John Lennon - overrated?

Last Saturday being John Lennon’s 70^th birthday, I put up a link to “Imagine” on Facebook. A few hours later, Ian, a friend of mine in England (one of those virtual ones I referred to here recently, whom I haven’t yet met) added a one word comment – “Overrated.”

Overrated? I thought. Bloody too-clever-by-half, elitist English gobshite! How could John Lennon be overrated? That’s as unimaginable as … as … as a bishop abusing little children! And then, having overcome my shock at this expression of heresy most dire, I started to think about it. Has the world, have I overrated John Lennon, one of the few heroes I have had in life?

Ever since I became aware of modern pop and rock music, sometime around the age of ten, the Beatles were always right up there at the top. Even then, my feelings of admiration and awe for them was intensely mixed with one of deep regret that I had been born too late, discovered them too late, for they were already part of the past; they had broken up in acrimony and there seemed to be little concrete chance of a reunion, although you could always hope.

The quartet from Liverpool were all fab in their own way; Ringo was funny, George was a cool guitarist, Paul wrote great songs (although there were some niggling problems about Paul I’ll come back to directly) and John, well, John was in a league all of his own, somewhere near God (actually, in his own controversial words, more popular than Jesus). Witty, intelligent, idealistic, rebellious, irreverent – the combination was irresistible. Let the girls swoon over the sweet love-songs of the apple-cheeked Paul, John was the soul, the mind, the conscience of the Beatles, the one who, more than all the others, took the Fab Four out of the realm of simple pop singers and made them into something important, something significant for society at large.

Or so I saw it back in the early 70s, a few years after the break-up. Today, with more distance, more knowledge, more hindsight, I can see how much of this viewpoint was itself the product of legend, a projection of my own desires and wishes onto my hero, a simplification (at least) of a much more complex reality. But, of course, I was not alone in this simplification, it was one shared by millions of Beatles and Lennon fans worldwide.

The conventional story of the final Beatles years was pretty simple (if not always completely consistent), involving a distracted hero, a supporting actor – in turn striving desperately to save the group as well as occasionally succumbing to megalomania – and a villainess. John, of course, was the hero, Paul the supporting man and the villainess – well, that one’s easy; Yoko Ono was born for the role. If only that strange oriental had not seduced John, making him try to have her accepted as the fifth Beatle (forget for a moment that this role was already occupied by, variously, Brian Epstein and George Martin), the group would still be together, making marvellous music while the sun shone down from a diamond sky upon Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields.

The truth is somewhat different. In retrospect, I would suggest that the Beatles as a group had been slowly dying on the vine since they gave up performing live in 1966, the release of Sergeant Pepper, their masterpiece album and the death of their manager, Brain Epstein in 1967. They were all maturing and developing individually; musically and personally and the group was simply becoming too small for all of them. This is, above all, true of Lennon. Even prior to the advent of Yoko (who first turned up in 1968 during the recording of the White Album), he had, I believe, simply started to lose interest in the group, at least musically. He had entered into a period of personal development involving much confusion, including extensive use of drugs, among others LSD and heroin. He needed to find his own way, dealing with his own demons as he did so, and this way led beyond the Beatles and would have done anyway, even without Yoko.

All this leads me to a first hint about what made John Lennon artistically and musically important; there are few artists in the pop and rock area who have been able to use their talent so openly and honestly to portray their own inner struggles – Johnny Cash is an honourable exception who comes to mind – most not getting beyond lyrical descriptions of unhappy or terminated love-affairs (not that I would deny the intensity of significance of such events when we are involved with them). But songs such as Mother, which explores the fraught relationship between himself and his mother (“Mother, you had me, but I never had you …”) or Cold Turkey, which describes his withdrawal from heroin, have a quality of universality which goes beyond strict musical categories. His relationship with Yoko Ono, as much as it can get on one’s nerves, serves as an inspiration for many compositions and his song for his son Sean, Beautiful Boy, released on the Double Fantasy album a few months before his death, contains one of the greatest and wisest lines ever included in a pop-song; “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Then there’s the whole corpus of music which exists under the label, Lennon and McCartney. Every Beatle fan knows that, while all songs are credited to both of them, the ones Paul sings were written mainly by him, while John sings those songs on which he did most of the work. In the later Beatles years, when the atmosphere between the two was increasingly tense, their collaboration was, in most cases, minimal. But they still usually performed their ideas first before each other and there generally followed a phase of suggestions, corrections and amendments. Looking at the Beatles song catalogue, it is striking that the greatest popular hits, and most of the songs that could be described as having become part of the general world cultural musical heritage, like Yesterday, Hey Jude or Let It Be, are McCartney songs (in terms of their primary composition). Paul’s feeling for a catchy tune was always greater than John’s. Still, it was often Lennon’s acerbic wit which saved McCartney’s songs from maudlin sentimentality. In this context, I’m reminded that the working title for Yesterday before the lyrics were written was “Scrambled Eggs” – a real Lennonism, if ever there was one – and I can still break up in laughter at the thought of McCartney, his big, drooping eyes dripping sincerity, hunched over the piano, soulfully singing, “I said something wrong, now I long for scrambled eggs … I believe in scrambled eggs.” And if they had still been collaborating in 1977, I am convinced that a few clever Lennon amendments would have saved McCartney’s biggest selling hit, Mull of Kintyre, from its tendency to drive diabetics into sugar shock.

Still, despite all the caveats and reservations, the Lennon/McCartney catalogue has to be considered as a whole as the combined work of both composers. It is interesting that even in the phases where the relationship between both was at its most acrimonious – apart from a few niggling comments – neither of them ever seriously questioned the collaborative attestation of their music. And, following the Beatles break-up, Lennon himself produced some fine songs like Jealous Guy, Working Class Hero, Watching the Wheels and, of course, the sublime Imagine.

