Interlude

or

What goes around comes around

or

Ten Years Ago Today


Jedi Master Am I Therefore Normal Rules of Grammar I Do Not Follow


It started on the net, it spread to the funny-pages in the papers, and then suddenly the serious columnists got hold of it. There is a space on the census form for us to specify what religion we are, so wouldn't it be a wheeze if all the Star Wars geeks wrote "Jedi" in the space. If enough filled it in, then the government would have to treat "Jedi" as a legitimate religion.

I haven't actually seen my census form yet. I understand from the Daily Telegraph that there is an entry for "race"; apparently, you are allowed to be Scottish or Irish, but not English or Welsh. (The English and Welsh have to be "White British", unless their grandparents came from abroad, in which case they are allowed to be Black British or Asian British.) Given this level of sensitive objectivity, I imagine that the "religion" section will say something like


Tick one:
1: Church of England
2: Loony fundamentalist
3: Papist
4: Godless heathen
If "1", please state whether or not you believe in God.

But it seems to me that the Jedi faction's sad devotion to this ancient form is entirely misplaced. What, pray tell, does "legally recognized religion" or "legitimate religion" or "official religion" mean? The last time I looked, we had religious freedom in this country. Since the 1839 Catholic Emancipation act, anyone can believe what they like. I understand that the French have banned Scientology, but we haven't. Small sects can claim charitable status. No religion, not even the C of E can advertise on the telly. Do the Jedi-ists want to avail themselves of Blair's stupid plan for state funded religious schools? But this would require Jedi teachers, and some parents who were prepared to put their children through the sort of abuse that Luke is subjected to by Yoda in Empire Strikes Back.

Granted, the Church of England has special status in that it is the Established Church; although this has only a very small effect in practice; if Charles became a Moslem, as he obviously would like to, then he would be disbarred from being King when the Queen becomes more powerful than we can possibly imagine because the Monarch is titular head of the church. Is the idea here that Jedi would take over Anglicanism's constitutional role? This would, at any rate, make State Openings of Parliament more interesting. "Policy of fiscal prudence my government will continue. Standards in schools my government will try to raise. Parliamentary time on fatuous legislation about fox hunting my government intends to waste."

In short, I think that the Jedi Census plan is based on a misunderstanding of the English constitution; not surprising, since, as I understand it, the original internet posting was a direct crib from one written in New Zealand where the rules are, I imagine, different. Even if the required ten thousand people did claim Jedi knighthood, I think it unlikely that the Jedi would re-establish themselves as a viable religious order. Tony Blair and Mrs Thatcher would wipe them out. Always two there are, no more, no less, a master and an apprentice. Now, if anyone wants to start a campaign to allow me to give my race as "Elvish", I may be willing to join in.

(First published 8th March 2001.)

MAWWIDGE

Marriage has a legal significance according to the British constitution. It has a spiritual significance according to the teaching of some religions. And many ordinary people think that it has a social significance.

The legal, religious, and social meanings overlap in all kinds of ways, like chocolate eggs and the resurrection of Jesus. The Church of England believes that Vicars have the power to cast magic spells whereby perfectly ordinary bonking becomes a mystic allegory of the interrelationship of the spiritual and the physical worlds -- or, as they put it, a sacrament. The government says that if two people make a legally binding contract to stay together for life (and cede to the state the right to divvie up their possessions if they break that contract) it will give them a number of privileges with respect to taxation, access to children, pensions and so on. Ordinary People see Marriage as a great big party in which two people affirm their love in front of their friends and their family and probably gain some social status and respectability into the bargain. But that social status partly comes from being married according to the law of the land, and illegal marriages are probably not sacramental.

I guess for most people, the social aspect is the most important: when buying a cake, planning a meal and choosing a dress, they are not primarily thinking of the love that is betwixt Christ and his Church, nor of their pensions.

