Unjust leadership?

The following column appeared on the 14th July, 1993. Considering our current Labour Government, strong on promises and weak on action, we don't seem to be much better off. And the hints of socialism are everywhere amongst their policies.

Unjust leadership? 

After a friend asked me if I knew the opposite phrase to ‘distaff side’ (‘spear side,’ we discovered), she took up my last column’s complaints about Mr Bolger, and said, ‘But who would you put in his place?’ I had no answer.

In spite of the possibilities of electoral reform, we’re still left with the problem of being unable to vote in a party’s leader.

We want leadership in this country, there’s no doubt; but not at all costs. Arrogant leadership of the Muldoon-Lange-Bolger style we can do without.

With the choices we face at present, perhaps it is time (given that it is suffrage year) to have someone on the distaff side: a Prime Ministress.  But the present field is pretty narrow: would we really want the Obsessive Housekeeper, or She Whose EconomicPolicies Must Be Obeyed?

Metropolitan Anthony

I’ve been reading a little book I picked up in the Regent book sale, Man and God, by Metropolitan Anthony (his name has nothing to do with a railway station: Metropolitan is an Orthodox church title, similar to archbishop).

This man clearly identifies one of the problems New Zealand is facing at present, though stating it in a different context.

He says when society defines man (including setting up an Ideal Abstract Man as ‘the pattern for the future’), we always meet – whatever the case, whatever the kind of dictatorship or pressure group – with something which the Russian writer, Solzhenitsyn, in his book Cancer Ward, defined in the following way.

One of the central characters has this said about him: ‘He had the greatest possible love and consideration of mankind, and this is why he hated so fiercely every human being – because they disfigured this ideal so horribly.

There is an echo here of Jenny Shipley, or Roger Douglas. Leaders who appear to have more love for their ideal State, where properly managed finances will supposedly bring proper social order, than for the individuals within it.

As M. Anthony points out, such leaders’ ideals are always focused on the future. Consequently the real people they are dealing with here and now have to be ‘transformed, changed and remoulded.’ Unfortunately, past experience ‘shows that many bones crack and many things have to be changed by force and even violence.’ (The communist revolution is one example.)

Individual people are disregarded in this kind of social change; people are only seen collectively.

Here in New Zealand it is easy to see those who commit benefit fraud as one group who blaspheme the great god Economy. It is also easy to lump the Poor together as one large unpalatable porridge.

Within our leaders’ world view, the poor eventually disappear not because of Recovery but because they have no means of surviving. Crime becomes their only hope and they are committed to prison. The prisons become totally overloaded, and finally something more permanent is done..?

Not in New Zealand?

We need a distaff side to our spear side policies: humanity as well as economy. We need policies that see people not as abstractions, but as unique wondrous creatures, each one called by name ‘out of (the) nothingness from which we were drawn by the will of God.’ (Anthony again.)

Arrogant and unjust rulership tends to arise when we leave God out, and though many of my readers won’t agree, New Zealand still needs God.

And New Zealand leaders need to see people as God sees them: perhaps not going so far as counting the hairs on their heads, but at least knowing that individuals make up the crowd.

Video splurge

Had a bit of a video splurge yesterday. Didn't start out that way, but circumstances just brought it about. I decided to see what Hitchcock films were available on You Tube, and found Notorious, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. It's one of Hitchcock's less action-packed films, relying on the subtle interplay of character, and has only one really big scene: a party hosted by Claude Rains, a Nazi-sympathizer living in Brazil after the war. The characters are vividly drawn, and the dialogue full of sub-text: the love story that underpins the suspense is the main focus of the movie in many ways. I've seen it a couple of times before, but had forgotten some of the story. It stands up well after fifty-plus years.

After tea my wife and I carried on watching the Australian legal series, Janet King, which is apparently a spin-off from some other earlier series about a legal firm. We're up to about episode five or six, and I think I haven't seen a series that's so full of improbable legal stuff in a long time. Because the Attorney General seems to be able to command that people do what they're told, for her own political reasons, the Department of Public Prosecutions (where most of the story is focused) jump and go through ridiculous hoops trying to prove cases that are unprovable. Added to that is the detective and his boss who seem to think that building a murder case on the most flimsy of circumstantial evidence is good police work, and you have a series that while it's full of solid characters requires them to do absurd things. The police seem not too fazed about producing witnesses who tell lies; the legal team seem careless about ethics, and so on. If it wasn't actually interesting, it would have been dumped by now. The main character is a lesbian, living with another woman and their twin children, who are toddlers. The lesbian angle seems to be just that: another hook to throw odd bits of storyline onto.

In spite of all this we actually watched two episodes last night, which goes to show how something that's well done can get away with plot-hole murder.

Puccini

Finally, after having written in one of my other blogs about a production of Puccini's opera, Gianni Schicchi, that I was involved in when I was at the Opera Centre in London in 1969, I decided to see if that was on You Tube too. It is, in at least three versions, and thankfully I picked the best-directed one to watch. The other two were okay (I checked out a minute or two of each) but the 2004 Paris version directed by Laurent Pelly, containing a very mixed European cast, was the one that I stuck with.