But, in the end, the ultimate reason why it is impossible to regard Lennon as “overrated” is his symbolic role as a public cultural avatar for the second half of the 20^th Century, a role finally set in stone by his assassination on December 8, 1980. John Lennon, his music, his utterances and his life became the incarnation of so many of the themes, memes and concerns of the baby-boomer generation that he became a cultural receptacle, a popular icon. He shares this role, along with the Beatles in general, only with Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan in the musical sense, and in terms of the whole range of broader cultural themes, particularly many of those which occupied the public consciousness in the 60s and 70s – drugs, war and (especially) peace, protest, rebellion, relationships, feminism and the roles of women and men, etc. – he stands above all the others. If he had not died, ironically, it would probably have been different. Today he’d be just another filthy rich, ageing pop/rock superstar like McCartney, Phil Collins, Mick Jagger and all the others. Certainly, he would probably have added considerably to his musical portfolio and it is slightly interesting to speculate about how he would have reacted to many particular events and issues – could Bob Geldof have talked him into a Beatles reunion for Live Aid in 1985 (possible), would he have given his name for commercial sponsorship and advertising as Pink Floyd and the Stones, among others, did in the 90s (unlikely), would he have split with Yoko or had an affair with Madonna (unknowable), etc? It remains speculation, because John died, or rather was killed in the quintessential way so typical for his adopted homeland, the USA, in treating its anointed heroes, particularly those of the 60s, and so achieved sainthood in a moment, along with King and the Kennedy brothers, or Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and various other rock and roll heroes.

No, Ian, neither John Lennon, nor the Beatles, are overrated. Musically he and the others remain giants, even if others, many others, could sing and play their instruments better. But above all, John Lennon cannot be overrated because he was made into a legend, a symbol for the hopes and dreams – for the very identity – of a whole generation. A symbol who achieved immutable immortality by dying young and thus taking himself beyond the inevitable relativising reality which would have come with time and age. Still, I’m thankful to you for raising the question, for forcing me to think about my own unquestioned idols – even if I choose to leave this one on his pedestal. And I take the gobshite back. J

Real Virtuality

Time to feed the blog again.

And, as I realised before sitting down to this, for the fiftieth time. A half century. If I were a cricket player, like my friend Neil (who I hope is reading this) used to be in his younger days, this would be quite a respectable total. Neil tells great stories of long ago cricket games (and rugby league games as well), of the ineffable joy of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat against all odds and can, when he waxes lyrical, even enthral an Irishman like me, whose general prejudiced view of cricket involves daft, upper-class Englishmen spending most of several days standing around on a perfectly manicured grass field using funny terms like LBW and googly (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with an internet moloch).

My friend Neil is someone I have never seen. This is something he has in common with Chris and Molly and Gabby and Ashok and Ed and quite a few others. For they are all friends I have made on-line in the past couple of years. And I use the word “friend” here quite deliberately. It is a word which has suffered under a peculiar kind of inflation on-line, particularly since the burgeoning popularity of Facebook and other social networking sites in the past few years. One of my “friends” on Facebook (and he is someone I do actually know) has nearly 4,000 friends there. Nobody has 4,000 friends, at least not in the sense in which I understand friendships; people you know, acquaintances, certainly, but not friends. To be fair, I will immediately add that the person I am referring to is self-employed in the entertainment industry, so that social networking and business networking are one and the same for him and he needs to hustle to make a decent living, therefore I can understand why he uses Facebook the way he does. But me, I couldn't even begin to keep track of my news feed with that kind of volume and friendships for me involve a basic mutuality, an interest in what my friends are saying and doing as well as me telling them what I'm up to.

And there is a little more to it as well. While I know that, practically seen, there are many of my virtual friends whom I will never meet in the “real” world, the hope that I will be able to develop at least some of these relationships face-to-face is very real. Last year on holidays in the Netherlands I was able to spend some time with Allan, who up till then I had only known on-line, and I certainly hope to meet with him again. And Ashok, among other things, organises excursions into the foothills of the Himalayas and, if everything works out well, I have plans to be part of one of those next year. Largely due to the efforts of my mother, Clare, I've made contact with branches of her family, the founders of which left Ireland for the USA over seventy years ago and there's a wonderful deepening of relationships going on in that area at the moment. The boundaries between “virtuality” and “reality” are permeable – and that's the way it should be.

For me it has worked in the other direction as well. Through the internet I have been able to re-establish and maintain old friendships, some of them going back to my childhood. And when I visit Ireland for a couple of days in a few weeks time, I'll be meeting some of them too.

Like most major revolutions in life, most of us have become so accustomed to (and dependent on) the internet so quickly that we now take it for granted. Yet for nearly everyone, all this has happened in the last 20 years. A few figures and dates make this clear. The term World Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 (the year the Berlin Wall fell) and the Web made its public debut in 1991. At the end of 1995 there were 10 million world internet hosts, today there are over 700 million. Also in 1995 (the year O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of double murder) Microsoft released its Internet Explorer 1 and Yahoo!, Amazon.com and Ebay went on-line. In 1998 the Google search engine hit the web (Bill Clinton denied he had “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky) and Wikipedia appeared in 2001, the year the twin towers fell. Facebook and World of Warcraft were launched in 2004, the same year the Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami killed around a quarter of a million people. YouTube has only existed for five years.

Maybe it's just that I'm getting older, but all of this seems to have happened only yesterday. In common with Google, I've been on-line for twelve years and during this time the internet has become an important part of my life, for all sorts of things from banking to shopping to finding and booking flights (and, in the past year or two, checking in as well). In retrospect, getting broadband a couple of years ago really boosted my use of the web – and can you remember what it was like with a dial-up modem, waiting for ages for that loading-bar in the corner to finally turn completely blue?

Of course, like any other major technological advance in human history, the internet has had its victims too; large areas of the retail industry, or travel agents, for example. The newspaper business is in trouble in many areas and is having to painfully reinvent itself to avoid going the way saddlers did after the invention of the motor-car. And spare a thought for those people who used to sell encyclopedias door-to-door, they seem to have disappeared as completely as the dinosaurs.

And that's no wonder, because one of the most significant effects of the internet has been the availability of simple information. The verb “to google” has entered many languages in the past few years and, for most of us, unlimited information is only a couple of mouse-clicks away. Of course, information is not knowledge let alone wisdom and the whole issue of the truth of that information is another big question. With the plethora of information instantly available, we have needed and continue to need to develop new skills to filter and find what we are looking for. And to try to be aware of when and how we are being manipulated. Everything we do on-line leaves a trace and we leave all sorts of information about ourselves “out there” which others can use for all sorts of things. Shopping and consumer profiles, for example. Or future employers. Or criminals. Or governments.

