Osama Jones

Its poor blogging to chat about stuff you saw on TV, it says something about a life wasted. But i am what i am.

There were two nice happy happy documentaries on last night, both set in the late seventies. The first was a Storyville special about the Jonesville Suicide death cult and the other was a historical look at America’s involvement in Afghanistan - which is topical I suppose with the release of the movie ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’.

First to Jonesville - this was one of the most depressing things I’ve seen. To give some background, Jim Jones was a cult leader/preacher in America in the late 70s who led a church called the People’s Temple. It was thousands strong, multi racial and counter cultural. A lot of the services were filmed, giving us lots of material of ‘healings’ and conversions and euphoric people selling their homes to give money to the church. Jim Jones then had a great idea to set up a new town in the South American rain forest and bring all his followers there. To cut a long story sort it all went sour when a congressman flew out there to investigate them (with some reporters)… all seemed idyllic until a couple of the members started passing notes to the reporters asking to be rescued… when they tried to leave Jones’ men shot and killed them along with the congressmen. This was all caught on film as one of the cameramen who died left his camera running.

It was gruelling to watch, especially then Jones then gathered up the 1000 people and told them that they would all have to die, and supplied the cyanide. There were no pictures of this but everything was taped through the PA system, letting us hear babies being wrestled from their mothers and poisoned, people pleading for their lives and ultimately the silence when everyone was dead. Three people survived by running into the jungle, and they told the story as we listened to the soundtrack. Gruelling. I’m not all that emotional or sentimental but I had to go and wake my baby son up to give him a hug after watching it - of course making him cry for the next half hour, doh!

Next was the retrospective from Afghanistan. This got my gander up a bit (always helpful when it comes to blogging). Some people have such a selective remembering of history, and are so accusing and self-righteous when using their 20/20 hind sight. In the late 70s when the world teetered on the brink of a nuclear holocaust which would have rendered the entirety of human progress and charity meaningless, the USSR invaded Afghanistan to set up a puppet communist regime. America decided to fund and assist the Afghan freedom fighters, a no-brainer really. But the narrative of this program seemed to be that American was stupid and immoral for backing the likes of Bin Laden and are now reaping a deserved whirlwind. Most of the interviewees were from countries who decided to spend their money on nicer hospitals and social welfare, and let bad old America step up to the plate of saving the world (hyperbole a go-go).

Anyway… this is too long a rant. All I’ll say is… if you travelled back in time to 1980 and told people that the Afghans they funded in the war against the USSR will turn on you after the year 2000, and you’ll get some problems with terror attacks, and a few thousand will be killed in New York. They would have run around the pentagon high-fiving saying… you mean we averted nuclear war!!?

The morality of meat

There is quite a push at the moment, on TV at least to encourage us to be more ethical in our consumption of meat and eggs. The latest sermon was given by Jamie Oliver last week in a live audience presentation and debate about battery chicken farming. It’s unfair to call it a ‘sermon’, I like Jamie Oliver and think its great when a star like him is willing to trade in a bit of his credibility to draw attention to causes he believes in, even if it does mean that arm chair sitters like me get to call him preachy.

My better half is a veggie, which you’d think would make for much debate in the house, but it doesn’t really. QMonkey isn’t as narky and argument-baiting in real life (I hope), if it’s not too cheesy to say - we respectfully disagree. The only thing she insists on is that I buy ‘quality’ meat, preferably organic and certainly free range. I’m happy to do this as I do subscribe to the moral of treating animals with respect. At least I think/thought… you sense the unsurity don’t you?

The problem with the TV show is that I was troubled by something, not by the images of the battery hens (although that was shocking in some cases), but I was more troubled by the audience reaction. People were hiding their eyes and shrieking at the scenes of substandard farm conditions, wincing and ugghging at the sight of processed meat. Then came the real revelation for me anyway. Jamie had with him an organically farmed chicken, the kind he is promoting, he had been recently trained and qualified as a slaugherman and was kitted out with state of the art equipment. He showed the humane method of killing the chicken with an electric shock to the neck, then cutting its mouth to let it bleed before butchering.

Here’s the reveal… THIS was the event the audience were most shocked by, they turned away, and some yelped and shouted. I was honestly taken aback by this. The audience were all meat eaters who I presume have no problem dicing a nice chicken breast for their stir fry or tucking in to a tikka masala. They seemed almost surprised that an animal needs to be killed in order to make this happen.

This completely undermined the rest of the program for me, or at least turned the message on its head. In my view if you eat meat then you should be willing if necessary to do the killing yourself, and certainly should be able to watch without feeling any sorrow or guilt or squeamishness. If you don’t like killing animals for meat then become a vegetarian. I have to admit to having never killed a chicken but I have killed fish and eaten them and although I don’t want to, as it’s a bit gruesome and messy, I would have no moral twinges about killing an animal for food.