In a traditional Church of England wedding the Vicar reads from the book of Common Prayer, and then he and the happy couple disappear back stage to fill out the legal paperwork, while the organist plays a long, rambling voluntary and everyone shuffles awkwardly. This makes it quite clear to everyone that the Vicar is doing two things: casting an Anglican spell, but also changing the couple's status under English law. But the law has the upper hand in the arrangement. The Vicar can't confer the religious status of "marriage" on anyone who the law says can't marry. If the Leaping Order of St Beryl says that marriage between cousins is forbidden, Leaping Priests aren't obliged to marry cousins in his church; but if the Leaping Order says that the age of consent is 15, rather than 16, then he can't conduct child-marriages -- or if he does, they don't have any legal status. (I've heard of devout Dungeons and Dragons players who decide to get all their friends together, dress up as warriors and wizards, and have the 10^th Level Cleric perform a ceremony according to the Melnibonean rite of Arioch. And that's very nice and very cute and very embarrassing for the in-laws, but it doesn't make them married in the eyes of the law, or in the eyes of any God apart, presumably, from Arioch.)

Since eighteen thirty something, it has been possible to have the "state" bit of the wedding without the "God" bit: to sign the legal documents in front of a civil servant, with minimal ceremony, and become married under the law. But those registry office wedding could be exceedingly clinical -- sometimes they really did take place in filing cabinet lined rooms in front of a council official and two witnesses -- so people who were not at all religious often chose to get married in churches -- or didn't bother to get married at all. (That is: they pretended to believe that their wedding had a spiritual significance, because a purely legal ceremony wouldn't perform the desired social function.) This wasn't an ideal arrangement, either from the point of view of the church or the state. So in two thousand and something, NuLab decided to let pubs, ships, hotels and parks accredit themselves as registry offices: the legal officials would come to you, carry out the legal formalities in a pretty room, along with whatever readings or songs you fancied. (At a stroke, this made non-religious weddings more attractive than religious ones, because you got to have the service and the party on the same premises.) There's currently a scheme to let people get hitched on the beach, although I suspect that wouldn't seem as romantic in Clacton as it would in Hawaii. Certainly not as warm. And in 2004, NuLab introduced civil partnerships which allowed same-sex relationships to have the same legal status as opposite sex ones, even though they were not actually called "marriages".

There are three wrinkles, however:

1: If you want a non-religious ceremony, then you have to have non-religious songs and non-religious readings. If you want God, head for the church of your choice. The state doesn't want it to be said that it's establishing a new religion in competition with the church of England.

2: There is no mechanism for a Vicar or Priest to officiate at a civil partnership even if the priest himself wishes to do so. That was implicit, I think, in the notion of "civil partnership". The state was saying "A relationship between two men and two women can have the legal status of a relationship between a man and a woman or a woman and man; and your family and friends may very well regard it as having the same social significance but its spiritual significance is none of the states business, thank you very much."

3: The Church of England is an established Church. The Queen is the Supreme Governor of the Church; the Prime Minister has final say on who's Archbishop; the Archbishop crowns the Queen and Richard Dawkins can't go on Thought for the Day, so there. Some Anglicans still take this to mean that if you are English you are automatically a member of the Church of England. It follows from this that everyone (regardless of church affiliation) has (in theory) the right to be married in their parish church; for their child to be christened there; and to be buried in the churchyard when they die.

This causes problems if, as sometimes still happens, the Vicar believes in God. As a Christian, he may not want to baptise a child whose parents are not serious about the ceremony: as a member of the Church of England he is legally obliged to do so. From time to time, someone suggests that the Prayer Book should contain a form of service in which a baby is given a name and prayers are said, but in which no-one sprinkles water on anybody. This is always interpreted as an attempted coup d'église by liberals and agnostics who want to stop the Church of England from going all religious on them. In fact, it's usually suggested by very hard line evangelicals who think that Baptism is so important that it shouldn't be treated as a mere social rite. (The next step would be to start immersing adults in paddling pools.)

