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?

Friday, October 13, 2006

It may be time to retire from satire due to unfair competition, again. The news item is unremarkable, but the readers comments are utterly beyond parody...

What Not To Wear

On Saturday October 8th, the Sun ran the headline

HOUNDED OUT
Hero soldiers' home wrecked by Muslims.

The substance of the story was that a house earmarked for servicemen returning from Afghanistan had been vandalized. The Sun drew the conclusion that the vandals were Muslims, although their only actual evidence was a quote from an un-named source and a non-committal quote from the police. ('One line of inquiry' is that the attack was racially motivated.)

Underneath this front-page story was a four column strip. On the left was a picture of a woman wearing a burkha. (This picture was approximately three times as large as the photo of the vandalized house.) In the middle was a caption which reads THE BIG BURKHA DEBATE – PAGES 6 and 7. And on the right was a photograph of Labour MP Jack Straw.

Elsewhere in the paper, you could read about Muslim cabbie's guide dog ban.

On 10th October, the front page of the Sun featured another picture of a woman in a burkha. This time, the headline was HIDDEN DANGER. The previous day, a Sun reporter had caught a plane to Paris wearing a niqab. Customs inspectors didn't ask her to raise her veil to check that her face matched her passport picture, although regulations say that they should have donei. This is chilling, apparently. 'I hope this is an oversight, and not political correctness' says the inevitable Tory MP. If you read the 'full story' on page 9, you would also have learned about a terror suspect (unnamed) who, it is claimed (we aren't told by who) tried to escape capture by disguising himself with a burkha. And who should be at the top of column 1 but Labour MP Jack Straw?

So, images of veiled women are being placed alongside stories about Muslim yobs and vandals; stories are dredged up in which burkhas are tangentially associated with terrorism. Anyone looking at Saturday's paper would have taken in the words Hounded Out -- Hero soldiers' home wrecked by Muslims -- The Big Burhka Debate in a single glance. The vandalism story is printed in a frame; and the 'burka' caption overlaps that frame: quite clearly, we are being invited to forge a mental link between the two stories. Muslims are dangerous and frightening. Muslims are alien. Muslims are chilling. And wherever there are stories about dangerous, frightening, chilling, alien Muslims there will be a little picture of a woman in a veil. The Sun has made veils into a hieroglyphii which means 'Muslims are scary'. And alongside this icon of Islamophobia there is always a picture of Labour MP Jack Straw.

Interestingly enough, the HIDDEN DANGER story only takes up about 1/3 of Monday's front page. The other 2/3 are given over to a promotion for something called Page 3 Idol. ('Turn to page 3', the caption very logically advises.) Female Sun readers are being invited to send nude photographs of themselves to the paper. Male readers will then vote for the picture they like the best, and the winner will be offered a job as a model. You couldn't, as I believe someone once said, make it up. This is illustrated, naturally, by a picture of a lady with no clothes on. (Page 3 itself has a total of 14 tits on it, which must be some kind of record.) So, when we look at Monday's front page, what we actually see is a small picture of a dark skinned lady wearing a veil, underneath a large picture of a light skinned lady wearing nothing at all. The message is clear: totally covering yourself up is 'chilling' and 'dangerous', whereas stripping naked, having your picture taken and sending it to a national newspaper so that strangers can masturbate over it is perfectly normal.

Meanwhile, the Daily Express has had one of its famous phone-in-polls in which it has turned out that 97% of readers think that Muslim women should uncover themselves -- though not, presumably, to the extent that Sun readers are going to -- because it would 'safeguard racial harmony'. In order to further safeguard racial harmony, the Express reported these findings under the headline BAN THE VEIL! The accompanying text is vintage Daily Express stuff:

CONCERNED Britons gave massive backing last night to calls for Muslim women to ditch the veil.

An astonishing 97 per cent of Daily Express readers agreed that a ban would help to safeguard racial harmony.

Our exclusive poll came a day after Leader of the Commons Jack Straw spoke out against the veils.

Note how 'Britons' are contrasted with 'Muslims' in the first line, and that 'ditch the veil' (choose to stop wearing it) in line 1 slides into 'ban' (prohibit it by law) in line 2. Observe the presentation of the story: 97% of readers 'gave backing' and 'agreed' to the idea of 'a ban': even though no ban has been proposed and there is nothing to back. And once again, it is all associated with Labour MP Jack Straw. It is literally true that he 'spoke out' against veils in the sense that he remarked that he would rather talk to people whose faces he could see. He quite explicitly didn't call for any kind of ban. But the trajectory of the opening paragraph goes 'Ban the veil – ditch the veil – a ban -- Jack Straw.'

Jack Straw knew what he was doing. New Labour is the political wing of the middle classes. Every New Labour speech goes out of its way to praise the car-driving home-owning hardwor kingfamily. These are the votes which win elections. White – people who read papers in which lapsed Anglicans from England are 'us' and dark skinned Muslims are 'them'. Paranoid – people who feel that their way of life is under threat from gypsies, gays, terrorists, asylum seekers, the political correctness brigade, Europe, foreigners in general. Four million of them pay money to read the paranoid fantasies of Richard Desmond and Rupert Murdoch on a daily basis. Ten days ago the average Sun readers didn't remember Jack Straw's name, let alone his job title. But for a week, they have had his face in front of them every day, linked with stories about Hidden Danger and Banning the Veil. What he actually said no longer matters, any more than it ever mattered exactly which river it was that Aeneas had seen frothing with much blood. Straw wasn't presenting an argument, but positioning himself. He has brilliantly associated himself with the paranoid middle-class. The people whose votes he most needs now think of him as 'That fellow who spoke up for ordinary White people and against chilling Muslim yobs who sneak through customs and vandalize guide-dogs.' And this, unless he is very stupid indeed, was precisely what he knew would happen.

