Mary Kenny doubts that the teaching of atheism can be made interesting. She writes:

[B]ut where are the stories? Where is the narrative? Where are the images that illuminate a child’s mind and develop that sense of history and purpose? Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Lot’s wife turning to a pillar of salt… [etc.]
…..
All in all, the imaginative resources of atheism remain pretty thin.
…..
I pity the child deprived of the life of the imagination that is illuminated by the light of faith.

The first thing I thought of on reading Kenny’s article was a passage from Primo Levi:

He told me his story… it was certainly a sorrowful, cruel and moving story; because so are all our stories, hundreds of thousands of stories, all different and all full of a tragic, disturbing necessity. We tell them to each other in the evening, and they take place in Norway, Italy, Algeria, the Ukraine, and are simple and incomprehensible like the stories in the Bible. But are they not themselves stories of a new Bible?

My point in reproducing this passage is not to suggest that those teaching atheism must necessarily draw upon the experiences of the victims of Nazi barbarity, though they well might. It’s only to counter-argue against Mary Kenny that the lack of imagination here is entirely hers. Charged with a curriculum that included the teaching of atheism, any teacher worth employing would know how to draw on the whole long record of human endeavour, endurance and creativity – not excluding the contents of the Bible – in fulfilling his or her task.

I just can’t stay away from Mars. Maybe it’s because I supported the war to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Anyway, if you go to this article by Sarah Boxer, you’ll see that it’s headed by another wonderful Martian picture, this one of a rock outcropping. But, strangely, Boxer is disappointed:

Spirit and Opportunity, the rovers rolling across the planet, may have sturdy little arms, hearts and drill bits, but often they are rather prosaic photographers. They have turned the mysterious red planet into an ordinary desert. Does Mars really look like southern Iraq?
…..
Now that the spaceships have landed… the pictorial prospect is… well, mundane. Some of the photographs are quite nice, but you have to keep reminding yourself that they come from far, far away. They don’t have the thrill of unfamiliarity.

I don’t know why, but my own reaction is the very opposite. I find the pictures showing landscapes on Mars that are mundane somehow extraordinary. Boxer recognizes this reaction, though obviously not sharing it:

For some viewers, of course, this is exactly the excitement. Familiarity. Mars is like home.

Not that I’ve ever lived in a desert (although I have been in one or two). Anyway, let someone else explain the reaction if they can.

The fact of it is
Haikus are bloody easy
But they’re often crap.

(Updated at 5.20 PM.)

My friend, former student and fellow Manchester United supporter, Pat Murphy, has directed me to this by John Cooper Clarke:

Writing a poem
In seventeen syllables
Is very diffic.

A variant is:

To express oneself
In seventeen syllables
Is very diffic.

Introducing the subject of haiku on to this blog, I was doing it merely for the amusement. Little did I know. For with my mind turned in that direction, I came across the following on a site called Workplace Spirituality:

A form of Japanese Zen poetry of seventeen syllables set in three lines of five-seven-five syllables, which functions as a powerful catalyst. Catalyst for what you wonder… well, find out what’s stopping you from reaching those profits with passion, which translates into making money and having meaning in what you do.

To gain and keep your competitive edge, Haiku! Don’t brush away or asphyxiate on the word Japanese poetry. It’s a great way to get organizational movement and momentum. My research, with over one hundred people in various managerial capacities[,] has shown that using this concise form of inner exploration leads to startling truths. In the repertoire of responses the following emerged: charting new strategic directions, helping one see life anew, healing those unseen psychological wounds, and giving one the strength to move forward with a spring in one’s step and a sparkle in the eye. Haiku served to illuminate those psychological processes that enable people to function positively, with energy and well-being.

‘Startling truths’ – and very significant benefits, I’d say. This is where to start, according to Edwina Pio, PhD (the author):

When an issue is not moving forward, and there is a deadlock.
When change is being introduced
When a project gets stuck
As a review mechanism

It is best to do this in a group. Try asking people to sit quietly for a few minutes and then focus on one major issue which is of concern to them. This must be expressed through the rigor of just seventeen syllables.

I must confess that, hooked and pulled along until now by the thought of those proffered benefits, I re-acquainted myself right here with the impulse of scepticism. Why don’t the sitting quietly and the focusing bits suffice? Read the rest and judge for yourself the three types of beneficial effect, of which I’ve only room for this one – the ‘Eureka Effect’:

Here, one finds the “ah-aha” experience. Individuals delight in their compositions, and laugh at their results. Sometimes this helps to solve hidden problems, and renew interpersonal relationships. For example:

Just forget the past,
Life is full of choices made…
You know your own heart!

