A child can do it

I get tired of hearing "Oh, you must be so talented, I can't draw a straight line..."

We have banned that phrase from this blog.

There is no such thing as "talent" if you mean by it some kind of Harry Potter gene that magically allows you to draw without lessons practice or effort. Leonardo da Vinci was apprenticed to the art studio at the age of 15. All the great masters started full time formal training early in their lives.

This belief that drawing is some kind of magical ability seems ridiculous if you apply the same idea to music. Yoyo Ma was indeed one of those young prodigies that became famous for being a wonderful interpreter of Bach while still in his 20s. But who would suggest, listening to him play, that he had just picked up the cello one day and started at that level? Who would say, "Gosh, he must have natural talent, I can't play the cello that well..." He started lessons when he was five.

If there is "talent" involved at all, I would rather call it love. Yoyo Ma loved the cello and loved music enough to pay very close attention, to want to become better, to examine problems in music and find solutions, to set higher and higher goals for himself. Love is essential of course, but so are a lot of other things that a person can't control. He was born into the right family; his father was his first instructor. He lived in a class and at a time when he was able to devote his time to study.

Ability in art has very little, if anything to do with "talent". I think, in fact, people talk about "talent" to give themselves an excuse not to try. "Oh, there's no point learning or practicing, I don't have the natural talent."

Until recently, instruction in drawing was routinely given to all children and anyone with an education past the primary level could at least render a scene recognisably in charcoal. I will say it again, it is a skill, like cooking or driving, that can, and very much should be taught.



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The new tolerance

The University College of London students' union has just passed a motion making the campus officially "pro-choice".

Fortunately, the Union is sensitive to the needs of "anti-choice" students. The motion has a clause assuring such neanderthal troglodytes that they will not be forced or pressured by the university to have abortions themselves.

“An official pro-choice policy would not prevent students who disagree with termination on ethical or religious grounds from exercising their right not to seek a termination.”

I feel so much better, don't you?



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"Big Society" meets "Real World"

Ah Britain...

It's a long story, but in a nutshell...

For quite a long time, however many years it was, the Labour Party under Tony Blair tried to make Britain a different place from what our mums and dads had known.

Very different.

Now, David Cameron, who likes to make people think he's a "conservative," has made up this new plan to make things more like they way they were. It's called "Big Society," in which, he figures, regular people will start helping each other, without going to the government to fix all their problems.

Trouble is, this requires the kind of people who lived in our mums' and dads' Britain, not the kind of people that Tony Blair's Britain has produced.

Here's a little example of why this isn't going as well as hoped. One of Tony Blair's friends' little projects, that gets talked about rather too infrequently, was this new thing, Not-A-Cop. Called "police community support officers," PCSOs, Not-A-Cops function just about as well as you would imagine from the name.

Here's a headline typical of their great contribution to British society and policing...

"PCSOs trash penniless homeless guy's tent, bought by local charity"

"The tent was warm and it was out of people's way in woodland.

"It was secure my own private space where I could read a book with my torch."

The tent disappeared when Mr Hicks was out walking around the town during the day.

He returned back to the area behind Witney's Windrush Leisure Centre to find the tent gone.

Mr MacKenzie said: "I inquired in the leisure centre (about the tent) as to whether they had any information and was told that the manager authorised two Police Community Support Officers from Witney Police Station to clear Justin's home away.

"Also, if the police had dismantled it then it should have been treated with respect and taken back to the police station so that Justin could have claimed it back.

And here's a funny video about it, so you can have a laugh in case you were starting to worry about this too much...


(Watch out for language...)





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Ocean very large; filled with water: study

Sometimes the temptation to climb up onto the top of the cupola at St. Peter's and yell "I TOLD YOU SO" down into the piazza is overwhelming.



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You may now point and laugh

I am frequently, and lately more often, obliged to remind commboxers to read the commbox rules posted to the sidebar. I wrote them quite a few years ago when I decided that one thing I would never tolerate was rudeness. You can say whatever you like, that is, make whatever point you think relevant to a post either in agreement or not, but you may not use foul language, you may not use an unpleasant or unkind tone and you may not indulge your personal fetishes for anti-anything here. No idiotic anti-Christian insults, but also no unpleasant rants about atheists, Darwinians, or whomever the target of the day happens to be. You can, and are often encouraged to be sharp or pointy, but meanness, rudeness or bad language is not allowed.

