In flat times when the news cycle slows to linger on old stories rather than spike and peak with changes that come around like perennials, the same time every year.
As the media aligns with peaks in the cycles of popular consumerism, as if by itself us buying more stuff would warm us more in winter than it does any other season I can't help but think as we endure the flatness of the news we must try harder to resist lapsing from the levels of watchfulness with which we attempt to care about for the rest of year.
In the present history of mass entertainment nothing is bigger than the games industry, whether financially, or whether in terms of the number of programmers it employs. Gaming dwarfs television, film and live music combined. All to produce ever more 'realistic' and enticing images out of electricity, meant to make the viewer forget they are manufactured, particularly when they use human likeness but invent different worlds that are run by rules that nobody would dream of making a reality.
I don't play video games but I do 'get the point' of them, when the mind is tempted to idle then it will idle, but woe betide the mind that is pushed to idle too long, and lets relationships slide to where 'there is nothing to do', that is where the point of being who we are will be tested.
On this day of peak sale upon all-year-round nearly peak sale of the year, the item that is going cheapest is faith in the commander chief in 'the greatest democracy in the world', and 'the greatest economy in world', the USA.
Where as age increasingly shrinks all previous perceptions of competence and the generosity of the country all the commander in chief can do is berate the logic and reasoning of those who question his memory.
This documentary is 100% worth seeing. The film was built on a simple premise: Testimony is evidence, Evidence is what forms a legal case in a court. The film started with a shocking testimony. In 2003 The Catholic Church tried to sell what was soon proven to be a cemetery for a former mother and baby home in central Dublin to a developer, for them to build a hotel on the site.
The last Magdalene Laundry was closed in November 1996. Across Ireland and outside Ireland the victims were presumed to 'statistical' and represented of a past that modern Ireland thought it could avoid. The victims were 'safe' and 'forgotten'. The shock was on the living victims, when in 2003 the Catholic Church sought to sell the plot of land which was discovered to be the graveyard of the former occupants of the Mother And Baby unit. To speed up the clearing of the land the Catholic Church found in it had record of the deaths of over 790 people for whom there were no burial records. The church proceeded to disinter the bones from the plot of land that was for sale, leaving the burial site of former nuns intact. Without regard to any possible relatives of those buried, the church cremate the bones, fill urns with the ash and reburied the ashes in impersonal site with little to say who was buried there. All with no notice given to those who might have been interested in those whose remains were so processed.
Admin around matters to do with death and burial would become a strong feature of the account of those anonymised by the grossly unfair characterisation of them, for the living survivors of Magdalene Laundries, the mothers separated from their children and those punished by incarceration/unpaid work. What stirred those living after time imprisoned to anger was how detached and secretive the Church was when it behaved the way it did.
From there onward, the film was a matter of the victims finding their voice, finding each other, and navigating the present day Ireland to retrieve what was left of the past that had mis-shaped them w when they found that they had no say in the matter of what shaped them. To find a voice they had to find intelligent allies. This they did and to retrieve the narrative was a long struggle that is still ongoing. First there were the young women who were shut up in the laundries late in their operation, who were kept doing laundry year on year. Then there were the babies sold in adoption schemes to rich Americans when money was the only point, but it was a point well hidden by a flummery about morality the did not withstand detailed examination. When the adopted children became adults and understood their adoption they were dissuaded by as much bluff and sincere dishonesty as could be generated by the nuns from from finding records of who their birth mothers were. Likewise mothers seeking children they unwillingly given up for adopting not knowing what money the Catholic Church made from the process, amongst many other things.
Then there was the collection of the accounts of beatings and punishments issued by the monks and nuns, where even when the collection of the Testimony proved to be a critical mass as a body of evidence, the state would push back against witnesses individually where the Irish state's defence against accepting that the beatings was two fold 1-we would have to corroborate with the long dead nuns that they did it before we could believe you 2-even if the state accepts that it colluded with such cruelty then accepting that it did is not enough cause for a compensation scheme, which would need witnesses and paperwork from the Catholic Church for it to work.
It was an enthralling film which often had me in tears, it was wonderfully well made. There were no clunky edits. I am sure the film could be the centre of a website that could expand and expand more. For example try https://jfmresearch.com/testimony/. The film stopped at ongoing matters, The website will explore further research of the subject.