Now, the so-called Liberal Democrats have recently proposed:

1: That the rule about religious readings at registry offices should be relaxed. Like all rules, it could be imposed rather officiously. A lot of people think that playing "I'm Loving Angels Instead" by Robin Williams (I looked it up) as the happy couple walked down the aisle would not automatically give rise to the creation of a theocracy.

2: That religious groups should be allowed to conduct civil partnership ceremonies if they want to.

3: Nothing else.

As a matter of fact, I do see a possible problem with this. Because of the established nature of the Church of England it is possible that if Civil Partnership service were permitted, church of England Vicars might find that they were obliged to carry them out, even if they themselves didn't agree with them.

Some people might say "So he damn well should: the law should make no concession to homophobia, or any other kind of phobia". But it seems to me that this is a different kind of question from the one about whether homophobic hoteliers ought to be allowed to insist that gay couples sleep in separate beds. It seems to me that regardless of how, or indeed if, you interpret Christian theology, the question about the spiritual significance of categories of bonking is one that religious groups have got to be able to decide for themselves. The state has no power to say that as of next Tuesday, sex between two men is an allegory of the mystic union which is betwixt Christ and his church, any more than it has power to say that as of next Tuesday, the powers of Darkness won't mind if you walk round stonehenge clockwise as well as widdershins, or that a ball hit to the boundary without bouncing will score 7 runs.

The Church of England itself will eventually have to form their own opinion of this question (the one about gay sex, I mean, not the one about cricket) and if all the bishops, appointed via the apostolic succession, learned in the Bible and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit decide that Male-Male and Female-Female relationships can be sacramental after all (or, much more likely, that regardless of what Mr Cranmer may have put in the Book of Common Prayer, they don't really believe all that sacramental gubbins and never have done) then the individual priest would have to accept that decision, regardless of what he or she happens to think. That's what you get for being the established church. You get more status, but less freedom of conscience. If you don't like it, bugger off to Rome and see how much freedom of conscience Ratzinger gives you.

If Quakers, Methodists and Unitarians want to have Civil Partnership ceremonies, or indeed cricket matches, in their churches, then none of this arises.

My own point of view, and please don't hit me, is that if two people love each other, then its a no-brainer that they should be allowed to affirm that love according to the religious traditions of their culture. On the other hand, I have some sympathy for the position which says "The state cares about sexual relationships only because they are likely to produce children. Two guys or two girls are quite welcome to live together, and the state doesn't care whether they call themselves 'Married', 'Flatmates', 'Confirmed Bachelors' or 'Special Friends'. We are not even neutral on the issue: it just doesn't come into the state's sphere of interest." If it had been down to me, we might have had gay church weddings, but no civil partnerships. But it wasn't.

However, what me and Steve H are interested in is not what has really happened in the real world, i.e. nothing whatsoever. What we are interested in is how this impacts on the Melosphere, where civilisation is always about to come to an end, and everything is either forbidden or compulsory.

In the Melosphere, "It is proposed that some churches may be permitted to marry gays" translates as "All church are now obliged to marry gays." Civilisation is under attack. "The attempt to stamp out Christianity in Britain is gathering pace". (She really said that. Really, really, really. I didn't make it up.)

ELF

Elves have, so far as we can tell, the same sexual organs as everybody else. Their clothes certainly cover up the same areas of the bodies. (This is quite odd, when you come to think about it, because sexual modesty implies a loss of innocence, and elves are free from original sin. But their souls and their bodies -- their fëa and their hröa -- are wired differently from those of mortal men, doomed to die.) According to custom, female elves are more likely to be healers, and male elves are more likely to be warriors, but there is no role that a female elf is prohibited from performing just because she's female. Nevertheless, there is an essential difference between the genders: if a male elf dies he always reincarnates in male form, and if a  female elf dies, she always reincarnates in female form. (This, incidentally, is true of the gods  Valar as well: although they are incorporeal and wear bodies when they have dealings with humans, some always wear male bodies and some always wear female bodies.)

