Fighting the Fight

Back in Horseshoe Cottage with the wind and rain outside, we might ask ourselves why didn't we didn't stay below, enjoying the winter sunshine on the Guadiana? What I reply to myself, over and above the family and practical reasons, is that there is time enough for perfect peace in eternity; meanwhile, in the few short years remaining to me, there is perhaps some small contribution I can make to the battle of life, even if it is simply a matter of attending to it and suffering it. Once aboard my boat, it has a certain habit of drifting out of my ken like a cloud of smoke!

This weekend I find myself more interested in following the fortunes of the British Labour Party than I ever have been before. While I would have my reservations about Mr Corbyn as a potential leader, I follow his story with interest for the simple reason that he appears honest and largely, in his attitude to the Syrian war, correct. He currently appears to be fighting for his political life. I expect he will lose it, but that only increases my sympathy for him.

I'm going to paste below a piece that I have just written for the Brandsma Review. I found myself giving the controversy about all the forgoing a rather novel twist, setting it in the context of another cultural war....

Yours etc, Offended!

and why Jeremy Corbyn should be attended to.

I know a grandmother who got into trouble with her daughter-in-law lately for trying to tell her grandchild that he had been made by God. ‘Nonsense, don’t ever mention that stuff to him again. Jim and I made him!’

Some people are going one better, and insisting that they make themselves. The media seem to reckon that their consumers are getting bored with photos of homosexuals getting ‘married’; they’ve moved on to holding up transexuals for our admiration. I used to take transvestites in my stride, not without sympathy for the  poor confused individuals, but something has changed with the ‘transexual’ variety; they insist we all buy into their self-mutilating fantasy-life, along with the media, the UN, and all the great and good of the enlightened democracies.

That old killjoy Technology  may be spoiling the fun with its sex-prediction, but up until very lately the first Word that was said about us, the moment when we entered human society, was either ‘it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl’. A sane voice like that of Dale O’Leary in The Gender Agenda may add that ‘biological sex is not determined by external organs, but by genetic structure. Every cell of the human body is clearly marked male or female.’ That only confirms, should it really be necessary, that our sex is an objective fact, bestowing a particular kind of orientation which in a coherent person follows through our whole personality.

We got the Gender Agenda - it’s all only a ‘social construct’- stuff trotted out with depressing predictability from our own grand-daughter, just down from reading psychology at UCD. “Is that what they’ve been teaching you?” “Oh no, it’s just what I think.” Well I say, when such facts as those of our sex are dismissed as mere ‘social constructs’ which a person may change at will, then language loses its meaning, along with everything else; it is hard to find any basis for conversation within our own culture, and we are confronted with the death of a civilisation; if we value it, being offended may be rather too mild a reaction.

Martine Delaney, a transgender Green Party candidate in Tasmania’s Federal Election, has lodged an official complaint to the Anti-Discrimination Commission about a booklet produced by Australia’s Catholic bishops entitled Don’t Mess with Marriage. He claims it is ‘offensive, humiliating and insulting’. They’re all off to a ‘conciliation conference’. Da-di-da; it’s sad to see even the Aussies flailing about in such mire. Maybe Germaine Greer hit the appropriate response over in Melbourne, where she ruffled a lot of the politically correct feathers by remarking that “I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock!”

But there is a lot more to the fantasy-life that we are expected to buy into than such matters as transexuals and homosexual marriage. I might mention the notion that the USA and western democracy embodies all that is good, and has some divine right to decide who shall be permitted to exist and who not. It’s not immediately obvious to me why a Mr Trump promising to “bomb the Hell out of Isis” should not be labelled a terrorist; actually he frightens me rather more than the Jihadis.

In point of fact it is neither easy to find an appropriate response to homosexuals, transexuals and their pc friends, nor to Jihadis intent on destroying Western civilisation in a different way. Hard enough as it is for the likes of us Brandsma readers, I imagine it is just about impossible to do so if one happens to be a young Moslem in the West, constantly exposed to put-downs of his religion while struggling with serious issues of identity; and if we ‘Christians’ in the West have lost the ability to communicate with each other, what possible hope is there for dialogue with them?

