Prestige literary adaptations have to turn into bonkbusters; kids adventure series just can't help taking the piss. I think the best solution would have been to run the two things together. Jane Eyre Warrior Princess dispossessed from Thornfield hall by evil King George, living wild on the moors with her band of, well, rather dour women, robbing from the industrial middle classes and giving to the inmates of evangelical boarding schools. That would really have been post-modern. Give me a minute and I can work in some hippos.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Reader, I Adapted Him
Prestige literary adaptations have to turn into bonkbusters; kids adventure series just can't help taking the piss. I think the best solution would have been to run the two things together. Jane Eyre Warrior Princess dispossessed from Thornfield hall by evil King George, living wild on the moors with her band of, well, rather dour women, robbing from the industrial middle classes and giving to the inmates of evangelical boarding schools. That would really have been post-modern. Give me a minute and I can work in some hippos.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Oh dear. I just thought that there was something rather cute about discovering Daily Mail readers unselfconsciously drooling about corporal punishment. It would have been a bit like coming down to breakfast and finding a man in open-topped footwear ordering a plate of Alpen and a copy of the Guardian -- particularly if he himself didn't see the joke. I'm sorry if anyone got the impression that I had mistaken what was going on for an actual argument.
I suppose one could bash out a decent thousand words around 'This house believes that inflicting pain in the short term is no less humane than removing liberty in the long term.' We might wonder out loud whether society could have developed in such a way that traffic wardens issued tickets requiring the owners of badly parked cars to report to the police station and be beaten-up and where everyone thought that 'fines' were a bizarre idea. We might note rhetorically that in the early 1980s we decided that blowing teenager's limbs off on the Falkland Islands was the kind of violence we could happily put up with; but whacking their backsides on the Isle of Man wasn't. Before long someone would be saying 'Of course, there is no crime whatsoever in Malaysia' and 'I'd sooner have the slipper than detention any day' and I'd be forced to give them a clip-round-the-ear.
The flogging of criminals officially ended in England and Wales in 1948; in practice, it mostly went away after the Cadogan committee recommended it's abolition ten years earlier. Perhaps surprisingly, it had been abolished in the armed forces in the 19th century; even more surprisingly it hung around as a possible punishment for misbehaving prison inmates into the 1960s. But even in the 30s, it seems to have been primarily juveniles who were subjected to it; perhaps because the courts were inclined to regard them as naughty schoolboys rather than criminals. There was an attempt to reintroduce flogging in 1961, mainly remarkable because it was the only occasion when Mrs. Thatcher, who supported the idea, voted against the Conservative Party, who opposed it. Please note that I just resisted the temptation to use the phrase 'Conservative Party Whip.'
You really have to go back to the nineteenth century, if not the eighteenth, to find the lost Eden in which whipping was the normal punishment for criminals; or else look at liberal dystopias like Apartheid South Africa or modern day Singapore. The Mail readers who miss the good-old flogging days would be just as likely to lament a medieval Olden Times when we used to put shoplifters in the stocks. Before it was discovered that all dark-skinned people were terrorists, it was common enough to be told that those Arab-johnnies have got the right idea about chopping off the hands of thieves. It is therefore more than usually clear that 'bring back the cat' is not a political proposition, but a portmanteau icon representing a deferential, crime-free never-never land located before the Second World War. Even our beloved prime minister, who explicitly distances himself from what he calls the 'hang 'em and flog 'em brigade' thinks that the period before 1939 was relatively crime-free, and that the present high-crime rates are the result of specific social changes that have occurred since the war.
It was understandable that the people who voted in Mrs. Thatcher in 1979 might have regarded the Cane, the Birch, the Noose and Winston Churchill as a symbol of a lost world where everything was simple and secure, if occassionally painful. Most of them spent their teenaged years in a world where these things were a reality. (They also remembered a time before many Indians and Afro-Carribeans had settled in the UK.) But it's harder to see why the mythology of a post-Blitz loss of innocence persists at a time when no-one without a bus-pass can possibly remember the War.
If, having said all that, anyone still thinks the question is worth asking, then I would say that deliberately hurting naughty people is a good idea if you believe the following:
1: The sole or main purpose of courts is to deliver Justice.
