A version of this article appeared in The Independent magazine in January 1988
This piece is republished here on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition to mark the 80th birthday of the painter and musician John B Vallely
I was, I suppose, looking for my father. The man sitting across the table might have been him. Not in reality. My father had died at the age of 48, when I was still at school, and this man was merely 10 years older than me. But, with the grace of partiality, he looked as I might have imagined my father to look now, given the arrest of ageing which untimely death allows. And this man’s name was Vallely, too.
All this is not why I am here, I thought. And yet it was. I first came across the name John B Vallely in Northern Ireland a decade ago. I was in the office of Sir John Hermon, then the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the province’s senior policeman had a painting by my namesake on the wall. Today, I cannot remember much about it, only that it was strong and vigorous, and that the canny chief of the constabulary was keen to emphasise that he had paid £2,000 for it.
For 10 years I had meant to seek the artist out, even as I also always intended to track down a man called Brian Vallely who was renowned in Ulster as a player of the traditional Irish uilleann pipes. They were firm purposes which I carried with me, ever unfulfilled, throughout the dozens of visits I subsequently made to Northern Ireland.
Now here I was, sitting in his house in Victoria Street, Armagh City, opposite the man. Or the men. For the John who was the painter was also the Brian who has been at the forefront of the revival of the Irish pipes in recent decades.
He was a sturdy man, a personification it seemed of his paintings – robust and rooted. Seamus Heaney said of John B Vallely’s art that he “liked its forthrightness from the beginning”. The same was true of the man. But there was about him, too, the elusiveness of the ethereal pipe music which he teaches every week at the Armagh Piper’s Club he founded 30 years ago. The two art-forms sometimes interact, as when he recently combined a musical tour of Verona, Bologna and Padua with a series of exhibitions in northern Italy. But there are many colleagues in each discipline who are unaware of his expertise in the other. “Indeed, some people think I am two people. It can be,” he says, with words as economic as his brush-strokes, “a convenient deception.”
He got a bit of gentle ribbing when Sir John Hermon’s autobiography was published and revealed that Vallely had been the proximate cause of the police chief’s second marriage. The chief constable, then a 58-year- old widower, was contacted by a 33-year-old law lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast who rang to upbraid him for some misdemeanour. He agreed to meet her and she went in to tear strips off him, but before she began she noticed the painting. “That’s a Vallely,” she said as she took in its strong composition and heavy impasto. They fell to talking and the painter became a matchmaker.
* * *
Armagh is where Vallelys are from. In idle moments on travels throughout the world, I have opened the phone book in New York, London or even Dublin. Vallelys are everywhere in short supply. But in Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of the island, there are dozens. Armagh is the place from which my great-grandfather – another John – emigrated sometime around 1880 and made his way to the North-east of England to a job in the steel works. He was, my grandmother told me, a puddler – a labourer who heated pig iron in a furnace to transmute it into something more refined. Further back than that the family memory does not go.
But nor did John B Vallely’s. Such is the general limit of the oral tradition. His grandfather had lived in the countryside outside the city where he was born in the townland of Drumcairn in 1858. His great grandfather had moved there from Ardress earlier in the 19th century. Almost certainly we were related, but there was no documentation to guide us beyond the residual family memories.
We took refuge in coincidence. His father had been a schoolmaster; so was mine. His father had founded the city’s Gaelic verse-speaking competition the Feis Mhor Ard Mhacha; mine had also been a lover of poetry. Both were referees; his for Gaelic football, mine for boxing (I can still remember the sour, leathery smell of the heavy brown gloves which hung, for some reason, inside the pantry door and how, in there, I cried silently in muffled fear the first night I put on them on before he took me down to his boxing club).