I don't like it.

One of the things the commbox rules made clear that I am the boss, the sole arbiter of right and wrong, the judge of tone, the authority on offensiveness. I am also, more to the point, the person with her finger over the smite button and I have a deletion policy that people often, for some reason, think I will not employ in their case.

I try to encourage people to think of my blog as my sitting room. You are invited to tea and are encouraged to be interesting for as long as you stay. Disagreeing with me is part of being interesting. Coming into my house and insulting the other guests, sneering at the colour of the carpet or making unkind remarks, however, does not make you interesting. It makes you evicted.

One of the things that I have noticed in years of using the internet for my work is that some think they are not really addressing real people. It is widely commented upon that this is a medium that encourages the lower instincts in people, and this is, moreover, a time when genuine good manners (I don't mean just saying nasty things without swearing), are rarely taught to young people. How to disagree well is an art that is sadly being erased by decades of a culture that encourages everyone to express whatever vile thoughts happen to cross his mind at any time.

I once had to intervene in a bit of unpleasantness between a pair of unpleasant, and needless to say young, roommates. One had accused the other of stealing and was in a violent rage. I ordered him, with my best school-marm voice, to leave the room and come back when he was able to speak quietly. He rounded on me with the most extraordinary and memorable assertion that I had no right to try to stop him expressing his feelings. He was a young man, perhaps 19, who had been raised all his life to believe that as long as he "genuinely" felt something, it was acceptable, nay necessary, to blare it out to the world at large, and the "rudest" thing anyone could do was to tell him to shut it. It was a learning moment.

Younger people, I have since noticed, appear to be nearly all convinced that they have no reason whatever, in any venue at all, to modify their tone, their ideas, opinions or mouths. Or to listen to anything anyone else has to say. And brother, do they get indignant when someone tells them to behave. This observation has been borne out only too well by long experience with the internet. Perhaps I don't get outside my own bubble enough to observe how people interact. My friends are all grown-ups who know how to argue well and politely (for the most part) and are able to forgive each other their occasional slips and oddities.

I watched the "occupy" kids interacting on video several times with people who did not agree and in nearly every case the arrogance of the former was appalling, even when they were not outright shouting obscenities. Not only do these young people, (and often not so young) seem incapable of having an intelligent conversation with someone who does not agree, they are also apparently barely able to articulate their own ideas. It was quite a spectacle, especially coming at the same time as those "English riots" in which the few young looters who were interviewed were nearly sub-verbal.

One of the most important rules on this blog, in place to help us all avoid the temptation to let ourselves go and "express our real feelings" in the modern way, is the requirement to leave a real or plausible-sounding name. Anonymous posts, I reiterate, are not allowed. Neither is it allowed to use a moniker, obviously made-up pseudonym or adopt the name of an historical figure. If I think that you are not using a real name, (because I tend to be in a better mood in general in recent years) I will usually instruct the commenter to scroll down and read the commbox rules posted to the sidebar on the left".

I have found myself having to do this more often lately. I suspect it is because cancer makes you interesting, but for some reason the daily site stats have taken an enormous jump recently. In seven years of blogging, I have usually just carried on as if the only people reading were the ten or fifteen people who regularly toss out their ideas. I got a steady 300-350 a day and was quite happy. I hate large parties, and especially don't like a crowd. In the past, when I have seen a sudden jump in numbers, I have put it down to a link from someone more famous and have just battened down a bit and waited for them all to go chattering off somewhere else. But now I see that we are steadily attracting up to 1500 a day, so I suppose I must resign myself to having people here who do not understand the purpose of this blog.

I will make it easy. This blog is for me to write things I think about and it is addressed to my friends and long-time readers. Lately, I have been writing about what it is like to have cancer while living in a foreign country, and about art. But I often write about politics, religion and social and cultural issues.

If you are neither a friend nor a regular, you are still welcome and if you want to join either group it is very easy. Be polite. Say intelligent things related to the posts. Do not be a bore. Do not talk about professional sports. (Just a heads-up: I am inherently and always bored and annoyed by professional sports.) If you only have the urge to say, "Great post! Loved it!" please say it out loud in the privacy of your own home. If you are constitutionally incapable of being either interesting or polite, you will not last long here.