I live in Germany and Germans are very touchy about personal privacy and data protection. Google Street View, for example, is having huge problems being launched here, because many people are insisting on their right not to have pictures of their homes available on the web and Google has been legally obliged to pixelate the faces of any individuals photographed to make them unrecognisable. While I don't share the extreme views of many of my German friends (some of which I frankly regard as paranoid), I am very glad that this critical position is well and eloquently represented as a counterweight to those who seem to have no compunctions in this area at all.

But, in the end, the most important thing about the internet for me is the amazing avenues it opens for communication, for “talking” to each other. Of which blogging is just one. The fulfilment of a desire to let others know what one thinks about things, to reach out, to make contact. Mixed, of course, with many other motivations (for nothing that we do is simple); the need to create something, something good perhaps, the need for the approval of others, maybe a desire to influence the thoughts and opinions of others and thus to have some tiny, minuscule effect on the way the human world turns. I plead guilty – on all counts. But, in my own case, there are also a few other reasons. Curiosity about myself, about my own capacity to take a particular form (the essay) and see what I could do with it. A need to test my own ability to keep my self-chosen project going, to see where my instincts for creativity would bring me and whether I would be able to reach others, to get them to join me, for a little way, on my own journey. About a month after I started it, I installed a counter here and since then this blog has had nearly 8,000 visits. Eight months, fifty posts and an estimated 70,000 words (and that's a good half of a decent-sized book) later, I'm content enough with the result to keep going.

So, my friends, new and old, tarry a while with me on my journey. Let us wander together the ways between real and virtual, and virtual and real. There are themes and subjects enough. Let us share ideas, and thoughts, and feelings, carried in bits and bytes, bringing us together in the most real of all worlds – the world of human interpersonal encounter.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

A Tale of Two Countries

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …

The famous beginning of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities comes to my mind when I think of the two countries which I regard as home, Ireland and Germany. This weekend Germany is celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the reunification of its eastern and western parts. This weekend Ireland is trying to come to terms with the practical ramifications of the final bill now estimated for the Irish taxpayers to bail out their national financial institutions, destroyed by the crash; 50 billion euros (around 65 billion dollars).

Following the euphoria of reunification, Germany looks back at twenty difficult years, dominated by the effort of paying for it and adjusting the country’s economic system to cope with the effects of globalisation, at the end of which (despite increased strains on public finances as a result of the events which began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers two years ago) it is enjoying healthy economic growth and falling unemployment. Ireland looks back at eighteen years of unprecedented prosperity followed by two years of increasing stress as it has become clear that the Celtic Tiger was constructed entirely out of paper and that this paper consists entirely of IOUs, the economy, such as it is, in free-fall and unemployment rocketing.

At the beginning of the millennium, Germany was regarded by most experts as the sick man of Europe. The former GDR had turned out to be a gigantic economic ruin, its industry (which had provided full employment under the communist system) destroyed by its monumental inefficiency. Shortly after unification, Kohl had promised “blooming landscapes” and claimed that the price could be paid from the petty cash account. That had turned out to be a classical case of whistling in the dark. Unemployment in the east, ten years after reunification, was running close to 20% and billions of tax earnings were being funnelled annually from west to east. West German industry was stagnating; crippled by restrictive practices and high wage costs it was increasingly unable to compete on the global market with products produced in Eastern Europe and the new tiger economies.

At the beginning of the millennium, the Celtic Tiger was really getting into its stride. Given a kick-start by generous structural funding from the EU at the beginning of the 90s, Ireland – long a land whose greatest export was its children – was nearing full employment. Multi-national corporations were rushing into the country – companies like Microsoft, Dell and Intel – eager to establish bases within the European single market, attracted by an environment with a young, well-educated, English-speaking population, moderate wage levels and very low corporate taxation. International financial institutions were setting up subsidiaries in Dublin’s developing financial district and domestic banks too were getting into the exciting game of financial products which seemed to able to grow profits like mushrooms in the dark as long as they were being fed a steady diet of bullshit. Drawn by the boom, immigrants were starting to come to Ireland, most of them from Eastern Europe, attracted by good wages in the building and general services area.

By around 2003, the Social Democrat/Green coalition in Germany realised that major reforms were necessary in the labour area and social services if the country was going to be able to bring its spending under control and make itself competitive on the world market. The so-called Agenda 2010 was pushed through against fierce opposition (particularly internally among the Social Democrats themselves), ushering in harsh controls and cuts in the area of social spending, liberalising the labour market by creating opportunities for the development of a low-wage sector and cutting taxes. Unemployment, which had peaked at 5.2 million at the beginning of 2005 is today down to 3 million and before the crash threw everything out of kilter Germany was expecting a balanced budget by 2010/2011.

I’m not going to get into a discussion of the specific issues and measures involved in the Agenda – many of which I am decidedly critical about. I won’t even begin to comment on the creation of a new caste of working poor, the dismantling of whole areas of basic workers’ rights, the continuing structural weaknesses in the former GDR. I will remain silent about the growing gap between rich and poor in the country. We went through hard years and there are many – very many – who still have it tough. But (seen at least from a classical economic perspective) the cure worked. The price for those who pushed it through was high; the Social Democrats faced a party split with many of its more left-tending members leaving to join a new left-wing party formed together with the remnants of the former East German communists, and Gerhard Schröder, the SPD Chancellor who championed the reform, lost power in 2005.

Throughout the first decade of the century, Ireland continued to boom, growth being increasingly driven by the property sector. There was building going on everywhere and real estate prices were rocketing. Ordinary people were paying more than half a million for normal homes, sometimes far more than an hour’s drive from their places of work. Various financial institutions had no problem lending them the money (in many cases all the money) for the purchases. Government revenue was buoyant, basically as a result of stamp duties, a tax on property sales.