I can see why they laugh at their results. One for Francis Wheen, I reckon; and the fighting fashionable nonsense site. (Via The Occupational Adventure (sm) Blog.)

Harry has a post which I urge everyone who passes here to go over and read. It’s about why we on the pro-liberation left have to keep plugging away with the arguments; why not to move on.

[T]he problem is that the issue just won’t go away will it? Every day there is another article in the liberal press that pretends to deal with the Iraq war while blissfully ignoring the startling relevant facts that the Ba’athists have been removed from power, Saddam has been captured and that Iraq, horrible mess that it undoubtedly is, has begun on the long and difficult road to democracy. It was an unnecessary war says one anti-war columnist today.

The Unnecessary Liberation – what a perfect title for one of the next hundred anti-war books.

Those in the anti-war movement who are not cheering on the killers of their ‘resistance’ instead pretend that the daily tragedies are the inevitable result of unnecessarily bringing down a fascist government. Or, as we have seen this week, they celebrate their shameful, pathetic demonstrations of a year ago as though they were events that everyone on the left recalls with a warm feeling. Oh the excited thought that in twenty years time we’ll all be recalling February 15, “the day when a million people were on the streets” with the same smug nostalgia as the 68ers. Or not as the case may be.
…..
Of course not all of the anti-war movement supports the ‘resistance’. Many apparently disagree with [those supporting] Stop the War. But you can hardly hear the dissent can you?

And instead of support for the terrorists and religious fanatics, we get as a supposedly more palatable alternative a feigned disinterest, a neutral approach to the struggle in Iraq as though the battle between the forces of democracy and those of oppression is something people, left-wing or otherwise, can remain detached from.

Which might, just might, be acceptable if this were some minor dispute on the other side of the world. But everyone knows that the struggle in Iraq, is not just an armed conflict between terrorists and the US army. It is a conflict which clearly has an international dimension, which is connected to struggles elsewhere and the outcome will have a very real impact on the streets of many other places.

As Christopher Hitchens put it recently: “You should not believe for a second that you watch all this as non-participants.”

So my reply to the complaining reader who wishes I would move on is this – sorry, but we are all still involved.

It’s a long post. Go read it all.

Jeff Jarvis is calling for people to ‘name the exceptional things about America that make it great‘. I kind of answered this question in my own way last year on the anniversary of September 11. As the links on my old site don’t always work reliably, I’m re-posting it here below.

———-

Like countless other people around the planet, I’m thinking about America this morning. I’m thinking about some of the things America means to me. I don’t need to be told (because I know) that there are also other sides of America than the ones I’m thinking about. I’ve known about them all my adult life: the legacy of slavery, poverty in the midst of wealth, Vietnam, Chile, the Contras and more.

On the morning of September 11 2003, this is the America I’m thinking about.

America

America is Hank Fonda and Jimmy Stewart. It is John Ford, Howard Hawks, Sam Peckinpah and the Coen brothers. America is Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. It is Armstrong, Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane.

America is the Fifth Amendment. It is Martin Luther King.

It is Babe Ruth, and Jesse Owens at the Hitler Olympics; Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali – formerly Cassius Clay.

America is Tom Lehrer. It is Guys and Dolls, West Side Story and Singin’ in the Rain.

America is Elvis, and Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly. It is Bix Beiderbecke; it is Thelonious the Onlious.

America is Mark Twain. It is John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Oh, and Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Mary McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Richard Yates.

And Damon Runyon: ‘Harry the Horse, Little Isadore, and Spanish John’; ‘the race track at Saratoga, which is a spot in New York state very pleasant to behold’.

America is Catcher in the Rye and it is Catch-22.

America is Texas and New York. It is Chicago and Nashville Tennessee. It is San Francisco, Boston, Washington DC. It is New Mexico, Virginia, Wyoming, Omaha.

And America is Omaha Beach. It is the liberation of Paris, the liberation of Dachau; it is part of the Allied war which defeated National Socialism across the continent of Europe.

America is John Rawls. It is John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, Ronald Dworkin, Michael Walzer, Richard Rorty. And America is Herbert Marcuse – yes, Herbert Marcuse, Frankfurt School refugee.

America is Manhattan, Grand Central Station, the Empire State.

It is September 11 2001. It is Flight 93. It’s ‘Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.’