(And spelling counts. If you don't know the difference between "are" and "our," "your" and you're," or "there," they're" and "their," or think that "u" and "you" are interchangeable, you should turn the internet off right now and read a book. I am happy to supply a suggested reading list by email.)

One thing is always required: you must use a real or plausible-sounding name. If you make up a name, you may use one common to whatever culture you were raised in. If you use it consistently here, neither I nor anyone else will know the difference, and you will avoid the tiresome implication that you are a Person of Consequence with a Big Secret Identity to protect. If you are really a Person of Consequence who fears being fired or something for being seen here, you may apply privately and receive an authorised nickname that only you and I will know.

The idea is not to make sure everyone else knows who you are, but to make sure that I do. The first rule is always the most important. This blog is my universe; ultimately only my opinion matters.

Long-time readers will confirm that I have no qualms whatever about deleting you if you have annoyed me in any way. I control only two spaces in the universe: my apartment and this blog. And I control them absolutely.

I mention all this now because,

ermmm...

I seem to have accidentally erased the post with the commbox rules.

When I get around to it, I will reconstruct them. Until then, you may all talk quietly amongst yourselves.



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Happy Birthday to Yoooooo

Dorothy's birthday is this weekend. She would like it to be known that her birthday is the whole weekend and not just a little part of it.

Go send her a nice note.

Hurrah for you, nice girly.



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Now I know how you all feel

A dear friend and close colleague, the man without whom I would not have been able to make any headway in my work in Rome, has been taken to hospital and is having surgery for colon cancer this week.

I'm in shock and am completely taken aback.

Damn cancer!



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Someone's mad at me

for being... well... me.

I have been saving this little gem for a rainy blog day. You remember the other day when I was musing briefly about isolation and what it does to you. The context, I believe, was the weird spectacle of the "official" mourning activities being filmed and enforced in the world's most isolated state, North Korea. I was thinking about it because I had also been musing on what sort of conditions one has to have to ensure that an entire nation of 33 million people have ex-ACT-ly the same opinions on the usual range of, shall we say, reproductive issues.

Canada, you will remember, has a press and broadcast media that is almost entirely state-run or state-vetted. The CRTC ensures that nothing in broadcasts from radio or TV comes with anything other than the officially approved editorial position. Nearly every newspaper in the country is owned by the same company, that is a heavy funder of the Canadian Liberal Party, and of course, we can count on academia and film to do its bit in making sure that everyone adheres in lock-step to the Frankfurt-school, feminist, neo-marxist, Planned Parenthood, Our Bodies Our Selves marching orders. There really is no place in Canada where you can get away from this, it is a self-contained media bubble, or was until the internet came in.

I pondered this once many years ago. Canada seems to have an ideal situation to be used as a guinea pig in a big experiment on how to change a deeply conservative country into a nation of whiney welfare-state addicted leftists. Part of it is the low population to land mass ratio. Canada has the second largest landmass in the world, but a tiny population. The population centres, moreover, are very far-flung indeed. If you grow up in, say the Gaspe, you will without a doubt have to move to somewhere larger and more densely populated like Montreal to get a job and start your life. This trend tends to isolate individuals, separating them often by thousands of miles from their family and their communities of origin.

By rigid control of the media, by creating an atomised population who have only the official state-controlled line for information and no other sources of moral or social stability but the state, you have a population that is ripe for brainwashing.

How do you shift an entire nation to the left? Look at what has been done in Canada.

I was thinking about all this because of an interesting email from a young man whose prodigious skills as a Classical Realist painter had caught my attention. You may recall that I linked to David Gluck's blog, Painting Stuff to Look Like Stuff.

Delighted that I had found more Classical Realists to play with, who moreover live in Duncan BC not an hour from my birth place, you can imagine that I wasted no time in giving them a little extra boost. It never would have occurred to me that I was not worthy in their eyes to dare to link to their page.

I received one friendly commbox note from Mr. Gluck and then, honestly, more or less forgot about him.