So having come to the conclusion that these audience members needed to either become vegetarian (for which I think there is a decent moral argument) or harden-the-f***-up, then what is the moral with regards to the treatment of animals before we kill them?

Jeepers, ‘her indoors’ isn’t gonna be happy … but I think I might actually be moving in the opposite direction to Mr Oliver. I think there’s a reasonable case that if these animals are bread for food, the life experience we give them is the life they know, are they really distressed/disappointed to find out that they aren’t wild birds (where a fox will mercilessly tear it apart anyway)? Isn’t the moral question - to farm and eat animals or not to?

Is it right to spend say £1 extra on your chicken fillets to give them a slightly more sanitized 54 days before we slit its throat… as opposed to using that £1 to keep an African child alive for a day longer? I don’t know the answer to that, I’m the question monkey, but if it’s a choice between keeping my child alive for a day or giving a battery chicken a foot more space in his cage, then it’s less of a difficult moral to wrestle with.

Daddys can’t be trusted

A moving tale was regaled to me around the table at a wedding over the Christmas period. You know how it goes, no one at the table knows each other but there’s the one guy who’s willing to be the chatty one - everyone else lets him fulfill that role because it’s easier than trying to think of our own conversation. He did though weigh in with a story about his niece which left us all close to tears.

His brother was very worried about his eight year old daughter’s performance in school, she was good at English and reading but was continually failing maths. He struck upon an idea to inspire her, she loved Harry Potter above anything else so he wrote out a fake letter from Dumbledore to his daughter saying that she had been chosen to attend Hogwarts next term, all she had to do was to get a C in maths. He rubbed some butter on the letter and put it under the grill for a minute or two, then ruffled it up, put it in a fancy calligraphy envelope and sealed it with some wax.

When his daughter got the letter she was overwhelmed with excitement, running around the house ‘daddy daddy, guess what!? Guess what!?’ he advised her not to tell her friends in school because they would be jealous, but to just try her best to do better at maths, this of course, she did, studying every night to get better grades. Her dad kept the letters coming, from Dumbledore telling her that she was doing well and to keep it up, the problem was that she was improving so well that the implications started to register with daddy.

He’d no idea what to do, he knew his daughter would be gutted when she found out that she wasn’t going to Hogwarts. He decided to stop sending the letters in the hope that she would just forget about it, a forlorn hope as it was all she ever talked about. He started to subtly cast doubt on the validity of the letters saying that she should get her hopes up too much, and that it might actually be better if she didn’t go to Hogwarts. One evening she came out with it… ‘Daddy, did you write the letters from Dumbledore?’ so there he was faced with lying to his daughter, right to her face, the alternative was terrible too but he had no choice… he said ‘yes, but only….’ . It was no use, she ran up to her room in floods of tears.

Days went by and she had stopped crying but she refused to even look her daddy in the eye. She had told her closest friends about the letters who hadn’t really believed her and now she had to tell them that they were right. There was nothing daddy could do or say, she wouldn’t engage with him. After a week or so as they were having breakfast her mum asked… ‘Darling, are you alright? Daddy is really sorry, I think you should be friends again’.

She replied in a very adult voice… ‘Mummy, I think we have learned something… daddys can’t always be trusted’.

Barely a dry eye around the wedding table.

Mass Child Poverty?

A hundred thousand children in Northern Ireland are living in poverty, it emerged today. New figures published by the Northern Ireland Assembly also revealed that 44,000 of them are living in “severe poverty”. Committee chairman Danny Kennedy MLA said: “There can be little doubt that having more than 100,000 children in Northern Ireland living in poverty and 44,000 children living in severe poverty is unacceptable in the 21st century.

Not that I don’t want to believe the Bele Tele or indeed our esteemed assembly but, seriously? That can’t be true unless the meaning to the word poverty has been seriously degraded. To me poverty means the possibility of not having enough food today, no clean drinking water, living in a cold disease ridden squat, living on the streets picking a pocket or two, leaving school at 10, working down coal mines by the age of 12, parents dead from aids and your infected, life expectancy under 40 etc etc etc etc.

If any of these kids own an Xbox or can afford to buy McDonalds or have a myspace account… then as far as grumpy old me is concerned, they aren’t in poverty! Not because I don’t think the lives of people should be continually bettered, just that it completely downgrades the real poverty of children in Darfur, Brazil, Bangladesh, Angola etc .. it leaves people thinking aww those poor Brazilian street kids, they’re just like Jonty in Andersonstown who’s ma can’t afford to buy him a new iPod.

