Masters of War

Tis' said that countless thousands should die through cruel war
But let us hope most fervently that soon it will be o're
Let them be warned old England, Is brave old England still
We've proved our might, we've claimed our right, and ever ever will
Should we have to draw the sword our way to victory we'll forge
With the battle cry of Britons, Old England and St George.

Mr. Blair wants there to be a war against Nasser Hussein.

I know that Mr. Blair is a truly great and good man, for he told me so himself. So I am sure that there must be some very good reason why he wants to have a war.

I'm just not quite sure what it is.

Mr. Blair has a special relationship with Mr. Bush. Mr. Bush agrees with Mr. Blair that we should have a War on Nasser Hussein.

Last year, on September the Eleventh, the Eleventh of September happened. This was a terrible tragedy, almost as bad as Holly and Jessica. So obviously, it would be bad manners to disagree with Mr. Bush about anything, at least for a while, in the same way you have to be extra-nice to Granny after Granpa's funeral. Anyone rude enough to not agree with Mr. Bush about Nasser Hussein must be anti-American, in the same way that anyone who doesn't think that Jewish people are always right about everything must be anti-Semitic against the Jews because Hitler was so horrid to them.

I'm not anti-American. I've found out that if you ask for "Americano", Starbucks will give you something very much like a cup of coffee. I even had a poster of Captain America on my wall when I was a kid.

There are three reasons why Mr. Blair wants us to have a war against Nasser Hussein.

1: Because he is a baddy (Mr. Hussein, I mean)

2: Because he might have an atom bomb.

3: Because he probably supports some of the people who almost certain support the people who probably bombed the Eleventh of September.

I think he is telling a big fat whopper. I don't think that these are the real reasons at all.

I understand that nowadays you don't have to say why you are having a war before you have it. You are allowed to have the war first, and decide what it was about afterwards. So when we went to war against Afghanistan, everyone thought that it was because the Bert from Sesame Street (the bad man who very nearly definitely bombed September the Eleventh) was probably hiding there and the Afghanistanis wouldn't give him to us so we had to go in and capture him. But after the war was all over, we decided that the real reason for having the war was because the people running Afghanistan were baddies. They were such baddies that when we liberated them all the Afghanistanis stopped being Muslims and shaved in the street, which proved that we were right to have the war. So I suppose we shall have to wait until after we have had the war against Nasser Hussein to find out what it's about.

I don't think that it will turn out that the real reason for having the war was that Nasser Hussein is a baddy. He's been a baddy for a long time, and we haven't had a war against him before, except once. In fact, he was a baddy even in the very olden days when the Ayatollah was the baddy and Nasser Hussein was the goody. And anyway there are lots and lots of baddies in the world, and we aren't having wars against all of them.

I don't think that it will turn out that the reason for having the war is that Nasser Hussein has an atom bomb, either. In the olden days, Russia were the baddies, and they had lots and lots of atom bombs; but they never used them, because the Americans, who were the goodies, also had lots and lots of atom bombs. So Russia was too scared to use them. It was like "there's no point in you killing lots of us, because we can kill just as many as you, so its better to play nicely," which in the end they did. But Nasser Hussein doesn't have nearly as many atom bombs as the Russians, and hardly any aeroplanes and missiles. So there isn't much chance of him bombing New York or London or even Slough. I reckon that if an aeroplane with a bomb on it flew out of Iraq, then Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair would shoot it down before it got to us.

Everyone agrees that Bert from Sesame Street, who very nearly definitely bombed September the Eleventh, is the biggest baddy in the world, as bad as Myra Hindley and Hitler and Jeffrey Archer put together. But I don't think it will turn out that we had the war just because Nasser Hussein probably supports Bert from Sesame Street. There are people in Pakistan and Bradford who think that bombing September the Eleventh was quite a good idea (though not most of them, because not all people with corner shops are Muslims, and not all Muslims support bombing people, anymore than just because you drink Guinness on St Patrick's day you agree with blowing up policemen with car bombs, and most Muslims are nice friendly people who run the good curry houses in Tooting Bec.) But even if there were lots of people who supported him, that wouldn't be a reason for going to war against Bradford. And anyway, I don't think Mr. Blair has any evidence that Nasser Hussein supports Bert from Sesame Street because if he did have he would have shown it to us by now.

So I don't think that any of the reasons that Mr. Blair has told us are the real reasons for the war. I think that he has a secret reason, which he keeps in secret room in 10 Downing Street in a file marked Secret.

I think that if we read the secret file, we would find out that Mr. Blair has picked up some crazy idea that his job as Prime Minister of England is to do things in the world which will be good for England, and America, and also Scotland. I think that he is silly enough to think that as Prime Minister, he ought to be looking out for our interests. I think that he has picked up some wild notion that we use quite a lot of petrol in this country, and that if we couldn't get any, or it was too expensive, everything would grind to a halt, and we would all be very poor and very miserable. I think that Mr. Blair is such a cynic that he wants to stop us all from being very poor and very miserable.

