Viva Cuba

It is pretty cool to wake up on my birthday, the first working day of a new US Presidency and to know that the guy in the White House is someone I did my little bit to help put there. In fact, to-day had all the ingredients for a day of feeling smug and it was tempting. However, not actually possible when reality is leaving teeth marks in your ass.

Because here in the political boglands, no one seems to be in charge. The economy is on a one -way bungee jump on a fraying elastic, the dole offices are the only workplaces recruiting for staff, cutbacks are slicing through essential services, government politicians are stuttering and spluttering and when they eventually do make a response its total bilge, our equality and rights agencies are fast disappearing, only banks and bankers have been given parachutes, the weather is enough to induce mass suicide and the only thing we have going for us, is that we are not at war with anyone, yet. (Although it would be tempting to declare it on Israel, after all they say war’s good for the economy and they have it coming and we're a long way away from each other.)

So, next year I’m going to Cuba. I’m going to spend my 50th birthday there. Anyone who wants to come and celebrate with me is most welcome. I don’t know how I’m going to afford it, but … ( Scarlet O’Hara moment coming up) so help me, if I have to beg, steal, borrow, hijack, abduct and hold to ransom the first born child of every overpaid politician in the cabinet, I will find the wherewithal to party in Havana by next January.

Countdown to the end of a Presidency and a new career as a Standup

A Blessing

Unfortunately, the blessing invoked by Bishop Gene Robinson was not televised at the WE ARE ONE Concert in Washington DC to celebrate Barack Obama's inauguration today. A broadcasting decision that will undoubtedly stoke further controversy in the days to come. But before the Bishop's prayer gets lost in the arguments that will follow, I thought I'd post it because it is beautiful in its simplicity and truth.


By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire

Opening Inaugural Event
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC
January 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.

The Order of Superior Entitlement

Back in the early 90s, as Northern Orangemen flexed their marching muscles determined to stride down Garvaghy Road, one often heard argument supporting their invasion of a Catholic housing estate was their self-proclaimed ‘entitlement to walk the Queen’s highway’. Quaint and anachronistic though the phrase, “the Queen’s highway” is, it was in the assertion of entitlement that the Orange Order demonstrated their belief that they were superior to their Catholic neighbours.

Of late, there has been no shortage in Ireland of arrogant, self- obsessed egotists promoting their over-riding indulgences. Despite their numbers, entitlement proclaimers are universally identifiable by an unfailing belief in their own superiority, breath-taking arrogance, contempt for the lower orders, in particular those who would question them and are unshakeable in their self- righteousness.

An example is one, Mr Rody Molloy, profligate extraordinaire of Fas who declared on the Pat Kenny show that he was entitled to fly first class anywhere in the world by virtue of the fact that he was Rody Molloy and CEO of Fas. RTE listeners took a deep intake of breath. Unfettered access to first class air travel and other expensive perks were, Mr Molloy felt, his due. His irascibility at Kenny’s questioning of his expenses, proved the extent to which Molloy felt that his own sense of inflated status should exempt him from any calling to account.

For outstanding chutzpah (Real Player required), it would have to be Mr Sean Fitzpatrick, who felt entitled as a captain of finance and industry and board director with Anglo-Irish Bank, to provide himself with an 87 million euro loan from said bank without any need to divulge his activity to the bank’s shareholders. His fellow board members appear to have agreed with him, dazzled no doubt by his overpowering aura of superiority.

More recently, when Beverly Flynn, fleecer of the public purse, claimed that she too was ‘entitled’ to an independent TD’s allowance in addition to her allowance as an FF TD, her pronouncement was made in a well- that’s- all- there- is- to- it- so –there tone. Entitlement it would seem requires no further explanation or clarification. Entitlement presumes that those who have it, declare it and flaunt it are beyond the reach of such mundanities as ethics or fiscal restraints.

But entitlement in the hands of true masters can excuse more than lining one’s own pockets or screwing the taxpayer, it can even justify the slaughter of innocents. The entitlement to defend one’s self as pronounced by Israel would appear to be the only reply it needs to defend the destruction of the Gaza Strip and the extermination of any of its population who get in the way. And unfortunately, they do tend to get in the way, given that there are so many of them and they are kind of, well, penned in.

Belief in one’s own superiority is essential to the understanding of entitlement. Those who are superior to others have entitlements, those who are vulnerable, dispossessed and discriminated against have rights but in the entitled world, entitlements trump rights, trump ethics, trump international laws, trump truth, trump life, trump everything.

The Smell of Things to Come

Fearful anticipation has a smell all of its own. It smells like breath held a beat too long, the scent of anxious eyes and a body steeled to run. I know you are thinking those things do not smell but they do. It is the smell immediately before sweat breaks, the odour emitted before undiluted fear reigns. It is most marked in the agitated moments, sometimes the hours, before terror consumes all.

In a crowded street where the heave of human activity fills every available space and where there are more people than possible escape routes; on a darkened road, where every movement is a potential threat, in unlit homes barricaded against armed invaders while the rumble of heavy engines draw nearer, its’ smell is most pervasive.

In Gaza, its’ acrid smell will have taken up residence between the bombed out buildings on rubbled streets. It will be piled up in the sewage-ridden gutters and seeping into the corners of rooms where huddled children watch the skies, waiting. It is the stench of powerlessness, of living with terror, of knowing the inevitability of sudden, indiscriminate, violent death. By now, it is clinging to the clothes of the people, blanketed over the roof of Shifa Hospital, wafting down its blood-strewn corridors. It is wrapped around the hills of Beit Hanoun and Gaza City, pungent and unrelenting.

Grit TV on Invasion of Gaza

Singing out the Year

Wuhoo I just learned to embed a video- there'll be no stopping me now- tomorrow I take Manhattan!

Dodging the Debate

Not for the first time, I’ve noticed how there are certain subjects on which it is nigh on impossible to engage in reasonable debate. The most pressing subject at the moment is the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Yet, anyone exhibiting support or concern for Palestinians in that tiny strip of land is immediately assailed by the kind of accusations and justifications that defy logic, morality and compassion.

In these retorts, the deaths of 16 Israelis from Hamas rocket attacks in the last year is more than justification for a sustained air offensive against an area the size of the Isle of Wight and home to 1.5million people, the deaths of 400 of their number and 2000 injured (at the time of writing). Proportionate and appropriate are unheard of definers. Only Israel’s “right to defend itself” is of importance, the military might of the Israeli Defence Forces, the range of unchallenging political support it receives from Western governments, the highly questionable legitimacy of its territorial claims and its flagrant contravention of international covenants and agreements are neither here nor there, for it is made clear by those who defend its actions that no amount of Palestinian lives will ever equate to one Israeli life. In the face of such irrationality there really is nowhere to go. It’s not even as if those of us who are concerned about Israel’s actions have actively sought out discussion with holders of Israel’s might is right views, unfortunately, it is quite the contrary. Anyone expressing any sympathy or the least care for the plight of Palestinans is homed in on like a heat seeking missile by Zionist apologists and excoriated in whatever media comes to hand.

The assault has a detectable pattern-: response is swift and immediate, for many it is wholly unexpected and thus having been taken by surprise, many are unaware of just how vicious the exchange is going to be. It contains not only Zionist arguments as to why excessive military action is required against the ‘terrorists’ but will accuse the original correspondent of naivety, stupidity, collusion, collaboration and general bleeding heart liberalism- the aim of which is to make the attack personal and thus avoid any engagement in political reasoning for such is not the protagonist’s forte. It is a highly successful strategy and has silenced numerous individuals. It also has a disconcerting similarity to Israel’s strategy against Palestine.