When one is comfortable and affluent, with all the props for one’s ego that could be desired, it is very difficult to realise how important even warped religion can be to a person who has nothing else going for them. One is threatening to deprive them of their very operating system. It is not at all surprising when their anger and confusion spills over way beyond taking offence and into terrorism, and if we want to see an end to it, we had better start by getting the planks out of our own eyes. We might make some kind of a start by distancing ourselves from the overgrown adolescents who thought it was clever to lampoon the Prophet Mohammed. In Ireland, we of all people should understand the dynamics of ‘terrorism’. Suppose the RAF had been sent to bomb the Bogside in order to get rid of the IRA? We might recall what it was like being Irish in England, when the Provos were on the go.  Pcdom is in danger of forbidding  that we should recognise any reason or humanity in Moslems.

Presidents Hollande and Obama’s rhetoric about ‘destroying Isis’ is pretty much on a par with Mr Trump’s. I find myself again going where I might expect only opposition, to the left-wing of the British Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn, to find a sane voice on the matter. As he said in his response to Mr Cameron’s call to arms: ‘The PM did not set out a coherent strategy, coordinated through the UN, for the defeat of ISIS. Nor has he been able to explain what credible and acceptable ground forces could retake and hold territory freed from ISIS control by an intensified air campaign. In my view, the PM has been unable to explain the contribution of additional UK bombing to a comprehensive negotiated political settlement of the Syrian civil war, or its likely impact on the threat of terrorist attacks in the UK.’

That the political/media elite do their best to rubbish Mr Corbyn only confirms the impression that he is someone who is really trying to see the truth of the matter. Almost alone among Western statesmen, he puts his priority where it belongs, on putting an end to the crucifixion of Syria. What more jets there are supposed to contribute to security in Paris or London is beyond me. The only justification for military force is to secure the Peace, and the question to be asked about any proposed use of it is this:- Is it primarily going to secure the Peace or amplify the Chaos? The more remote and depersonalised the force involved, the more likely it is to do the latter.

One immediate responsibility of us Catholics is to give the lie to those seeking to promote a populist agenda of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and war between Christians and Moslems. As I tried to indicate at the beginning of this article, ‘the West’ has anyway just about lost its credibility as the bearer of Christian civilisation. The future is there to be secured by building dialogue and trust, and the less bombers of all kinds have to do with it, the better, as indeed our Popes have ceaselessly tried to make clear.

The ground is clearly shifting under our feet, and if we are to build a new civilisation on the ashes of the old, there’s no knowing where we will find allies.  I would suggest the first move is to use language carefully, recognising that words mean something beyond what we would like them to mean; but if people insist on using them purely on their own terms, and interpret life only in terms of their own interests or obsessions, it is impossible for others to relate to them, and it is I’m afraid too bad if they choose to take offence. They might possibly learn a thing or two from Catholics - we are only too accustomed to being insulted, and worse!

Such misuse of language is the beginning of the process of dehumanisation that enables evil, which is so little understood in our contemporary Western world, to flourish in all its many forms. It is vital that our words should represent, not what we may think politically expedient or to our own advantage, as indeed most have been schooled to do, but rather our best effort at speaking truth. In the beginning was the Word. The good news is that the little flowers of truth pop up in all kinds of unlikely places, and it is not that difficult to recognise them.  Forgetful of themselves, they are orientated to the sun! And the Word was with God.                                                                      

Joe Aston,       

27.11.2015

Season's end on the Uadi Ana.

Some people don't like going anywhere twice, for without the factor of novelty, they cannot vividly appreciate a place. Well, a place does indeed feel different the second time you go there, and I was in a way fearful that I would find the fairy kingdom of the Guadiana (from Arabic Uadi Ana) had lost some of its magic, with its fancy new metal perches all up along it. But we soon settled in, and five weeks whistled by there as we pottered about in great contentment.

The moon waxed and waned, as it sent the tides pulsing up and down the river; the bright stars circled overhead and the birds went about their business up and down the river, all in the same old dance together. They twitter and sing blissfully in the riverside trees at dusk, giving way as night falls to the chorus of crickets and tree-frogs, with the odd heron screeching and owl hooting. In late October there came some rain and wind to ruffle our feathers, then high pressure reasserted itself and chased the clouds again, as the hills turned green and the sun turned less fierce and more smiling!