It was a classic bubble scenario, but the few voices of warning were ridiculed. In an overheating economy, wages were rising and – following Ireland’s accession to the Euro zone – the conventional strategy for controlling such a bubble (basically allowing interest rates and inflation to increase) wasn’t possible; the European Central Bank was keeping interest rates low to stimulate growth in the rest of the zone, where it was stubbornly sluggish, and to keep inflation down. The competitive edge which had started the tiger roaring in the 90s was long gone. Seen from an international perspective, Ireland was pricing itself out of the market.

Few people in Ireland (and, to be fair, few international observers at that) noticed, instead many Irish were losing all contact with reality. It became fashionable for thousands to fly to New York to do their Christmas shopping – the dollar being weak and the euro strong. Visiting Ireland during this period, I was ever more bemused at the way money was being thrown around and, simply, at the horrendous cost of everything. While I sometimes wondered wryly at my own stupidity at having left a poor country for a rich one, only to see my host country grow poorer and my homeland grow steadily richer, at the same time, I had the niggling feeling that this couldn’t last. Ordinary people were paying more for a house an hour’s drive or more from Dublin than a well-off professional would pay for one in the most fashionable district of Munich! Who was actually earning all this money?

Nobody, as it turned out. Most of the money flying around was being lent on the basis of notional profits, generated by complex financial schemes nobody understood. When the crash came, the Irish financial institutions and the Irish people were left holding the baby. It was like a game of musical chairs when the music stops and there’s no chair left for you. The property market crashed and the revenue which it had been generating – which had been keeping Ireland’s public finances afloat – vanished.

Like nearly every other country in the world, Germany took a hard hit from the crash too. It has a strongly export-driven economy and the uncertainty worldwide meant that, in the short-term, orders plummeted. The goal of balancing the budget had to be abandoned, extra funds provided to help businesses let hundreds of thousands of employees go on short-time work (much preferable to complete lay-offs), various stimulus measures implemented to keep up a basic domestic demand, above all, billions to bail out the banks. But Germany had a large, fundamentally healthy economy, based on production and manufacturing, mostly in the hands of small and middling sized businesses rather than mega-corporations and could, once the dust started to settle, borrow the money for these measures pretty cheaply. Two years after the crash, the German economy has bounced back better than even the optimists had predicted. And the government is continuing to try to consolidate the public finances – although the methods being proposed and implemented are the subject of heated public debate. But that’s another aspect of issues (about which I do have decided opinions) I don’t want to go into here.

Ireland’s political leaders would love to have Germany’s problems. Those they have to deal with are of another dimension entirely. Ireland doesn’t have toxic areas of the banking system to deal with, the whole Irish financial system is, at the moment, one gigantic bad bank. And the Irish government has guaranteed all the resultant debt from the public purse. Boiled down to per capita terms, this means € 10.000 for every man, woman and child in Ireland. This is not the national debt, mind you, it’s just the cost of sanitizing the financial sector. And this means that the Irish people are facing not some very hard years, but some very hard decades.

Amazingly, Ireland’s political leaders still seem to be more concerned with spin and power than talking openly about and tackling the consequences of the fecklessness of the past two decades. If the Irish are to deal with their problems rapidly and in a dignified manner, fuelled by hope, solidarity and hard work, they need inspired, open, honest, principled leadership. Looking at the quality of the present incumbents (and, indeed, most of the current parliamentary alternatives), I could easily tend to despair. But then I think of the basic decency, generosity, creativity and capacity for hard work of most of my compatriots and begin to think that they will, somehow, manage.

Europe will bail Ireland out; out of self-interest more than anything else, because Ireland is a member of the euro-zone and the alternative would be far more expensive. But Europe will demand a price, and that price will be stiff. The signs are already firming up; Ireland will have to present detailed budgetary plans for the next four years, at the end of which the deficit may not be more than 3% of GDP (one of the basic Maastricht criteria). In return, Ireland will be guaranteed affordable financing to clean up the banking mess.

But one of the many pounds of flesh which will be demanded involves a central aspect of Irish economic policy, one that has been a thorn in German eyes, in particular, for many years; Ireland’s low rate of corporation taxation (12.5%). Transnational corporations have found Ireland very attractive in the past decades for tax-avoidance. The recipe is very simple – through internal accounting, you ensure that your profits are low in countries where taxation is relatively high and high were taxation is low. Germany has had to accept many corporations making poor returns in Germany while their Irish subsidiaries were recording large profits. To add insult to injury, it was a spectacular case of fumbling investment irresponsibility by an Irish subsidiary, which led to the most spectacular almost-crash of a German bank, the Bavarian Hypo Real Estate, and cost the German exchequer billions following the Lehman fiasco.

Irish politicians have stated in the past few days that Ireland’s corporation tax policy is not open for discussion and have been making noises about sovereignty. Understandably, it’s one of the few major incentives Ireland still offers foreign companies to locate there. It means drastically necessary investment and jobs. But beggars can’t be choosers and, to mix my metaphors, Germany, as the largest and arguably healthiest economy in the euro-zone, will be paying the piper. And the EU economics commissioner, Olli Rehn said two days ago; “It’s a fact of life that after what has happened, Ireland will not continue as a low-tax country, but it will rather become a normal tax country in the European context.

“You ask about tax increases, I do not want to take any precise stand on an issue which is for the Irish Government to decide, but I would not rule out any option at this stage.”[1]

It may, in the long term, even be a blessing in disguise. For the past forty years, Ireland has relied almost exclusively on attracting big foreign companies to invest in the country. They have come when it suited them and gone when it suited them, first bringing and then destroying jobs, long before anyone apart from a few financial specialists knew the name Lehman. Maybe the time has come for the Irish to rely more on their own talents and capabilities. But, one way or the other, the next years are going to be very difficult. I’ll finish this as I started it with a Dickensian allusion; Hard Times. Indeed.

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[1] Quotation retrieved from the Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/1002/breaking6.html

Early Birds and Night Owls

The early bird catches the worm. But who wants to eat worms?

For most of my life I could have taken this as my unquestioned motto. I had always regarded myself as a night-owl and refused to make any apologies for it. Other sayings like, One hour’s sleep before midnight is worth two after, I have always regarded as rubbish, something that only worm-eaters would want to believe. But in the past couple of years I’ve noticed a bit of a change in myself. Nothing dramatic, but significant nonetheless.

