Saturday, February 26, 2005

Freedom of Speech

In theory, I've already got it. I live in Europe, so it's my Human Right to get up on my hind legs and say or write what I like. Publish and be damned. Except it doesn't quite work like that; if I were to express my deep and heartfelt conviction that, say, Rupert Murdoch is the Anti-Christ (I don't actually believe this - the Anti-Christ would have more charisma) or that Coca-Cola tastes like fizzy horse-piss with added sugar, I'd be sued off the face of the planet. The fact that I'm no-one and my opinion is hardly likely to sway millions of consumers is unimportant; I wouldn't be suffered to live any more than a witch under Torquemada. The same goes for religion; for instance, I've got nothing against the Pope personally, he seems like a nice enough old chap (though we've never met, of course) and is probably quite sincere in what he does. However, his stance on contraception, especially condoms, is condemning hundreds of thousands of Africans to a slow death from Aids; if we're going to have such a thing as a Pope at all (and that's up to the Catholics), then I think we'd be better off with one who understood the 21st century and was willing to admit his predecessors may have got things a bit wrong. I don't understand how come the Catholic Church is so firmly anti-contraception anyway; surely Jesus didn't have any opinion on the matter, condoms didn't exist in Roman Palestine in the 1st century A.D., as far as I'm aware.

Things get even trickier if you want to talk about Islam. I'd like to state quickly (before someone fatwas me) that my ex-husband, the father of my daughter, is a Moslem. The only religious differences we ever had were over Ramadan. Not the theory or practice of, that's entirely up to the individual in my book. Our problems began because my ex is deaf and dumb, so I was the one who had to wake him up at 4.00 a.m. to eat and pray. I wouldn't even have minded that, except that I had be at work by 8.00 and deaf people inevitably make a lot of noise in the kitchen. Or mine did, at any rate; to this day, I don't know if he was doing it on purpose. The worst for me was when Ramadan fell over the Xmas period. I don't "do" Xmas in a religious sense, but if you've got a child you get sucked in anyway. So there we were, my family and I, quaffing fit to bust while Momo sat there like the Egyptian Death's Head, unable to drink so much as a glass of water. Not a situation calculated to promote marital harmony, and indeed that was the last Ramadan I experienced, as we split up later that year.

I wouldn't have minded so much if he'd been a Moslem the rest of the year, but apart from not eating pork you wouldn't have noticed the difference. He'd happily swill beer, smoke and chase skirt the other 11 months; I don't know Allah's opinion on people like him, but it seems to me that any God worth his salt would rather not have someone like that on board. But where would I be able to say or write that without someone or other getting offended? There's been a lot of debate about whether to include Islam in the Blasphemy laws, which of course are Christian in this Christian-by-default society. Personally I'd go for scrapping Blasphemy as a "crime" altogether; Incitement to Racial Hatred, yes, we need that now more than ever, but in a secular society I can't see the need for even the concept of blasphemy.

And censorship pops up in the most unexpected of places. I write online on several sites, one of which is the BBC "Get Writing" site. I don't think I'm a particularly foul-mouthed person; sure, I let slip the occasion "fuck this for a game of soldiers!", but who can really honestly say they've never let their temper get the better of their tongue? In fact, if I lose my rag with my daughter, I usually let off a volley of gutter-German; one day she'll study German at school and realise what I've been saying all these years, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. However, when I'm writing dialogue, it's often appropriate to use what my Grandma used to call "language". I submitted a short story to the BBC site which was mainly a dialogue between two police officers and a taped interview with a "loony"; there wasn't a gratuitous "fuck" in the whole story, just an attempt at realism. Criminal psychopaths probably don't say "Oh my gosh!". To my surprise, I got a Stern Reply telling me my work had been edited because the language used was "unsuitable". Someone had laboriously gone through it and asterisked everything even slightly contentious, regardless of context. It wasn't the story I'd written any more, precisely because I'm so sparing with expletives and when I do use them they're for an immediate and calculated effect.