2: The purpose of Justice is to restore a state of equilibrium by making a criminal suffer to a degree comparable to his victim. This process directly benefits the victim: if the criminal doesn't suffer, the victim is harmed. While it may have various utilitarian side-effects, the punishment of criminals is therefore an end in itself. (It follows that concept of 'rehabilitation' is a denial of natural justice. If a thief learns a trade while he is in jail, and as a result gives up stealing and spends the rest of his life earning an honest living then he has benefited from his crime and been rewarded for his wrongdoing – particularly if the victim doesn't also get free woodwork lessons.)
3: Therefore, the only or main purpose of prisons is to punish criminals by keeping them in disagreeable conditions for long periods.
4: In practice, prisons are comfortable, not to say luxurious institutions. Therefore in nearly all cases, 'natural justice' does not occur: a murderer who spends 30 years in a prison can be said to have 'got off scott free'. On a personal note, I should mention that I went to Bognor Regis on three occasions and Clacton on Sea twice, and that prison is not in fact very much like a holiday camp at all.
If you accept these superstitions, then whipping must indeed seem very attractive. It's the only thing a court can sentence someone to which is purely punitive; and therefore, delivers the maximum quantity of natural justice. If you don't, then it was a silly and pointless form of brutality for brutality's sake, to be regarded roughly at the same level as putting the brick on trial because it fell on the King's toe. Even to ask the question 'Could flogging ever have a place in the modern criminal justice system' is to move the discussion onto non-rational territory.
And so it goes on. A bread-shop in Birmingham has started calling their spicy anthropomorphic cookies 'ginger people'. Readers will be very surprised to learn that Angry Customer Darren Ellis thinks that this is 'political correctness gone mad.' Angry Store Manager Who Refuses To Be Named doesn't like the fact that he 'has to tell children they can't have a gingerbread man, they can only have a ginger person.' When was the last time you went into a cake shop and asked for 'one of those iced buns with a cherry on the top' only to be told 'we don't sell iced buns with a cherry on the top; come back in again and ask for a Belgian.'i
It's certainly something gone mad.
But this story was forced off the cover of Tuesday's Express by an even more important one..
VEIL SHOULD BE BANNED SAY 98%.
BRITONS gave overwhelming backing last night to a call for a ban on full-face Muslim veils.
Ninety-eight percent of Daily Express readers agreed that a restriction would help to safeguard racial harmony and improve communication.
If this seems a bit familiar, that's because this is exactly the same story that they ran last Saturday: the same use of 'Briton' to mean 'Daily Express readers who could be bothered to shell out 50p on our premium rate phone-line'; the same insinuation that 'Muslims' and 'Britons' are two different sets of people; the same name-checking of Jack Straw.
The story continues on page 6 under the headline Why object to tackling extremism? (I can think of all sorts of answers to this question. 'Dunno. Who does object?' 'What does the wearing of funny clothes have to do with extremism?') But on the same page there is a separate, and much more disturbing story.
There is in Yorkshire a private Muslim school, imaginatively called The Institute of Islamic Education. It was recently visited by the schools inspectors, who gave it rather a bad write up. The Express lingers over this Offsted report for three columns, rehearsing such juicy details as:
Parts of the school building, including the dining room and boarders toilets, were dirty,
and
Teachers showed limited understand of pupils aptitudes and prior attainments
Surprisingly enough, the inspectors also thought that this religious school was placing too much emphasis on religion. Or, as the Express puts it:
Inspectors who visited the school, which stands just yards from the former home of 7/7 suicide bomber Sidique Khan concluded that the emphasis on Islamic teaching came at the expense of secular studies.
So why, despite this rather desperate attempt to link the story with terrorism is item illustrated with – see if you can guess – a picture of a woman wearing a niqab? Well, that's the clever bit. You will be aware that Mrs Alshah Azmi recently got herself into an altercation with her employers. She teachers English-as-a-second-language at a state school; her employers says that she can't do this wearing a veil because it means that the non-English-speaking kids can't see her lips; she says that she can teach perfectly well; she's taken them to a tribunal to settle the issue. If not for Jack Straw it's hard to believe that this trivial story would have been front page news for a week.
Surprisingly enough, this Muslim teacher has a father (Dr Mohammed Mulk) who is also a Muslim and a teacher. It has 'emerged', as these things do, that he a headteacher at the Yorkshire school with the dirty loos.