But where I had remained resolutely resistant to the sport, Brian, it transpired, has embraced not just the boxing but also weightlifting, cycling, fell-running and athletics. His enthusiasm led him to get deeply involved with the National Athletic and Cycling Association of Ireland of which he had been a member since the age of 14 and which his father and uncle had founded in Armagh in 1934. Indeed he became the Armagh delegate to the General Council in the late 1960s and was elected International Secretary in 1973 – in which role he had an uphill battle as the NACAI had been suspended in the 1930s by the International Amateur Athletic Federation when the Association refused to conform to the Political Boundaries Rule implemented in 1934. (When, in 1937 the Amateur Athletic Association of Eire was formed by six breakaway clubs from the NACAI, the IAAF accepted these six clubs as representing the 26 Counties of Ireland for purposes of international competition. And so the NACAI was suspended from all international contact.) Brian travelled all over Europe establishing sporting links and arranging exchange visits with teams from both Western Europe and from behind the then Iron Curtain – under the umbrella of the International Workers Sports Federation, the CSIT. Brian, it was clear was a socialist rooted in old-style syndicalism. We were back to coincidence; my grandfather had been one of the founders of the penny-a-week trade union health scheme which was, so we were proudly told as children, one of the fore-runners of the NHS. Brian’s activism had been more confrontational. “For his pains,” said the catalogue notes from his mid-term retrospective at Belfast Castle, “he has had the dubious honour of being a guest of Her Majesty, on an issue of workers’ rights.” He was imprisoned on a charge, on which he protests his innocence, of assaulting a police officer on a picket line.
Until 1972, Brian Vallely was a heavily committed civil-rights activist. “It was meetings seven nights a week.” Then on Bloody Sunday, British paratroopers shot dead 13 civil rights marchers. “After that, you realised you could be leading people down the road to be shot. It stopped all our overt activity.” It was at that point, he says, he realised he had to choose between activism and art. “In the end I decided there were plenty of people who could do that, but not so many who could do this,” he said, waving his arm vaguely around the paintings that lined the walls of the spacious terraced home which was built in Victorian times.
* * *
Suddenly, he seemed uncomfortable at the point the conversation had reached. We rose to inspect the paintings, some of them the work of artists he admires, but many of them his own. Several were of traditional Irish musicians playing fiddles, elbow pipes, concertinas and bodhrans. All around the front room with its spare gallery atmosphere lay instruments – a beautiful harp and heavy tin whistles nearly three feet long. In the hall, a dozen or more violins, guitars and uilleann pipes were piled up in their cases. Later in his studio, housed in an industrial estate known as the Armagh Business Centre, a score of canvases, liberally pigmented with heavy oils which exude an abstracted physicality, all had musicians as their subjects. They were variations as obsessive and as haunting as those of the pipe tunes he plays. And they were charged with the intense melancholy, aching lyricism and dark rhythmic power of this mournful nation’s music.
Once, I had thought it my music. I remember the first time I went to Ireland in my twenties and discovered with the sudden force of revelation that the manners and mores of the place of my birth were those of Ireland. Our rhythms and rituals, customs and cadences, tunes and temperaments, weddings and wakes were those of another place, crudely disguised with a Middlesbrough accent.
For a while I wondered about reconnecting. But it was a rhapsody which mistook romance for reality, a bogus MacStiofainism which could not distinguish between Oirishness and the real thing. And my father’s maternal grandparents, I knew, by contrast, were of Yorkshire farming stock. I knew because I had traced their remains to the barely intact letters “Hannah and Ruben Ludley” on a crumbling sandstone tomb in the overgrown old churchyard at Ampleforth in the fold between Yorkshire’s wolds and the moors to the north.
So when Brian Vallely spoke of how he had visited his mother’s family in Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo – a family with whom I thought I could have no connection – to hear them play the fiddle and flute in the rough, rhythmic, huff-and-puff traditional style developed for dances in the home, I knew that he told of a world which was not mine. It was perhaps a glimpse into my history, but it was not who I was. Like Brian Vallely, I had made my decisions, though my choices were not between activism and art. The voyage around my father was not yet complete. But in meeting this singular musician and painter I had travelled a little further.
FollowNo-one should be excluded by lack of cash from watching the Olympics
Already the Olympics have produced some golden moments reminding us of so much that is great about the human condition: application, determination, power, resilience, tenacity and, even, for the silver medallist, grace in the face of disappointment. It is a shared experience which brings peoples together. The last Olympics, in Rio in 2016, were watched on television by more than half the world.
It is all the more sad, then, that this time – though we have shared big moments in the big sports – viewers throughout Europe are being denied the opportunity to experience “never miss a moment”, to borrow the BBC’s 2016 slogan when it live-streamed every individual sport. This time the European rights have been sold exclusively for €1.3bn by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to the Discovery Channel which wants to use the Games to win audiences from Disney, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. British TV is allowed only to cover two live events at any given time.