The opera, which runs for just on an hour, is a total ensemble piece, with a cast of fifteen or sixteen, nine of whom are on stage the entire time. There's no chorus, just larger and smaller roles (one lasting about two minutes). It's a piece of nonsense about a man, Buoso, who's died and left a very unsatisfactory will - that is, he hasn't left anything of substance to his relatives. They plot to bring in the cunning neighbour, Schicchi, and he, being even more cunning than they've thought, winds up replacing the original will with his own version, in which the bulk of the proceeds go to him.

The cast played the thing in a style verging on the comic grotesque, and there were even some surreal moments (a kind of ballet involving the moving around of the bed which features prominently). It's a lot of fun, and requires the main singers to do a huge amount of work. Those who are on stage all the time have to keep up particular characters constantly: there's no let up. Very enjoyable, even if it was sung in the original Italian with French subtitles....some of which I understood and some of which I probably misunderstood.

Labouring the point

Somewhere along the line I've managed to hook into the Labour Party's email system, which means that at least once a week I get an email from one or other Labour MP telling me that the naughty National Party isn't doing things properly, and that I should write to the National MP in question and tell him so. And hundreds of others are doing this as well. And we'll make them change their approach/thinking/habits/behaviour...or whatever.

Well, yes, there are some things that the National Government is doing that are definitely not to my taste. All Governments all the time do some things that don't impress their constituents, and it's the right of the people to complain.

However, what concerns me about the Labour Party's emails is the fact that their main approach is to knock the Government. I know that those in Opposition always seem to see this as their main objective in life: "whatever the Government does we'll tell them they're wrong for doing it." It gets tedious and is counterproductive in the end.

Having Andrew Little, the current Leader of the Labour Party, popping up on TV every time there's some sort of political issue, and invariably saying nothing more than that the National Government is doing it wrong, is like having a neighbour poking his head over the fence every time you do something in your backyard and telling you what you should be doing. It's wearying.

The trouble is they almost never say how they would do it right. If the Opposition only opposes, and never proposes, then after a while you switch off and don't want to hear from them anymore.

So here's the Labour Party writing to me by email week after week, and in none of these emails is there anything that suggests how they would do it better. I have to assume that they have some plan up their sleeve, or that they know the proper way to do something, but they don't talk about it.

It's like two gangs in the street: there's the gang that's currently cock of the walk. They pretty much do what they want. The rival gang happens at the moment to be number two and not number one and they resent it. So they spend their time carping at everything gang number one does. It's self-defeating: no one wants to hear a whiner day after day. (I know this from experience because my wife has frequently told me so!)

So, Labour Party emailers, here's a suggestion. Instead of focusing on what the National Government is doing wrong all the time, how about showing me what you will do right when you're next in Government? Because at the moment I wouldn't vote for you as a Party if you paid me. (I have voted for my local Labour MP because I think he's got some nous, but for the Party as a whole? No way.)

Ditch the bookmarks!

Dorothy L Sayers, from a short essay entitled A Note on Creative Reading (from the back of a book called Begin Here, which was published during the Second World War and deals with economics and Germany and politics and a good deal more). 

Which reminds me: please burn all your book-markers - even the pretty one Aunt Mabel sent you last Christmas (or at least put that one away and only bring it out when she comes to call.) You cannot possibly be so bird-witted as to be unable to discover which page you got to by looking at it.
If the author mentions some other book in terms which make it seem important, whether he approves or refutes it, don't take his word for it: get the other book and read it, and judge for yourself. If he refers to something, or uses a word, which you don't understand, get a dictionary or work of reference and look it up. (Don't write and ask the author to explain; he is not required to be an Encyclopaedia, and you will only give him a poor idea of your industry and intelligence.) Especially, examine the sources of what he writes; to read Mr Somebody's critical valuation of Milton's prose or his examination of the economic effects of the Peace-Treaty is quite valueless if you have never read any Milton and do not know what the Peace-Treaty actually said.

How times have changed, you might say. I don't at all agree with her view of bookmarks because I'm plainly bird-witted enough to need them to find my place. It must speak volumes about my lack of attention to what I'm reading (!)
As for asking the author to explain: these days authors are all too ready to explain, and enjoy discussions with their readers. Or so we're led to believe. It's one of the joys and perils of the Internet. You can drop an author an email or even a tweet without blinking. And mostly they will reply...quickly. 

Gripping and gritty movies

Taking a punt on movie choices can mean that often you wind up seeing something that's a bit of a dud. I usually prefer to have some idea about a movie before I watch it, even if it only costs me a couple of dollars from the Public Library.  However, last week I picked up three movies (we haven't watched the third) and the first two turned out to be crackers. 

One was Nothing but the Truth, which apparently didn't get much of a theatrical distribution for reasons that are beyond my understanding, in spite of having a top-notch cast: Kate Beckingsale, Alan Alda, Matt Dillon, Noah Wylie, Angela Bassett and Vera Farmiga, an actress who plays her roles with such intensity that the television screen threatens to go on fire. The film is based on a true-life case about a political reporter who refused to reveal the source of her story, and wound up in gaol for months.  However, the scriptwriter and director, Rod Lurie, has rewritten the thing from the ground up, changing all the details and the background, so that the film is presented as a proper drama, not as a piece trying to fit around a real-life episode.  It's all the stronger for this, and allows Lurie to write excellent roles for his cast, none of whom let him down.