Indeed, if I examine my early memories a little more closely, some strange recollections arise from the mist. Memories as a very young child of lying awake in the early morning with no notion of going back to sleep again, being bored and waiting for everyone else to wake up. Later, after I had learned to read, this boredom vanished. On weekends and during school holidays, if I woke up early, I could always take a book and read in bed. Indeed, my mother would often bring us breakfast in bed. While some may see this as a sign of great love and care, or even frown on it as being an indication that we were hopelessly spoiled, I believe now that she had much more practical motivations. Not that I am suggesting for a moment here that my mother didn’t love and care for us, but I suspect that such kindness had more to do with the fact that she had five children and was glad to be able to avoid having at least the older of us under her feet too early on Saturday mornings.

The teenage years followed. Unlike those of many of my friends, who regarded sleeping late in the mornings as a dangerous sign of moral turpitude, my parents were more tolerant and enlightened (on Saturdays and during school-holidays, that is) and generally allowed us to follow the normal inclination of teenagers, which is to view mornings with deep suspicion, things at best to be avoided whenever possible.

And then, having finished school, I decided to join the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church. Now religious orders have been famous for many things over the centuries, but a deep approval of sleeping late is not one of them. From the time of St. Benedict, the father of western monasticism, religious life has been known as the regular life; which included ideas like the mortification of the body and greeting the Lord at (or before) dawn with common prayer. Indeed, the stricter religious orders, like the Cistercians, made a point of getting up extra in the middle of the night to pray and there were more observant periods in Dominican history when they did this too.

By the time I entered the Order in 1977, thankfully, such extreme practices had long been abandoned. Still there was common morning prayer (the traditional offices of Matins and Lauds) at seven or seven thirty and that was bad enough. Particularly in the noviciate, where attendance at such ceremonies was not optional. For a whole year I was up early every morning and even spent four weeks, following torn ligaments in my ankle, going to Matins and Lauds in the public church on crutches. (There were ninety-nine stairs between my room and the church – I counted them.)

Having survived the noviciate, I moved to the studentate, a large community in Tallaght, a suburb of Dublin. Life was, from my point of view, a lot more civilized and reasonable there. Following the noviciate, with its emphasis on regularity and rules, the studentate ethos was big on personal responsibility. If you weren’t at morning prayers, it was assumed that you had a reason not to be – like being out late the previous night. For those who were there and subsequently repaired to the refectory for breakfast, there was a custom which is one of the most wonderful I have ever experienced and one which should be made compulsory for any institutions where people live communally, even temporarily – two breakfast tables. At one sat the people who were bright, chirpy and, above all, talkative in the morning. At the other sat those who were none of these and it was understood that silence reigned at this table.

Over the years, on the increasingly seldom occasions on which I put in an appearance at breakfast, my place was firmly at the silent table. But, more often than not, I was still in bed, for I was living out more and more my tendency to be a night-owl. My absence in the morning was occasionally a subject of discussion between me and those responsible for my religious formation, but the behavioural changes resulting from such discussions were generally pretty modest and, above all, short-lived. The fact that I was a student during this whole time wasn’t positively conducive to early rising – as anyone who has ever been a student can confirm, the necessity of being at lectures which take place early in the morning has always been a relative thing.

What made it all easier was the fact that I wasn’t the only night-owl in the community, particularly among the younger members of it. Even at two or three in the morning, you could usually find a couple of people having a late cup of tea in the refectory. Later again (or earlier, depending on your point of view), at four-thirty or five, on the not infrequent occasions when I had spent a very long night up, often with one or two others, we would meet Brother Dal. Brother Dal was an elderly lay-brother, stiff, correct and always impeccably polite, who was a very early riser. The greeting was always formal; “Good morning, Brother Francis!” “Good night, Brother Dal!” What he thought of us young radicals, long-haired, bearded, usually in jeans (and, in my case, an old Italian army surplus jacket), I never discovered. Perhaps he shared our joy at achieving something new, the genuine twenty-four-hour community.

Having left the order, a number of elements entered my life which concretely threatened my preferred status as a night-owl. I had to work for a living. I trained as a nurse, a professional choice which poses difficulties for night-owls, as it’s a job where the early shift traditionally starts very early indeed, often around six. But then, you also work late shifts and night shifts, so in that respect it’s not as bad as a job where you have to start at seven or eight every morning. Or so I consoled myself.

And then, of course, children. Children, especially when they are small, awake – as a rule – disgustingly early, particularly at weekends. Not only that but they are frightfully active and full of beans early in the morning (at least mine were … until they hit puberty, then that changed, no that’s not accurate enough, then a total inversion took place). While it is general conventional wisdom that parents rear their children, in fact children rear their parents just as much. When you have small children, being wakened at nine in the morning means that you have been allowed to sleep late; and I firmly believe that, in most cases, that it is the presence of small children which finally trains us away from those legendary teenage capabilities to sleep long beyond midday.

We are, above all, creatures of habit and biological creatures at that. The existence of pretty precise biological clocks, so-called circadian rhythms has been scientifically proved fairly conclusively, with humans based on an average of 24 hours and 11 minutes, an internal clock which resets itself daily. Our individual need for sleep varies somewhat more, but is estimated for adults as being somewhere from 7 to 8 hours daily. The question is, when do we take this sleep? And that’s where habit comes in. If you go to bed and get up regularly around the same time, your body will get used to this quite quickly and will wake you naturally at the same time every day.

Of course, most of us don’t live completely regular lives. On top of this, technological development has – for better or worse – liberated us from natural rhythms of light and darkness. It is easy for us to forget that, for most of human history, people tended to go to bed shortly after it became dark and got up when it became bright, for none other than the very good reason that the capacity to produce enough artificial light to do most things which require seeing clearly requires quite an advanced, widespread and affordable technology. Try reading (or sewing) for an extended period of time with only a candle and you’ll realise this.

