all the ages’ is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less popular but equally important point that it is good for him sometimes to realize that he is not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal antiquity; it is good for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and to experience ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.
We are both descendants and ancestors of a longer history than we care to imagine. But we have a great advantage over a historical past and a hypothetical future – We exist. This undeniable superiority inspires in us a certain arrogance. Human nature provokes a solipsism of the present, where our actions are deemed obviously more important than anything people have already done, or may do in the future. Perhaps this feeling wanes when one becomes a parent, and you are no longer a peak in human evolution, merely another worn link in the chain.
As I have said before, before, there are times when I feel as though we still exist in some kind of kooky pre-enlightenment era, where nonsense prevails and in the future historians will ridicule us for our narrow mindedness. We have invented the technology to harvest power from the sun, yet our system somehow deems it more appropriate to spend billions on securing a worryingly finite oil supply, instead of at least optimising the solar harvest. Some people genuinely believe that they – and their land – have identities that persist outside their own mind. Others spend millions on make-up, and millions more on make-up remover.
What sort of ancestor do we want to be? At present, it looks like we are set to become nothing more than a mad old grandfather. Full of incoherencies and self-contradictions, he talks about things that do not matter. He might have been interesting once, but now he sits in the corner, ignored.