I live in Bristol. Burkhas are quite rare, although there are increasing numbers of Somali women whose robes cover the whole of their body except their faces. (I think that they look very attractive and exotic.) Headscarves are so common that I no longer notice them. I admit that, when I see a black hat and ringlets, I still think 'Jew' before I think 'man'; but when I see a headscarf, I no longer think 'Muslim woman' or 'religious woman' or 'Asian woman' but just 'woman'.

When I first moved to Bristol the man in my local corner shop had a West Country Accent. If you want to buy a pint of milk after half past ten, the person who sells it to you will be an Asian: it's a stereotype, but it's true. 'What's a Pakistani man doing with a West Country accent' I said to myself. 'Everyone knows that Pakistanis have South London accents.' Since then, I have noticed that some teenagers combine Brizzle dialect with British Asian, even when their vowels are RP. 'Where's Rashid to, innit?' White kids are also picking up the 'innit' habit, which seems itself to be a bit of cockney dialect pressed into service to represent a Punjabi tag word. I find this aesthetically displeasing. The whole purpose of teenage slang is to irritate people over 30. That is what 'assimilation' means. You spend decades worrying about the fact that New York has been overrun by Italians who don't speaka the lingo proper, and then wake up to discover that Pizza is a classic American dish. I shouldn't be surprised if next year, white teenagers decide it's fashionable to cover up their faces. If it irritates Jack Straw, I may start doing it myself.






i Private Eye points out that the story is not attributed to Anila Baig, the dark-skinned journalism who carried out the stunt, but is claimed as an exclusive by light skinned Julie Moult.

ii Actually, the icon is a partial photograph: the paper tends to show a narrow strip of two eyes looking out from a slit, rather than the whole head. The papers' layout therefore distances the woman more than the actual veil does.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

The Sun is a disgusting little right-wing sexist New Labour rag, but it has to be said that How do you solve a problem like Korea? is a bloody good headline.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

It's international talk like a pirate day, apparently

"You are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery.

But damn ye all together: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment? ....You are a devilish conscience rascal, I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world, as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience tells me: but there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure and pin their Faith upon a Pimp of a Parson; a Squab, who neither practices nor believes what he puts upon the chuckle-headed fools he preaches to.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Flogging a Dead Horse

A shy young farmer is showing his girlfriend around the farm. He shows her the haystacks and the milking machine, and then they come to a field where a cow and a bull are doing what cows and bulls do when farmers put them in fields together. The farmer and his girlfriend watch for a few minutes and then the farmer ventures: 'Er...do you know, one day, I'd like to do that.'

'Well, it's your cow,' she replies.


We are all much less screwed up about sex than we used to be. Everyone is glad to be gay. We don't tell children that if they play with themselves they'll go blind. Sado-masochism is openly discussed in the pages of Woman's Realm. But it is still relatively rare to come across an 'out' necrophiliac. Dead people don't put up postcards in phone boxes. If I were to walk in on a friend having sex with his ex-girlfriend, I would probably say something slightly stronger than, 'Well, it's your corpse.'

Why is sex with a dead body necessarily more depraved than, say, sex with a manikin? You or I may think that both pastimes are a bit yucky, but 'yuck!' is not really an argument. Norman Tebbit thinks it is yucky for two men to have sex together, even if both of them are still alive, to which the only answer is 'That's all right, no-one asked you to watch.' Norman would probably reply that it's the whole idea of a man having sex with another man which he finds yucky, to which I would reply: 'Well, I think the idea of John Major having sex with Edwina Curry is pretty yucky. Or indeed, the idea of anyone having sex with Edwina Curry. Or, in fact, John Major. Do you want to ban that as well?' Aesthetic judgements are a very bad guide to morality.

We think that desecrating a corpse is an offense against the family of the corpse's original owner: but we no longer think that desecrating corpses in general is an offense against humanity in general. There was a time when we tried to prosecute artists for doing challengingly post-modern things with the dear departed. But now we permit 'Body Worlds', even though it is an exhibition of high-tech human taxidermy, because all of the exhibits signed legal documents agreeing to be filleted and put on display when they die. So what would be the moral difference if someone willed their mortal remains to be used for some much less educational, but possibly more enjoyable, artistic venture?

The only rational objection to necrophilia is the practical one. It's rather difficult to pursue the hobby without a dead body; and it's rather difficult to get hold of a dead body without killing someone or digging someone up. (There are also questions about hygiene and public health, even if you wear a condom and don't share shrouds.) We object to necrophilia because we don't think that you should interfere with human remains. The fact that some people find interfering with human remains a sexual turn-on is is beside the point.

I mention this because necrophilia is one of the categories covered by Tony Blair's proposed law against 'extreme' pornography. The others are sexual violence and bestiality. At present, it is illegal to produce or distribute certain kinds of dirty book. But what the world has been crying out for is a law against even having such material in your house, in a cardboard box under your bed, or, and especially, in a file on your hard-drive marked 'Very boring bank statements, do not read.' I have never been entirely sure what a rubicon is but I am pretty sure that we have just crossed one.

Prime Ministers have always regretted the fact that they can't legislate about what goes on in our minds and in our trousers. But with the advent of the World Wide Wank it is theoretically possible for Tony Blair to spy on all of our wet dreams. In the past, we drifted off to sleep turning dodgy little paraphilias over in our heads, hardly remembering them the next morning. Nowadays, we type 'Doctor, Rose, Dalek, tentacle, slash, threesome' into Google and see our most secretest fantasies dance before our eyes in living colour. Or so I have heard.

