the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
Right, finally I got sick of all the marketing calls I’ve been getting – none of which are for me! Who on earth is Mr Claire??? I’m guessing he must’ve had my number before me…
Anyway, I just registered with the
grrrrr.
Anyway, well over 700 plays on MySpace yesterday, and loads of great feedback on the new tune… Just need to get the artwork finished and sent off to be pressed, get the CD back from Mastering, and I can set a release date and put it up for sale… Yay!
While large sections of the church are getting all het up over a popular work of fiction, we can always rely on the ever-wonderful Brian McLaren to talk sense. He’s interviewed in the latest Sojourners SoJoMail newsletter, and it’s great stuff. Here’s the first couple of Q and As –
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What do you think the popularity of The Da Vinci Code reveals about pop culture attitudes toward Christianity and the church?
Brian McLaren: I think a lot of people have read the book, not just as a popular page-turner but also as an experience in shared frustration with status-quo, male-dominated, power-oriented, cover-up-prone organized Christian religion. We need to ask ourselves why the vision of Jesus hinted at in Dan Brown’s book is more interesting, attractive, and intriguing to these people than the standard vision of Jesus they hear about in church. Why would so many people be disappointed to find that Brown’s version of Jesus has been largely discredited as fanciful and inaccurate, leaving only the church’s conventional version? Is it possible that, even though Brown’s fictional version misleads in many ways, it at least serves to open up the possibility that the church’s conventional version of Jesus may not do him justice?
So you think The Da Vinci Code taps into dissatisfaction with Jesus as we know him?
McLaren: For all the flaws of Brown’s book, I think what he’s doing is suggesting that the dominant religious institutions have created their own caricature of Jesus. And I think people have a sense that that’s true. It’s my honest feeling that anyone trying to share their faith in America today has to realize that the Religious Right has polluted the air. The name “Jesus” and the word “Christianity” are associated with something judgmental, hostile, hypocritical, angry, negative, defensive, anti-homosexual, etc. Many of our churches, even though they feel they represent the truth, actually are upholding something that’s distorted and false.
I also think that the whole issue of male domination is huge and that Brown’s suggestion that the real Jesus was not as misogynist or anti-woman as the Christian religion often has been is very attractive. Brown’s book is about exposing hypocrisy and cover-up in organized religion, and it is exposing organized religion’s grasping for power. Again, there’s something in that that people resonate with in the age of pedophilia scandals, televangelists, and religious political alliances. As a follower of Jesus I resonate with their concerns as well.
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Top stuff, and heartening to read in the midst of mad people trying to sue Dan Brown and The film-makers for blasphemy or some such nonsense. I still can’t be bothered to read the book – I none-too-bothered by messianic conspiracy theories, especially as he’s rehashing all that ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ stuff from a few years back.
George Galloway, in an interview with The Metro in london on Tuesday –
“The Metro – Will Gordon Brown make a better Labour leader?
Galloway – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are two cheeks of the same arse.”
:o)
…and suspect they might have been stupid enough to vote BNP, here’s a great list of what the BNP councillors have done thus far in the various bits of England where there are enough people who can’t seem to channel their frustrations with the way the country is run in any direction other than towards these fascists…
Please forward this list to anyone you know in Barking. It might do them some good if the bump into any BNP supporters…
Soundtrack – Rosie Thomas, ‘When We Were Small’ (finally I get to listen to something other than me!)
The local elections yesterday were definitely a triumph for the right wing – Conservatives made pretty big gains in most places, and most scarily the BNP picked up a load of seats. In Barking and Dagenham they’ve now got 11, possibly 12 seats. How on earth they’ve managed to convince that many people that their disgusting, pernicious, racist, hate-fuelled filth is worth electing is anybody’s guess. Are there really that many people who are actively violent racists, or are the people there just so fucking stupid that they think that the BNP is an acceptable ‘protest vote’?
The record of the BNP in local elections is risible – their last ‘councillor’ in Barking and Dagenham quit after two months, their councillors in Burnley never turned up for council meetings and contributed nothing to local democracy. A huge number of their candidates last time had convictions for racist attacks and football violence. They are scum, pure and simple, and anyone moronic enough to vote for them should hang their head in shame. The only upside is that their councillors are unlikely to turn up to meetings, won’t get anything done (because the council is still controlled by Labour anyway) and my guess is half of them will quit by Christmas… The Stop The BNP campaign tried hard, but it looks like the BNP will have to be left to shoot itself in the foot.