So really our freedom of speech is limited by a lot of factors, because we have to tiptoe through life not uspetting anyone at all. The trouble with this is, as soon as you have an opinion about anything at all, you've upset someone or other. And if you aren't part of something, a Church or a political movement, you've got no natural allies; worse, if you do put forward an opinion, you risk getting jumbled up with one side or other of an argument, even if the rest of your beliefs are totally opposed to what you've been lumped in with. I've never in my life found any religion, philosphy or political grouping which I could whole-heartedly believe in, so I don't appreciate being called any kind of "ist" at all, and I don't have an "ism" to fall back on when my opinions are questioned. I don't have a Holy Book to quote from, I'm not one of the Chosen (it's my opinion that they choose themselves anyway), and even to myself I tend to define myself by what I don't believe in; there's a lot more of that in my life than genuine convictions, and I think that's a pretty average Western European philosophical position.

Here in the blogosphere, for now at least, there is freedom of speech. Until they work out some way to censor us, which probably will happen some day, we can all say whatever we like, and not bother ourselves if we offend some people. Here's an example; I personally believe all religions are bullshit. I'm of the opinion that they exist for lazy people who can't be bothered to have a personal philosophy, and of course for the enrichment of "spiritual leaders" everywhere. They promote war and hatred, however much their founders might have preached peace, and they give a leg-up to hypocrites the world over. I'd be very happy indeed if all the committed Christians, Moslems, Jews, Hindus and all other denominations just decided to call it quits. By all means carry on loving thy neighbour, embrace the positive, humanistic side of any faith, but stop trying to "Evangelise", worry about your own conscience, not mine. If people could bring themselves to act like civilised beings for the sake of it, and not because a God told them to, then I believe we'd be making a big social and evolutionary step forwards. It seems ludicrous in the 21st century to be fighting, actually killing human beings, for the sake of something someone may or may not have said a couple of thousand years ago. Let go of the tit!

So there you go. In that one paragraph, I've insulted about two-thirds of the world, because my own sincerely-held belief is that their sincerely-held beliefs are ludicrous. Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of anything which makes human beings behave better, but in my opinion religion doesn't accomplish that. Once you declare for one side, whether Christian, Moslem, Scientologist or Moonie, however sincere or well-intentioned you may be, every person of a different religious persuasion becomes the "enemy", the "infidel", the "heretic". Even wierder in my opinion are the divisions which exist within religions; Sunni and Shia, Catholic and Protestant, Orthodox and non-Orthodox - what's all that about then? I know the technical reasons why some religions have diverged over the centuries, but does it really matter any more? Apparently it does, enough to be still fighting and killing over it in a depressingly large number of countries. Last year in Northern Ireland the news was full of Catholic children having to walk though a Protestant area to get to school; children, children, running a gauntlet of abuse and even physical violence in the name of their parents' religion. And this is Europe, not some poor benighted third-world country we can discreetly ignore.

It seems to me that freedom of speech is, or should be, more important than "blasphemy", religious or political. When I was at University in the UK, the British National Party (a bunch of vile racist thugs) applied to speak at our Student Union. As I was on the Entertainment Committee, I had to vote on this. I have a lot of anathemas (I collect them) but racism and nationalism are probably top of my hate-list. However, just because I personally find these people repugnant, I don't feel this gives me the right to censor them. So I voted "Yes", then stood outside the Union Hall with a banner and a box of throwing-eggs to protest about it. Censorship implies that we, the people, are too stupid or easily led to make our own decisions. Blasphemy laws imply that the religion they're institued to protect can't stand a bit of criticism. Somebody, I can't remember who, said "I disagree with everything you say, but I'd fight to the death to defend your right to say it", and that's more or less my position. Yes, I think it still needs to be illegal to incite hatred on grounds of race or religion, because people seem to be too stupid to see for themselves that it's wrong, but I hope the day will come when these laws will become as obsolete as the Blasphemy laws are today.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Appealing Ideas #1 - an occasional series.

Every now and then I come across an idea which really pleases me. I don't feel the desire to have thought of it myself (well, maybe sometimes), or even to rush out and rip it off; I just like to roll it around in my brain like an intellectual Mint Imperial, letting it zing! across my mental cavities. Sometimes I come across some really novel idea which means I have to read a book several times, then read another few books just to cross-check, then a couple of books with opposite ideas just in case. Ideas like that are rare (so anyone who's read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" might like to check again) and to be savoured; who says there's nothing new under the sun?