Relative poverty should be called something else, because I’m relativly poor compared to Bill Gates.

Grown ups, pff!

I’m reading a great book at the moment called They F*** You Up, It was recommended to me by a fine scholar and a gentleman of sorts. The basis is a well worn polemic of Nurture over Nature, but it’s very well written and revelatory. It is heavy on case studies from families and evidence of how much the way we treat and relate to our children effects what we become in later life. I’m reading it as a bit of advice on how to be a good parent myself, but I’m finding a lot of things about my own upbringing with rings strikingly true, uncomfortably at times.

The most obvious, yet the most striking thing is how children take on the values and beliefs of parents they respect.  In fact how we relate and teach our children can resonate down through generations. What a responsibility! Both my parents where god-fearing church goers and I ended up having their values and beliefs almost by default… my father in law turned veggie about 20 years ago, and his children who liked and respected him followed suit soon after. Believe-you-me (first time with that phrase) his daughter (and son) can argue passionately for that value.

But here’s the rub… I manged to negociate a default non-veggie ethic for my little boy, but it’s just hit me that he is going to at some stage decide to be veggie or not… probably depending on which parent he respects more,   oh dear, the competition begins!

On such small things

In 1983 the Soviet Union had become terminally paranoid that the West was about the launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike. On the night of 26th September 1983 (as I was doing my P5 homework in the suburbs of Belfast) Commander Stanislav Petrov took over his shift at the South Moscow missile early warning bunker.

The bunker monitored the satellites which were trained on the American missile silos to detect a launch. Early in the evening loud sirens started in the bunker and the words WARNING LAUNCH flashed up in large red letters on every screen. He had to wait for a moment for the satellite pictures to be beamed down to confirm his worst fears - but when they did, they were inconclusive. He decided to go with his instinct and override the computer until he had more confirmation. However, a minute later the sirens started again to indicate five more launches - again the photos where inconclusive.

By now the warnings and images where being view by President Andropov and the Polit Bureau and a massive retaliation was being initiated. Petrov however sensed that something wasn’t correct and refused to confirm the attack to his supperiors until he had more evidence - again he override the computers.

He of course turned out to be correct, unusually high cloud cover had reflected sunlight to the satellite and falsely triggered the alarm.

Petrov was dismissed from the army for failing to follow correct procedure and authorise retaliatory launches.

On such small things

MIA - Paper Planes

New Year TV musings

So what happened over the holidays to inspire comment? Nothing much really, so I’m gonna go with TV programs that I watched. I think we can officially call that scraping the barrel. I found myself, usually by default watching Victoria’s Empire on BBC2, three one hour programs around New Year. The premise was that Victoria Wood (yes) was travelling around the world to places that were named after her. It turns out that they were actually named after Queen Victoria, who would have thought. The premise was a flimsy excuse for a travel show, with a slice of Empire history thrown in. She interviewed all kinds of people, to mostly ask them about how they felt about the impact of the British on their country - most people gave a shrug and a puzzled look, but some, usually older folk had opinions worth broadcasting.

Wood herself is pleasantness personified, but she started to lay the Empire guilt thing a bit thick at times. I don’t know what it is about the Brits and guilt? the French or the Dutch don’t seem so bothered, when on the face of it they have more reason to be.

If there’s one thing that winds me up… well I suppose there’s lots of things… but one in particular is passing moral judgment on past generations and isolating them from their historical and cultural context.

In Australia she met with an old aborigine, lamenting the invasion of Europeans and their land grab. I couldn’t help thinking… that’s the way it goes, that’s history, the UK is made up of the countless invaders and immigrants. We don’t complain to the Romans or the Vikings or the Saxons for the way ‘we’ were treated. Not sure what I mean by that - sounds worryingly BNP

In Ghana she visited the slave prisons and ports and it was a chilling insight into the industrialisation of the slave trade. But the empire didn’t invent slavery… it DID end it, that’s the contribution to human history, the ending of slavery. How stunning is that, for people to actually stand up and deicide that something which was endemic, and completely natural to human kind actually needed to end - no mater what the loss of profit.

On new years eve I watched bit and bobs of Spartacus… here’s the opening voice over.

Yet, even at the zenith of her pride and power, the Roman Republic lay fatally stricken with a disease called human slavery. In the Greek province of Thrace, an illiterate slave woman added to her master’s wealth by giving birth to a son whom she named Spartacus. A proud, rebellious son who was sold to living death in the mines of Libya before his thirteenth birthday. There, under whip and chain and sun, he lived out his youth and his young manhood dreaming the death of slavery two thousand years before it finally would die.

Maybe making this happen is the Empire legacy more than anything else.

(watch too much TV?)