Tony can't stop you thinking about naughty things; but it is now fairly easy for him to discover what naughty things you have been thinking about and if he doesn't like them, to send three big uniformed police officers to your house to confiscate your computer, handcuff you, conduct an intimate body search and then take out their big, manly truncheons, and

I don't think that looking at images of necrophilia, sexual violence or bestiality is one of my more fundamental human rights. It's a right I'm perfectly willing to give up, along with my right to shout 'fire' in a crowded theater, my right to drive on the right hand side of the road and my right to put potato peelings in my wheelie bin, so long as it does some good. But I would quite like to know what kind of good the new law is supposed to do.

Are cemeteries being vandalized in order to provide models for a booming necro-porn industry? Is the RSPCA worried about an epidemic of cows with sore bottoms? Then by all means, let's take action. Let's impose a criminal penalty on people who look at pictures of non-consenting bovine sex, in the hope that by cutting off demand, you will put the suppliers out of business, as has worked so successfully in the case of hard drugs.

But no plague of pornography-fueled sheep-buggering corpse-shaggers has so far been detected. Instead, we're told we need a new law because extreme pornography is 'repugnant', 'abhorrent', 'disturbing', 'repellent' and 'unacceptable to the vast majority of people' which is as much as to say, being interpreted, yucky. Those of us who point out that maybe some people find the stuff you look at quite yucky; and that in any case we doubt whether everyone who looks at yucky stuff ought to go to jail, are told that some of this stuff is very yucky indeed. Feminists in particular are inclined to say that they once saw, or heard about, a movie in which a woman was tortured, or appeared to be tortured, and that this was so yucky that if you had seen it, you would have been sick. They think this settles the question. If you persist, and say that, even assuming genuine 'snuff' movies exist, you don't see how sending a few Internet masturbators to prison is going to help, they seem not to understand the question. The representative from the Home Office explained to the BBC that:

By banning the possession of such material the government is sending out a strong message - that it is totally unacceptable and those who access it will be held to account.

It has to be banned because it is unacceptable. We are are going to ban it because it's the kind of thing which should be banned.

Some people are prepared to give actual reasons why yucky things should be banned. The most common argument is that we have to ban the possession of extreme porn because extreme porn harms the people who possess it. There are three versions of this argument. On one view, extreme porn is cleverly put together by pornographers who understand how your sexuality works. If you look at pornographic images of sexual violence, you will start to be turned on by those images. This will make you a bad person. This seems to me to be a circular argument, roughly equivalent to saying: 'It is bad to look at yucky pictures, because they will make you the sort of person who looks at yucky pictures, which is bad.'

The second, and more common form of the argument is that looking at extreme pornography is likely to turn you into a criminal. If you look at yucky pictures, and become the sort of person who likes to look at yucky pictures, then sooner or later, looking at yucky pictures is not going to be sufficient: you are bound to actually go and dig up a corpse. This is every censor's argument: people are too weak and stupid to distinguish fiction from reality. Fredric Wertham said that any comic book which depicted a crime (in any context) was a 'crime comic', and that 'crime comics' by definition turned the youth of America into criminals. Christianist extremists have said that the depiction of 'magic' by J.K Rowling is likely to turn children into disciples of Aleister Crowley. When the BBC put the question to the man from the ministry, he went completely to pieces:

There is no conclusive proof that in every case certain types of images will have a certain impact on every individual but we know that in that particular case....that these images do have an impact, do feed certain fantasies in certain individuals and we believe that it is our responsibility to prevent that from happening.

Does anyone know what it means to 'feed' a fantasy? And has it been proved that if you did feed one, it would get bigger and stronger and eventually burst out of its cage and bite someone's head off? Isn't it just as possible that it's lean, mean, starving fantasies which do the harm, and the best thing that anyone can do with one is to keep it well fed and docile?

If there were concrete evidence that people who looked at pictures of people having sex with kittens went out and had sex with kittens, then it wouldn't necessarily follow that the best way of protecting kittens would be jailing anyone who owned a sexually explicit kitten picture. As it stands, the argument is circular.

'We must ban yucky pictures.'
'Why?'
'Because they harm the people who look at them.'
'What is your evidence for that?'
'It is intuitively obvious.'
'Why?'
'Because they are so yucky.'

The third form of the argument, and the only one which I think has any credibility, is that looking at pictures of people doing weird sexual stuff is inclined to 'normalize' the weird stuff that you might want to do, and make you more inclined to do it. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this can be the case. You spend thirty self-loathing years thinking that your are the only person on earth who is sexually excited by teddy bears - and then one day you discover www.arctophilia.com, spend a happy hour downloading teddy-porn, and post a message to the teddy-porn forum saying 'I never knew anyone else was interested in this...I thought I was the only one...' With the encouragement of other arctophiles, you might even come out of the toy-cupboard and admit your fetish in public.

But this pre-supposes that your interest is eccentric but basically harmless. If what you are interested in is obviously criminal, then it's another matter. Your parents, your teachers and your community leaders have taught you that murder, rape and child-abuse are morally wrong. Your conscience tells you that you shouldn't kill people or have sex with them without their consent. Your sense of empathy tells you how horrible it would be to be murdered or sexually molested. And your common sense tells you that if you do these things, you will be shunned by your community, sent to jail, or, in primitive countries, executed. Yet the tendency of certain images to 'normalize' or 'legitimize' deviant behaviour is so powerful that it over-rides your upbringing, your conscience, your morality, your empathy and even your fear of punishment, causing you to go out and do something which you know is wrong. This is an extra-ordinary claim; extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary evidence. The burden of proof is on those who believe that these images possess this power. But the only proofs cited are circumstancial evidence that many people convicted of violent sex offences have violent pornography in their posession; vague metaphors about 'feeding fantasies' and 'mental furniture'; and general assertions that some images are so nasty that they probably have some kind of effect. This is insufficient to establish that some images have can turn normal individuals into ammoral psychopaths.