Beckingsale's character is given the chance to write a piece for her major newspaper that will expose a female CIA agent, but refuses to name her source. This refusal gets her into deep trouble with the Government, and she is thrown into jail by a heavy-handed judge (the actor, in real life, was an attorney in the original case). This causes havoc to the CIA agent and her family, to the reporter's own family and doesn't, in the end, let her off the hook.  It's a tough film made tougher by the insistence on principles that the reporter clings to, and which she finally brings her lawyer around to. You may guess the surprise ending - my wife did, but I didn't; it neatly rounds the film off. 

The other film was originally played over four nights on British television. It's called Father & Son, and stars Dougray Scott, Sophie Okonedo, Ian Hart and Stephen Rea. It's a gripping piece that doesn't turn out the way you might expect; it's violent and dark, but it's about integrity and the idea that eventually the choices you make in life have to be for the sake of others or else you die from the inside out.

The story concerns a career criminal, Michael O'Connor, who wants to put all his bad behaviour behind him.  Unfortunately things aren't as easy as that, and he's forced to decide whether he will amend things he's done wrong properly, or only partially.  His teenage son, Sean, (Reece Noi), the child of a mixed marriage, is accused of a gang retaliation murder, though we know from the beginning that he's innocent. O'Connor hasn't seen his son in a while after his wife was murdered about five years back and there's considerable bitterness in the boy.  But behind the bitterness, we eventually learn, there's a great deal more going on than we first suspect, and part of the story is about the reconciliation required between O'Connor and his son, a reconciliation that needs to take place before things can be healed. There are father and son connections throughout the story, none of them very satisfactory at the start, and a host of brilliantly drawn and played characters.  Part of the story is also the truth about the murder that took place some years before, and how it fits into all the other elements.

Scott plays a tough man who seems at first to have matured; but we learn that his seeming vulnerability towards his new wife and unborn child is only skin-deep.  It takes far more to bring his true self to the surface. He's surrounded by duplicitous characters - the links between different people turns out to be nastier than we expect - and it takes a good deal of sorting out.  The writer was Frank Deasy - he died about the same time the series aired.  He had written the last episode in the Prime Suspect series, and the same grittiness is apparent here.

For the sake of the Green Card

Watched a movie called Crossing Over on DVD last night, and kept thinking about my son, who's living in the US these days all the time - on a Green Card.   The film is a drama about immigration in the States, about deportations and illegal immigrants and people who aren't legal themselves but have children born in the country who are automatically citizens and so on.  Harrison Ford is in it as an immigration policeman, Cliff Curtis (an Arab this time) is his partner, and there are a host of other bodies, including Ray Liotta (looking curiously seedy throughout), Ashley Judd and Jim Sturgess in smaller roles.  It's one of those films where several stories are begun and then gradually begin to intersect; not always without coincidence.

There's an underlying sense of violence in it, though the occasion on which this really shows up is when an Asian youth caught up with a gang doing a liquor store robbery nearly kills a female customer - his mate has already shot the store owner, and none of the gang apart from the boy survive the incident.  And there are some unnecessary (to my mind) sex scenes: not just the usual we-have-to-show-you-the-characters-at-it but conversations held with the characters in the nude, and a later scene in which two lovers are shot while in flagrante delicto  (which I've just learned means in blazing offence, something I'd never known before).  To my mind forcing actors to converse with each other while they're naked does nothing for their ability to put the scene across successfully.  There was a terrible scene in an otherwise very good TV play quite a few years ago in which the woman was astride the man, in bed, and they had a conversation about politics throughout the we-have-to-show-you-the-characters-at-it scene.  For me, it's just an embarrassment to watch scenes shot in this way, and the fast forward on the remote is very handy.  We-have-to-show-you-the-characters-at-it scene are like those ones that take place in men's toilets, in front of the urinals; that idea, perhaps novel when it was first done, seems to me to have been well and truly overdone, and was probably never very effective in the first place.  (In my experience, men don't tend to linger around urinals having conversations, but maybe New Zealanders are different.)

Anyway, apart from all this, there are some very emotional moments in this movie: a family split apart, another made new; a young man wounded by his girlfriend's casual attitude to prostituting herself in order to get a Green Card, and the scene in which Cliff Curtis faces up to what his brother has done - for the sake of 'family.'   There's also one funny scene in which Jim Sturgess, trying to convince an immigration person that he's Jewish enough to work at a Jewish school (he isn't), is rescued by an elderly Rabbi, in a moment of grace.

In fact there's a good deal of grace exhibited throughout the movie: Harrison Ford is a man who does his job but hates what it does to the people, and he attempts to reunite a Mexican woman and her child when they've become separated by the system.  It's way beyond the call of duty, but he has that kind of integrity as a person.  (It's what Ford does well, of course.)  Grace is given in enormous measure by Cliff Curtis to the Asian boy, a grace that he not only doesn't deserve, but almost throws away.  Quite a picture of the sort of redemption each of us receives from God, if we're willing to take Him up on it.

Busman's holiday

It's been a week or so of watching videos.  I'm kind of having a holiday after Grimhilda! you might say, although it's a bit of a busman's holiday, in that I've started on the ebook that I want to produce based on the musical, and I have a couple or three other projects in mind as well, including the sequel to Grimhilda!