The point is the victims voices were recovered-most by the victims themselves and through the help on offer to them, which they were not expecting to find. The Irish state is still resistant to accepting it's role in colluding with the Catholic Church. I can guess the indifference shown to the public, by both the Irish State and The Catholic Church whilst legally each shielded the other, and tried to play off and divide public opinion to dilute the public's revulsion at the whole authoritarian and falsely moral edifice that The Industrial Schools and The Magdalene Laundries represented.
P.s. I say this film was about the victims being seen to recover their voices.I want to mention this film's well intentioned opposite. 'The Magdalene Sisters', a 2002 fictional film made by actor/director Peter Mullan. It depicted three teenage girls trapped in the punishment/laundry system run by the nuns. I heard about it at the time but felt disinclined to go anywhere near the film when I found out how much those drawn towards it were drawn by the depiction of the violence by the nuns on the teenage girls who were looking for their way out. Recycling anger by drawing the public's attention to it might seem cathartic, but it will also leave more scars, for viewing it, than the process of exploring loss the way 'Testimony' does.... ....seeing faces creased by time and suffering, for waiting for the audience with which to be believed spoke most clearly to me.
Just as there are burner phones, devices for staying in touch with others that are meant to be used for only one job, so there burner relationships where one or both parties seeks to make the other disposable to them without appearing to do so.
I was in one such relationship unawares that who I thought of as 'my friend' wanted rid of me, whist appearing to be pleasant.
For twenty years we knew each other, where we disagreed and agreed by turns until one crucial day he visited me and did not ring back after the visit, or message me, ever again.
I know how much we are capable of being double minded, where we think one thing say something contrary to it, and then act contrary to how we have spoken.
However much I accept that, I still don't understand what prompted him act that way, that last day, and never darkening my life again.
The past is always stretched between faith and fear as we recollect it, where the faith of those in power came from their belief in having the means of tipping the balance of probabilities in favour of old rhetorical answers.
The fear of the weak was that they could not argue their way out the rhetoric that left them so many ideas that the rhetoric denied them the expression of.
Whether you are on the side of power, or the side of weakness, I wish you endurance, and endurance for those you are opposed to, that we may each endure one another better.
In these days that we could fairly describe as 'times of war and rumour', where any sense of central authority seems to be AWOL, and the media narratives that we used to reassure each other with have lost their shape, from too many actors of state thrusting themselves onto the world stage before they got their lines I find myself patient as I wait for the narrative that explains what is actually changing, what the world is changing to - where the present more resembles past, better managed war and rumour, that is more clearly resolved by recent goings on.
Are legendary entertainers still legends when their adoring public sees them live, decades after their prime? Or does the status of the performer shrink in the eyes of those who built up the myth when the cold light of day exposes them, as ageing, and far more human, than they were previously allowed to be?
Extroverts are acknowledged by the company they maintain-that is part of their nature.
Beyond the space they live at from other people, what affirms an introvert to themselves?
'Coming out' to myself as an introvert I find that I repeatedly locate myself at a distance from other people I did not intend to - because of who they were and who I am. Where that distance between us is all there is left for me to hold on to.
So here's to the space apart from other people that I did not set out to live at being the place that holds me in a way that I can live with.
I have not heard much about COP 30. On my radio the present day White House madness that is American Politics has taken up more space on the airwaves than they deserve. But I know COP 30 has had some effect, not least on UK advertising campaigns.
In the latest adverts for cat food on UK YouTube, some cat food corporations have been buffing up their greenwash credentials by reminding viewers that if they buy the latest in highly packaged and over processed cat food the manufacturers will salve the consciences of the cat owners by investing in some small acts that attempt to preserve small tropical islands at risk of sinking beneath the rising sea levels.
Such surreal promises of perverse intent are how green wash dishonours the point of COP 30, for the most credulous consumers.
In the analogue life, a home owner's identity was made secure by the strength of their front door. Where, when television tried to instruct citizens on who to let through that door, and who to block, television presenters found they were stuck.
When they wanted to show the public the genuine identity card of a gas, or electricity, board man (they were always men, and such boards were all there were) the television presenters could not show what such a card should look like. Criminals watched television too: anything that television showed could be adapted by those who it was unadvisable to let through door.