Most people, apart from hippies, think it is all right to have a war against someone who is hurting you. But wars in the old days were easier. When Hitler landed at Hastings, to invade England in 1966, we all got together in lots of little ships and sent him homeward to think again. When the Argies invaded the Falklands, we killed all the Argies and freed the Falkland Islanders, which was a good thing, apart from encouraging Jim Davidson.

It's like this. If in the old days, Mr. Hitler had put lots of U Boats in the English channel and blew up all the oil tankers bringing oil to England (and also Scotland), it would have been all right for us to send out Spitfires to blow up the U Boats and let the oil tankers through. Of course, some of the evil jerry scum who we drowned would probably have been nice Germans who liked Beethoven and sausages and didn't deserve to be killed. But everyone agrees that it was still all right for us to kill them (except hippies).

But nowadays, because of the Internet and Starbucks coffee, the world is more complicated and wars can happen by remote control. Nasser Hussein doesn't need to send out boats to stop us getting any oil. He can lob a Weapons Of Massive Destruction at Kuwait, or Israel; or even do something awful (I'm not sure what) to Saudi Arabia. (Saudi Arabians chop peoples heads off and don't allow beer or vicars or homosexuals, but that doesn't make them baddies it just means that we tell their ambassador that we have very real concerns about their record on human rights from time to time.) And this would still mean that we wouldn't get any oil, and that other bad things (I'm not sure what) would happen. So having a war against Nasser Hussein is really just like bombing Hitler's U-Boats, and if some people get killed as well, then that's just the same as killing German sailors. We're still making sure the oil gets through. Okay, Nasser Hussein hasn't actually done anything yet, we just think that he probably will. But that makes sense too. It's like as if you bombed the U-Boats before they got to the channel; or even better, bombed the dockyards before they built the U-Boats, or even better, bombed Berlin before Hitler even gets into power so the situation doesn't arise. We are sort of saying "We think that if he makes an Atom Bomb, which he hasn't, Nasser Hussein might do something horrid in Israel, or Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, or Slough in which case we'd have to have a war against him, so it makes sense to have a war against him now, before he even gets to do the things that would have forced us to have a war."

Which makes sense to me.

So, when the war is over, it will turn out that it was really about petrol. But if you say that to nice Mr. Blair and clever Mr. Bush, they say: "Oh no. It's not about oil. It's about an important moral principle. Nasser Hussein is a very bad man, and Mr. Blair thinks we should smack his bottom, and Mr. Bush thinks we should kick his ass, which I think means more or less the same."

But I think wars about moral principles are much worse and more scary than wars about your country's good. If we had to go to war every time Mr. Blair had a moral principle then we would never get a moment's peace. Bert from Sesame Street bombed The Eleventh of September because he had moral principle, because he thought that America is bad and decadent and that Moslemism is the best religion in the world. Lots of people think that, but that doesn't mean they can kill people over it. So Mr. Blair shouldn't kill people because Nasser Hussein is bad and decadent and New Labour is the best religion in the world.

Maybe, just maybe, it would be all right to kill Nasser Hussein and Bert from Sesame Street if we could catch them. In America you are allowed to kill very bad people, provided you give them lots of ice cream to eat first. In England, we stopped hanging people just before the first ever episode of Doctor Who went out. But in both England and America we all agree that they should have fair trials first (apart from the person who almost definitely didn't tell the police about the man who probably had something to do with killing Holly and Jessica, who should be lynched on her way to court, obviously.)

In conclusion: I think that the safeguarding of British strategic and economic interests in the Middle East is legitimate grounds for military intervention in Iraq. I think that it is incumbent on Mr. Blair to explain to Parliament what those strategic and economic interests are; and that if he did so honestly, the campaign would meet with widespread political and public support. But I think that he should immediately abandon the mendacious, sanctimonious propaganda about there being a moral imperative to secure a regime change because of some nebulous quality called "evil" supposedly attributable to the Iraqi leadership. 

Our leaders should trust us with the real reasons for the forthcoming war. Saying over and over again that we have to have a war against Hussein because he is such a naughty, bad, wicked man make us feel that we are being treated like children.

What Happened During My Summer Holiday

Arthur:  And what happened to the earth?
Ford:  It’s been disintegrated
Arthur:  Has it?
Ford:  Yes. It just boiled away into space.
Arthur: Look, I’m a bit upset about that.
Ford:  Yes, I can understand.

So; Flash and me and Darren and Keith hired a little pleasure boat at Inverness, and spent a week tootling down the Great Glenn, across Loch Ness, Lock Oich and the imaginatively named Loch Lochy.