The sequel?  At the moment it consists of a couple of pages of notes, but my collaborator and I haven't sat down and talked it through as yet (we only had a brief conversation one night after one of the performances) so it's early days.   And our church, Dunedin City Baptist (I feature briefly in their slide show at the top of their home page) - formerly Hanover St Baptist - is celebrating its 150th Anniversary next year, so I'm loosely thinking about doing something in the way of a drama/sound and light/something on Rosalie Macgeorge, who was the first Baptist missionary sent out by the newly-formed NZ Baptist Missionary Society.  We don't know an awful lot about her, but I'm hoping to be able to find out more than I already have (otherwise it might be a short piece!).  She was quite a pioneer, a woman well ahead of her time in how she thought about doing mission work, from her insistence on living with the people she was attempting to bring into the church rather than in a separate European compound, as was the norm; to her dressing as one of the people; to her refusal to take the wage paid by the Mission Society so that the people didn't think she was a wealthy foreigner.  She lived for only around six years in the mission field, became very ill and died on her way home to New Zealand.   She was only 31 when she died.

I've also been memorising poetry again - I'd stopped during the latter stages of the Grimhilda! production period because I found I just didn't seem to have the mental energy to cope with memorising.   Anyway, after reading Moonwalking with Einstein, I got going again, and have got four new poems pretty much under my belt, using some of the techniques Joshua Foer discusses in his book and some learned previously.  I've also started memorising music again, something that I've only done spasmodically in my lifetime, because I always felt I wasn't very good at it.  Like any kind of memorising, however, you only get good at it by doing it, and keeping on doing it.

For some time I've been 'collecting' poems from the Writer's Almanac that comes out each day as an email.  I don't keep them all, by any means, because some just don't grab me for one reason or another, but I've got about 160 on Evernote. One I'd like to learn, though it might be a challenge, is Barbara Hamby's Ode to Hardware Stores, a delightful poem with at least six beats a line and full of detail.  She mentions, at one point, nearly every nail you can think of, but she doesn't get onto acorn nuts, fortunately, or any of their innumerable brethren.  Equally naming her poem as an 'ode' is perhaps a little overstating the case, but it's done tongue-in-cheek.  As Stephen Fry says in chapter five of his book The Ode Less Travelled: 'In English poetry it [the Ode] was once the most grand, ceremonial and high-minded of forms, but for the last hundred years or so it has been all but shorn of that original grandeur, becoming no more than a (frequently jokey) synonym for 'poem.'"  Hamby's ode/poem is a great chunk of a thing full of wonderful words, plenty of rhythm and lots of energy.

Anyway, back to the videos - or DVDs, I should say.   Last night we watched The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher, and Jim Broadbent as her husband, Dennis.   It's not a biopic in the usual sense.  Although it does take us through some of the political years, seen in flashbacks, it also focuses a good deal on the relationship between Maggie and her husband, and the dementia that was creeping up on Thatcher at the time the film is set.   Some American reviewers have complained that it's too British and doesn't explain enough about what's going on politically or historically.  That's right, it doesn't.  Some reviewers complain that it's not a 'proper' biopic, in that it doesn't take the person's life as the arc of its narrative.  And that's right too.  The scriptwriter and director (both women) have set out to do something different.  Being artists in what is still very much a man's world they have considerable sympathy with the way Thatcher was very much a woman in a man's (political) world.  But they don't forget that Thatcher was also domineering (especially in her later days) and wouldn't brook disagreement very readily.   She was unwilling to give an inch when the Falklands were invaded by the Argentinians, and was both loathed and admired for her strength in protecting what was still essentially a far-flung British colony.

But all this is undercut by the dementia she shows in the present - her continual hallucinations in regard to seeing her deceased husband (who keeps popping up to annoy her, it seems) and her very slow sense of what's happening mixed with occasional signs of her old passionate self.

Meryl Streep unfailingly gives reality to her portrayal of Thatcher; she has the ability to inhabit a personality in an almost uncanny way the voice, the behaviours, the stance, the characteristics of people she plays.  It's not just a performance; it goes way beyond that.  (Her uncanny and hilarious portrayal of Julia Child is a standout in this regard, but her performance in Mumma Mia was a disappointment, perhaps because she was playing such a one-dimensional character.)

Jim Broadbent and Harry Lloyd (apparently he's the great-great-great grandson of Charles Dickens) play Dennis Thatcher at different periods in his life; both are delightful performances, merging well into each other as the story swings back and forth in time.  The crazy humour that Dennis has is linked well between them.  I enjoyed the film, and was a bit surprised at the critics' dismissal of it.  Perhaps they didn't like the idea of a woman being at the centre either...?

Greens and the elderly

The political party debate last night on Channel 3 brought more Tweets to my Twitter page than any other subject has ever done.  Even my son-in-law made some comments.  It was all very invigorating, and it hasn't stopped.  I don't think anyone made any more sense of anything as a result (not assisted by Paul Henry getting in on the act) but at least everyone was involved.

Tonight it seems the Greens are taking over Twitter, pushing their policy on child health/poverty in NZ.  I think their concern for child health/poverty is admirable, but it's interesting that the only person with any concern - as far as I'm aware - for older people is Winston Peters.   On the other parties' radar, the older and elderly don't even appear.

I've replied to the Greens tweets about child poverty with a couple of questions about whether they're concerned for older people.  No tweets in response, at this stage.

Update on this: 
Someone at the Greens has sent me a tweet: We sure are. Sue Kedgley did a report about it last year.  

I've now downloaded the report and will have a look at it after Downton Abbey has finished....