Excellent though the above-mentioned book is, my favoutrite idea recently comes from somewhere completely different, from some books by Robert Rankin in fact. In case you have the misfortune not to have read Rankin, the idea is this; inside the earth is a big clockwork motor which not only keeps us rolling around the sun in the approved planetary manner, but, when we approach Armageddon of one sort or another, gets set back by The Controller (Ooooh!) to a point just before that of no return, with the precipitating factor edited out. No-one remembers, the world just rolls on. So we are, all of us, always, living in the End Times. The point just before Armageddon.

Of course, the idea of a big clockwork motor inside the earth is clearly preposterous, as Rankin himself (through a character) points out. He doesn't go into details but they're fairly obvious surely. We'd long-ago have run out of oil, for instance, because The Controller would have been tapping it from underneath to keep the wheels spinning; imagine clockwork big enough to drive a planet; lots of lubricant, right? Also, someone sometime in human history would have discovered it (the Greeks, probably, they were pretty good at that kind of thing) and forever after guards would have to be posted over every manhole and storm-drain to stop disaffected loonies dropping spanners down them. Spelunking would never have evolved as a sport, thus robbing us of many rib-tickling jokes ("See Kevin over there? From Accounting? He's a spelunker, he is!") and the occasional opportunity to get rid of rich but dull husbands ("He loved spelunking, Chief Superintendent - it's how he would have wanted it. And who could have known that the spare batteries had been taken out and used for the remote control?"), incidentally saving a great deal of money on coffins.

No, it's a nice idea, it really is - try rolling it about a bit yourself, ramify, man! - but it's not true - sadly, perhaps. We might never have discovered warfare, for instance, because who could afford standing armies when there were holes in the earth to be vigilantly guarded day and night? Unemployment would never have existed; "If you can't find yourself a hole in the ground, go dig one!" Hole-watching (no doubt dignified in every language with some such title as Guardian of the Netherworld) would have been quickly assmilated into every human society, and would of course have become riddled with heirarchy, corruption and nepotism. There's an obvious and enormous social gulf between, say, Standing Guard at the Buckingham Palace Stop-Cock and sitting in a roadmender's tent in the rain by a rabbit-hole on Orkney. If they have rabbits in Orkney, I'm afraid I don't know that for sure. It's a metaphor, stop being so picky.

If the discovery had been made by, say, the Chaldeans (also very good at stuff like this, but a millennium or so earlier than the Greeks) it would have become an integral and ritualised part of human society, right from the start. Astronomers today proudly trace the history of their science back to the observations of the ancients; it isn't magic any more, but there's no denying the aura clings. "I'm an Astronomer" has so much more of a ring to it than "I'm a Dinner Lady", although few (parents, at least) would deny that the dinner-lady is probably more socially useful. Apologies to the Atronomical Fraternity, but getting pre-schoolers to eat cabbage is a lot more challenging than calculating redshift. But I digress. There would have to be a name for hole-watching, of course, something suitably Greek or Latin (give me a moment, I'm freewheeling here), and probably a High and Noble Order of. In the Middle Ages the good holes (Paris, the Vatican, Hull) would all have been snapped up and become hereditary, and of course a whole social order of Holewatchers-by-Proxy would have developed; nobody would really expect Lorenzo de Medici (a total Banker, if you're not familiar with the name) to sit next to the main drain in Florence all day, for example.

Burial customs would be completely different; they wouldn't involve burials, for starters. I wonder, if humans had never buried their remains, if there'd be a noticeable difference in soil composition here in Europe, say. Think of all the billions of us who've generously donated our physical selves (often long before we've actually finished with them) to the earth's fertile bosom; would it be noticeably less fertile if we collectively hadn't, do you think? If cremation had always been the norm, what would Europe be like now? Don't just rush off to the next blog with an exasperated expression, when you think about it it's quite boggling. An intelligent person (or a statistician) could probably work this out with a bit of effort; take the most accurate assessment currently available of how many people who've lived and died in Europe since we wandered north from Africa, assign the average bod a carbon content, nitrogen content, H2O content etc., then work out how much of all that is lost in heat or light energy when the bod is cremated. After all, we acquire all our constituent elements from the environment around us; what if, as a species, we'd just not put them back?