The elves reproduce in the same way as all other mortals,  although it is hard to imagine a hobbit doing it, isn't it? Elf marriages are like English "common law" marriages: the act of sexual intercourse is sufficient to make two elves married. In practice, the elves do perform solemn ceremonies of marriage and betrothal but it isn't the ceremonies which make the marriage. (By tradition, the brides mother gives the bridegroom a necklace to signify betrothal, a point which was presumably not lost on Aragorn.) 

Elves marry for life. Since dead elves are reincarnated, it is pretty bad form for a widow or widower to remarry. Finwe did marry Indis after Miriel died, but that was a source of ill-feeling between Feanor and his half-brothers Fingolfin and Finarfin. 

After they have had a few children, an elvish couple lose interest in sex, and dedicate themselves instead to other elvish pursuits: sitting in idyllic woods idyllic composing harp music about idyllically sitting in woods idyllically composing harp music; idyllically baking lembas; idyllically fighting genocidal wars about the ownership of magic gems. After their children have grown up, which takes millennia, they may actually live apart. There is really no such thing as elvish lust: affection, sexual desire and the bearing children go together, almost, one might say, like a horse and carriage. You really can't have one without the other.

Daily Mail readers believe that this is also how human sexuality works. But it isn't.

BUTTON

There was once a young journalist. Each morning, as he set out for work, he worried: "What will I do if I get to the office and find out that there is no news to report." He confided his concern to a more experienced reporter. "No news?" replied the old hack "Wow, what a story that would be! I can just imagine the headlines FIRST DAY IN HISTORY - ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS"

Political nerds on both sides sometimes talk as if they would like all newspapers to be Soviet style press releases for the Ministry of Propaganda. Papers, they say, should report the facts about what a brilliant job the Prime Minister is doing, and nothing else. That's what ordinary people really want to read about. Tony Blair, the disgraced former Prime Minister, affected to believe that ordinary people were just not that interested in the intrigues and power struggles within his government, and certainly not his disagreements with Gordon Brown, of which there weren't any anyway. What they really wanted to read about was what percentage of what New Labour was rolling out year on year compared with the last seasonally adjusted Conservative Government.

But this is foolishness. Newspapers are about news; and news means stories, narratives, things which are worth repeating. Newspapers are incredibly selective about what they report: but then, so are you. You don't tell your friends if you went into Sainsbury's and saw a lady with a small child, but you do tell them if you went into Sainsbury's and saw a lady with a small rhinoceros.

Stupid people often say "I wish the papers would report more good news". But good news is not "a story". How could it be? NO-ONE IN BRISTOL HAS BUBONIC PLAGUE might be very good news, but it isn't a very good news story.  BLACK DEATH STRIKES MONTPELIER --wow! what a story that would be.

Dog bites man is not a story. Man bites dog is a story. I made that example up all by myself.

It may possibly be true that in relatively recent times, "politics" (stories about the rich and powerful), "society" (stories about the rich and famous) and "sport" (stories about the rich and stupid) have come more and more under the umbrella of "celebrity news". It may be true that current affairs and crime are increasingly reported in the language and style of a show-business gossip column. It may even be true that this is all the fault of Channel 4 and Big Brother.

It would be very surprising if murders and other sensational crimes were not reported in newspapers. You'd expect headlines that said: WOMAN DISAPPEARS, BODY FOUND, BODY IDENTIFIED, MAN ARRESTED, MAN CHARGED, MAN TRIED and MAN CONVICTED or ACQUITTED. But that's it. Everything else is sadomasochistic voyeurism. But increasingly, "murder" is treated as a sub-set of "celebrity news". Being murdered, like appearing on X-Factor, is a path to celebrity status. Along with all the pseudo-people that we have pseudo-relationships with, we need some pseudo-corpses to pseudo-blub over. When someone dead acquires a nick-name -- Little Jamie, Maddy, Lovely-Jo -- it's a safe bet that they've stopped being people and become a brand-names. They kept the Maddy brand going for a year. Tony Blair's success owed much to cynically positioning his product alongside the Little Jamie brand. The Diana-brand has come to its natural end, but the Kate-brand is even now being prepared for sacrifice.