Flash and I flew from London to Scotland. That meant on one day I traveled on a train, a car, a bus, a plane and a boat.

Scotland is very pretty. There are hills and lakes.

One night, we tied up at mooring point a mile or so from the nearest village. There was no artificial light. We couldn’t take our eyes of the stars (until it got too cold and we went into the boat and drank whiskey and read poems out loud out of a book).  It surprises townies that the night sky has stars in it.

According to the guidebook, you could drown the whole population of the world in Loch Ness, three times over. Somewhere in its murky depths there hides a Monster.

Never mind the scenery, the whiskey, or the stars. It’s the Loch Ness Monster that keeps the tourist business going. Souvenir shops offer you soft-toy Nessies (usually sea-serpents) or china ornament Nessies (usually plesiosaurs). Dumnadrochit has got a large fiberglass plesiosaur in front of a mocked up boat, so you can show your friends a photograph of you with the Monster. As you sail through the lock system into Fort Augustus, there’s a topiary of the monster and a little baby monster.

Flash explained that in Scots, you can’t mistake the word “Lock” for the word “Loch” because “Lock” is pronounced “lok” whereas “Loch” is pronounced, er, “clorrk”.

It only takes two people to pull a little boat through a lock, so while Darren and Keith held onto the ropes, me and Flash jumped off, walked into the canal-side pub (the Lock Inn, ho-ho) downed a quick pint, and rejoined them on the other side.

It was September, so the weather wasn’t perfect but we didn’t have any thoroughly washed out days. There’s a snapshot of the three of us looking very drenched by a very disappointing historical monument.  (An ancient well where the dismembered heads of seven people who had been executed in some blood-curdling highland feud were washed before being presented to the clan chief, apparently.)

The worst disaster occurred when we thought it would be a Good Idea to take the boat out into the middle of the lake while Keith was preparing a good healthy English cooked breakfast. The first time a teensy tiny little wave struck us, he poured a – fortunately not very hot pan -- of cooking oil over himself.

The charter company set Fort William as the limit of how far we could take the boat. It was Tuesday. A nice enough medium size town, containing the one good pub we found, name-check the Goose and Gruel. It’s the place you go if you want to climb Ben Nevis. We didn’t. We did visit the Ben Nevis whisky distillery, however. Not a whisky drinker myself, but I forced myself to try the free samples.

We took a taxi back to the marina where we’d left the boat.

“Och, have ye heard the news?” said the driver “Apparently, an aeroplane has crashed into a big hotel in America.”

We only had a radio to communicate with the outside world. But then one would automatically turn to  Radio 4 in a crisis in any case. When we turned on, there were car bombs going off all over America and tens of thousands were dead. Canary Wharf had been evacuated. Things only gradually got back to normal. I am happy to say that I still haven’t seen the footage of the tower collapsing.

I was going to use the word “stunned” to describe our reaction. Perhaps “embarrassedly not sure how to react” would be more honest. Since none of us on had friends or relatives in New York we turned off the radio and carried on with our holiday. There didn’t seem a great deal else to do.

There was an American family we’d passed in a couple of locks, with a star and stripes tied to the back of their boat. We noticed they’d lowered it to half-mast.

Last February, I lost a very close friend in a pointless futile stupid railway accident. That’s left me a bit mixed up over how to mentally process big disasters. I’d been through the experience of seeing a news report of a major accident, saying “tut tut, how terrible” and finding out twelve hours later that there was a real person involved. It would be nice to say “and that made me feel much more Christian sympathy for the horror stories coming out of New York”, but it actually just made me want to switch off. Must then a Christ perish in torment in each age for the sake of those with no imagination?

I think the media actually does very well at bringing minute-by-minute reporting of major events. In the old days, the morning papers were history’s second or third draft: by the time you heard the news, it had been tidied up. Journalists knew the facts before they reported them. Live news creates a weird immediacy, despite its inaccuracy. Fog of war – conflicting reports – “something terrible has happened, we don’t know what the details are yet”—too early to speculate. Real life must be very much like that. 

But after a few hours, it very rapidly reverts to normal; human-interest items about children who have lost parents and arty photos of the fire brigade raising the Stars and Stripes. Would the girl who lost her fiancé be any more traumatized if he’d slipped on the steps outside his house and broken his neck? But because he perished publicly, her grief is News.

I know what they were doing and I don’t blame them for it. 6,000 dead is just a number, they want to put a human face on it. But it has the effect of assimilating the shock into an easily digestible narrative:  tragedy as soap opera. At some level, those of us who weren’t directly involved were enjoying it. God help us, we were.

