Masses Today

6.30: Seán Giblin, (Anniv)
11.00: Mary Mahoney, (Month's Mind)
6.30: Tom Murphy, (Anniv)





Events This Week and Last






AS I WAS SAYING...

Twenty five years ago this week, on May 4th 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher became British Prime Minister, the first and last woman so far to do so. (John Paul II and Ronald Reagan were also elected that year. Coincidentally, within a short time, all three had survived assassination attempts). From the outset, she was the most anti-European of all her contemporaries. Yet, ironically, Europe has now moved in the general direction she forced upon a sometimes reluctant Britain: the primacy of the 'free market'.

But that wasn't her only glaring contradiction. On the threshold of No. 10 Downing Street, a triumphant 53 year old Thatcher declared:
"Where there is discord may we bring harmony, Where there is despair may we bring hope."
She was a most unlikely disciple of the humble Italian.

Anything BUT harmony travelled on her coat tails. She was the most confrontational of all modern British Prime Ministers. Confrontation was at the core of her personality. The Hunger Strikes, the Falklands War, and her ruthless routing of the coalminers bear this out.

The feminists have argued that the world is in a mess precisely because it is run largely by men. Margaret Thatcher gave the lie to that. She was described by some as 'the only man in the cabinet', or words to that effect! Yet it is difficult to meet anyone who ever admitted to voting for her! But millions did! Not just once but three times. (She actually had a majority of over 40 seats). So why are her erstwhile supporters now so coy?

In the unlikely pages of Woman's Own Magazine, Thatcher uttered these now infamous words: 'There is no such thing as society'. To be fair to her, she said it in order to highlight the importance of obligations over a culture of entitlements. But the original sentiment stood: 'There is no such thing as society'. She came across as raw, rugged individualist. And she did very little, subsequently, to disown that image. On the contrary! She cultivated this image with her 'Iron Lady' posturing. Not surprisingly, the mud has stuck, caked on to her image, and, when coupled with her confrontational style, made many of her voters shy of associating with her publicly.

Ironically, Thatcher was probably the most explicitly Christian of modern British Prime Ministers in that she drew heavily on a Christian vocabulary. Or, more accurately, a Methodist vocabulary. She spoke incessantly of 'duty' and 'obligation'. But 'compassion' didn't figure at all in her lexicon! Such a 'soft centre' didn't become the Iron Lady! But her denial of society became her Achilles' Heel. She had a point, of course: individuals, families and communities all have a part to play; but what about those who -through no fault of their own- are in no position to play a part? The sick, the old, the handicapped, the unemployed? This is where her 'christian' posturing was exposed as a sham.

Most of what we do affect society at large. To paraphrase John Donne's famous Easter sermon, 'no man is an island, entire of itself;...if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.' Mrs. Thatcher should have stayed with the sentiments of her fellow countryman, and left St. Francis to those of a more peaceful disposition. Christianity without society means nothing. Her legacy? A probable third term for Labour!

-Dick Lyng.




THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY

Where technology is concerned, the emphasis is on know-how and on efficiency. The idea is to do things competently and swiftly. The focus is on production, on getting things done, on achieving results. Whether the technology is industrial (an electronic engineer designing a robot that can paint a thousand cars in an hour); or medical (a research scientist developing new drugs in a laboratory); or communications-oriented (a computer scientist producing a mobile phone with a colour display built-in digital camera), the goal is efficient, high-performance, profitable production. The notions of building bigger and better, faster and finer, are dominant. The main goal is: production for consumption for profit. All else is essentially subordinate to this goal, even when what is produced could be said to enhance the quality of human life.

In this scenario human reason tends to be instrumental (use-oriented); human activity tends to be productive, productive-for-consumption; and human beings tend to be seen as consumers, who exist only to buy, indeed who are to the degree that they do buy: tesco, ergo sum. Gradually a way of living (a culture, indeed) is generated in which instrumental reason, technical skills and conspicuous consumption occupy the highest places. Aesthetic, imaginative, poetic, speculative, artistic and religious thought all remain lower on the totem-pole than instrumental, productive reasoning. Sheer technical ability - to make, produce, construct - takes precedence over those distinctively human activities that have their ends in themselves, such as, celebrating a meal; parenting; worshipping; making a home; working at a marriage. In the final analysis, it is the doing that defines us - not 'who are you?' , but 'what do you do?'

-Jim Corkery.




A MUSLIM PERSPECTIVE

Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, who was commandant of the Baghdad prison, is fighting back. Many more people were involved in the abuse, she says. Is this unedifying self-justification, hurling the blame at others? What is clear, however, is that some coalition troops have been sent to Iraq without a moral compass.

One cannot help thinking of another case of the tragic abuse of military power. On March 16, 1968, American troops executed four hundred villagers in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. As in the Iraqi jail, someone took photographs, and the resulting scandal contributed to the eventual American withdrawal from Vietnam.

One of the soldiers present at the My Lai massacre had had a deeply religious upbringing. But as he commented afterwards: 'I didn' t think we were doing anything different from any other unit. You really do lose your sense, not of right and wrong, but your degree of wrong changes. A different set of rules, and I don' t think that any of us quite knew what those rules were. This seems to get to the heart of what happened in the Baghdad prison. 'Your degree of wrong changes' . The intoxication of power, and the enemy' s frustrating tenacity, combine to lure us into moral shortcuts.

What Iraq now needs is a spiritual agenda. Not some miserable fundamentalism, of the kind which has done so much harm on both sides. But a sense that religion must chasten us when we are in positions of great power. God is greater, so we should be humble. Muslims should remember the following verse of the Holy Koran. 'You will surely find the closest in affection to the Muslims to be those who say, We are Christians. That is because there are among them priests and monks, and because they are not arrogant.'

-Abdal Hakim Murad BBC 4




SLIPPERY SLOPE

Left to its own devices, middle age will swallow up my spirit, wounding me with aches and failures while offering no succour in the form of wisdom. So goes the logic of my fear. And so, a slave to adrenaline and endorphins, I wage a conscious and steadfast battle to make myself a little bit uncomfortable regularly: to leap across some void or other, to risk not everything but something. Because too much safety has a price, because I live in comfort, because risk and fear are part of what makes us human, I choose to live, however fleetingly, if not on the edge then on some edge. For life without edges is, well, smooth; and a smooth slope is a slippery one, indeed.

-THOMAS J. McCARTHY, America, 8 September 2003, p. 6




MEMORY

Stony seaboard, far and foreign,
Stony hills poured over space,
Stony outcrop of the Burren,
Stones in every fertile place...
Till there arose abrupt and lonely,
A ruined abbey, chancel only,
Lichen-crusted, time befriended,
Soared the arches splayed and splendid,
Romanesque against the sky.

-John Betjeman.






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