And yet, there are still early birds and night-owls, or so I hold anyway. There are those who awake full of energy and fizz and who can’t keep their eyes open in the late evening. And there are others (a group to which I belong), who are more inclined to start the day groggy and tend to be more active in the evening. But you can train yourself a little and the results can be positive. I was forty before I realised that, for a night owl, it’s not necessarily the best strategy to stay in bed until the last minute before flinging myself into an optimally planned schedule to get from my bed into action (usually defined as leaving the house) in a minimum amount of time. Admittedly, I still can’t bring myself to eat immediately after getting up, but I’ve found that getting up a little earlier, taking some time to approach the day more gently, drinking some coffee, checking the newspapers (on-line these days), giving the day a bit more time to get going does me good. All (all!) it takes is that bit of effort to get out of bed before it’s absolutely necessary. And so, with the wisdom of age, this night-owl has realised that he can learn something from the early birds.

This still doesn’t mean that I’ve become interested in eating worms …

Tea Time

US Americans are fond of thinking that their country is special. In one sense, of course, they’re right, but only that in which every country is special, every country is different. No, with Americans it’s a bit different. The very fact that they appropriate the general term of description for all residents of North, Central and South America, “American”, to describe themselves is perhaps a little indicative of this; I know that if I were a Canadian, an Argentinean or a Mexican it would annoy me. But it goes farther than this; they have a real sense that their country is more than just one nation among others on the earth. To quote the journalist, publicist and educator, Max Lerner (1902-1992), “America is a passionate idea or it is nothing” (Actions and Passions). And indeed, historically, there is a lot of truth in this. The Revolution of twelve British colonies in 1776 was something special, something new in world history, a revolution based on ideas of the Enlightenment such as equality, like the Rights of Man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (although, come to think of it, there might be one or another citizen of the Helvetic Confederation who would also stake certain claims in this area). Moreover, certainly for most of the 19^th Century, the USA served as a dream, an ideal for millions of the huddled massesin the “old world” yearning to breathe free, a dream capable of inspiring its own citizens to grow beyond themselves, in dealing with their own problems to go beyond themselves, to form out of their country an ever more perfect union.

Yes, it’s a great story, an inspiring story, a continuing story, apparently a never-ending story. Something its citizens can justly feel proud of. But what makes it unique is its particularity and it is only this which makes it different from the particularity of the stories of other countries; the French particularity of challenging with their Revolution the anciennes regimes in the rest of Europe, the Indian particularity of Gandhi’s way of non-violent resistance, the particularity of the South African way of truth and reconciliation, to mention just a few.

And now a group of US Americans once again appeal to their uniqueness, the holy precepts of their ancient constitutional expression of liberty to protest against … against what? Against big government which they see as threatening their freedom. Against federal government which they see as imposing too much taxation, supporting unnecessary social programmes. Against – above all – a political elite which has lost touch with their needs and their realities, which claims to represent them without listening to them, without caring for them, interested only in preserving their cosy world of power, privilege and prosperity, obtained and sustained at the expense of ordinary little people. Appealing to one of the early symbolic gestures at the genesis of their Revolution in Boston, they call themselves the Tea Party.

What, I believe, would surprise most of those who identify with the Tea Party is that they are really not that original at all and can instead be considered as the US American expression of a movement which has been gaining strength throughout what we may call the western democracies in the past decade or so. Perhaps movement is too strong a word; what I am referring to is a general feeling of alienation from the political process as represented and controlled by the established political parties which has given rise to divergent groups and parties in different countries, all feeding off the same inchoate feelings of resentment and practical powerlessness. Despite different national characteristics, they all offer quite similar platforms; the National Front in France, the UK Independence Party, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands and the Sweden Democrats being some European examples.

A look at the – for want of a better word – policies formulated by these parties and movements serves to give a clearer view of what the issues are which concern their supporters, what the needs, desires and longings are of those who throng to their rallies, what fuels the anger which leads them to elect these parties and movements or candidates endorsed by them. They can be conveniently be clarified under a few basic headings.

1) We are being ripped off. We are ordinary people who have to make ends meet. We work hard to earn our livings and have to cut our cloth to suit. We are the ones whose taxes are paying for everything and we are not getting value for our hard-earned dollars, euros, pounds. Instead, those in power pay themselves handsomely with our money to preserve their power and privilege, at the same time using much more of this money to support those too lazy and indigent to go out and work themselves. At the same time, the provision of those services we have a right to is becoming ever worse, things like roads, protection (policing), emergency services, etc.

2) Professional politicians are not representing us. Those “up there” don’t care about us anyway. They present themselves ritually every couple of years for election or re-election but when the elections are over they don’t give a damn about us. They pay themselves so well that they have no idea what it feels like to have to worry about how to pay next month’s bills, that the car needs expensive repair or, worse, replacement, they know nothing about bad schooling and the struggle to stay healthy and cope with illness. They live in fancy neighbourhoods, can pay for private schooling and universities for their kids, have adequate private health insurance. They have no experience of the fears that their children will stray from the straight and narrow, will be pregnant or addicted by the age of sixteen, won’t get decent training, won’t find jobs. Inside a cocoon of privilege and wealth, their children will make the right friends, get the best education and then inherit the political positions held by their parents. And it doesn’t matter what party you vote for, because – in terms of those in power and influence – there’s very little difference between them. They all sit in Washington, in London, in Brussels, jetting around and our costs and passing off all the real work to faceless bureaucrats who live in their own artificial worlds and are, practically seen, responsible to nobody.

3) We are being forced to pay for mistakes our leaders have made in the past and our children will have to pay even more. Already billions of the taxes we pay are being spent to service debts accrued in the past and the politicians are still borrowing more, paying more and more of our good money to the banks every year. We know from bitter experience where that leads, what happens when you can’t pay the mortgage on your house, the loan for your car. That’s why the city can’t afford to repair the roads, police the playground, etc., because it’s in hock up to the eyeballs. Debts made by politicians on our behalf, which we have the privilege of paying back. And if we can’t, hell, they’ll just borrow more to pay the interest and our children can pay for it.