“We are all Americans now,” said one commentator. I was at college in Brighton when the IRA came within a hairsbreadth of assassinating Mrs. Thatcher; one of those rare moments when strangers are allowed to talk to each other, even if it’s only to look down at the paper and say “Tut tut, nasty business.” People stood on the beach and gaped at the wreckage of the Grand Hotel. A man with one of those RAF moustache accents said “You a Tory supporter, then?” and I said “No, but that’s a bit irrelevant, isn’t it?” -- as if my opinion of the Falklands War or the Miners Strike might have any effect on my opinions of the moral wisdom of putting explosive devices in hotel bedrooms.

My opinions on the U.S foreign policy, the middle-east situation, George Bush’s brain-power, globalization and the fact that Starbucks make crap coffee remain precisely where they were on September 10. But that’s a bit irrelevant, isn’t it?

The most moving sound image which Radio 4 piped at us was the Queen’s guards playing the Star Spangled Banner outside Buck House as part of the changing of the guard; and the mainly but not entirely American voices singing the words. The cynic in me knows that “the Queen’s” decision to change the ceremony was really the result of a press adviser who wanted to make sure that she didn’t fumble the ball like she did when Di died. But it was very moving, nonetheless.

We can’t do patriotism; we aren’t allowed. At about this time of year, there is a minor classical music concert in the Albert Hall. Tradition dictates that the second half includes Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance and a silly medley of English Sea Songs, culminating in Rule Britannia. And every year, I mean, every year, without fail, there is a minor controversy about whether these songs are a bit bellicose and jingoistic and it wouldn’t be better to sing “I’d Like To Teach the World To Sing In Perfect Harmony” instead. This year there was even more mumbling. As it happened, the little American conductor with the line in weak jokes replaced Land of Hope and Glory with Ode to Joy but still let the multitudes belt out Jerusalem and everyone went home relatively happy. But one couldn’t help comparing our embarrassed confusion about patriotic traditions with the purity and wholeheartedness of that of the Americans.

The Vicar preached an entirely adequate sermon about Recent Events in the World. He said that it reminded us of the frailty and contingency of human existence; he said it reminded us of the weakness of human endeavor compared to the will of God; he said that if we put our trust in God rather than towers made by men, that, in the long run, even in the face of terrible events, we would be OK: that death needn’t be the final and total evil. He pointed out that in the Psalm, where it says “God is our refuge” the word “refuge” means literally “unassailably strong tower.”

All doubtless very true.

But it struck me that all he had really done was use an “item in the news” as a sermon illustration: rather as if he had drawn an moral point out of England losing the football (don’t set your hearts on human heroes, they may let you down) or, less likely, England winning the football (press on towards the goal however hard it seems.)

And that, one feels, is what a lot of people have been doing: like any big event, it can’t just be a Terrible Thing which happened: it has to be a metaphor of Titanic proportions; onto which we gradually project meanings. Sensible meanings, if we are C of E vicars; mad ones if we are Richard Dawkins or Pat Robertson. There are crazed fundamentalists on all sides. (Tony’s “reorder the world” speech reminded us that it was possible to be a well meaning liberal and a crazed fundamentalist at the same time.)

It’s unlikely that “Why does God allow bad things to happen” was at the forefront of the congregations mind. If we regarded “the problem of evil” as an impediment to Christian belief, it’s unlikely we would have been in church in the first place. The issue that we could have done with guidance on was, I thought, more practical. “What’s the Christian response to evil? Should we try to forgive the people who did this terrible thing, and encourage our leaders to turn the other cheek? Or should we rather take up arms against Evil, and prepare for a Holy War?  Great Christians have  taken both positions. And if a Just War it is to be should we regard it as a Crusade against Islam, or merely a crusade against a minority of bad people? Or perhaps a police action against one Evil person? But if it is a war against bad people, why these bad people in particular; why not a never-ending theocratic war until a holy world government ushers in the Millennium?”

Answer came there none.

Someone said that reacting to a terrorist is rather like smacking a naughty child. You know that he’s trying deliberately to provoke you, and in reacting, you are in one sense, giving him precisely what he wants. But if you don’t, then he smashes up your house. There’s no doubt that the point of a terrorist attack is to provoke a retaliation, to make the target behave like the wicked oppressor that the terrorist believes him to be. (Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Look at me I’m being oppressed!)  But in one sense, what else do you do?

As a dyed in the wool liberal with dangerously pacifist tendencies; I would like to hear a good deal less about good wars, about how we are going to defeat the forces of evil and make the world a good and happy place and a great deal more about straightforward retaliation. Swift retaliatory justice, annihilating the perpetrator of the atrocity, in so far as we know who he is, and indeed where, taking out as many civilians and tacit supporters as happen to be in the way – nuke the whole country if you like, I don’t mind. It may not be an ideal solution, but it seems to be morally straightforward, in a brutal, Old Testament way. I can understand the morality of “If you kill our citizens, we will kill you”. It has limits. A blood-letting , some mourning, and we get back to normal. But a general war against terrorism – or, in some views, against evil in general – seems too open ended. It could go on forever. Millions could die. And it’s a blank check to give power to our rulers. Of course we aren’t going to be too critical of them during a crisis; but don’t let it go to their heads, otherwise the crisis could mysteriously drag on for ever and ever, with more and more of our liberties being eroded along the way.

