Peace and Love

It’s been a while since we last shared a communication 4 weeks ago, although to be fair, a week at Glastonbury effectively took up 2 weeks of my thoughts. It seems like a huge tranche of time – one so large it could only fit into the new Vauxhall Meriva with it’s FlexDoor system – allegedly unique for a car of it’s kind (though not for a Mazda RX8, Rolls Royce Phantom, Austin FX4 London Hackney carriage, or indeed any one of over 500 cars manufactured in the first half of the 20^th Century). Plus ca change (plus c’est la meme chose).

This wicked new set of suicide doors set me thinking (you would have to be a freak like me to know how that works {note 1}). What if there really is nothing new under the sun? Are we doomed (blessed?) to travel on a mobius band whereby Euclid only gave two options, rediscovering and re-contextualising the same old scene {note 2}. Our friends at Vauxhall have justified the unconventional doors in terms of ease of access – no shit … doors that let you get inside something and then allow you to access outside again – but with a focus on the likely target market of young families and oldsters, rather than the Mazda RX8s yuppie or the Phantoms plutocrat.

For me it was only a hop, skip and a jump over a synaptic gap to make the link with other things that last forever – religion and bureaucracy.

Whilst not all religions claim to be a force for goodness as it is widely understood, the mainstreams of the Christian and Islam beliefs are amongst the many that do purport to offer a way of truth, enlightenment and generosity of spirit to one’s brother man. How then can today’s Iranian islamists believe that stoning to death an alleged adulterer perpetrates justice? To further stretch credulity, the same civilization really believes that locking up a young alleged adulterer for four year until she is old enough to be stoned to death is warranted, as indeed is the choosing of the rocks used to carry out this heinous sentence (which are chosen so as to maximize suffering and not cause instant unconsciousness or death-dealing trauma).

Wars fought in the name of religion, individuals tortured and deathed, cruelties unimaginable to today’s sanitised morality are more understandable when read of in the history books. Time lends a distance, a tut tut and a shaken head that implies ‘bless ‘em, they knew no better’. Add to that the dichotomies that exist in some of the notable characters that have perpetrated some of histories most abhorrent religious atrocities, and the shaking of the head becomes more vigorous. Torquemada for instance was a Dominican Friar before he headed the Spanish Inquisition with their butchery and fanatical zeal. Saladin studied Arab poetry and was known for his chivalry as well as for successfully resisting Richard Coeur de Lion in his fight to spread Christianity.

But that was then. Since those barbaric times we have had the benefit of Tony Bair as a Middle East peace envoy …

And let us not just pick on the followers of Allah (pbuh – now that’s what you call hedging your bets). How can the Christian religion, with it’s teachings of tolerance and gentleness and equality still have pockets of resistance that disallow women to attain high priesthood, will not sanctify gay marriage, and forces unwanted children on the poor and ill-equipped? It beats me, and yet … and yet … once a week (only on a Sunday) I give my thanks to my god for all the important and beautiful things that I have been granted. So, if my god instructed me to go out and stone queers and ho s, would I feel that I was contractually obliged to fulfill my part of the bargain? Would I do it for gain (HOW many virgins?) or out of fear (the devil’s pitchfork is soooo sharp).

I believe that much of the bad stuff that is associated with religion is due to the bureaucracy baggage that comes with all worship – but the secular world is bedecked with this schmutter too. Well done Boris Johnson for supporting the Schonrocks in their right to allow their kids to cycle to school. Whether you believe that a 5 year olds should be cycling through London accompanied by only an 8 year old sibling is irrelevant; the nanny state must have it’s umbrella redistributed from hand to rectum to allow life a fighting chance to be supercallifragillisticexpealli - freakin’- docious again.

In Britain we have fucked things up for at least two generations of kids; on the tv news last night the brother of that murderous nutter Raoul Moat, killer of his ex and her new boyfriend (and now himself) who had been terrorizing a huge area for 7 days and shooting policemen, complained. Just as Moat had complained that nobody cared about him just before ending his miserable life, so his whining brother moaned that he had been allowed to see the incident on news coverage. There will be lawyers earning fees on that case as I type, or my name is not Anne.

On the 70^th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, when ‘the few’ saw off the Luftewaffe, the mirror now truly shows a nation characterized by the antipodean term ‘whingeing pom’. Much of the blame must be linked to the desire to kowtow to the politically correct, health and safety-rich and common sense-lite doctrine of homogeneity, peddled initially by our own governments and now being fed to us by gavage from the European state. Quite why we have sleepwalked into the control of countries which have given us Hitler, Berlusconi and Sarkosy escapes me, but I have mutely done so along with the rest of the UK.

We are where we are.

It is never too late to change though; a policy of containment for the feral hoodies which infect all areas (with possible sterilization?) and an attitude of zero tolerance to ‘proper’ crime would be a start. Throwing off the shackles of cotton-woolism and clearing the statute books of stupid and repressive law – especially that from Europe – will help too. Challenging impractical addenda to The Human Rights Act must be a given; when we cannot even guarantee our own pensions in our dotage, how can we afford to give asylum to gays who choose to live here because their religiously repressed home country will not tolerate their sexuality? Please believe me – I am not racist, homophobic or xenophobic, but I neither am I willing to bite my tongue any longer to avoid the taunts of liberals.

Our children need the space and time and freedom to explore the world, to be given the responsibility to make mistakes and learn. What they don’t need is to be denied classic tales such as Little Red Riding Hood (she walks alone in the woods), Hansel and Gretel (abandoned) and Cinderella (overtones of slavery). Parents must to be allowed the choice to slap their child if they see fit rather than the being criminalized for it as our European overlords wish. Kids have to be allowed to take a piece of birthday cake into nursery for their friends without the Pre-School Nutrition Project posting the parent’s names on a tree in the village square. There will be mistakes. There will be tragedy. There will be blame and finger-pointing.

Once again I say ‘Plus ca change (plus c’est la meme chose)’

Living up to my nom de plume a little more today, but peace and love at ya all my brothers and sisters; as much as could be fitted in the new Vauxhall Meriva with it’s fabulous FlexDoor system.

Anne.

Note 1: Just as Leonard Cohen talks of a lover who handled him like a piece of meat; ‘You’d have to be a man to know how good that feels’ according to LC.

Note 2 More musical reference, this time to the King of Cool, Mr. Bryan Ferry, on Flesh and Blood, his 1980 Roxy Music album (as we old timers call them).