4) The money we worked so hard to earn, which we pay in taxes, is given to people too lazy to work. Now we know that anyone can hit a bad-luck patch and that’s what social services and unemployment benefits are for. But there are thousands and thousands who have no interest in doing anything for themselves and, worse, there’re more and more of them coming every year. Because in poor countries all over the world, the word has spread that if you can get in here you get money for nothing and, if you set about it right, you can even bring your whole family too – and your in-laws and their families as well. And, if they do work, then they’ll work for less than we can live on and take away jobs, of which there aren’t enough anyway, from our children. And they don’t make any effort to fit in, to learn our language, to dress the way we do. Often, they seem to even look down on us and have the cheek to demand all sorts of extra rights for themselves and accuse us of discrimination if they don’t get them. And the politicians do nothing to stop this. Why should they, they don’t have nests of them living in their neighbourhoods, they are more inclined to find their presence useful, as household-helps or gardeners.

5) Things are not as good as they used to be and we’re afraid they are going to get worse. We can remember times when things were simpler and more understandable. Our countries have proud histories of struggles to establish the values we hold dear and those values used to be taken seriously and respected by everyone. Today everything seems so complex and no-one seems to take these values – like hard work, honesty, fairness – seriously any more. The future seems ever more uncertain and threatening and we don’t know which of the experts to believe or whether they’re all just following vested agendas anyway. We yearn for straight, simple answers, for strategies which we can understand and which make sense to us. We need clear and credible leadership, leaders who name things by name and tell it like it is. We’re not getting it.

The impressions that I have sketched here are real for millions of people in our societies, they are the result of their concrete experiences. The problem is that these experiences are the result of complex processes in complex societies, societies which are interconnected and networked in ever more complex ways. Furthermore, we process everything we experience through our individual and common perceptions and it is mostly the fact that what we perceive has happened is far more important for us than any so-called objective explanation of what has actually been going on.

And here is where my problems with the Tea Party movement and all the other parties and movements like them begin. They are an expression of a longing for simple answers to complicated questions, a desire for certainty in an uncertain world. They quickly reduce difficult issues to appeals based on simple slogans, slogans which every individual can then interpret for him or herself.

Let us take one concrete example. A popular theme in the Tea Party movement is the call for less Government. The question begs itself as to what people mean by this. When you start to reduce it to the thousands of individual questions involved then you start to hear all sorts of different opinions. What does less government mean in the realm of education? Should we reduce communal funding for schools, reduce the length of free, compulsory schooling? That would save money. What about policing, law-enforcement, crime and punishment? What about consumer protection, the setting, implementation and control of standards for food and drugs? The basis of an awful lot of what we call government is the establishment of standards in all sorts of areas of life, standards which are necessary to secure our basic wish for equality, justice and fairness in all sorts of situations. Most of the laws we have (and laws and their implementation are the basis of government) are the result of concretely perceived needs and desires for regulation in communal life, the necessity of regulating conflicting interests. And it goes without saying that we all tend to regard our own interests as legitimate and necessary.

The dangerous thing about the Tea Party, and UKIP and the Sweden Democrats and all the others is that they offer a platform for various individuals to exploit the real fears and discontentment of ordinary people who have finally become fed up enough to start to articulate themselves or, more often, look for figures to articulate their worries and concerns. I don’t want to go into the individual motivations of those who emerge as leaders in such groups; many of them may well be sincere in their involvement and really believe in the simplistic slogans they offer as panaceas. But many of them are also following their own agendas, even if these be nothing more sinister than their desire for the personal rush supplied by the cheers and applause of the crowd, that craving for approval some seem to need on a larger scale than normal and whose rhetorical and communicative talents allow them to obtain this in such an arena. And I won’t even go into the possibilities such movements offer to all sorts of vested interests and groups with specific agendas to steer, influence and manipulate.

Of course, all this could not happen if a vacuum had not developed in the first place; a vacuum of trust, a fundamental disconnection between the “professional” political castes which exist in most of our societies and the people they purportedly represent. The perception most ordinary people have that politicians are not to be trusted, that they are lacking in understanding and empathy for our everyday problems and lives must be taken seriously by those involved in politics and those considering getting involved in politics. The very emergence of such groups is already an indictment of the political establishments. Unfortunately, the instinctive reaction of professional politicians in the established parties is one of hostility, ridicule and rejection. They should rather ask themselves where they have failed and what they could have done to prevent people being so disaffected as to feel they have to channel their needs and frustration in such directions. These are questions Democrat politicians at all levels in particular could profitably and honestly ask themselves in the USA at the moment. A look at Sweden or the Netherlands at the moment, where populist “right-wing” parties hold the balance of power following recent national elections should be warning enough.

The sad thing, in my view, is that such movements don’t really solve anything in the long term. Simplistic slogans and easy remedies may make people feel good but they don’t deal with complex problems just by being stated or chanted. Looking back in nostalgia to the good old days when everything was simpler and better is a universal human tendency but it is usually highly selective and involves strongly rose-coloured spectacles. We live in a complex, interconnected, networked global society and the future is not going to get simpler, particularly a future in which the world population will continue to grow, resources will become scarcer and a larger proportion of the global population will be demanding a fairer share of them.

And, perhaps, we need to demand more of our politicians. Not more work, for, in general, they work hard enough. The questions are at what, and for whom? No, what we must demand of them is more principle, more honesty, more moral courage. The courage to tell us the truth, even when the truth isn’t comfortable. The courage to say no more often. The courage, occasionally, to resign rather than compromise on basic principles. All of which is also, in the end, a challenge to us all to look at ourselves first. The conservative Savoyard diplomat, Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), a hero of the Counter-Enlightenment, has left little useful to our modern society, with one important exception; his comment, “every nation gets the government it deserves.” If there is any truth in this, then our politicians are, in some sense, a mirror-image of ourselves. And that, truly, can be a very worrying thought …

Narnia

A few evenings ago, I had the apartment to myself and needed something new to read. This, in itself, is not so unusual; those who know me better know that I am incurably, deeply addicted to reading and that I always have a book going, frequently more than one, and it is completely unthinkable for me not to have something to read. Reading is as necessary for me as breathing and eating and has been since, at the age of five, I discovered the myriads of worlds contained inside book-covers.