And so everything gets back to normal; my holiday is over; there are reports of bombings on the news and some vague mutterings about anthrax in the stock exchange. It’s not even very interesting any more. Just some dead people in a foreign country; a subject to write about; slag off the clergy, maybe a parenthesis or two about Tony.

It’s been a standing joke in this column for years that half the readers are a mysterious alien race called “Americans”. I drop in friendly little asides about how “my readers” won’t pick up on the irony or understand my references to English literature. Assuming that they exist it would have been nice if I’d been able to think of something better to say to my Americans readers beyond “sorry”. Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

You could drown the whole population of the world in Loch Ness, three times over. Somewhere in its murky depths there hides a Monster.

Dungeons & Dragons

 Dungeons & Dragons

 

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the umpteenth level priest
If you're evil and he turns you then you're instantly deceased
He's got wisdom twenty seven, it's been magically increased
And he goes marching on…

The receptionist at my office expressed surprise that Dungeons & Dragons could be turned into a movie at all. "After all," she said, "It’s only an old cartoon series."

Well, no, actually, not.

Before D&D was a cartoon, it was a game. Those critics who have heaped abuse on the movie also entirely missed this point. Dungeons & Dragons was, as the title proclaims, an attempt to capture the essence of fantasy role-playing on the screen; and it did this remarkably well.

The movie is set a generic, undifferentiated fantasy-never-never-land. It contains crowded markets, crowded bars, castles, a forest, and not much else. It’s the sort of place where things called "orcs" and things called "elves" meet in bars; where things called "halflings" are mentioned in passing and where there is an obligatory "dwarf" who starts fights and spills food on his beard. At one point we see an establishing shot of a city floating in the clouds, but nothing comes of this: it’s just another collection of taverns, markets and a thieves' guild. The non-humans don’t regard the elves or the orcs as remarkable, alien, or even foreign; when one of the characters spots an elf in the bar, he just tries to chat her up. All the archetypes are dragged out of Tolkien and Howard and made contemptible by decades of familiarity. This looks like Middle-earth, but it's actually New York, or, at the very best, Disneyland. Even the dragons are significant primarily as a kind of nuclear deterrent.

Total absence of sense of wonder; just like a D&D game. Check.

The two main characters, Ripley (or possibly Ridley) and Snails (no, really) are nominally thieves. Ridley is played by Jimmy Olsen out of the Lois and Clerk, and Snails is the result of a terribly experiment in genetic engineering involving DNA from Eddie Murphy, Red Dwarf’s Cat, and Jar Jar Binks. I don’t know if you call his dialogue "rap" or "jive" or just "very, very irritating." I’m pretty sure I heard Ripley and Snails calling each other "dude"; and they definitely do that high-five thing with clenched fists. It is impossible not to think of them as Bill and Ted wandering around Middle-earth. The movie starts with them ineptly robbing the wizards’ guild. The funny black man is comically terrified, while the swashbuckling white man remains cool and confident, yet it is very clear that neither of them actually believe themselves to be in the slightest danger. They behave, get this, as if they are playing a game.

Check.

Then there is the matter of the plot, or rather scenario, or rather scenarios, because the script keeps changing its mind. Having been captured by a girly wizard while robbing the guild, Jimmy Olsen finds himself involved in a quest to find the Staff of Something-or-other, which confers on the wielder the power to control computer animated dragons. At the beginning of the film, the point of this is that the Evil Chief Wizard is going to take the staff of office (which also controls dragons) from the Good Empress, so we need a spare staff to protect ourselves from him. But at the half way point, up pops Tom Baker in a blonde wig and pointy ears and talks some guff about how wizard's USE magic, but elves ARE magic. The point of the quest is thus really to stop anybody using magic staffs of any sort because every time a dragon gets killed you upset the balance of the Force. (At this point some black elves in masks look at each other and then look at Ridley and say with sub titles "Does he understand his full potential?" No he doesn’t, and nor do we, but this is all right because the subject is not raised again.) One has the impression of a scriptwriter chucking a McGuffin at our hero and retrospectively working out some reason for it to be important.

Check.

The story about the Evil Wizard and the Good Empress is lifted wholesale from Phantom Menace. The Empress actually wears one of Amidala's cast-off costumes, until the end when she changes for no good reason into Mordred’s armour out of Excalibur. The scene in the Wizards Council Chamber (which looks like an Italian Opera house, actually rather cool) where Jeremy Irons as Profion, Chief Evil Wizard, asks the Empress to hand over her staff and she, speaking up for the rights of Commoners everywhere, says "That is something I cannot do" is almost frame-by-frame the Senate scene from Episode I. The end of the movie, which is completely over the top and almost worth the price of admission, has Ripley sword-fighting with Profion at the top of an absurdly narrow tower, while dragons of various types set fire to things and fall out of the sky. (It is one of the perils of computer animation that once you have rendered out one dragon, you can just as easily show 1,000 of the beasts; and therefore do so.) Profion suggests that Ripley should use the Staff of Something against him.

