Today, regardless of what we think we are doing, we are not remembering the dead of that horrific war. The so-called ‘Great War’ is now all but beyond the horizon of living memory. Instead we are sharing in – not remembering – an imagined past; a glorious celebration of invented heroes who serve only to justify more modern, less morally justifiable wars – land and resource grabs.
Repression and the Rise of Capitalism à la Foucault
Nothing short of revolution, suggests Michel Foucault, will extricate “We other Victorians” from the polymorphous mechanisms of power which have conditioned us over millennia. The exercise of power has undergone a transformation from the feudal spectacle of the scaffold to the age of repression
Open Your Hand and Let Go
“Letting you go has always been difficult.” I haven’t seen her since 1991, and still she remains one of the growing number of people for whom my desire to see again and hold close knows no limit. She told me stories, she tucked me into bed at night, fretted over me when I was sick, … Continue reading Open Your Hand and Let Go
Horrific Loss of Life at the Hajj in Mecca
Crowd control takes planning, and controlling crowds of the size of those who visit Mecca each year requires excellent planning. Stampedes happen, and this is not the fault of the people caught in the panic – no matter their ethnicity.
But To Me, You’re As Fair As You Were, Maggie
This was a human catastrophe, and my fear is that the pomp and remembrance of their sacrifice serves only to veil the true horror of the war. Seldom do we hear our history teachers tell that this war was futile, and we are seldom, if ever, told the human stories of the pain and the suffering.
That’s the Wrong Way to Tickle Mary
Let me tell you this, my buttocks now bear the permanent impress of the weave of the bus seat’s upholstery. If I had thought that the English Channel would have offered the reprieve of a boat to walk about on, I was sorely mistaken. We made our passage to Europe under the waves via the leaky Channel Tunnel.
Clean Your Own Damn House For Goodness Sake!
Let’s not be kidding ourselves on. Having a maid is nothing more than a status symbol and yet another way to humiliate and oppress another human being. Yes, hiring a skivvy – because that is what is being done – does create employment, every bit as much as it allows people with excess money to do less real work.
Giving the Last Rites to Authentic Christianity
At some point in the story of the Christian community the Church became the preserve of the well-to-do, the polite, and the fashionable, and was forever lost to poor, the outcasts, and the simple working people who were the earliest Christians. Up to this point in history the Christian faith was the laughing stock of the wealthy and privileged, it was the comical cult of a criminal provincial holy man, and better suited to fishermen and the lowest class of prostitutes.