What with getting the news that I am much less likely to die of cancer, dealing with the long-term side effects of chemotherapy, recovering from major abdominal surgery, dealing with the emotional and physical stresses of surgically induced premature menopause and suddenly finding myself in contact with a father whom I had assumed had forgotten all about me and from whom I had not heard since the early 1980s, ... oh, and trying to get back to work...you can imagine that Mr. Gluck was not prominent in my mind.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I received the following little note by email.

From: David Gluck
To: quicustodiet66@yahoo.ca
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2012 12:20:52 PM
Subject: please remove our link

Please remove the link of my blog from your blog. I must say at first I was excited to find a fellow BC Canadian realist who was supportive of what my wife and I were doing, but quite frankly after reading your blog, I am turned off. I cannot accept intolerance of gays, transgender individuals, woman's rights, etc. I also found it in very poor taste you are trying to draw a parallel between abortion and the holocaust (especially since many of my family members were wiped out in it). You seem like a very angry individual, and we do not want your followers bringing that sort of hatred to our our blog. Thank you.

David Gluck

ps. You may also want to consider removing Sadie Valerie as well considering she is a huge supporter of gay rights and marriage. In addition, I am friends with most of the artists on your links section and I cannot say they would approve of your blog either.

(emphasis added)

A pariah in the Classical Realist world! Dear me. Having other things on my mind, I responded somewhat tersely,

I'll do whatever you like, but I'm disappointed that a fellow adherent to the Classical Realist revival is so narrow minded as to be unable to disagree on politics in a civil way.

I'm always shocked at the ingrained intolerance of the left.

Very disappointed.

H. White

He replied,

"On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 10:13 AM, David Gluck wrote:
Trust me when I say this is me being as civil as humanly possible. I sent you a personal message as opposed to posting anything on your blog that was negative and I was very polite in the manner in which I did it. By the way, I find it a stretch to call someone who is accepting of people for who they are "narrow-minded."

Yesterday, I found out that he must be lurking about here because I received the following, "I asked you very politely to take me off of your blog. Please take me off the links section immediately. Thank you."

I thought of all sorts of replies, (like, Good grief boy, I've really got other things to think about...) but then I thought I would put it to my readers what my response ought to be. (I also considered "friending" him on Facebook, but worried that his little head would explode.)

I have thought about writing back to explain that in the world of grown-ups it is possible not only to disagree civilly on political matters, but to remain close friends with people for many years who differ radically on such issues. It is often difficult, but with the application of charity, forbearance, kindness and forgiveness, and a habit of keeping one's own faults and failings firmly before one's eyes, (I realise these are rare traits in the lefty world, but I have met them there) it is possible greatly to benefit by maintaining contact with people outside one's own political bubble.

Faithful chorus, please discuss.

(I ask only that you do not bother the poor fellow at home. No emails please or commbox messages at his place please.)



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Just had a little follow-up

appointment with the GP this evening, to see how things are going, adjust medication, complain about the weather etc. He called the gynaecologist and got the specifics for the blood tests I need for starting HRT. One of the things I need is a mammogram.

Mammogram huh?

Wouldn't it be funny if...



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BBC knows ABSOLUTELY no shame

Who pushed the bill to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade through Parliament? Who forced the British ruling classes to look squarely at the gruesome realities of the slave trade? (Graphic images anyone?)

In 2007, the British held a national celebration commemorating the 1807 Act of Parliament that made the slave trade illegal. For its contribution in that celebration, the BBC produced a documentary smearing the man at the centre of that triumph of Christian virtue over barbarism, William Wilberforce.


According to the BBC, Wilberforce is no hero. According to the BBC doyenne Moira Stuart, he was nothing more than a political opportunist and (wait for it)...a Christian and therefore obviously a bigot who's real contribution was nothing more than to make the British feel better about themselves.

Moira, a 30-year veteran of BBC shenannigans, opens her "personal journey" into investigating the "true" history of abolition by saying she is "following the crusade of the man who is said to have abolished Britain's trade in human cargo" (emphasis in the original).

The introductory scenes show a scholarly type fellow in front of a wall of books saying, "If you want to look at a godly Christian nation, doing good things, look at us ending the slave trade."

I guess a challenge like that was too much for the secularist hounds at the BBC. A godly Christian nation? Christians doing good?! Hooo! We'll see about that!