Lovely-jo has stopped appearing in the newspapers because there is, er, no more news about her. And that's what you'd expect: things have returned to their normal state, in which a person who has passed away is remembered by, and mourned by, their family and friends -- the people who actually knew them -- and no-one else. Of course the rest of us are going to forget all about her. Why wouldn't we?

Daily Mail Woman doesn't understand that. If Lovely-jo's pictures is not appearing in newspapers, then it means Lovely-jo has been forgotten; if she has been forgotten, it means that she didn't matter, and Daily Mail Woman thinks Lovely-Jo matters an awful lot because she was pretty and liked posh pizza. Lovely-jo used to appear in the Daily Mail, like the important people. Now she is only on a police website. What can we do to promote the Lovely-jo brand?

Daily Mail Woman tries to retrace Lovely-jo's last movements. The easy way of getting from the flat where she may have died to the place where her body was found is by crossing Clifton Suspension Bridge. It is thought that the actual murderer must have taken a much longer route to avoid the security cameras on the bridge .

"Perhaps" says Daily Mail Woman, "He also wanted to avoid the 50p toll."

She has a very odd relationship with money, does Daily Mail woman. She has money for veggie burgers and pizzas, but no loose change to cross a bridge. She attempts to get across the bridge without paying her toll. She tries to put a button in the bucket, and (this is a comic master-stroke) she tells us which expensive shop the button came from. Still, they will not let her cross. The fee is, in fact, 50p.

Again, one asks: what does she imagine should have happened?

She visits the crime scene, and is surprised to find that there is no ceremony there. But how long should police stay at the scene of a murder?

She is surprised that no-one slows down outside the flat where Lovely-jo lived. How long does she think that cars should carry on slowing down for? (And do they only have to slow down outside the houses of people who have been murdered, or do they also have to slow down at houses where Mum has died tragically young of lung cancer?)

She is scandalized that the toll bridge won't let her pay 30p for a 50p fair. What does she think should happen?

That payment to cross a toll bridge should be optional, like a "pay what you can" night at the theater?

That the sign should say "50p, or 30p for people with the buttons off posh frocks"?

That the toll booth man should say "You go right ahead, you are a Daily Mail journalist"?

Or that, because there has been a murder in the town, all normal commerce should be suspended?

SPECIAL "PRETTY WHITE GIRL MURDERED" OFFER: ALL TOLLS HALF PRICE

I think I know what is going on. Oh god, I think I know what is going on. When you are bereaved, you feel that the world has ended. This can easily turn into a feeling that the world ought to have ended: into anger against people who are carrying on as normal. How dare they just buy vegetables in the market as if nothing has happened! Most people recognize that this is just a feeling. King Lear didn't really think that the death of Cordelia was likely to make all the horses and dogs and rats drop dead in sympathy. W.H Auden didn't really think it at all likely that all the clocks and telephones would be switched off when his boyfriend died. It's a way of expressing rage: what English teachers used to call the pathetic fallacy. But the Liz Jones character is so controlled by her feelings that she effects to believe that normal life really will be suspended when a pretty white girl is killed, and that if it hasn't been, someone should damn well do something about it. It's the ultimate triumph (the ultimate caricature) of the "feelings over facts" believe system.

And finally, the master stroke. The most literally mad thing that has ever been said by anyone ever not excluding Mr Dave Sim:

"Isn't it interesting that you can snatch a young woman's life away from her in the most violent, painful, frightening way possible, take away her future children, her future Christmases, take away everything she loves, and yet there are elaborate systems in place to ensure you do not cross a bridge for only 30 pence?"

No, it isn't interesting. It isn't even a little a bit interesting. And there aren't any elaborate systems in place. There's a little gate. You pay your fare, the little gate opens, you drive through, the little gate closes. Do you imagine that little gate technology could be put to use stopping people being murdered? Or that every time someone wants to install a little gate or a little turnstile, they should be told, I'm sorry, you can't have a little gate, you can't have a little turnstile, people must be allowed to use your bridge, your road, your car park, your zoo for free because there are still sometimes murders and we don't always know how to stop them.