Apples with apples

Okay, I have no professional training in stats.  I have had an interest in them over the years, and have done some reading, and worked with stats for three years before I retired.   All still in a fairly non-academic way.

But it really irritates me when news reports use stats to make a case without comparing apples with apples.

Let me be clear.  I suspect there is a considerable disparity between the rich and the poor in New Zealand, perhaps (and I use that word advisedly) more than in the past.  But I don't have actual figures to prove this.  And nor, it seems to me, does Lane Nichols in his article on Stuff.co. nz entitled Revealing the gap between NZ's rich and poor.  He throws a number of 'stats' around, but do they make the case he's claiming?  I'm not sure.

Firstly, anytime you quote the OECD stats, you need to remember that there are two issues with these: firstly, they're often out of date (Mr Nichols doesn't tell us what figures he's discussing here, it needs to be noted) because the OECD can be comparing stats from 2009 for one country with stats from 2002 for another country.  This was something that concerned me greatly when I did stats work over the last three years.

Secondly, the OECD stats from one country will be based on the way that particular country collects them - which isn't necessarily the way another country collects them.   One of the issues we looked at constantly in my last job was suicide.  The suicide stats are always some years behind, because they rely on coroners confirming that a person has actually committed suicide.   That's in New Zealand, and is probably the same in similar countries.  In other countries suicides aren't necessarily recorded in the same way at all - in some countries suicides can bypass the stats easily. 

This isn't to say that the OECD stats are inflated on one hand and deflated on another.   It just means that we have to be careful that we're comparing apples with apples, and unfortunately we're usually not.

Mr Nichols writes about a report from the NZ Stats: The report's 2004 data – the latest available – reveals the richest 10 per cent collectively possess $128 billion in wealth, with median individual wealth of $255,000. In contrast, the poorest 10 per cent collectively possess $17.2b, with median individual wealth of $3200. While the richest 1 per cent held 16.4 per cent of the country's net wealth, the poorest 50 per cent owned just 5.2 per cent. 

Let's look at this a little.   Firstly, the report is seven years old.   We've had a recession since then, and considerable chaos in the world markets.    That's not to invalidate the report, it just needs to be borne in mine.

Secondly it would be interesting to know what the phrase 'median individual wealth' means, especially in relation to the poorest 10 per cent.   What wealth do these poor possess, exactly?   And since this is a median figure that presumably means some of them will possess/own nothing, while some will be comparitely well-off.   Meanwhile, what about the 80 percent (I'm not sure why 'per cent' is the form for Stuff, but I normally write percent as one word) in the middle?    What's their 'median individual wealth'?   We have no idea from this article, because it's making a case relating only to two groups, pitting extremes against each other.  Furthermore it doesn't seem to quite tally up with the 99 percent slogan put out by the Occupy movement.

I'm not going to pick this article apart word by word.   One final comment about another statement: But the gap between rich and poor still ranked ninth worst in the developed world in 2008. Again we're not given any stats/information to back this up, and I'm a bit confused as to what 'ninth worst' actually means.  In relation to what, or to whom? 

Reports that use stats in this way are similar to those 'scientific breakthrough' articles that we often see.  They throw around a bit of information, but not enough.  'Cure for cancer' is touted - until we read the fine print.  The trouble is the fine print seldom appears in the news reports, as it doesn't in these stats reports.

Brash and Spong?

From Toby Manhire's blog on things political in the NZ Listener: 
 
Asked about his religious convictions, Brash said he is a fan of Bishop John Spong. Who he? Why, a liberal, progressive American Christian. And what sort of things does he promulgate? Here he is, from his personal site, on capitalism:

A socially-sensitive, community-oriented capitalism that refuses to allow too much wealth to accumulate in the hands of the super rich and too little opportunity provided to break the bondage of the chronically poor is, I believe, the best economic system for stability. At this moment in America, the gap between the rich and the poor is dangerously wide.

Have we got the right guy, Don, because – never mind.

Hmm.....well Don, if Spong's your cup of tea, good luck to you.  You can have him.  

Blasphemy is a tribute to God

Michael Gerson reminds us that : British author G.K. Chesterton argued that every act of blasphemy is a kind of tribute to God, because it is based on belief. "If anyone doubts this," he wrote, "let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor."

If all else fails, quote Chesterton. He'll back you up every time. Gerson's article is called, What Atheists Can't Answer, and was published in the pages of the Washington Post. This is what he's discussing:

Proving God's existence in 750 words or fewer would daunt even Thomas Aquinas. And I suspect that a certain kind of skeptic would remain skeptical even after a squadron of angels landed on his front lawn. So I merely want to pose a question: If the atheists are right, what would be the effect on human morality?

So who's Michael Gerson? Well, I didn't know either, but here's the bio the Post helpfully provides:

Michael Gerson writes about politics, global health and development, religion and foreign policy. His column appears on Wednesdays and Fridays. He also contributes to PostPartisan.

Gerson is senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement's Center on Faith & International Affairs. He served as a policy adviser and chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush from 2000 to 2006. Before that, he was a senior editor covering politics at U.S. News & World Report. His book "Heroic Conservatism" was published by HarperOne in 2007.

Global Warming going down the tubes?

In the light of the ongoing debacle over the global warming scandals, a long quote from an article by Muriel Newman of the NZ Centre for Political Research.

