Philosophy And Waterfowl

Salmonella Transponder is often regarded as the first female philosopher to engage openly in Socratic dialogue with waterfowl. Her Dialogue Concerning Existentialism With Various Mallard Ducks is - quite rightly - regarded as a classic of philosophical literature, especially in its relation to waterfowl. The book is credited with revolutionising the whole question of what stance to adopt when throwing bread crusts to ducks, at least - that is - in the modern western world.

However, Transponder's later work, such as A Treatise On The Mind/Body/Eider Duck Problem, did - according to many commentators - stray too far down a rather esoteric path, accessible only to philosophy professionals and the more erudite of mute swans.

Although, in her latter years, when Emeritus Professor of Embden Geese And Symbolic Logic at Cambridge High Street Fish and Chip shop, Transponder did return to her earlier, more straightforward, philosophical position. This was after she concluded that Saussarian linguistics was woefully inadequate in its inability to successful resolve the Two Mandarin Ducks And A Trumpeter Swan Paradox that has so bedevilled post-Husserlian phenomenology.

Unfortunately, her inability to reconcile post-modern relativity with a metaphysics of Aylesbury ducks led to the depression that caused her to take her own life, in late 1998, with a fatal overdose of goose-liver paté.

Notes and Comments: 03/03/2009

Apparently, there are some people out there who – according to the Torygraph anyway – actually choose to dunk chocolate-coated biscuits in their tea and/or coffee. No wonder the country is going to the dogs. Pah.

“Narrative tension is primarily about….” A fascinating interview with the spiffing Ian McEwan in the New Yorker. It is very long though.

“This looks like another case where the news media opted for making an emotional connection with their audience rather than enlightening anybody, where emoting took precedence over analysing important events or explaining the world – a symptom of the trends in journalism which some of us have criticised for more than decade.” Mick Hume at Sp!ked on the press coverage of the sad death of Ivan Cameron.

Learning To Love Big Brother

Somewhere in my folder of unfinished short stories is a short fragment, which is the very beginning of a sort of …. Confession, I suppose, by a torturer for some unspecified regime. The fragment is years old and I’ve never really returned to it – maybe out of some sort of fear. Fear that I might – as you do when writing stories – find some part of yourself in it that you don’t really like, or fear that I couldn’t get it right, or just fear of the subject matter.

Anyway, I wanted to show – and this also made me nervous of returning to the story in case I couldn’t get this tone right – that this torturer did what he did out of love, not of hate. That he did what he did out of love for his country, out of love for his leader, his party and – even – out of a sort of love for those he tortured.

He saw those he tortured as a kind of errant children, people who he had to attempt to return to the fold. Unfortunately, he felt that he had to be a very strict parent, but it seemed the only way to make them understand the error of their ways and how they had upset everyone in the state apparatus through their mistaken lives, views and acts. These errant children of the state had to be made to understand – the torturer believed – that the state only wanted the best for them.

It was to be an exploration of the ‘love’ the authoritarian has for those under their control.

I was reminded of this putative story of mine, when I read this at the excellent Heresy Corner a while ago, which – in turn - also reminded me of something Blair said around the time of the F1/Ecclestone affair, summed up by his “I am a pretty straight sort of guy” attitude. Blair seemed genuinely incredulous that anyone could ever accuse him of doing wrong because he was “one of the good guys”. There has been – at least since the days of Thatcher – this belief on the Left that they are the ‘good guys’, the men people in the white hats battling selflessly against the evil Right, Tories, capitalists and other wrongdoers and ideological miscreants. This is why Labour folk such as Straw and Blunkett cannot see that the ‘good things’ that they do as ‘good people’ from the ‘good side’ of the ideological divide for the ‘good of the populace’ can be anything other than ‘good for the country and its people’.

They do these authoritarian things out of love for us, for our own good. These people mostly come from the post-60s ideological Left, where they were always the good guys, against Vietnam, Watergate, cruise missiles, Northern Ireland, Thatcher, Monetarism, yuppies and so on. The Left has always liked to believe it has right, morality on its side, that it is leading us all – no matter how unwilling and ungrateful - to some promised land.