Fast forward forty years, and life is now online, with pale echoes of it so many places digitally, everywhere except where that life started. Criminality is now mobile and international, it flows from country to country, and is impossible to stop.
Even the digitally savvy are ripe for being easily mislead. What value identity when who we are is more about us being a target for theft, than us being who we say we are?
I would have been in my thirties when I first recognised the nature of one peculiar modern narrative furnished by different branches of the many governments in the world at the time. In this narrative, a branch of government we were not meant know existed does something where all proof that the deed was done exist solely in the denial of the deed.
In this narrative the public are told about some event that could have happened, but due to the actions of the government agency we are not allowed to ask about, the event never did happen and the lack of evidence is due to both the secretive government agency thwarting the event and how, because of the event being thwarted, there is now no evidence of what was stopped from happening, happening.
The 2020's version of this non-news news is some publicity hungry popular entertainer 'coming out' as having survived some peculiar drama, where some minor symptom of the drama left them with minor trauma, after which there was some minor hurt, but talk about it on chat shows on light entertainment television has done wonders for their public recognition. .
Here, today I am in not in 'emit' mode, I find I have little to say. Nor am I in 'receive' mode, though I have done what I can to follow the headlines of the day, until their absurdity defeated me.
When we are not in 'emit' mode, and 'not receiving', we are in retreat and we don't know how to describe it.
The ultra wealthy of today have wealth enough to treat the law courts as their personal casinos, where the lawyers there act as their ushers the losses can be written off comfortably: whatever the law that the wealthy are testing, it was always somebody else's money before they got their hands on it, where the somebody else never knew the money should have been theirs, to own until other people lost it, at random.
The poor, who can't afford lawyers and don't do visits to casinos, seek cheaper ways to experience risk - as - life, in which they can withstand the losses.
There, money might well be involved, but the currency of personal experience of each other, which can vary more than anyone may know, is valued more and is often harder to put into words that the poor present to each other as a stable currency.
I have written a lot about the follies of my youth, the misdirection of my childhood, even writing about how I attempted to 'come out' as 'gay' on my own, not knowing of any 'gay community' to join when I 'came out' to myself. Not knowing where the writing was going until it got there.
Coming out, what I found most was a lot of isolated men, for whom 'family had not worked' who were attempting to make a virtue of working their way out of their isolation.
Most of my writings had some minor therapeutic value, where a therapist, and a community to form an attachment to, would have served me better. No matter, as I inherit my present in the age of digital media, where neighbours use WhatsApp to avoid giving each other eye contact whilst talking to each other, my poor man's therapy seems to be very popular variant of the sort of avoidance that has stalked the ages.
It not that older people think less when they appear to have less to say. What older people have to say seems briefer because the are used to speaking that way, and living at a pace that was slower when they were young.
Whereas the new electronic media can edit what the young have to say to deliver it at speeds unheard of, the young not realising that with their ideas being so raw, so unprocessed, what they share will go out on hyper-fast media, un-listened to, also.
That venerable news organisation, the BBC, 'is now being sued by Donald Trump', for something he said where they reported his words slightly differently to how he said them.
It is old news for Trump to find somebody new to throw lawyers at in the pursuit of wealth. He has done that for longer, and more often, than statisticians have been prepared to count.
Trump has always been a 'throw the stone then hide the hand' sort of politician. What the BBC is being sued for is editing 'the stone' and 'the hand' in his words to make them appear as if they were part of one continuous well thought out movement.
The law is not on Trump's side, but that is something which he has often found advantage in, making the publicity on the world stage to be worth more to him than the court's time.
The BBC is a media minnow compared with the American tech giants who are courtesans in Trump's court, Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, X, Google, Microsoft and Apple. The BBC will outlast being noticed by Trump and his army of lawyers. The case is weak. Where American television networks have paid Trump in lawsuits when sued in America, the sums has been a payment to ensure their latest corporate mergers are passed by the government, there is no such agenda with the BBC.
In the meanwhile watch the Whitehouse, to see an executive where the overreach stretches towards infinity, and then beyond....
I saw from the notice for the latest local meeting for the u3a, University of the Third Age (Open University as it used to be), an open meeting with the title 'Great Women in Irish History', the lecturer was a male. I wondered, where are the women historians, who can explain women's history, and men's history, from a female perspective? Was this mansplaining in disguise? Or more localised, and unintended, irony?