The Christchurch Press reported that the 32-strong delegation of New Zealand politicians and officials who attended the Copenhagen climate fiasco has cost taxpayers at least $600,000.[5] Under the Official Information Act I have been trying to find out from government agencies the cost to taxpayers of funding officials to fly all around the world for the last five years endlessly talking about ways to reduce carbon emissions and negotiate a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. While all of the information has not yet been received, it looks likely to be at least $2 million. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of taxpayer funded costs that have resulted from the government’s blind faith in the IPCC reports. Instead of seriously questioning the scientific findings that underpin those reports, to see whether they were robust enough to base complex and expensive public policy on (especially as there has been no lack of local independent criticism of the whole IPCC process) the government has exposed the New Zealand public to gross exploitation by climate alarmists.

All of this leads to questions over the integrity of our own National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). NIWA scientists featured in the Climategate emails and in early January NIWA came out with the astonishing claim that the last decade was the warmest on record. This finding, based on measurements of fractions of a degree, helped support the cause of catastrophic global warming. However it has now been revealed that even though their raw data shows no warming, NIWA has been adjusting their temperature records to produce results that show a warming trend. When asked for the details of how they make their adjustments they have astonishingly had to admit that they don’t have it![6] The fact that their data has been massaged might also explain why NIWA has found warming down here in New Zealand, while Professor Phil Jones, the Director of the Climatic Research Unit and the scientists at the centre of the Climategate scandal, has just confirmed in an interview with the BBC that there has been no significant global warming for the last 15 years![7]

See the rest of the article - Climate Change in Tatters

Two extracts from Finding Sanctuary

Finding Sanctuary is by Abbot Christopher Jamison.

In February 2004 BBC Television broadcast a programme entitled 'What the World Thinks of God.' As part of their research they commissioned Bradford University's Peace Studies Department to carry out an audit of wars over the last hundred years, with specific reference to the role of religion in causing those wars. Looking back at history, they analysed the actual mechanisms by which religion might case war and found several possible ways in which this occurs. These mechanisms might be the promise of salvation to those who fought the infidel, or the intention of religious leaders to seize holy places - both key factors in the medieval crusades. Or they might be the desire ot convert the enemy, as in the wars of the Reformation.

The researchers then analysed the thirty-two wars of the twentieth century. Their conclusions were that only three had a significant religious element. They considered the Israeli-Arab wars, for example, to be wars of nationalism and liberation of territory (and I would ad that the same is true of the Irish wars and conflicts). They noted that the current campaign being waged by Arab terror groups is largely about political order in the Arab countries, especially the presence of foreigners there. These groups use the language of religion, but the use of religious language to justify terrorism is disowned by mainstream religious leaders.

Political leaders use differences in confessional faith as a way of mobilising support for political wars, and it is mainly in this way that religion becomes a factor in war. Furthermore, the main wars of the century (the two world wars, the Russian civil war leading to Stalin's regime, the Chinese civil war leading to Mao's regime) claimed seventy-five percent of all casualties of war in the twentieth century: they killed 150 million people. None of them is attributable to religion. The recent conflicts in which religion has played a significant role have killed only one per cent of the number of victims of secular wars.

This study provides evidence that religion is not a major reason for war in modern times. But the two great moments of violent religious conflict in Europe, the Crusades and the Reformation, have cast a long shadow over the popular mind, so that even though there have been no truly religious wars for many centuries, even intelligent commentators still insists that religion causes wars. The reality, however, is that in the modern world it is governments, and not religions, that cause wars. (pp 165-6 Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition 2006)

And on another tack entirely:

I offer a final story from the desert fathers and mothers. A young monk once went to see his superior: 'Father, ' he said, 'I must leave the monastery because I clearly do not have a vocation to be a monk.' When the older monk asked why, the younger monk replied: 'In spite of daily resolutions to be good-tempered, chaste and sober, I keep on sinning. So I feel I am not suited to the monastic life.' The older monk looked at him with love and said: 'Brother, the monastic life is this: I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down.' The young monk stayed and persevered. (pg 172 ibid)

And in spite of the title of this post, one more:

You may be wondering whether such an approach to scripture is only for monks, so I offer you this thought from St John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople. "'I am not,' you will say, 'one of the monks, but I have both a wife and children, and the care of a household.' This is what has ruined everything, your thinking that the reading of scripture is for monks only, when you need it more than they do. Those who are placed in the world, and who received wounds every day, have the most need of medicine." (pg 66 ibid)

From Panic to Pandemic

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the way people panic these days, as soon as there's the slightest hint of something out of the ordinary. (Another example is the people in the States who are buying up six months worth of food and other necessities to last them through the Recession.)
I mentioned the swine flu 'pandemic' in the post, and was rather cynical about it. Seems that we're now reaching the pandemic level - according to the World Health Organisation. But, as MacDoctor notes: Bear in mind, however, that we essentially get a pandemic of influenza every year. Although this virus is likely to be significantly more dangerous than the standard influenza virus, it is also likely to turn out more like the Hong Kong flu pandemic rather than the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. There will be some tragedies and some disruption to life - but the world will not come to an end.
MacDoctor also lists five myths about swine flu, which make useful reading:
1. You can get Swine Flu from eating pork/ham/bacon
2. If Swine Flu becomes pandemic it will kill 50 million people worldwide like in 1918
3. Swine Flu is just media hype
4. The current flu vaccine offers protection against Swine Flu
5. The antivirals have terrible side effects and will kill more people than the Swine Flu
These are an interesting mix of ideas, and MacDoctor deals sensibly with each one. By the way, MacDoctor is Dr. Jim McVeagh, who is currently working in the New Zealand public hospital system and in Accident and Medical practise. He thinks politics and health make strange, and often uncomfortable, bedfellows and that the law of unintended consequences is particularly bitter in medicine.
One other thing: an article from AAP in the paper today reports that Worldwide, seasonal flu kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people in an average year. That's far more scary than the current panic about swine flu....