"No" shouts Ripley "NO. I’ll never turn into you. Never."

The possibility that Ripley/Ridely might in any way be in danger of turning into Profion has not even been mentioned up to this point. But still, we can at least be grateful that Profion resists the temptation to tell Ripley that he is his father. None of this makes the slightest sense in terms of the "plot" we just feel that the characters are re-enacting their favourite bits from the Star Wars trilogy because it felt like a fun thing to do.

Check.

I could also mention the complete lack of emotional depth. I saw the film with an audience which was clearly made up of D&D geeks. There was no heckling or popcorn rustling; everyone was in the cinema because they positively wanted to see the film. Otherwise, they’d have been next door watching Hannibal. When the trailer for Lord of the Rings came on, there was a sense of religious fervour. But even so. When Snails gets killed off -- sorry that’s a spoiler isn’t it, the cute annoying humorous black guy who's the hero's mate gets killed, there’s a turn up for the books -- the whole audience collapsed into laughter. I mean, the whole scene -- Snails falling from the battlements; Ripley or Ridely falling to his knees and shouting out "Noooo". One would have to have a heart of stone to read of the death of little Nell without laughing. Quite clearly neither we nor Ripley nor Ridley really care that he’s dead: he’s just acting out the sort of thing that heroes do in movies when people die. One expected Wayne and Garth to pop up and say "Yeah, like we’d end the movie like that!". We all know it wasn’t real.

Check.

Finally, there are the stock characters. We’ve mentioned Amidala. We have Jeremy Irons doing a mock Shakespearean villain, e-nun-ci-at-ing every line. We have the ultimate geek icon, Tom Baker popping up for no reason to deliver some of Yoda’s old lines. Best of all, what almost makes the movie, we have Richard O’Brien camping it up as the head of the thieves guild, who puts Ridley, into, get this, a MAZE. Not, admittedly, a crystal maze, but nevertheless. If you ever played in one of those D&D campaigns where Elric and Frodo went up against Conan because the referee thought it would be kinda cool, you’d feel right at home.

Check. Check. Check.

Oh, I could go on. The way in which character's meet up at random and join "the party" without introductions or explanations because they are PCs and know that that is what they are meant to do. Arbitrary deus ex-machina for the good of the plot: when Ripley goes into the dungeon to retrieve the Staff of Something, the DM puts up an invisible barrier to keep the other characters out of the way "because only he is meant to go in." Arbitrary appearances by monsters from the monster manual who don’t actually do anything. The whole film is as perfect an impression of the kind of D&D games you used to play from about age 12 until you discovered Call of Cthulhu as it is possible to imagine.

The film ends with Ripley, wearing what appears to be a modern biker outfit, standing at Snails’ grave, and talking about how wizards and commoners are going to be equal, just like Snails, something of a civil rights campaigner in his spare time, wanted. When suddenly one of the elves starts talking mystical gumf again, about how maybe Snails isn’t really dead as long as we all remember him, when, bang, the writing vanishes from the grave stone and everyone is turned into a sort of swirly Tinkerbell bolt of lightning. The end.

You what? I mean, really, you what? What was supposed to have happened? It seems (seriously) obvious that something has been cut out. And I think I can guess what it was.

In the original version of the film, the swirly bolts of lightening were going to shoot over the city, out into space, and in one of those cosmic zoom effects, shoot off the planet and out of time and space. Whereupon, we were going to transfer to a geeky student bedsit, where all the actors, now in modern clothes, would be sitting around a table. There would be half-eaten pizza on the floor, and little miniatures looking like the characters from the film. Snails, of course, would be alive and well. There would probably be Doctor Who posters and Star Wars books and Crystal Maze videos, in order to drive home the point. I don’t know which character would turn out to be the DM; maybe Jeremy Irons? It would probably be filmed in black and white, like Wizard of Oz. All the characters would start to laugh and say "Yeah, that was a good game, same time next week". Snails and Ripley would shake hands to assert their real world friendship. Snails and the Elf-girl would probably be dating. Everyone would leave. The camera would linger for a few seconds over the dice and the character sheets on the table. The light would go out. The credits would roll. The end.

Had they left this ending in, it would be possible to appreciate the film for the classic it really is.

A Very British Coup

Hitherto, the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed, when we read them--how Plato would have every infant "a bastard nursed in a bureau", and Elyot would have the boy see no man before the age of seven, and after that, no women, and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry--we may well thank the beneficent obstinancy of real mothers, real nurses and above all real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.