There are a certain number of people whose moral conscience and sense of empathy was flawed or non-existant even before they plugged their computer in. These are certainly dangerous and scary individuals. But it isn't smutty website that have made them so. (*)

I have been assuming that the reasons for introducing the new law are rational ones. But, of course, they aren't. Laws are no longer about spotting crimes and working out realistic ways of preventing them. They are about 'sending signals'; they are about creating newspaper headlines; they are the government's attempt to create a popular 'narrative.'

In 2003 a young woman had unspeakable things done to her by a not-at-all well man who got off on doing unspeakable things to young women. Not surprisingly, he also spent some of his spare time looking at pictures on the internet of young women having unspeakable things done to them. The relatives of the victim believed that these pictures had in some sense caused the murder. They organised a campaign to get 'violent porn' prohibited. The new law is a response to this campaign. 'Victory for mother in war on violent porn' explained the Daily Mail. Even our own dear Guardian found the narrative – 'out of this great evil must come something good' – too appealing to resist, and referred to it in three separate headlines. 'Violent Porn Ban 'a memorial to my daughter'; 'Legacy of Jane Longhurst'; 'Jane's Legacy'. Without even noticing it, we have replaced jurisprudence with soap opera. Last month, the Home Secretary was referring to his pro-lynching initiative as 'Sarah's Law'. Right at the beginning of his reign of terror, Tony Blair said that he had made it illegal for grown-ups with licences to fire guns at paper targets, not because it was a good idea but because 'We owed a debt to the people of Dunblane.' I find this tendency very disturbing. Laws should be made because they will serve a clear and tangible purpose: not because they provide an uplifting ending to grotesque murder stories.

You may wish to say that I am being flippant. You may think that murder, corpse mutilation and cruelty to animals are crimes; and that it is self-evident that there shouldn't be a trade in pictures of people committing crimes. We could have a terribly interesting debate about medieval child brides, the age of consent in Sweden, Shirley Temple movies, and what the hell's going on in those night clubs where people dress up in school uniforms and listen to old Boney M records. But as soon as we start to talk about actual pictures of actual people actually doing things to actual children, then we would all be in agreement: it's illegal, it's always been illegal, and it ought to be illegal. You may think that images of women actually being tortured and graves actually being vandalized should be treated in the same way. I would probably agree with you. But Tony Blair's new law goes much, much further than this.

The governments consultation document states very clearly what kind of pictures they want to lock you up for looking at:

15: In summary, material would need to be:

a: Pornographic

b: Explicit

c: Real or appears to be a real act...


16: It would cover

i: serious violence *

ii: intercourse or oral sex with an animal

iii: sexual interference with a human corpse

* by serious violence we mean appears to be life threatening or likely to result in serious, disabling injury (my italics)

In case you missed this, the paper goes on to define it's terms.

'The second threshold would be an objective test for the jury in respect of actual scenes or depictions which appear to be real acts...By actual scenes or depictions which appear to be real acts we intend to catch material which either is genuinely violent or conveys a realistic impression of fear, violence and harm.' (my italics)

So. New Labour's legacy will be to re-define 'real' as 'fictitious' and 'actual' as 'simulated'. For years, people have argued about whether or not 'snuff' movies really exist. Tony has brilliantly circumvented the question: looking at a clever special effect in which someone appears to be killed will be defined, under English law, as just as bad as watching a film in which someone is actually killed.

Owning a movie in which someone is killed or appears to be killed in a horrible way will not, in itself, be a crime, which is a relief for those of us who bought the DVD of The Passion of the Christ. We can only go to prison if the violent film is also pornographic. In case we don't know, pornography is defined as:

material that has been solely or primarily produced for the purpose of sexual arousal...We believe that this first test should eliminate, for example, photographs of works of art, news and documentary programmes by mainstream broadcasters which are of public interest and works classified by the BBFC

So; everything depends on the intention of the person who created the film. If someone makes a film of someone digging up a corpse, with the intention of making me violently sick, traumatizing me, and giving me nightmares for a month, then I am not committing any crime by owning a copy. But if someone makes a film of someone digging up a corpse with the intention of giving me an erection, then if I have a copy of the film I can go to prison for three years. (If I do get a hard-on while watching it, then we're in the clear provided no-one intended me to; if they intended me to get a stiffy but I actually find it a complete turn off, then I can still move directly to jail.) If what I'm watching is only a very impressive special effect, it makes no difference: a sexy special effect is against the law, a merely disgusting or horrifying one isn't.

Lawyers will be able to have endless fun with this. If I get excited by looking at pictures of – say – a group of teenaged squaddies mud wrestling in the nude, then that's perfectly okay, provided I'm looking at a real film of real recruits being really abused in the sort of perfectly normal, heterosexual horse-play that made the British army what it is today. But if exactly the same scene is staged by a gay porn website for the benefit of the kind of people who like that kind of thing, then a crime is committed by anyone who looks at it. Mary Whitehouse famously tried to argue that since it would be criminally obscene to perform anal sex on the London stage, it must logically also be obscene to convincingly simulate the same act. But in Blair's Britain there are cases when looking at the real thing might be okay, but looking at a simulation is against the law.