However, as the physicist Steven Weinberg once said, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” As I said in another piece here there is a lot of overlap between religion and ideology. Just a glance at Fascism, Nazism, communism, even the French and other revolutions shows that nominally ‘good’ people can do evil in the name of ideology too.

So, even when they are out there – on the line – saving us from the naughty terrorists and other evil-doers, even saving us from ourselves by creating the perfect society where all of us will live long, healthy, fulfilled lives and all we can do is respond with small-minded nit-picking and carping.

Instead, all we have to do is trust them, see they are doing it all for our own good, and – in time - we will learn finally how to love Big Brother.

Notes and Comments: 02/03/2009

Yes, it is the return of Notes & Comments, but without… er… the Comments today.

NOTES:

Via Stephen Law, Amanda Gefter the New Scientist book review editor on how to spot a hidden religious agenda in ‘so-called science books’.

The excellent as usual Heresy Corner on the Goodwin pension business.

“Blasphemy Day International is an international campaign seeking to establish September 30th as a national day to promote free speech and stand up in a show of solidarity for the freedom to mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal.” Join the Farcebook group here (via The Freethinker).

Monday Poem: Haunted

The house will haunt you long after
you leave it. Opening the doors
of all your dreams, to take
possession, never let you go.

The night, once more, will find you there,
back walking dusty passageways
and living in cold, ancient rooms,
peering through clouded windowpanes.

The time will come for you to walk
away from yesterdays. Although,
it's harder than you think to close
the doors of all those memories.

 

[See here for an explanation of these posts labelled as Monday Poem]

Monday Poem: An Explanation

Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

The Tragic Death of the World's Greatest Film Actress

Despite the tragic accident than claimed her life at the relatively young age of 35, Spoon Llamagasket will - most likely - be regarded as the greatest film actress of our age.

While only appearing in a bit part in a single almost insignificant scene in the 1990's biggest box-office flop Return of the Clone of the Terminator Wars IV: The Revenge of The Stoats, where she played a night-club barmaid, Llamagasket's star quality shone through. Although she didn't have a single line of dialogue and only had to raise a single quizzical eyebrow, her appearance in this one scene shot her to mega-stardom almost overnight. That scene, despite the 137 takes it took for her to get her eyebrow to rise at just the right moment that the script demanded, is indelibly etched in the memory of so many film fans worldwide. You only have to mention the topless bar scene in Return of the Clone of the Terminator Wars IV: the Revenge of the Stoats for many a film fan's eyes to glaze over in reverie.

Llamagasket's fame seemed to grow exponentially from the moment of that film's release, especially from its premier night where Spoon discovered her one true great talent, the art of falling out of her dress right in front of the hordes of press cameramen. Consequently, she secured invitations to all the major film premieres worldwide, and at each one managed to fall out of her dress at precisely the right moment and with such studied casual artistry, earning not only lots of media attention for her, but for the film she was there, at least nominally, to watch.

However, yesterday evening, when stepping out of her limousine at the world premier of All My Tax Returns II at The glamorous Wigan Movie Multiplex, tragedy struck. With only one leg out of the car, Spoon Llamagasket's designer dress collapsed around her a moment too soon, forcing her to stumble as she left the car, hitting her head hard on a slightly-too eager cameraman's zoom lens, rendering her immediately unconscious.

Unfortunately, the press of photographers surged forward, in their understandable public duty to get as many photographs as they could of Llamagasket naked in a puddle, which meant that the barriers holding them back from the red carpet gave way under the pressure from so many heavily-built middle-aged men struggling with unwieldy camera equipment.

Unfortunately, just as she was regaining consciousness and beginning to smile through the blizzard of strobe-light camera flashes, all the photographers fell in a heap on top of her. So, at the tender age of just 35, Spoon Llamagasket was crushed to death under a massive avalanche of excessively-corpulent press photographers.

The funeral will take place in three days time at the Wigan Crematorium, where Spoon Llamagasket's casket will be slid under the crematorium's door at 3:30 PM GMT.