C.S Lewis

Mr Tony Blair's latest bright idea is that there should be secular Christenings at registry offices, on the model of civil weddings. Instead of just filling out a birth certificate, the registrar will give you the opportunity to make a series of promises about how you are going to raise your child. You'll even be able to appoint somewhat oxymoronic secular god-parents.

Speaking a fully immersed Baptist, I think that the idea of separating 'baby-naming' from 'Christening' in the mind of Joe Public is a thoroughly good thing. Baptism, whether it involves dunking squalling infants in fonts or throwing fully clothed adults into paddling pools, is a ceremony of initiation into the Christian Church. You get baptised to show that you have become a Christian, or to show that your parents want you to become a Christian, or to actually make you a Christian, depending on your viewpoint. In the Olden Days 'Christendom' meant 'the whole world' or at any rate 'the whole world apart from those nasty Turks', and 'Christian' came to mean 'any civilised human being'. So, naturally, the Christian-making ceremony was done to new-borns, and 'Christening' came to mean 'the act of giving someone a name', as in 'he is known as Bloodaxe Deathbringer, but he was christened Kevin.' Moslems get very annoyed if you ask them what their Christian name is.

The Church has always been stuck with two incompatible roles. Its clergy see themselves as part of the Apostolic Succession, continuing the work begun by Jesus and His disciples, dispensing the Holy Spirit and other technical terms to the Faithful, acting as the interface between the Supernatural world and the here-and-now. But the rest of the world see them as part of the oil which lubricates the cogs of Society; marking and dignifying important events like birth, marriage and death with solemn ceremonies, crowning queens, burying princesses, running midwinter festivals and coffee mornings. We don't care about, or even believe in, Heaven, Hell, the Holy Spirit or being Born Again, but we do think that a Church which does impressive rituals at important times of your life is necessary for providing national identity or social cohesiveness. Or maybe we just sometimes feel like a jolly good ceremony. The Archbishop of Canterbury was barking up completely the wrong tree when he said that the public interest in Princess Di's funeral service showed that they retained some measure of belief in Anglican Christianity. What it showed was a desire to have a serious, solemn, elevated ceremony; the Church just happened to be the group most able to provide it. In the past, people who wanted a serious, solemn, elevated ceremony to mark the birth of their baby often opted for a church Christening. This tended to produce a ceremony hopelessly at crossed purposes with itself; the clergyman talking about dying to sin and being raised to the new life in Christ when all the parents wanted was for him to splash some water over the kid's head to make sure his name stuck properly.

I remember, sometime around the age of eight, being utterly astounded to discover that my two thoroughly modern cousins did not go to church or Sunday school, and had, indeed NEVER been to church or Sunday School. What never? quoth I. No, never, they replied. Not at Christmas? Not at Harvest Festival? They assured me that they had never been inside a church. What about when you were Christened? They paused. All right, they conceded, we must have been to church when we were christened. But not since then.

Increasingly, clergymen have become unwilling to baptise infants of families who are not entering into the service in a sufficiently serious spirit. It is still (I think) technically illegal for a Vicar to refuse to Christen someone who asks for it; but it is not illegal for him to require the parents to come to long boring talks about the true significance of baptism. In any case, fewer and fewer non- or semi-religious families seem to want to put their children through a ceremony which they don't really believe in. While this is a good thing both in terms of the understanding of Christianity and in terms of personal integrity, it means that there is no ritual way of marking your babies coming-into-world.

Now, we may not have the admirable separation of church and state enjoyed by our colonial cousins, but the English have always known where church stops and government begins. A Church wedding has a religious component and a secular component because marriage has a religious and legal aspect to it, but there is a clear demarcation between the two areas. There are the legal vows (marked with stars in the prayer book) that you have to say in order for it to be a legal wedding; there's the signing of the register. Then there are then specifically religious bits about the marriage at Cana and the mystic union 'twixt Christ and His church, which the state has no interest in. From the state's points of view, you can talk any mumbo jumbo you like, and it's still a legal marriage. If you opt for a registry officer ceremony, you get the legal bit without the religious bit. Similarly, when Aunty Hilda kicks the bucket, the state has absolutely no interest in what prayers or rituals you may say over her body. You can read from the prayer book; you can wheel on the duty atheist to read passage from Bertrand Russell; you can play Bohemian Rhapsody or put up a Totem Pole. The state's interest in the matter finishes once you have filled out the paperwork and got permission from the environmental health officer to dispose of the corpse. When people produce an infant, dribbling and mewling at its mother's breast the only legal requirement is that they should register the birth. They can sprinkle it with water, pass it through a Yew Tree or chop parts of its naughty bits off; that is of no interest to the state. Until today.