A crime will only be committed if the pictures you are looking at are 'explicit', helpfully defined as

activity which can be clearly seen, leaves little to the imagination, and is not hidden or disguised, (e.g by pixilation.)

So; any notion that this law is needed to prevent unspeakable things being done to real animals, real cadavers and real, live women can be put aside. This law is not to protect them: it is to protect you. A picture of someone buggering a cow in which the naughty bits are pixilated out might be less likely to corrupt and deprave the person looking at it; and it might be less yucky for the rest of us. But it presumably doesn't make any difference to the cow.

Jemima Lewis, writing in the Independent provides a clue to what is really going on.

It hardly matters whether footage of a rape victim having her throat slit or limbs sawn off is real or fake: its message is one of savage hatred of women... We always reserve the right to protect ourselves, however imperfectly, from things that are bad for our bodies or souls. Like drug abuse or racism, misogyny is a social cancer which we should be unashamed to fight.

So. What we are legislating against is not the images themselves; not the real people hurt in the production of those images; not even the criminals who some people believe are created by these images. What we are making laws about is their subtext; their ideology; their message.

Joan Bakewell, writing in the Guardian, concurs

But the truth is that many people can watch films of cruelty and degradation without harmful effect. That said, extreme pornography degrades women and brutalises men, which is why I think that removing it from the Internet would be the best way forward.

(Isn't it cute that she thinks that making a law and locking up a few people, is the same thing as 'removing it from the internet'.)

But if what we're worried about is the sub-text, why stop at snuff movies and necrophilia? Half the top shelf of your average sub-urban news-agent could be said to be misogynistic and to degrade women. So, why not jail the consumers of that, as well? Jeremy Coutinho, also in the Guardian agrees. The new law does not go far enough. It does 'not in itself address society's attitudes towards women'. (It is not clear who said that it was supposed to.)

While I welcome this bill, the mainstream objectification of women has to be tackled too if the government is really serious about women's human rights.

He gives a number of examples of certainly yucky but presumably consensual and not life-threatening 'mainstream' images that he would like to 'tackle', such as novelty gentleman's toilets and pictures of men ejaculating in women's faces.

I think that misogyny is a Bad Thing. I also think that racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, islamaphobia and whatever-the-word-is-for-someone-who-hates-Christians are Bad Things. I am very doubtful whether people who own literature which express an racist or anti-semitic message should go to prison. You may not agree with me; you may think that some ideas are so offensive that even to possess a book or tape or disc which contains them should incur a term of imprisonment. In a way, that's not the point. The point is that this looked like a law against a particularly nasty kind of porn. But it is really ideas which are being censored. It always is.






* These two paragraphs have been edited following criticism. The original version read: "This pre-supposes that your interest is eccentric but basically harmless. Whether we are talking about kinky sex or trainspotting the Internet makes it much easier to contact fellow enthusiasts. If you find other people who like the same thing you do, it's much more likely that you'll go and do it together. If what you are interested in is obviously dangerous and criminal, then it's another matter. Everything in your up-bringing and your conscience tells you that murder, rape and child abuse are morally wrong: the only actual objection to teddy-sex is that it is slightly unusual. I simply don't believe that a web-site and a peer-group who say 'Digging up corpses is perfectly okay' is going to over-ride every piece of socialization you have experienced since you were born – unless, of course, you were a psychopath to begin with. In which case, it's not the the website's fault."

Friday, September 01, 2006

Davewatch

"I just finished my commentaries on the Gospel According to Mark a couple of weeks back and from my reading of the circumstantial evidence in the text, I think it’s a safe bet that the Synoptic Jesus didn’t go to the cross. Someone else took his place and the short ending on the story (there are two versions of chapter sixteen extant) would seem to indicate that he and Magdalene went west. Picture yourself travelling as Mrs. Jesus and taking up residence in a new country just as his “messiahship” is starting to be taken for granted. I think it explains the French Revolution, for one thing. "




i'm sorry i just couldn't resist

Davewatchwatch

As long as we speaking in the Vulgar Tongue, I have no problem in saying that Mr. Dave Sim is crazy, cracked, loony, potty, insane, several land cards short of a Magic deck, nuttier than a fruitcake factory which is hosting the annual convention of the Cashew Appreciation Society. I have said so myself on many occasions. My only problem is with people who use 'He's mad' as shorthand for 'I can form a critical judgment about Cerebus the Aardvark without the bother of actually reading it.'


Earlier this year, Steve Bolhafner, stalwart of the Cerebus mailing list described me as:

The conflicted Andrew Rilstone who I think loves and hates Cerebus in equal proportions more strongly than almost anyone (there are those who love it more and hate it less, and vice versa, but he is very strong and articulate about both positions).

I believe that this was intended to be a flattering remark, and I took it as such. But I think that there is something a little off-the-wall about needing to describe me as 'conflicted'. I think that Cerebus is a masterpiece and Dave Sim is an idiot. What is 'conflicted' about that? 'Greatest living comic book creator and total asshole' is a sentence I am still rather proud of.



Having read Cerebus the Aardvark and the associated essays notes and letter columns and commentaries, I tend to experience Sim as a series of gobbets of total lunacy strung out like idiotic pearls on a string of interesting, creative and verbally inventive writing. People who gave up on Cerebus after Melmuth have largely experienced mad-Dave only via his most extreme and therefore most widely quoted remarks. (The Victor Reid material in Cerebus #181; 'Tangents', the bonkers interview in the Onion.) Obviously, my Davewatch thing contributed to this tendency. I don't say he doesn't believe the madstuff; but I do say that that isn't all he ever talks about.