The official motto of the IOC is “Faster, Higher, Stronger.” Perhaps they should also add “Dearer”. Today’s Olympics are increasingly all about money.
Host cities almost always lose vast amounts. Every Olympics since 1960 has run over budget. In 2012 the London Games cost three times what was planned. Japan budgeted $7 billion, has spent $28 billion and is predicted to lose at least $35 billion. This is why five major cities pulled out of the bidding to host next year’s Winter Olympics.
The organisers at the IOC experience no such jeopardy. Over the years they have evolved an elaborate structure of sub-committees and agencies which consume around 15 percent of Olympic revenues. The huge IOC entourage in Tokyo has been estimated to number 10,000 VIPs.
In theory IOC members do not make anything, though the president receives an annual “indemnity” in excess of €200,000 and lives free of charge in a luxury hotel. Ordinary members, who are treated to lavish hospitality by Olympic would-be hosts, have in the past been embroiled in bribery and corruption as well as opaque processes and questionable decisions.
Nowadays 75% of IOC income comes from television rights. That is perhaps why IOC officials were so adamant that the games this year could not be cancelled – despite rising Covid infections in an unvaccinated Japan, opposition from local residents, and medics’ fears the Games could become the world’s largest super-spreader.
Had the Games not gone ahead the IOC would have had to repay not just the €1.3bn to Discovery but what NBC has paid for the US rights. Then there is the 18% of their income from sponsors – many of whom have, like Toyota, already pulled their advertising and brought in marketing consultants to minimise the damage the Games may do to their brands. Had the IOC cancelled it would have had to refund between $3 and $4 billion.
It is time for the world’s governments to take a closer look at the International Olympic Committee. Then, at the very least, at the 2024 Games in Paris, television viewers might be able to engage properly with the full range of activities which make up what ought to be the world’s greatest celebration of human sporting achievement .
Occasionally the mask slips on even the greatest showman. Donald Trump, at the rally to launch his re-election campaign this week, spoke to a half empty auditorium. Afterwards, in the dark, the dispirited President of the United States was seen with his red tie undone and his ‘America First’ baseball cap crumpled in his fist as he arrived home alone.
This was not how it was supposed to be. Mr Trump’s 24 hours in Tulsa were intended to set him on the road to re-election, to put behind him his inept handling of the coronavirus crisis and his wayward responses to the Black Lives Matter protests. He had, he boasted, had a million requests for tickets for the 19,000 seater stadium and had had to build an overflow compound to hold the excess crowds.
It was not needed. Perhaps even his devotees decided they did not fancy attending an indoor rally with thousands of people not required to wear face masks or remain socially distanced in an expression of the President’s contempt for COVID-19. Ironically six Trump staffers contracted the virus while preparing the rally.
More likely the President had been out-smarted by thousands of teenagers who had used their K-pop TikTok accounts to encourage one another to apply for tickets and then not attend the rally which was being indelicately, or provocatively, held in the city which was the site of a horrific massacre of Black Americans by a mob of their white neighbours in 1921. The social media post outlining the plan was viewed two million times before the kids swiftly deleted their messages to keep them from spreading to the mainstream internet.
Whatever the cause Trump staffers stood horrified as the start time approached as they gazed at the banks of empty seats. The local Fire Department estimated only 6,200 people attended. The president, after yelling at aides backstage went out and gave one of his most rabble-rousing speeches ever – decrying the “Chinese virus”, which he dubbed Kung Flu, and spending 15 minutes lambasting the “fake news” mainstream media for broadcasting an unflattering video clip of him gingerly descending a ramp at West Point or using two hands to drink a glass of water.
Critics often suggest President Trump’s hyper-sensitivity is rooted in some kind of personal narcissism. But in a live-streamed lecture last week the Cambridge academic, Sir Richard Evans, posited a more calculated explanation.
The eminent 19th and 20th century historian was discussing populism, a movement which began among Russian radicals and American farmers in the 1890s and continued among Peronists in Argentina and Poujadists in France in the 1950s. It has resurfaced in our own times on the Left – with Chavez in Venezuela, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece and the global Occupy movement – but mostly on the authoritarian Right, with Erdogan in Turkey, Le Pen in France, the Lega Nord in Italy, the Brexit party in the UK and Bolsonaro in Brazil. There are touches of it in Boris Johnson.