The morning mist is often slow to clear, giving us time to say and sing some prayers and even browse the web for a while before the sun comes over the hill, chasing the mist, drying the night-time damp and calling us to work. 

I chip away at the lists of jobs-to-do; the worst was to replace the rusty exhaust manifold that I found to be caput. We are slowing down, as another year dies, but thoughts are turning to the new one, and personally I feel good for another ten years or so of sailing, with the help of God! Fiona too is enjoying the life, and her company is very good. She however feels the sense of being in a kind of no-man's-land less positively than I do.

As well as being on water and between two strange lands, at this season, between one year and the next, one is in a bit of a temporal void. Memories well up from the past. A converted Irish fishing boat, the Ros Alither, has pulled into the river. She was built in Killybegs, the classic BIM (Irish Sea Fisheries Board) build, like all the Ros boats and our old Eiscir Riada, of which I became the proud skipper/owner in the late 1970s. 

When those little ships were being built with pride and joy in the BIM boatyards in Killybegs, Arklow, Dingle and Baltimore, and owned and crewed in the same tight-knit communities, with a sense of purpose and optimism, feeling themselves effectively supported by the State, what a different scenario was presented by the Irish fishing industry to the grisly scene evoked, exaggerated as it may be, in the recent Guardian article Revealed: trafficked migrant workers abused in Irish Fishing industry!

Of course the fish stocks were much better than now and the markets improving too.The white-fish boats in Killybegs had a fine time of it, even a fairly steady routine, fishing Monday to Thursday, servicing boat and gear on Friday, Saturday about the house, Sunday, going to Mass and a Gaelic football game in the afternoon. I vividly recall one crisp winter's day when I went out with 'Forty' Murrin on the Ros Alainn, for a day's seining at the back of St John's Point. We were back in Killybegs with a hundred boxes of fish before nightfall!

A Leprachaun postcard of Killybegs in the 195/60s.

Too good to last, you may well say! Once the bankers and the Government start to smell money, there's trouble ahead, especially in the context of an explosion of technology. Big loans were handed out to the select few. A class of millionaires emerged, while the majority of fishermen had to find work in factories or whatever. Not that they were able to make a steady living there. The women of course had to become wage-slaves as well.... Wonderful liberation!

Small boats were practically eliminated, markets rocketed upwards and then collapsed, places like Donegal Bay became fish deserts. The BIM yards were first nationalised and then mostly closed, while the big new trawlers were built abroad. Those fishermen who survived seemed to be serving the bankers and the machines, rather than the other way round. Needless to say, they mostly no longer found time to go to Mass on Sunday; perhaps that constituted some kind of 'tipping point'?

What conservation measures there were proved ineffective, while politicians collaborated in the process, with the odd brown envelope thrown in to encourage them. Some of us had dreams of doing things differently - Small is Beautiful and all that. Were we just impractical utopians? Maybe. Humanity, it seems, has to learn the hard way; but can we even be bothered to learn at all? Just how hard does it have to be? Well, I did not prevail with my ideas, but maybe I should be thankful for that too; it's hard to see how life could be better for us right now!

Delivering supplies

So long as the politicians manage to keep those pensions coming, it is hard to complain; but let us just remember that many of our fellow human beings have little or nothing coming; they have nothing to lose and are in danger of inheriting a bombed out world. If they rise up and try to destroy us in their anger, it is not good enough to respond in kind. I am writing this in the wake of the latest outrage in Paris, and I am distressed at much of the response as well of course at the murderous acts themselves.

Those crazy Moslems also have a story that must be listened to, and if we want Western civilisation to prevail, we must firstly attend to our own very serious shortcomings, and secondly make the effort to understand them. Maybe we just might be then able to make a wonderful new civilisation together, that will enhance the world rather than destroy it. Indeed there are many traces in the landscape and the towns of Andalucia (Al Andalus) of an Islamic culture worthy of considerable respect!

Fiona in Castellejos.