You want to stop rare birds becoming extinct, but Whatabout farm chickens?

You think my house-cats may get out and eat rare birds, but Whatabout the feral cats who need to be neutered?

You want me to pay 50p to cross the bridge, but Whatabout the lady who was murdered not five miles away?

In the 1950s, it fell to a particular sub-committee of Blackpool (or, it may be, Clacton or Brighton) Town Council to censor the seaside postcards: to decide whether a picture of a fat man, anxiously searching for a lost child and exclaiming "I can't find my little Willie" went beyond the realms of what could be sold in a decent holiday resort. The committee came up with the wheeze of showing all the cards to the mayor's wife. If the Lady Mayoress said that the post-card to be filthy, dirty and disgusting, it was adjudged to be a harmless bit of risque japery. But if she ever said "I don't see anything funny in that" then the card was ruled to be genuinely obscene, and banned.

Dirty jokes, sick jokes, bad taste jokes, "politically incorrect" jokes. The old Daily Mirror cartoons made it quite clear that Andy Capp regularly beat up his wife. This didn't mean that the readers were supposed to approve of domestic abuse -- any more than they were supposed to approve of drunkenness or laziness or blowing your wage packet on the dogs. Andy Capp wasn't a role-model: he represented the worst possible stereotype of a lower class Geordie.

It's people who are rather coy, not people who are completely uninhibited, who laugh at dick jokes and loo jokes. George Orwell said that the very smuttiness of the seaside postcards showed how very moral the lower orders were: if they didn't take marriage very seriously indeed then the idea of a nervous little man with an enormous fearsome wife surreptitiously glancing at a curvaceous blond in a bathing costume wouldn't be funny. But there's a line -- surely there must be a line -- that decent people don't cross. C.S Lewis -- who liked rude jokes well enough himself -- thought that some people told sex jokes because they were funny, and some people told sex jokes simply because it give them an excuse to talk about sex. The same might apply to other offensive jokes. It is possible that you really have thought of some way to make people laugh that just happens to involve taking the mickey out of some minority. But you'd better be very, very sure that you aren't merely using "it's funny" as a fig leaf to cover up a lot of bigoted rubbish that you, or your audience, really believe in. (The aforementioned Jimmy Carr seems to be to fall on one side of the line; the ghastly Jim Davidson on the other.) It's certainly inconceivable that anyone would draw, or even reprint, an Andy Capp wife-beating gag today.



So: assume I am right, and Liz Jones is a fictitious character -- a self-parody -- an Internet troll. Does that mean we can sit back and say "Well, that's all right then?"

Either someone sat in an office in London and imagined, with a terrible smirk on his face what Daily Mail Woman would do if she were asked to write about a murder.

Or else a real journalist, maybe really called Liz Jones, really walked around Bristol, really walked into Tescos, really picked up a Pizza and then, trying to be funny, or trying to give us the frisson of being shocked really wrote things like "This pizza proves that this dead woman, who I never knew, wanted to have a lovely life.

(Wanted to have a lovely life? Who doesn't, fuckwit, who doesn't? You might as well write "Finland Is A Land Of Contrasts".)

This is not reporting: this is voyeurism. Trying to get a laugh or some morbid, masturbatory sentiment out of the death of an actual human being who you, your paper, have turned into a commodity.

Am I offended? No.

Was I offended when I first read it? No.

Stunned disbelief would describe me feelings better. Horror. Not so much at the piece, but that there exists someone who would sink so low as to write such a thing.

So yes. Yes, I have very probably just wasted you time repeating at length the judgement I made when I first read the column.

"You utter shit."

Speaking of which -- Melanie Phillips:







update: I appear to have been unfair to Jim Davidson. not a phrase i ever expected to write