Let the debunking begin! As our presenter Moira Stuart says, "I've discovered that many believe it's now time to re-examine this history". I'll bet you have.

As usual, this high quality smear job roams all over the world looking into the dark, dank and hideous corners of history. All the horrors are present (on a TV programme that children can see!)... tiny windowless stone rooms in a seaside fortress in Ghana that held hundreds of human beings...shackles, whips and torture implements, the famous diagrams showing the packing of people into the cargo holds of ships. All the usual trappings carefully placed with the correct music to engender a powerful emotional response in viewers.

Moira Stuart is careful to let her horror show on her face, and there are some eloquent moments when she is hugged and comforted by the people showing her around. After she has seen the dungeons, we are granted long shots of Moira, gazing soulfully out to sea, sharing her deepest fears, telling us, "I'm angry and I'm in pain..." This, we must understand at the start, is a deeply feeling person, a good woman who fights evil wherever she sees it. Someone who would never lie to us.

Then we get down to the meat of the matter. William Wilberforce has been turned into an icon of British history as the man who stopped this foul abomination, the single voice crying against it, forcing upper class ladies and gentlemen of government to look, and smell the nightmare of enslavement. He is a British hero, who selflessly fought a great evil and, as Moira points out in the first few minutes of the film, was moreover an example of the Christian man doing what he thought best for society.

They pull out all the rhetorical trickery they know to demonstrate that Wilberforce was no hero, but in reality a myopic religious fanatic (and probable racist) who took credit for the work of others. Let's examine a few of the techniques the BBC uses to manipulate a population who now no longer has enough historical knowledge to refute their assertions.

The first is a straw man, the two premises of the programme. A history professor is brought out for the thesis statement that "Britons have made Wilberforce into the national hero and pretended as if the slaves were freed entirely through the efforts of this one very benevolent man. And history didn't happen that way."

History Professor Adam Hochschild then points to an inscription on the plaque under Wilberforce's statue in Westminster Abbey that says, "He removed from the British nation the guilt of the African slave trade." (No, we don't get to see what the rest of it says; no context allowed.)

"That's the key," says Pet BBC Historian, "to why Wilberforce has become such a national hero. He made Britons feel good about it."

"It's comforting to imagine that the slave trade was stopped through the efforts of this one very nice, very benign, very philanthropic, very religious man ... see he's holding a bible in the statue..." (Emphasis in the original.)

Wait a second. Who ever said that? Who? Where? No one has ever said that one man alone ended the slave trade. Wilberforce didn't start the abolition movement, everyone knows that he joined it. No film or book no matter how adoring, would ever try to suggest that it was his efforts alone. This is probably the most glaring lie in the programme and they present it right at the start, obviously confident that the average British viewer is too stupid to catch it.

Moira tells us, "This is the story of my quest to find out why" Wilberforce has been remembered as a hero. She says she wants to examine the evidence and "make up my own mind".

But this is another blatant lie. From the opening sentences of this film, she has made it clear that her mind is already made up from the start, and the biases of the film make it obvious. It is really the story of her "quest to knock a great man off his heroic pedestal, to destroy another icon both of Traditional British culture and to defame the Christian virtues he embodied and, with the same convenient stone, to raze to the ground and sow salt on one of Christian civilisation's great historic claims..."

Remember the other opening quote? "If you want to look at a godly Christian nation, doing good things, look at us ending the slave trade."

Any doubt about where this is going?

She interviews a government official in Ghana (a majority Christina nation, by the way Moira; don't get their religious cooties on you) who tells her what everyone knows, that Wilberforce was part of a great movement manned by many people, including Africans, to stop the trade. But this is supposed to demonstrate that the British are wrong, and probably trapped in latent imperialist delusions, to hold up Wilberforce as a hero.

In Ghana, Moira "discovers" another great coverup by the Wilberforce lobby. He didn't end slavery. Slavery was made illegal in 1833. Wilberforce's achievement was "only" to make the trade illegal. Well! No one knew that! It's all obviously a giant Christian conspiracy to cover up the facts...

facts that anyone can find on Wikipedia...