Overall, it was a disastrous night for the Labour party, who were hemorrhaging seats across the country. There’s a cabinet re-shuffle taking place at the moment… let’s see who goes.
Now go and vote.
Just a quick political thought or two…
it’s been a pretty disastrous week for the Labour party – John Prescott’s affair with his secretary was gruesome misuse of power (and a sackable offense in just about any other area of work), Clarke letting thousands of foreign prisoners free was laughable for a home secretary of such draconian ideals, and Patricia Hewitt being laughed at and heckled for suggesting that this has been the best year ever for the Health Service, mere days after thousands of job cuts were announced was the icing on the cake…
The party is imploding, the government is falling apart, and even for those of us who think they’re a waste of space, it’s pretty bad timing, given that we’ve got local government elections coming up this week, and one place that a lot of disaffected voters from all parts of the political spectrum seem to be turning is to the BNP. Oh yes, racists seem to crop up all the way from left to far right, and for some reason, the pathetic bunch of political ignoramus convicted violent criminals that populate the BNP seem to be enticing them. The mind truly boggles at the lunacy of such thinking. I mean, even if you’re a racist, surely the Tories offer a slightly more coherent brand of thinly veiled white middle class straight male hegemony than the BNP.
Which brings us to the thing about voting. It’s vital. It really is. Given the profile of the BNP of late we all need to get out and vote for anyone but them. Find out who’s on your council at the moment, and who the nearest challengers are and vote for them if there’s no other sensible option. Anyone but the BNP. The rise of fascism in Britain, however small their actual support base may be, is something that needs to be fought at every turn. Right now we’ve got a government that are implementing a load of laws that if not directly fascist in their application right now, hand a dangerous level of information and power over to whoever happens to be in government. Under UK law, they work for us, they’re trying to reverse that. One look at the rise in popular support for the BNP shows why ID Cards and laws against the right to protest are so dangerous.
We’ll get back to fighting the Labour party on the 5th May. Election day is the 4th, and that’s the day to stop the BNP.
Anyway, head over to The BBC news page about the local elections, find out about your area, vote, and stop the fascists.
who has put my email address on a public website somewhere??? I’m getting so much spam over these last few days, it’s mad. I’ve had very little for the last 6 months or so. Seemed like a lot of it had gone. But now it’s back, and I’m getting loads of spam comments on this blog… they get filtered, and I can delete them, but they are a pain in the arse…
grrrrr
*grumble grumble*
This has been in the news a lot of late, the case of an RAF Doctor who has refused to go back to Basra on moral and ethical grounds. Jyoti’s blog on this is a fantastic piece of journalism so go and read that first.
He was quoted from the trial, in The Guardian as saying,
“I have evidence that the Americans were on a par with Nazi Germany with its actions in the Persian Gulf. I have documents in my possession which support my assertions,†he told the court. “This is on the basis that on-going acts of aggression in Iraq and systematically applied war crimes provide a moral equivalent between the US and Nazi Germany.â€
How much more damning could an assessment be? This isn’t some peacenik, this isn’t me calling the government fascist scum, this isn’t John Pilger getting all hot and bothered again about some foreign place where people are dying. No, THIS IS A MILITARY DOCTOR, WHO HAS ALREADY BEEN TO IRAQ TWICE. He’s seen this shit with his own eyes. He’s just put his total career on the line in order to follow his conscience, a conscience that previously led him to join the RAF. That is a huge huge thing.
And that the legal system in this country (I initially wrote ‘our country’ there, but who are we kidding?) would jail him for this rather than applaud him and have him head up an investigation into the war crimes he says he can document (along with those that are already only-too-well documented), is a tragic tragic indictment. What a hateful regime. How can that happen? He’s apparently appealing the sentence, I just hope he can appeal to a civilian court where he might get a fairer hearing at least, if not a standing ovation for exposing the corruption, murder and deceit that is the illegal occupation in Iraq.
We’re nearing the end of Holy Week in the church Calendar. Starting with Palm Sunday, running through Maundy Thursday (today) to Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday.
My thoughts on all this are the same this year as they were last year, so click here to read last year’s blog post about Good Friday.