That's what I like about ideas like this. A good one will spark off a whole chain reaction of associated ideas, ricocheting off in directions the originator (Robert Rankin, in this case) probably never considered. Or at least didn't think were funny enough to put in a book if he did. A really decent idea can keep me happy for a week; I'm a great fan of daydreaming, for instance - as, I suspect, are many insomniacs. It stimulates me to read other books, either by the same author or (in the case of ideas political and philosophical) opponents of the author. I don't really mind if the idea's a joke like the one above, or a serious new take on consciousness like the one I found in Dog in the Night-Time; if it inspires creative thinking, or research, in fact any expansion of the mind at all, then it's worth it.

Another, more real train of thought which came from Robert Rankin's clockwork earth was the idea that we're all, permanently, living just on the brink of global destruction. This is slightly scarier, because we are. I'm not going to bang on about Global Warming or nuclear terrorism here (plenty of time for that), but it's a fact that, since the 50's, the "First World" as a society has been living out it's own particular End Time. What make this different from the End Times of, say, 999 A.D., is that we aren't (or at least I'm not, the Seventh Day Adventists may be) living in fear of a wrathful God putting an end to His creation. We're living in the very real fear of man-made destruction; we know it can happen, we've seen it on TV. I was born in 1966 so I don't remember the "height" of the Cold War, when people were encouraged to build nuclear fallout shelters and the 4-minute-warning sirens were regularly tested; I can only speculate as to what it must have been like growing up in such a fear-dominated society, only decades after the most destructive war the world had yet seen. Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have been a bucket of icewater over the collective psyche of the Western world, already staggering from the reality of conventional war; Dresden to the power of ten in seconds, could anyone really imagine that?

So, a good idea, can really lead you anywhere, if you let it. Personally, I'm a great "evangeliser" of ideas; if I read something that hits the right chord, and that's so far anything from Philip K. Dick to Baudelaire, I get on a mission and threaten, bribe or cajole my friends and relatives to read it as well. "But you don't understand, I've got no-one to talk to about it!" I would wail to my ex-partner as I spent hours online urging people to read whatever I was into at that particular moment. Ex-partner, who reads a couple of books a year (in fairness, he does have a life), really didn't understand; for me, ideas are for sharing and discussing, batting backwards and forwards over a bottle of wine, disseminating as widely as possible. Which is more or less what I'm doing here, I suppose. And why I love the Net so much; once an idea is out there, it persists, and with a bit of effort I can find it.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

The Unspeakable in pursuit of the Uneatable (cheers, Oscar)

Fox hunting is "all the rage" here in the UK at the moment. People who do it are raging about the recent "ban", people who don't are raging about the total lack of enforcement of said "ban". I'm using quotes for this word, because in the opinion of many (especially foxes, I imagine, but they can't vote), this recent piece of legislation does not actually stop fox-hunting per se. Not only is it a totally unenforceable fudge (for instance, you can't allow your hounds to rip the fox to pieces any more, but you can use 2 hounds to "flush" a fox from it's den - and then shoot it), but the police have been told to "go easy" on the hunting community. The difficulty here, I feel, is explaining to the 28 other hounds that they aren't allowed to join in. And, as the Master of one Hunt remarked on national TV yesterday, "accidents do happen".

Of course, I can see that; there you are, innocently riding cross-country with 20 0r 30 chums, accompanied by a pack of hounds bred and trained to hunt and kill foxes, and ooops! Perfectly natural, could happen to anyone. It isn't often that we're treated to a real display of "one law for the rich"; many people take objection to the position that fox hunting is a "rich man's sport", but it is an undeniable fact that horses are expensive to own and maintain, especially trained hunters, and that this "sport" is far beyond the reach of most ordinary people here in the UK. The "ban" came into effect last week, and the public at large were treated to the spectacle of hundreds of people, including the Great and the Good of this fair Kingdom, deliberately and openly flouting the law. "So arrest them all!", a naive person might say, looking puzzled and perhaps scratching their head. Sadly, this isn't going to happen; we'd end up arresting half the judiciary, most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, and all of the Royal Family still spritely enough to sit a horse. It isn't just a rich man's sport, it's the favourite passtime of most of our aristocrats, plutocrats and even some politicians.