Now she's armed. She's discovered a big lie. She heads back to England wanting to know "why Britain remembers him as the man who ended slavery when the 1807 bill only stopped the trade."

Having made the discovery of this nefarious conspiracy, Moira confronts a Wilberforce biographer at Wilberforce's house in Hull. All smiles as Kevin Belmonte reads her the legend at the base of the statue in the garden of the house that says, "England owes to him the reformation of manners; the world owes to him the abolition of slavery".

Moira jumps at the chance to call the lie. Gotcha!

"Is that so?" she says.

"Yes."

"Right, because I know that he was fundamental to the abolition of the slave trade but to slavery itself?"

The sadly unenlightened Mr. Belmonte explains patiently that you could not have made slavery illegal in 1833 without having made the trade illegal first. From the passage of the 1807 bill, it became clear that the next step was to take aim at slavery itself. From the first bill, the abolitionists were able to "lay deep foundations to take aim at slavery".

"It took far longer (26 years) than Wilberforce would have wanted, or indeed hoped."

Nevertheless, her response, in a voiceover so Mr. Belmonte could not hear, Moira comes back with "Despite the delay, such monuments reinforce the idea that Wilberforce ended slavery in 1807." Because obviously, people learn history entirely and exclusively from looking at monuments. Who reads books nowadays? (Or Wikipedia.)

But Moira's claws really come out when she addresses Wilberforce's religion. She tells us she wants to get "past the misconceptions" and get to know the real man. We hear that he was born into a well-to-do merchant family and became an MP for Hull at 21 and later for all of Yorkshire.

"But it's clear from his journal that he also believed in God and wanted to make a difference."

About the worst sin an MP can commit in the eyes of the BBC is to try to "impose his religious beliefs through legislation". I was wondering how the BBC would reconcile this axiom with the inescapable fact that the people who drove the abolition movement were Christians who were explicitly motivated by their religious beliefs.

Christians, according to the received wisdom of the publicly funded broadcaster, are to practice their religion privately at home. An MP who bases his work on his religious beliefs is trying to turn Britain into a theocracy. The solution? Demonstrate that the Wilberforce legend is fraudulent and that the man himself was probably a racist.

The real clincher is when Belmonte shows her in the Wilberforce family home in Hull, an embroidered rendition of the famous image of a black slave in chains, praying on one knee to be freed, "Am I not a man and a brother?" ... an image that caught the popular imagination at the time and significantly helped the movement.

Moira's delicate BBC-trained politically correct sensibilities recoil, however, at the image which she sees as evidence of the essential racism of the movement. "The Wedgewood cameo was probably the first campaign logo, found on everything from tea sets to women's brooches, it was popular amongst abolition supporters. But today, it's an awkward and difficult image."

She interrupts Belmonte's description of the contribution made by the image, saying, "What does that say to you?"

He says, "Britain still needs to be aware of the needs of the sons and daughters of Africa."

Getting a little tetchy, Moira jumps in, "It seems a travesty of the African, who has fought for his freedom to be seen in this as a mere supplicant." She ends the discussion, interrupting Belmonte's rebuttal.

After Hull, she returns to London to discover that with Wilberforce in Parliament, "It seems religion was his driving force." (Emphasis in the original.)

She interviews a painfully apologetic churchlady who explains away the kneeling black slave pictured in a stained glass window of Wilberforce in the church he worshipped in after his "evangelical conversion."

Looking at it, Moira says with a disapprovingly arched eyebrow, "No hint of repentance from the point of view of having caused the pain of enslavement in the first place..."

Aaaahhh, here is the crux of the matter. This is the real thesis of the programme. Wilberforce, and by extension all well-intended white Christians, can only redeem themselves of the sin of having been white, privileged and successful, by adopting grovelling white liberal guilt.

Pressing her point with this poor terrified little old churchlady, who is clearly desperate to please this woman (who is famous as the first "African-Carribean" to get a prominent place at the BBC), Moira continues, "It just bothers me that there is a deification..."

"Yes, I think that Wilberforce would have been quite unhappy to have been put in a stained glass window," the poor little mouse responds.

You can watch the rest on YouTube if you like. But I don't think there is any point. It has been admitted by the people who run the place that the BBC has hatred of Christianity, traditional morality and British history and culture written into its DNA.



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