It's a bit like discussing the Ring Cycle, the Silmarillion and the Bible. Long, inaccessible works: people who don't like them tend only to know them from a few isolated passages for the very good reason that the only people who can be bothered to encounter the complete work are those who are fairly sympathetic to it in the first place.



'So Andrew, what you are saying is 'I'm the only one round here who's slogged through Sim's writings, so I am the only one who is allowed to slag him off.' '

'You could put it like that, I suppose.'



When we go beyond this and describe Sim as mentally ill we appear to be talking about his behavior: his asceticism, his celibacy, his reclusiveness, as opposed to his gnosticism, his extreme anti-feminist theories and his alleged personal misogyny. (*) Of course, many respectable religions have a tradition of hermits and anchorites, to say nothing of vows of poverty and clerical celibacy. But I am happy to grant that cutting off your links with your family is not widely regarded as normal behavior. 'Dysfunctional', 'maladaptive' and 'unable to function in society' might be apt descriptions. This may be one of the things which is meant by 'mental illness'.

How is this 'mental illness' related to his strange theories? Without the whole case history before us, we can't know. Perhaps Dave came up with the idea YHWH was a ball of fire at the center of the earth and therefore ostracized his mother. Or perhaps it just so happened that he developed a bizarre theological theory, and quarreled with his mother at the same time. Or maybe the experience of living alone without any human contact caused him to produce these rather elegant and ingenious but entirely self-referential religious models.



The commentary on 'The Last Day' for the Yahoo mailing list was, I think, the single nastiest thing which Dave Sim has ever written. The commentary takes the form of a heavily moderated Q & A session. Someone implies that they think that Dave regards Cerebus' 'gospel' as a genuine addition to scripture. Sim responds:

'Also, nice try from the he/she/it side of the fence: slipping an accusation of blasphemy against me in under the fence. Obviously I don’t think 289-290 is divinely inspired.....Yes, I know you didn’t mean to accuse me of blasphemy, but that’s the nature of atheists. You’re empty vessels wide open for demonic possession 24/7.'

Someone else asks a rather geeky question about the dates of Cerebus' world and how they relate to real history. Sim's answer is that it's a mistake to assume that Cerebus' story is taking place on our earth. But it comes out as:

'My assumption is that everywhere in the universe planets roughly the size of YHWH all enact their various tantrums and plodding resistance to the truth and infantile he/she/itisms in roughly the same way (and for all I know bigger planets are no different in the same way that all he/she/its are the same), so Cerebus’ story could probably have been enacted on any of a trillion times a trillion little blue balls that think they’re God just as there are probably a trillion times a trillion of each of you everywhere in the universe all behaving exactly as you do, each of whom has chosen to turn his/her back on God. Or maybe out of the trillion times a trillions versions of you there might be one or two that are actually God-fearing, but that would surprise me if it was true.'

So: Sim is no longer the only Real Man in Canada or the only man on Earth who is not a feminist: he is now possibly the only God-fearing man in the universe.

A question about the politics of Cerebus' world leads to a rant about terrorism:

'In order to sustain itself as a political movement, he/she/itism in our society needs to convince people that the proper reaction to killing Islamist Muslims who are plotting violence against civilians is grief at their death and/or fear of the people killing them. The proper reaction isn’t grief and/or fear. The proper reaction is relief coupled with determination to kill as many more as it takes until Freedom is the universal condition of man.'

Note the straw doll. Who are these liberals who express grief when Islamist Muslims who are plotting violence against civilians are killed? What Dave has in mind is liberals who express grief when innocent Muslim civilians are caught in the cross fire; or else liberals like myself who are concerned when individuals who may or may not be plotting violence are arrested, imprisoned or killed without having been given a fair chance to defend themselves. If we could win the warren terra simply by shooting a few easily identifiable and clearly labeled Bad Muslims, then life would be much simpler. In Dave's world, you can, and it is.

And in passing:

'Guantanamo Bay doesn’t actually bother Democrats but they do see it as the way back into the White House (mistakenly, in my view).'

We then get on to theology. Apparently, you can still be tempted to sin after you are dead. In order to be on the safe side, when he gets to the Afterlife Dave will do nothing but recite his prayer until the Day of Judgment. He concludes:

'I think unconsciously I was documenting the loss of my soul which was pretty much a given until I started reading the Bible. It’s one of the reasons that concepts like “fun” really don’t resonate with me at all anymore. My only interest at this point is Not Blowing It Big Time and making it to the grave and Judgment Day without any serious slip-ups. Like allowing people to accuse me of blasphemy without refuting the charge. I am on high alert 24/7 for exactly those sorts of things. '

Now I can think of a lot of words to describe this writing. 'Fanatical' and 'Puritanical' come to mind. It's the kind of Bad Religion which sees life as an inconvenient distraction you have to get through in order to reach heaven, with all pleasures and human interaction being temptations which are best shunned. But it doesn't have any of the joy of the Lord or the sense of being part of a positive, self-assured community which can make both puritanism and fundamentalism very positive forces in some people's lives. I might also describe the writing as 'mean spirited' or 'just plain nasty'. But mad? The product of mental illness? I think this lets him off the hook too easily.

I still don't quite know what follows from any of this.

* I say 'alleged' because there is a widely disseminated tradition that he behaves as a perfect gentleman towards his girlfriends, and is quite charming towards any other women he happens to bump into.

Thursday, August 31, 2006

When Pants Ignite

Every time that people talk about "creating the characters," I always say I co-created them. I co-created Spider-Man with Steve Ditko. I co-created The Fantastic Four and the Hulk with Kirby. I co-created Iron Man with Don Heck. Very often, when people would write about us in the newspapers or the trades, they would say, "Stan Lee – Creator of Spider-Man," and that would get Ditko angry – but I had nothing to do with that! I have no control over what journalists write.