The state, in the person of Jack Straw, thinks that the Christening ceremony was a good thing irrespective of whether or not you believed in it, and since most people have stopped bothering with it, has decided to set up a secular alternative; a state-sanctioned rite-of-passage. Where once Registrars were interested only in filling out legal paperwork, they will now become minimalist shamans, presiding over rituals with no legal significance. This represents a blurring of the religious and the secular, and re-definition of the relationship between government and citizen with which I am deeply uncomfortable.

Of course, the proposed ceremony is entirely without content--how could a New Labour confection be otherwise:

'We promise to try to be patient with our baby, neither demanding too little nor expecting too much. We will try to offer him unconditional love regardless of his success or failure.'

What does this mean? A promise implies a conscious decision; an act of will. I might have told a lie on my tax form or revealed the secret password of the I-Spy club, but I had promised not to do so, so I didn't. How can you promise to love someone? Have you ever met a parent who says, 'We used to love little Johnny, but then he got his ear pierced, and we decided we wouldn't bother any more'? Is it remotely conceivable that the mother of a serial killer could say 'When I found out that little Johnny had eaten fourteen people, I was going to stop loving him, but then I remembered that I promised Jack Straw that I'd carry on, so I did.' In any case, we aren't promising to love little Johnny unconditionally, only to 'try' to 'offer him' unconditional love--whatever that means. We are also going to 'try' to be patient, as opposed, presumably, to actually being patient. How long must I be patient when Andrew leaves his bedroom in a mess? Unto seven times? One could imagine much more moderate, un-ambitious promises which, entered into sincerely, might actually do some good. Esther Rantzam may at this moment be drafting a pledge which says 'I promise that I will never smack my child, never shout at it, never smoke in front of it and feed it on a low fat diet'; but this would involve making some actual decisions about where you stood. New Labour prefers to endorse greeting-cards bollocks so vague that everyone can sign up to it and everyone can, with perfect sincerity, think they have stuck to it. 'I promise to make a vague commitment to have the same feelings about my children that even the very worst parents do in any case.' That's bound to save the family, Jack.

Vague, content free: but not, unfortunately, entirely meaningless. If you had asked me to write 30 words of high sounding waffle to be used when not-Christening a baby, I might have come up with the following:

'We promise to be kind to our baby; to give him the space to grow into the sort of person he wants to be, and never to put our aspirations before his happiness.'

In terms of knowing whether you have kept the pledge or broken it, my version is as vacuous as that of the Straw Man. But its attitude is very different. Mine is focused on the happiness of the child; on the concept of the child as an independent person. Straw's is focused on concepts of 'success' and 'failure'; a bad parent, note, 'expects too little' of their child; and, without this promise, a bad parent might stop loving his baby if it was not a success. What does 'success' mean? Success at school, success in his career, successfully shading in his Tellytubbies colouring book? I fear that Straw's focus is bringing people up to be good, well-behaved, 'successful' citizens. But then the stated purpose of this enterprise is to stabilise the family for the good of society. Broken homes and a bad parenting is a bad thing, not in itself, but because badly brought up children of broken homes tend to become criminals.

I do not think that making stupid promises in town halls will do the slightest bit of harm; nor, of course, will it do the slightest bit of good. But I think that the whole idea of the Government creating a state-sanctioned rite-of-passage to replace the religious one is rather ridiculous, and slightly sinister. What Blair appears to want to do is to endow a purely civil, legal action (registering a birth) with a quasi-religious significance (making promises about your future moral conduct.) Can we expect to see the state creating an official secular form of words for funerals; say, a registrar listing the things which the deceased has contributed to the Community? Can we expect to see registrars giving moral homilies to the couple at a registry office marriage?

C. S. Lewis said that the essence of religion was 'the finite self's desire for, or acquiescence in, and self-rejection in favour of, an object wholly good and wholly good for it.' If you are going to set up a secular religion you are going to have to define what the 'wholly good thing' is--the Flag, or Communism, or Freedom, or Democracy, or Society, or the Species. If that secular religion is created by the state, then it is very likely that the state is what will be defined as the ultimate good; and what you end up with is fascism. If it is created by particular political party in a democracy, then the ultimate good will be defined as the particular ideological hang-ups of that political party. If Mrs Thatcher had set up secular churches, they would have held up 'Britain' or 'the Monarchy' or 'the markets' or 'prosperity' or 'families' or 'choices' as the Wholly Good. For Blair it will be 'modernity' or 'society' or 'the community' or 'access to information technology' or perhaps New Labour itself.

The government cannot take unto itself the responsibility for telling us what is good; in fact, the whole concept of a democracy implies that we know, and they don't. The collapse of the national church may be a bad thing, but it is no part of the remit of the prime minister to set things right. When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing, they believe in everything. But perhaps, with a little gentle pushing, they can be induced to start believing in Tony.