I observed no remembrance of the dead of I-don't-know-how-many wars this Sunday, since the war the remembrance was meant to commemorate most ended 117 years ago.
The Imperial War Museum website lists 33 wars that have started since 1900. That is surely a conservative estimate, 6 of the wars are listed as 'ongoing' - most of them have been ongoing since 2014.
The oldest ongoing conflict started in 1948. If it is ever settled, then how it is settled will be the cause more regret than the world is prepared to admit to, or rebuild from.
We may as well call Remembrance Day 'World Rearmament Day' for all that we are capable of changing what we see as our nature, and think of the day as a breather from the cycle in which the arms industries across the world become the source of an ever increasing wealth for the few, increasing the misery of the many.
The weapons will be sold 'to renew the worlds defences'. The stated aim will be peace, as part of cycles of rest from war - the lull before the next storm - where war becomes sold as 'justified'. Again, and again, and again....
In these Trumpian days for the world, where power and wealth are more concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals, such that we have to relearn the real-politic lessons about how empires restructure themselves that George Orwell once made cogent and clear, because the world seems to has forgotten them, I think of how Czar Nicholas II once accrued that much power around himself that in the chaos of his court he became incapable of making clear decisions.
There, in those times those he made decisions for asked themselves Should we blame the Czar? Or blame his ministers for this indecision?
What they could not ask, which we can, because history has given us the answer, is 'Will the next regime centralise power even more than the present president? And be even more secretive/opaque?
I don't count the number of claims that my government is incompetent, I accept that such claims are part of the price of being a grown up and being able to vote, that I will be advised by a diversity of opinion.
I have to trust that whatever the opinion is, something like it has been said before and it was no more accurate then than now. But I will read and listen, in spite of the uniformity of mediocrity that I find often surrounds me. I remain hopeful of something fresher on the horizon.
I was not 'born political', like some are. The house I was born into avoided politics. The adult take on politics was expressed as a code, where all cynicism was hidden from the children, lest the child openly by cynical toward their parents.
I was one such child. What Politics meant was also obscured by the tabloid press that my parents subscribed to, there any political narrative in the news had to be rewritten as an illiterate joke with a banal punchline, for the adverts that made the paper's profits to seem half truthful.
Nowadays YouTube brings me my world news, which is to say I watch how America's sees itself, and I know that it takes a lot of money to make the events it portrays seem like a soap opera set mostly in a casino, whilst presenting what appears to be a truthy explanation.
My mother might have been less cynical, and more engaged with the television news, had she seen how reports and Party Politics could be remade as a kind of soap opera for export.
I don't mind being raised in the cheap, Mother scrimping and saving every penny she could find, to cut the corners to the future with.
Somebody has to live that cheap for others to set up the waste-for-profit schemes that are modern Capitalism.
Where cheap living gets difficult for me is the isolation and lack of skills that comes from me living within my means.
When grown up friendships cost money, and a social capital that I was raised to live without, then a cheaper past means a cheaper future, where the most I am to aspire to is that my cheapness 'is sustainable'.....
It is a recent trend in the media for adverts for popular products to talk about 'making memories', as if families did not do this before, whether with or without the assistance of the technologies of their day.
How much is the spread this phrase a reaction against the new awareness of dementia? It seems that way to me, much more than it is about the unity of family, when previously memory was a given, regardless of how generous, how mean, or merely banal, the events were, that created the memory of family.
Back then a memory of an unhappy family was better then having no recollection of family at all, and whoever in the family got away with the most wrong doing, buried that in how family was misremembered and made the greatest social capital they could out of what would otherwise have been, as an adult, memories of a misery laden childhood.
'The Bridge', a 1990s painting Australian painter Rick Amor (born 1948) a scene he revisited in several published sketches.
'Evening on the Ti-Tree Shore', a 2018 landscape painted by Rick Amor (born 1948). I accept that these paintings will seem much more impressive when they take up the width of a gallery wall.
'Terraced House by The Garden' a 2022 painting painted by Rick Amor, an artist drawn to atmospheric landscapes, of which Australia has many.
'The Shore' as painted by Rick Armour (born 1948) here is the artists website.