Stan Lee, interviewed on IGN, June 2000


Celebrating his 65th years at Marvel, Stan "The Man" Lee comes face-to-face with some of his greatest creations of all time. Five all new 10 page stories by Stan Lee with 10-page backup tales from top talents in the industry, along with reprints of classic Stan Lee stories. Stan Lee Meets Spider-Man. Stan Lee Meets Dr. Strange. Stan Lee Meets The Thing. Stan Lee Meets Dr Doom. Stan Lee Meets The Silver Surfer.

Marvel comics flyer, September 2006.

(Stan Lee's name appears 17 times in this leaflet. A no-prize for anyone who guesses the number of occurrences of the words "Ditko", "Kirby", "Jack", "Steve". The cover for the Spider-Man comic appears to be have been copied from Ditko's art on Amazing Fantasy #15, and the cover for the Thing appears to have been copied from Kirby's art on Fantastic Four #51.)

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

A.N W.I.L.S.O.N I.S A S.H.I.T

For those of us who have read A.N Wilson's mendacious biography of C.S Lewis or his goofy book on Jesus this is quite siimply the funniest thing which has ever happened in the entire history of English literature.

Davewatch

"The strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force are irreconcilable, in my view. That’s the whole point of the debate. The weak nuclear force (YHWH, he/she/it, Marxist-feminists, the Feminist-Homosexualist Axis) wants to be the strong nuclear force (God, masculine men) and can’t be and therefore everywhere across time and space is doing what he/she/it has been doing in our own society since 1970. Screwing things up. The science isn’t suspect, I don’t think. The he/she/its don’t like it because if follows the evidence and concludes that he is preferable to he/she/it. Strong instead of weak."

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Walking With Jesuses

If you enjoy this essay, please consider purchasing a copy of Where Dawkins Went Wrong and Other Theological Blockbusters from this address - a collection of  some of the best and most-linked-to essays from this blog and its predecessor. It contains my five part assault critique of 'The God Delusion', along with essays on gay bishops, the 'gospel' of Judas, the 'legend' of the three wise men.







...and then one Thursday, nearly 2,000 years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change...



The Genesis Code; The Gospel Code; The Magdalene Deception – W.H Smiths bookshelves are sagging under the weight of silly conspiracy theories about Jesus. So the time is right for the BBC to do a documentary called The Miracles of Jesus. The series promises that it will 'decipher' the meanings of Jesus' miracles. A cipher, you see, is a sort of code. If we can fit the words 'Jesus' and 'Code' into the same sentence, then maybe the young people will turn on the TV during the godslot. Or, on the other hand, maybe they won't.
The shtick is that the programme is presented by a Muslim, BBC war-reporter Rageh Omar, who pretends that he is looking at the Gospels with an outsider's eye. The last time the BBC did a major series on Jesus, it was presented by Jeremy Bowen, another news reporter. God forbid that religious documentaries should be presented by historians, archaeologists or clergymen. That would be old fashioned and deferential; it would suggest that we lived in a world where experts taught and everyone else learns from them. TV shows of this kind have to be presented by naive seekers-after-truth. Unfortunately, it's clear that Omar is better informed than the format permits him to let on. He keeps saying 'many scholars believe....' which makes us suspect that he has read actual books – but he isn't allowed to tell us which books, or what they said.
The hidden message which he finds in the Gospels is – and stop me if you've heard this before – that Jesus believed himself to be the Son of God. Not only that, but he thought that is was necessary to suffer a violent death in order to overthrow Satan. Oh, and his disciples very probably believed that he had come back from the dead – in what was 'perhaps' the greatest miracle of all.
Reith forbid that a Sunday afternoon TV series about Jesus should contain anything so mundane as any actual passages from the Bible. Oh no; it uses 'special photography and computer generated images to bring the miracles of Jesus to life'. That is to say, actors wander around dusty landscapes and roll their eyes a lot. Jesus looks Wild and Strange. The Disciples look Surprised and Foreign. There are subtitles. There is some fairly tasteful pre-watershed flagellation, so I assume that the language must be Aramaic. We get to see the scenes repeatedly, from different angles, sometimes in black and white. Jesus turns water into wine in Matrix-style bullet time.
Since Walking With Dinosaurs the buffer-zone between documentary and fiction has been hopelessly compromised. A sensible viewer might reasonably watch a computer generated reconstruction and say 'How do we know that the disciples laughed when Jesus refused to exorcise the gentile woman's daughter?' or 'How do we know that a brontosaurus marked out its territory with wee?' The answer, in both cases, is 'We made it up. Out of our heads.' But Omar is inclined to treat the filmed reconstructions as if they were the events themselves. He then sets about decoding their meanings. Since the dramas are based on someone's interpretation of what must have happened, this is a dangerously circular argument. Each scene is introduced with a little caption that says something like 'Sea of Galilee, A.D 28' which insidiously suggests that we are watching documentary, rather than historical fiction.
So, after he has been baptized by John the Baptist, we are told that Jesus had a mystical experience, seeing a dove and hearing the voice of God in his head. We see a computer generated dove super-imposed over the actor's face, to make it quite clear that this is a subjective psychological event experienced by Jesus alone. When mystics have such visionary experiences they often become quite confused and have to spend weeks working out the meaning of their vision. And sure enough, we see Jesus spending the month after his baptism in the wilderness, looking very agitated and confused. Omar draws various conclusions from this: Jesus state of mind suggests that he himself was surprised by his vision, and doubtful about the nature of his mission and his role. The trouble with this is, the fourth Gospel is quite explicit that it was John, not Jesus who saw the the Dove. ('And John bare record, saying 'I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.') The other Gospels could be read either way. And you have to push the text quite hard to put Jesus in a confused state during the next 40 days. The Gospels describes a personal Devil tempting him, and Jesus responding confidently with quotations from scripture.
All of which is a shame, because Omar's central argument is actually rather good. Jesus was not the only exorcist and healer in first century Palestine – so why did he inspire devotion in some people and hatred in others? The answer is that his miracles conveyed a very specific and shocking message, quite different from the other wonder-workers. For example:

  • Exorcists traditionally used spells and rituals to evoke the power of God: Jesus simply told evil spirits to go away, as if he personally had authority over them. But the only person who has authority over Satan is God. It is very significant that the Gadarene swine ran into the sea, because Leviathan is a symbol of the devil, Leviathan lives in the sea, and in the Old Testament, YHWH is sometimes depicted overcoming Leviathan. (Er...nice try.)


  • When a crippled man was brought to him, instead of healing him, Jesus announced that his sins were forgiven – something which only God can do. Omar implies that in saying this, he is pointing out (or possibly deciphering) a previously neglected significance. In fact, the meaning of the story is absolutely explicit in the text of Mark's Gospel.'Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God only?'


  • On another occasion, Jesus calmed a storm on the sea of Galilee. He seemed to be giving orders to the elements – which everyone knew was God's job. Indeed, one of the Psalms specifically talks about God controlling a storm. (We aren't told which Psalm, because that might make us switch over to Emmerdale instead.) But there was no need to do any deciphering to discover this, because it is quite explicit in the synoptic account. 'Who can this man be? Even the wind and the waves obey him!'


  • Finally, the disciples are shocked (in the film, if not in the Bible) when he changes his mind and heals the gentiles daughter; because Jesus appears to be unilaterally extending the privileges of the chosen people to a goy – which surely is God's prerogative. Omar goes so far as to say that Jesus himself is surprised by this; a pretty weak point, since Jesus has on several occasions argued from the Old Testament that God is concerned with non-Jews.

Most interestingly, we are told (without supporting evidence) that firstcenturyjews regarded Rome, the occupier of the Holy City, as the immanent representation of Satan on earth. The old conundrum – 'If Jesus was a spiritual leader, why did he end up being killed as a traitor by the Romans? But if he was a political revolutionary in what sense was he a spiritual leader?' turns out to be a false dichotomy. Jesus 'would have' regarded curing demon-possessed Cyro-Phoenicians and freeing Jerusalem from the Romans as the same kind of action – kicking Satan out of places he wasn't supposed to be. If this is so, then throwing himself on Roman justice and allowing himself to be killed on the symbol of Roman oppression was a clear and symbolic way of saying 'I am engaged in the ultimate conflict with Satan.'
What the programme needed – and I never thought I would say this about a BBC religious documentary – was a healthy dose of skepticism. It is a good idea to discuss the significance of the miracles as stories, without wasting too much time worrying about whether it is scientifically or philosophically possible for them to have occurred. But once you have decided to treat something as a story, surely you have to ask: Who told this story? Under what circumstances? To whom? What, to coin a phrase, was it's life-setting? But Omar accepts uncritically that the Gospels are reports about incidents in Jesus' life – possibly inaccurate and biased, but essentially historical accounts. The story of Jesus temptation is, for him, a psychologically plausible event in the life of a visionary: the idea that '40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness' could be an allegorical or symbolic reference to the book of Exodus isn't even hinted at. We are told that 'some scholars believe' that the calming of the sea isn't literally true, because it is 'just too spectacular.' But he doesn't mention that the parallels with the book of Jonah – or indeed, the allusion to Psalm 107 – make other scholars think that the story is a literary creation.
Perhaps this doesn't matter. Mark reproduces a story in which Jesus acted as if he was God. And Mark certainly believed that Jesus actually was God, which is why he thought the story worth telling. It may not make much difference whether he was repeating a story told him by an eye-witness (say, Peter); recording one element of a 'Jesus tradition' that had been embellished by many hands; or making it up himself. Either way, the meaning is the same. And this really is as far as you can go. The New Testament writers write about a Jesus who believed he was God, because that is what they believed; and what they believed he believed. Is it what The Historical Jesus believed? We certainly can't find out by reading the Gospels and trying to 'decipher' what is blindingly obvious on every page.
When the BBC transmits this kind of programme, some Christian always stands up and says 'Pah! You wouldn't make a film that was nearly so skeptical about Mohammed!' I would be inclined to draw a different conclusion. You wouldn't make a film about Mohammed that gradually and tentatively came to the conclusion that he may perhaps have believed that the Koran was written by Allah and delivered to him by an Angel – and which expected your audience to be surprised by this information. Most people have got a rough idea what Islam teaches about the Prophet. But despite an Established Church and a degree of compulsory religious indoctrination that would be un-believable to most Americans, the population of the UK seems to be largely ignorant about The Jesus of the Gospels. (Look at the furore over The Passion of the Christ: most commentators seemed genuinely not to know what significance the Crucifixion has in Christianity.) Most of us seem to sincerely believe that Hippy Jesus – the one who preached peace and love and was murdered for it by those pesky Italians – is the one venerated by the Church. So I guess there is some point in the BBC using CGI to remind us that Scary Jesus – the person who said he was God and lived up to it – is the only Jesus you'll find in the Bible.
And yes. They do quote the appropriate bit of C.S Lewis.