The naive person mentioned above might point out that, morally speaking, fox hunting is no better than badger-baiting or dog-fighting, and both of those have been banned in the UK - they still happen, of course, but people really do get arrested for it nowadays. However, badger-baiting and dog-fighting have traditionally been sports for the poor. Nobody important was upset when they were banned, and nobody important gets arrested for it. I've always considered myself quite a cynical person, but I'm still amazed at the power of these Lords and Ladies in a so-called democracy. If I decided to go out and break the law, consciously and deliberately, then I'd do it in the knowledge that if I got caught, bad things would happen to me. That's part of living in a society; you might not like the laws, you might not always obey them, but you have to accept that they exist and that if you break them, you'll be punished. That's life, right?

Not here in the UK, or at least, not if you're rich or titled. Amazingly enough, anyone actually tried and convicted under the new hunting laws (if that ever happens) won't even get a criminal record. Yes, I find that hard to believe too; at first, I couldn't understand the rationale for it. However, it's no great mystery; no-one with a criminal record can become, for instance, a magistrate or a judge, and the people who engage in tearing small woodland mammals to pieces for fun are, in fact, our de facto ruling classes. A real conundrum for our so-called Labour (that used to mean Socialist, for those unused to British politics) Government; the "ban" has huge public support, it was part of the Manifesto which got them elected, but now they're in power, they can't afford to upset the "Establishment". Hence the craven, compromise-riddled piece of legislation that was batted about between the House of Lords and House of Commons, taking up (incredibly enough) some ten times more Parliamentary time than the Iraq War. Yes, that really is true. In spite of 2 million people marching through London to protest against "Tony's War", only 11 hours of Parliamentary debate was needed to ignore the hell out of us. The (pro-hunting) Countryside Alliance, however, was important enough to force the Governemnt to back down again and again, and is confident enough in it's own untouchability to blatantly declare that they'll carry on hunting regardless. And they are.

It's years since I've been an active saboteur, my days of sprinting through woodland with bottles of lemon juice to mask the fox's scent are long behind me. However, in spite of disability and motherhood, this incredible display of arrogance and Government cowardice have made me angry enough to dig my wellies out of the shed and contact the Hunt Saboteurs Association again. I'm not kidding myself that standing around with a banner having insults hurled at me is going to achieve much; I'm a veteran demonstrator, petition-signer and agitator, and it hasn't made a blind bit of difference so far. Nevertheless, I'll be there; I think I just want to see it with my own eyes.

And having seen this for myself, I intend to buy myself a black-and-white stripey sweater, a small black mask, and a large bag with "SWAG" written on it. If you can break the law just because you're properly dressed for it and it's "traditional", then I don't see why I shouldn't just politely knock on people's doors and announce my intention to burgle them. What could be more traditional than thieving? It certainly pre-dates fox hunting.

To Blog or not to Blog

I'm a blogging virgin - and that's a statement I never thought I'd make in this incarnation. I'm not new to writing or even publishing, but I fell off the world 12 years ago, and now I've made it back I've found that everything has changed. No more laboriously double-spaced manuscripts sent off with trepidation to publishing houses, no more compliment slips with "Please never contact us again" by return of post. Nowadays, I write a poem or an essay, post it online and voila! At least 3 people read it. Sometimes even 4. And now there's blogging; any fool can do it, and many of us do. Some people have something to say, some people just seem to like seeing their opinions in print, others seem to want to change the world. I'll be honest - I'd like to change the world, too. I'd like to take it back and get a new one. However, since nobody elected me God (as far as I'm aware), I'll just have to put up with commenting on it like the rest of us.

What I like most about the wonderful new world of the Net, which evolved whilst I was "away", is the total freedom to read and write whatever you feel like, for no other reason than that you can. Imagine a world where everyone blogged (imagine a world where everyone had clean water!), imagine if every single one of us could add their voice and opinion to every debate, and those voices were heard. Imagine if there were so many of us that the media and governments couldn't drown us out. Imagine the blogosphere (available to everyone, not just us rich Westerners) becoming the informal international parliament, a techno-crucible of ideas and opinion and (most of all) information. I wonder what would happen if, instead of just accepting whatever information we're spoon-fed by the media and politicians of every ilk, people decided en masse to find out for themselves the facts behind the spin and propoganda. What would happen if nobody could lie to us any more, unless we wanted them to? If there were so many of us that repression was simply impossible? Shall we try?