All the King's Men - so many stars they can barely all fit on the screen

How can a movie with an all-star cast fail? All the King's Men is a prime example of just how easy it is.
Part of the problem seems to be that the script can't decide who the story is about: is it Willie Stark, played by Sean Penn, or the equally significantly-named Jack Burden, played by Jude Law.
The Sean Penn scenes, the ones in which he's the focus, have an energy and aggressiveness, mostly due to the full-in-your-face Penn performance. When he's off-stage, the cast, including Law, all seem to be playing a movie that's going on underwater. Everything is taken at a slow, meaningful pace, full of glances and elusive dialogue. This isn't the cast's fault: everyone of these people has played intense roles before, and held our interest fully. But the Jack Burden side of the story, with all its psychological stuff (made even more heavy-handed by a voice over from Law, full of portentous hints and warnings) isn't that interesting, and the cast do their best with what are basically underwritten roles.
Penn himself comes most alive in his speechifying, but he's adopted an accent so thick that often the speeches loose comprehensibility. The rest of the cast are easy to understand: we just don't know why they're saying what they're saying!
The film takes a curious turn about fifteen to twenty minutes in. Stark is portrayed initially as a quiet do-gooder, a man of integrity who's unlike all the corrupt politicians and businessmen around him. Burden is seemingly amoral. And then, after a scene in which Stark downs a full glass of whisky (he's always drunk soft drink up till then) and collapses on the floor, the roles all seem to reverse. Stark is shown as increasingly corrupt; Burden is a man with a conscience; Patricia Clarkson, who is woefully underused in her role, turns from being a woman on the make in the political scene to a kind of mother-figure-cum-mistress who's being used herself, and James Gandolfini ceases to be the slimy, sly political force intent on getting Stark elected, and becomes a blithering idiot without another decent scene in the film.
And besides these actors we also have Kate Winslet and Anthony Hopkins, two more Brits adopting various versions of Louisiana accents (they are playing upper-class Americans, of course), and Mark Ruffalo as Winslet's brother. He gets to play the most underwritten character of all. Seemingly he's a medical person of some sort, but he spends his time playing the piano - we think. And then he gets pulled into the arena to front a new hospital that Stark is building. A less-likely front man is hard to imagine, as Ruffalo is allowed no charisma, nothing to show that he might have any substance. And then finally he comes quietly out of the shadows and shoots Stark. Hmmm. And gets shot himself.
The build-up to this climax is almost entirely lacking in tension. We're really quite happy to see Stark gunned down, because he's such a snot; but because Ruffalo has been such an unassuming character we're puzzled why he also gets shot, as he seems to be performing a public service.
Winslet drifts in and out of the movie, and the scene that should be most significant, when seemingly Burden rejects making love to her, is confused (and made even more so by the voice-over), and so we have little idea what she's supposed be doing in the film. Hopkins is strong enough, but again he's more tied up with the Burden story than the Stark one, and that again confuses the role he plays.
The whole thing needs reshuffling to bring one side or the other into focus. Pity to waste such a cast on such twaddle.

The people you meet at barbecues

I went to a barbecue the other night - men from our church were getting together for the last night of a series of evenings they'd had in which the Book of James was discussed. I haven't been to this group, as it happens, but I thought I'd put in an appearance for the last night, as I've had an interest in men's groups for many years - and in fact, was involved in two or three earlier versions of men's groups in our church back in the 90s and early noughties.
Someone remarked that I only appeared when there was food - I then remembered that I'd also been to the original breakfast meeting of this latest group. Hmm, that could be the case!
Anyway, I mostly knew all the guys there, and pricked my ears up at one point when I heard one of them say he has a blog. We then discussed what we both wrote about - quite different subject matter for the most part.
Anyway, let me recommend True Paradigm to you. It covers more than one field: I note on the page that's current there are posts on NZ Politics, Calvinist views of predestination, atheists, physics, and various other topics that require you to use your brain more than you'll need to on this site (!)

The Dunedin Blogs - and Lars

I've just added another Dunedin blog to the list of links down to the left: Al's Dunedin Blog.

Al(istair) uses his blog for at least three different purposes: to be skeptical about politicians and city councillors (with the Stadium issue at full bore in the city he has plenty of material); to promote other Dunedin blogs, which get visibility each time they produce another post (at least I think that's the approach), and thirdly, to promote the Affairs of the Society for Creative Anachronism in Dunedin: the Canton of Castelburn and the College of St Kessog. Yes, well you have to check out that section of the blog to get the full gist of what he's on about there! As far as I can make out with a quick look at the photos, this society likes to dress up in mediaeval gear and play out their fantasies in Chingford Park. Have a look - it might be just up your alley!