America is the Grand Canyon and the Rockies; it is the Mississippi. It is Route 66, it’s Maine to Albuquerque – jeez, it’s all those names. It’s one of the greatest of national anthems (with the Marseillaise); you hear those swelling lines, and if you don’t feel anything about America, you’re a stone.

America is Hank Williams, it’s the Carter Family, it’s Bill Monroe, it’s Johnny Cash. And America is Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette and Emmylou Harris. America is Blonde on Blonde and it’s Kind of Blue. It’s the transcendent Bob Dylan, and the resplendent movie tradition, second to absolutely nowhere, and nothing, else on earth.

America is the Supreme Court and the Constitution; it’s a political culture despised everywhere but exceeded nowhere.

America is a myth and America is a legend.

What a great country. No, I’ll rephrase that. What a fucking great country.

Some reading I found going round the blogs in the last day or two.

> Alan Brain has a useful story, from which you can learn what to do if you’re attacked by a certain kind of shark.

> At One-Sided Wonder you can find out about the origins of St Valentine’s Day.

> Gary Jones links to an item explaining why ‘fewer lies appear in email than on the phone’. See if you can come up with an answer yourself before going round to Gary’s.

> British Spin comments on the ‘tired, cliched rubbish’ that is A.L. Kennedy‘s journalism. I have to confess that she is one dnoc opinion dispenser whose stuff I find it virtually impossible to read. It gives you the very essence of the word ‘rebarbative’.

> Mick Hartley highlights a rather curious statement by Seamus Heaney concerning intellectuals and the Iraq war.

> Tim Blair links to this story: ‘Australia’s national broadcaster has instructed its staff not to identify Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizballah as terrorist organizations, because they have not been designated as such by the United Nations.’

> Alois, at Schmaltz und Grieben, tells of the Norwegian teacher ‘asked not to wear a half-inch Star of David around his neck so as not to offend some students’. (See also here.)

> Tim Newman has respect for The Unity Coalition.

> And Hak Mao has a robust answer to being characterized as ‘pro-war left’. She begins so: ‘That would be pro-liberation left thank you. The question of whether Saddam Hussein was a monstrous, murderous tyrant has two answers – “no” or “yes”. There is no “yes but”.’

> p.s. My own latest guest post is up at A Fistful of Euros.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu wants George Bush and Tony Blair to apologise for an ‘immoral war’. They should just say no.

They might also like to ask him about the weight of this statement:

Human rights are human rights and they are of universal validity or they are nothing.

Liverpool, hey – they always get the easy route. If they could just manage to beat Portsmouth now…

Unless I was fortunate to miss something, Madeleine Bunting hasn’t been writing too much in the Guardian lately on (in the broad sense) war-related topics. I inferred that this might be because when she was last so writing regularly about them, she didn’t exactly cover herself in glory. Wrong inference, evidently – she’s back at it today.

She’s nostalgically remembering the day millions marched in a collective, if (by many of them) still strangely unacknowledged, effort to save the regime of Saddam Hussein (‘My baby’s pram still has the badges – “Peace begins with me”‘), and she’s angry because, a year on, Tony Blair is still there. She lets her readers know.

How dare they sell us a war that was unprovoked and unnecessary?

(‘Unnecessary for whom?’ is not a question that gets a look-in here.) However, now the problem is: how to balance this righteous anger against the danger of letting in the Tories if we, the good progressives, allow it to influence our vote? But then again:

Surely the lives of thousands of dead Iraqis count for more than the modest successes of a centre-left government?

Note, here, the Jonathan Freedland (or Linda Colley and all those writers) system of accounting. Thousands of dead Iraqis – whatever you do, don’t mention the regime or its victims, don’t say Saddam Hussein.

Still, if that is the way one is going to reckon things, surely the government and the party that supported it, should be given their marching orders at the next election. I mean, if we’re talking thousands of unnecessary dead, period. It should be ‘Bye bye Tony and and the gullible, complaisant Labour party’, no? Well, no:

What would settle the dilemma is a surgical strike. Lance the boil and let Blair pay the price for Iraq. Prime Minister Gordon Brown would then reposition the line on Iraq – not outright repudiation, with troops still in Iraq – but the “we’ve learned some lessons” line. It would liberate the next election from the endless questions about trust that have dogged Blair’s political career. It would give a fresh impetus to New Labour’s political project, which would give it a fighting chance of two more terms.

Just a neat bit of repositioning, not outright repudiation or anything like that, and the trick is done. Verily, the moral accounting of the playpen.