So, the non-story about the school report appears under the headline
Veiled protest woman in link to 'radical' school
There is a clever ambiguity in this Azmi is certainly a woman, and she sometimes wears a veil. This undoubtedly makes her a 'veiled woman'. She is protesting about the fact that she has been asked to take it off. This arguably makes her a 'protest woman'. So she could be called a 'Veiled protest-woman': a woman in a veil who is protesting about something. However, the lack of punctuation will cause many readers to suppose that she is also a 'veiled-protest woman', a woman who is wearing a veil in order to make a protest. The headline is implying that she is covering her face in order to make a political point; which is clearly not true.
The 'radical' bit is also rather fun. Despite the quotation marks, no-one appears to have described Dr. Mulik's school as 'radical'. The closest we come is a claim that the school forbids pupils from reading British newspapers or TV stations. But the word 'radical' is code for 'bad Muslim'. Earlier in the week we discovered that we may have to spy on Islamic students in case the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Union 'radicalises' them -- that is, turns them into terrorists. The Express wants us to think that the dirty toilet school is a school for terrorists (a terrorist once lived in a street near by, which proves it) even though no-one has actually said so.
So. A picture of a veil; a headline about a radical school which is linked, quite spuriously, with the London bombings, above a separate headline about extremists. The message is clear. Radicals, Muslims, veils, extremists, terrorists. They go together like cake shops and the political correctness brigade.
In between Veiled protest woman and Tackling extremists there are a few hundred words about the incredibly unimportant case of Miss Nadia Eweida, the airline employee who was asked to remove her cross and suspended from work when she refused. The interesting thing about this story is that it has become enmeshed in the racist narrative about veils. Jack Straw's original incendiary remarks were not about religion. He was ostensibly saying that face-covering was an intrinsically bad idea despite the fact that it was a religious symbol. But everyone seems to think that this is somehow related to the claim that Christian air-stewardesses and news-readers are being prevented from wearing their crosses because they are religious symbols.
This is a pretty important distinction. So far as I know, no-one has ever suggested that 'this is part of my religion' can be used as a get-out-of-jail-free card which over-rides all other considerations. If performing unnecessary surgery on children is a bad idea then it's a bad idea regardless of the fact that your religion may require it. But those of us who are reflexive liberals would only play the 'bad idea' card over very serious matters. 'This is cruel and abusive' might be sufficient grounds to stop someone from practising their faith; 'This seems a bit strange to the rest of us' isn't. This is why, on the whole, we don't worry about Jews lopping bits off baby boys (seems a bit strange to those us us who were never snipped) but do worry a great deal about Somali traditions of 'circumcising' girls (intrinsically cruel). There will, of course, be borderline cases and grey areas. That's what the House of Lords is for
The French and the Dutch have made moves towards banning the public wearing of headscarfs because they are religious symbols even if the headwear itself is unexceptionable. (How this works in practice I don't know: could I argue in court that I was not wearing a bowler to represent my allegiance to the orangeman course but simply because I was an upper-class twit?) Jack Straw wants us to believe he has no problem with turbans, headscarfs or rosaries but would have objected to face-covering just as strongly if there had been a community of secular circus-clowns in his constituency. However, the fact the 'crucifix' story is being invoked alongside the 'veil' narrative shows that this is not how the Sun and the Express see it. 'They can wear their turbans and headscarfs,' they argue – 'So why can't we wear our crosses?' When they talk about 'the veil', they are talking about what they see as a symbol of Muslim-ness; and it's that they want to prohibit by law.
Why can't the politicians see that every time they say 'We should have a sensible debate about veils' a large proportion of the electorate will hear 'Muslims are terrorists with dirty lavatories'? What we need right now is not a debate, sensible or otherwise. We need Tony Blair and Jack Straw to stand up and say, very loudly 'Muslims are Britons. Muslim Britons sometimes dress in a way that some other Britons aren't used to. Just like some Britons wear kilts and some Britons have their tongues pierced. And if you find kilts, pierced tongues and veils a bit strange, then that's your problem, and you should try to get over it.' Why is that so hard?
The question in today's phone-in poll is 'Is Labour wrecking our great British army?' I can't wait to find out there answer to that one. Pass me a gingerperson.
iYou don't think that the confectioner had perhaps made biscuits in two shapes and made up a price tag marked 'ginger people' because he couldn't be bothered to write 'gingerbread men and gingerbread women', do you?