Al's a bit more organised in this respect: on my blog everything is bundled together in one large room without differentation. Thus music and the arts get lumped together with comments on atheists and Christianity, and acting in a play bumps shoulders with reviews of movies.

Which reminds me, I finally caught up with Lars and the Real Girl last night. I'd heard it was one out of the box, and it surely is. It takes a few minutes to align the audience with the mood and tone of the movie, but once it's got its grip on you, you're hooked. At least, I was.

Lars lives in the somewhat remodeled garage of the family home; his brother and expectant sister-in-law live in the main house. Lars is there by choice: he has a disinclination to need the close company of other people. In fact, we learn later on that he can't even bear to be touched. His mother died giving birth to him, and though his father never rejected him, he obviously left a sense of guilt/gloom on his son. The father is now dead too, so the only family Lars has is in the house across the yard from him.

However, even Lars knows that all isn't well with his soul, and in an oddball attempt to reconnect with life and the world, he buys a sex doll. Not for the reasons most guys might get one, not at all. Lars wants Bianca to be his girlfriend, and his relationship with her is very chaste. He wants other people to accept her as real, something they have some difficulty in doing - at least at first.

The film then becomes the story of Lars recovery, and of the townspeople's part in that recovery - along with Bianca's. It's quite off the wall, but once you accept where it's going, and that Lars isn't as delusional as his brother thinks he is, it's a delight. Furthermore there's very little hint of the salacious in it, and the filmmakers purposely avoid making Bianca a commodity or an object. (As the short accompanying film shows, they enjoyed 'believing' in her as a real person, and had a lot of fun with the fine line between belief and reality.)

The cast aren't well-known to me at all, especially Ryan Gosling, whom I don't remember seeing before. Emily Mortimer and Paul Schneider are familiar, but I couldn't tell you what I've seen them in. Patricia Clarkson is a very familiar face, but again I had to check out what she'd been in to see why I recognised her. Everyone of them is great, perfectly cast. You get the sense that everyone is fully involved in the movie and in its success.

End of The West Wing, for us.

My wife and I watched the last episode of The West Wing tonight – I mean the last episode of the last series. It was like leaving a bunch of old friends. Nothing particularly dramatic happened; in fact, there were more goodbyes and clearings-out than I’ve seen in a program in a long time.

But at least the country was left in good hands (!) with Jimmy Smits taking over from Martin Sheen. They must have been hard shoes to fill.

I don’t remember watching a series before where the names of the characters were as familiar to me as the names of people at work. That might be classed as being a bit sad, but The West Wing, even in its final less glorious three seasons without Aaron Sorkin. While Sorkin’s writing style – a combination of wit and intellectual rigour - was one of the things that made the show in the first instance, the series managed to keep its end up pretty well, thanks to a superb cast, interesting plotlines and top production values.

The last two or three episodes seemed to be a round-up of cast members who’d long since vanished from the program. For example there was the briefest of appearances from Ainsley Hayes, the slightly nutty Republican who got employed by a Democratic government, Timothy Busfield, as C J Craig’s old flame, the three Bartlett daughters, Mallory O’Brian, (Leo McGarry’s daughter), Rob Lowe looking as though he’d never really been part of the main cast at all; Mary-Louise Parker who seemed to appear out of nowhere and take over a place in the cast again, and of course, the Secret Service agent who’d played a big role in earlier seasons.

It was like gathering all the gold back under one roof.

Michael Gurr

Michael Gurr is an Australian playwright

‘Believing your value as a human being is measured by your independence and separation from others is the great lie of the market-driven world.’
From Michael Gurr’s memoir Days Like These, quoted in Time Magazine 6th Nov, 2006

‘On the early trains, slightly damp hair and recently applied make-up give you access to bodies so lately asleep or naked that it can induce a sensation like the swoon of a long kiss.’
Ibid.

In regard to writing his memoir, he discovered his aim was:
‘To put a bit of steel back into the language of ideas that have come to be seen as soft, nebulous, weak. All the things that have been stripped out of the national conversation.’ This follows from an earlier comment about Australian politics: ‘I’ve never been angrier. Our current national government has presided over a time of almost unbelievable moral corruption.’

Education in Times of Trouble

How thankful I am that I live in a country that’s basically at peace and has been throughout my lifetime, a country where violence is mostly individual rather than general. I’m also thankful that I live in a time when, for the most part, life doesn’t consist of one political or civil disruption after another.

Certainly in the wider world there has been huge unrest and lack of peace during my lifetime. For some reason I’ve been privileged to be sheltered from this. Whether this has been good for my character or not, I can’t say, but my preference is for peace rather than war.

What made me think about this was in reading a brief history of the life of Comenius, the ‘Father of modern education,’ but more importantly, a wonderful Christian man whose life was spent in times of almost constant distress and turmoil. His first and second wife both died, along with two of their children, and, even then he married again. He wrote prolifically, much of his work was destroyed and had to be rewritten (no great joy in a time without typewriters or word processors), and he strove to maintain a sensible and not extreme form of Christianity.

I only came across his name when I was sorting out some old secondhand books, amongst which is a volume of sermons in German by Comenius. Unfortunately it’s printed in the old German font, but I think in English it’s something along the lines of Sermons for Passiontide, Easter and the Ascension. (The German title is: Passions-, Oster-, und himmelfahrts- Predigten).