A fortunate aspect of my particular form of this infinitely pleasant addiction is that I am well capable of rereading many books; in fact, one of my basic criteria for judging a book is the question as to whether I could imagine reading it again. So I perused my bookshelves and stopped at a large, handsome hardback volume, a special offer at Amazon for a pittance I happened to stumble across around a year ago, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Now that’s an idea, I thought, just the right evening for it. I made a choice of CDs (Händel’s Wassermusik being the first of the selection), a pot of roibusch tea, settled down into my armchair and returned happily to a world I first discovered over forty years ago.

When I was nine years old, we moved from the village of Tinahely to Wicklow town. I found the move very hard. Tinahely is a small village, beautifully situated in the Wicklow Mountains, and I had felt completely at home there. It was small enough for us as children to know practically everyone (or so we thought anyway) and, as a boy I had, with friends, explored large areas of the hilly countryside round about (http://www.tinahely.ie/index.php?id=1). The move to the larger town of Wicklow left me feeling desperately homesick for many months, even if there were compensations, like a large public library. One cold and wet evening that winter, my father returned from a business trip to Dublin bringing three books by C.S. Lewis with him, The Magician’s Nephew, The Horse and His Boy and The Silver Chair. And so, for the first time I entered the world of Narnia.

I think I would have loved the books anyway; my acquaintance with fantasy went right back to the first book I remember reading, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and I had already been enchanted by The Wind in the Willows. But I think my unhappiness at that time increased my wonder at the world Lewis had created – it was escapism, pure and simple, but such escapism need not always be bad, particularly for a child. And what an escape! Children having wonderful adventures with marvellous, fantastic creatures in a magical world, written in a beautiful language with a narrative surety which pulls you along effortlessly through the stories. Lewis once said somewhere that he wrote the stories he himself as a child would have liked to read and he knew how to put things into stories which are important for children, like describing good things to eat, and, more generally, taking the time to tell of nice and happy things which happen, as well as portraying the tension, fear, uncertainty and discomfort which are the motors which move an adventure along. He also had the talent of addressing his readers directly with little asides, as an oral storyteller will do, moving briefly with a sentence outside the story (reminding you, often at some of the most frightening parts, that it is just a story), something which generally appeals to younger readers. At any rate it appealed to me.

Lewis wrote the seven Narnia books between 1949 and 1955 (they were published annually from 1950 to 1956). Although their publishing order is somewhat different, they follow a clear chronology, portraying the world of Narnia from its creation in The Magician’s Nephew to its end in The Last Battle (although the first published and perhaps most famous is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). My father, I think, knew nothing of this when he brought those three books home to us in the winter of 1969-70, and the fact that I read them out of sequence didn’t particularly worry me at the time. Interestingly, in his choice of three out of seven he managed to select the only books in which none of the Pevensie children play a role. Be that as it may, having read those three, I was determined to read the others as quickly as possible and, in the next year or two I managed to get my hands on all of them (if, in some cases, only temporarily from the local library).

What happened to those original books I do not know. I have four younger brothers and sisters and our family moved house a couple of times after that, none of which facts are particularly conducive to the survival of individual paperback books. During my time as a novice in the Dominican Order, I rediscovered all seven of them in the novel library of the noviciate house in Cork. I reread them, of course, along with many other of the books there – that novel library played a not insignificant role in my surviving that pretty strict, austere year (and I was instinctively careful not to mention to my novice master just how frequently I used it to enliven what were frequently pretty monotonous afternoons and evenings we were supposed to spend “studying,” just one aspect of a fairly completely regulated daily timetable).

The Chronicles of Narnia, as they are generally known, have been read and loved by millions of children (and adults) since they were published over half a century ago. They have also been the subject of some (frequently fierce) criticism. Lewis’ friend, fellow academic and fellow Inkling (a member of their informal literary club in Oxford), J.R.R. Tolkien disliked what he saw as Lewis’ too pervasive use of allegory in the stories, even though Tolkien himself was a convinced Catholic and more than a little instrumental in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. And, indeed, the allusions to Christianity, particularly in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle, are laid on pretty thick; the former being – in its basic plot line – a retelling of the basic Christian theme of betrayal, execution and resurrection, with Aslan as a hardly-disguised god-man (or god-lion) Christ figure. The contemporary children’s fantasy author and hard-line atheist, Philip Pullman, has been particularly harsh, describing the Narnia cycle as “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read” (http://www.crlamppost.org/darkside.htm). Pullman, of course, as a member of the Richard Dawkin’s school of muscular atheism, finds Lewis’ Christian apologetics deeply repugnant and resents that innocent children, reading the Narnia stories for fun, are thus willy-nilly subjected to Christian propaganda. He goes on to lambast Lewis’ “supernaturalism … reactionary sneering … misogyny … racism … and sheer dishonesty of his narrative method.”

Although my world-view is much closer to that of Pullman than of Lewis (my own faith-journey having taken the opposite direction to that of Lewis), I think he goes much too far here. Yes, Lewis is pushing Christianity, but I don’t think that really influences his young readers all that much. Children aren't bad at filtering out superfluous stuff and in Lewis' books the story is the important thing, because it's being told so well. And yes, he is (for all that he was Irish born) an English gentleman academic, born at the end of the 19^th Century, with all the residual misogyny, snobbery and racism such a background brings with it. Much the same can be said for Tolkien (although Tolkien had no interest in expounding Christian theology in Lord of the Rings and didn’t). In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because the Narnia books are rattling good stories, exquisitely written. And, if I dare say it, much better than Pullman’s Dark Material trilogy, fine though this undoubtedly is. Pullman writes good fantasy, Lewis wrote classics.

One thing does unite Pullman and Lewis and contrasts them with Tolkien – the film versions of their works (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian and Pullman’s The Golden Compass) are weak. It took the genius of Peter Jackson to tackle the most complicated and difficult project and produce a worthy cinematographic version of The Lord of the Rings (even if not as good as the literary original, but then, films never are really, are they?).

So, I’ve got to go now. You see, I have an appointment in Narnia (more correctly in Calormen, that threatening empire across the Great Desert to the south) with the Horse and his Boy …Narnia and the North!

Sixpence None the Richer are were a professed Christian group, who gave C.S. Lewis as one of their major influences. "Kiss me" was their biggest hit.