Our Liberal Democrat life class

Seeking to draw what consolation I can from the Liberal-Conservative victory in the recent General Election, I am reminded it is a life of surprises.

As Prefab Sprout put it:

Darling it's a life of surprises
It's no help growing older or wiser
You don't have to pretend you're not crying
When it's even in the way that you're walking

Few "progressive" voters really believed the Liberal Democrats would actually go in to coalition with the regressive forces of conservatism, despite what the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg had warned.

Indeed subsequent polls indicated that most Lib Dem voters, on a scale of 4:1, wished for a coalition with the Labour Party.

Yet how much was this actually a case of wishful-thinking?

Continued at UKSpirituality

Back to Labour

Well, it's been a strange election. It seemed only a couple of months ago that the Tories were a shoo-in. Then came the televised debates where people were tempted by a third choice - the Liberal Democrats - and the competition became up for grabs again, with the possibility of a hung parliament that would leave no one party in power and could mean coalition government and proportional representation if the Lib Dems got their way, which would bring us closer to a kind of democracy.

Two months ago I was going to vote for Jenny Sutton, of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Alliance , who were the most Left wing party standing.

Then I, like many, was attracted to the Lib Dems because I don't like the sitting Labour candidate very much and I would like to see PR, so my vote for an obscure Marxist party can one day count for something (it's a safe Labour seat, so my vote currently counts for nothing).

But on refection, I'm going to stay with Labour, especially now it looks like the Tories are likely to win a majority and go about asset-stripping the country, embedding inequality and lining the pockets of their City friends, all in the name of austerity, yah?

Because when it comes down to it, I will always choose the side of the working class. As it currently stands their only genuine hope is Labour and in the months and years of recrimination to come I want to feel I did what was right, despite everything.

A surprising source of redemption in the most powerful film of the year

One of the good things about being stranded in England is being able to catch some movies (they are always dubbed at home - a rare example of Italian inelegance). I've been particularly lucky that it's been at a time when some of the finest films of the year are on release - Kick Ass, with it's explosive c-word scene an instant classic, I am Love, an art-house meditation on the brutal authenticity of love, and City of Life and Death, on the pitilessness of war and specifically the 1937 "Rape of Nanking".

With our own focus on the Holocaust, Chinese suffering in the 1930s and 40s tends to be overlooked, yet between 10-20 million lost their lives. Before the war in the West had even begun (and long before Pearl Harbor) the Japanese had invaded China and sacked its then-capital Nanking.

The atrocities committed presaged those to come, as graphically portrayed in the film, the most convincing depiction of World War Two war crime since the Russian Come and See and certainly superior to Schindler's List, not least because for most of the characters there is no happy ending. It is also a far more complex film, making an attempt to understand this dreadful "phenomenon" from both sides and even daring to empathise to a limited extent with the perpetrators. We criticse China's freedoms, but I cannot imagine a Western film as even-handed - Letters from Iwo Jima perhaps, but the context was very different.

A further example of how it challenges our preconceptions is the portrayal of the leading "hero", Nazi official, John Rabe, German consul in Nanking. Rabe represents the refugees in the so-called Zone of Safety and does all he can, alongside American missionary Minnie Vautrin, to protect the terrified civilians. Unlike Oscar Schindler, it appears Rabe was a convinced Nazi, although for his activities he ended up being questioned by the Gestapo on his return to Germany and lived in poverty after the war, supported by a grateful Chinese government. Traumatised by what she witnessed, Vautrin committed suicide at home in Illinois in 1940.

What comes out of the film quite strongly is how, in the wrong circumstances - inevitably unlimited power - human beings can behave to other human beings. It is ironic that Rabe, apparently at the time a true believer in the Nazi's perversion of Nietzsche, should, when faced by its consequences, become the champion of the weak. It is perhaps one of the few sources of redemption in this outstanding, unflinching film.

I also saw Roman Polanski's highly-rated The Ghost Writer but thought it was crap.

A Space Idiocy

Posted complete because of technical problems at UKSpirituality...

A debate took place recently about whether we should actively attempt to contact aliens, and it made me think how very like the inhabitants of planet Krikket from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy we humans are.

The Krikkets lived on a planet completely encompassed by cloud (a lot like England, now I think about it) until one day a spaceship burst through the atmosphere and crashed.

The event caused the Kirkkets to actually look up for the first time and contemplate what lay beyond. They soon knocked together a spaceship and saw the splendor of the universe for the first time.

One astronaut turned to the other. ‘It’ll have to go,’ he said, and thus the galaxy’s most destructive intergalactic war was born.

There was another scene in Hitchhikers when as a punishment they shackled someone to a chair and forced them to see themselves in contrast to the immensity of the universe; how, in a kind of reverse-telescopic effect, they became less and less consequential. It invariably sent the victim mad.

It was actually not unlike this.

There are apparently as many planets in the universe as there are grains of sand on every beach on the world. Think about that next time you bang out your deck shoes. All those tiny planets!

It’s been said that we have replaced our longing for the Messiah for the dream of alien-contact.

I signed up to SETI once – I could see the value in searching for electronic signals from outer-space, and I think the alternative of looking for carbon dioxide (based on the principal that aliens would fart the same as us) is also pretty cool.

However, I think the idea of actually beaming signals in to space to deliberately contact aliens is really, really stupid.

As Dr Marek Kukula, public astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, said: part of me is with the enthusiasts and I would like us to try to make proactive contact with a wiser, more peaceful civilisation.

But he was concerned at the risks.

We might like to assume that if there is intelligent life out there it is wise and benevolent… but of course we have no evidence for this. Given that the consequences of contact may not be what we initially hoped for, then we need governments and the UN to get involved in any discussions.

Given that the consequences of contact may not be what we initially hoped for.

Yeah, like they might eat us.

With an almost infinite amount of planets, it seems sensible to conclude that there are an almost infinite amount of possibilities, both benevolent and malign.

The smart thing would be to hunker down in the corner of the cave until we have developed enough tools to protect ourselves should we venture outside, or worse – something come in.

But, like the inhabitants of Krikket, I suspect we have an exaggerated sense of our own worth.

Our expectation of “salvation” from the stars could simply turn out to be somebody else’s lunch.

The Tao of David Beckham

Watching the legendary footballer sobbing as he realized he had broken his Achilles tendon and would not make it to the World Cup, I felt real sadness. Not just for England’s World Cup chances but for the man himself, whose serene attitude exemplifies a kind of oneness at odds with the fractured celebrity-culture the Beckham “brand” paradoxically embodies...

Continued at UKSpirituality

If religion is the new rock and roll, is Unitarianism the new Indi?

Of course rock and roll was the first rock and roll, then it was comedy, next food, but certainly since 9/11 religion has been the new rock and roll and no, not in a good way, but that was what rock and roll first represented: lewd hips, long hair, parental outrage. Rebellion, conflict, the shock of the new – counter to the prevailing culture, whatever it was...

Continued at UkSpirituality

The value of poverty, for those who can afford it

Contemplating the latest bout of politics at the office, I resolved that rather than get drawn in I would attempt to cultivate a more “religious” attitude. I imagined a more detached me; forgiving, unencumbered, quite possibly a bit smug too...

Continued at UKSpirituality