What unites all these, and Donald Trump, is a vision of The People versus The Elite, in which the populists present themselves as the purest expression of the silent majority. They attack the Establishment, ‘the system’ or the ‘deep state’ which they perceive in self-perpetuating elites in politics, business, the media, banks, universities and the judiciary. They insist that referendums are more democratic than parliaments which can frustrate their plans. And they use vulgar language to show they do not belong to the polite elite but are men of the people. They offer simple solutions to complex problems.
They generate a constant sense of crisis – to which they claim to embody the answer. They belittle opponents. They peddle conspiracy theories. They even tell bald lies. “I have done a phenomenal job on it,” says Mr Trump of COVID-19 which has now killed 121,000 Americans. Yet their supporters accept personal corruption as the price which must be paid for getting things done.
Populists seek to undermine alternative sources of authority – parliaments, judges, awkward journalists and academics, and neutral civil services. They disregard or dismiss experts, which is why President Trump has already had four national security advisers, four White House chiefs of staff, three heads of the FBI, and four attorney-generals.
For populists emotion and instincts trump evidence. That’s why they are better in opposition than actually running things – and why populist leaders have the worst record in handling the pandemic. But eventually in government they run out of road. Donald Trump appears to have just got an inkling of that fact.
This is a longer version of my Church Times column for 26 June 2020
Why we should prefer history to hysteria
When a Roman patrician donated a new bathhouse, aqueduct or road to the city he would often have a prominent stone inscribed D.S.P.F or de sua pecuna fecit. It meant ‘paid for with his own money’. In return his fellow citizens often put up a statue to him. When the great man fell from public favour the statue was often torn down – a practice, I learned while researching my forthcoming book on philanthropy*, which became a great symbolic gesture in any revolt or sedition.
The lessons of history go far wider than that, as we have seen this week with the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, once lauded as the city of Bristol’s greatest philanthropist, but now reviled as a slave trader. The event tells us something about the nature of history, the need to remember, the danger of forgetting and the fact that we do not stand detached from history but are part of it.
The need to remember is perhaps the easiest of these lessons to learn. Colston gave the contemporary equivalent of about £25 million to build schools, almshouses, hospitals and churches, though he excluded as beneficiaries the Catholics, Dissenters and Whigs his politics led him to despise. But his fortune was built upon the sale of 84,000 slaves, of whom 19,300 died in the ships he used to transport human beings from Africa to the Caribbean and then bring tobacco, sugar and rum back to Britain. It is hard to argue that such tainted money can ever be fully redeemed by good works.
The danger of forgetting is clear from those who fail, or refuse, to understand that at the time slavery was generally condoned by the educated church-going classes. John Locke, that most celebrated philosopher of liberty, was a shareholder in Colston’s company. The protester who sprayed “Churchill is a racist” on his statue in Parliament Square may remember historians’ revelations that Britain’s wartime leader privately used derogatory anti-black language – but appears to have forgotten that the choice in 1940 was between Churchill’s slang and Hitler’s genocide.
After the fall of the Soviet Union several East European countries took down their statues of infamous Communist dictators but, rather than destroying them, placed them in statue-parks so children could learn something of the context the past gave their present. History is a better option than the hysteria on display in Bristol this week. Liverpool, whose splendid array of Grade 1 listed architecture is a testament to another city whose greatness was built on slavery, has responded to the complexity of its own history with a Slavery Museum in which future generations can learn to comprehend the complexity of their own chequered past.
In such ways do we make our own history in an honest and healthy fashion. Colston died in 1721. The notorious statue was erected only in the era of Victorian imperialism – almost 200 years after his death. Removing the statue to a museum would merely have been another stage in the way city makes its history – and one from which its children could learn far more than this week’s attempts simply to erase the past.
* Philanthropy – from Aristotle to Zuckerberg by Paul Vallely will be published by Bloomsbury in September
Time for action not more words on Black Lives Matter
A celebration of the five decades of the music of Ella Fitzgerald was shown on television last weekend. It was a glorious uplifting reminder of the incomparable phrasing of the greatest jazz singer of the 20th century. But the shadow of racism fell across the joy.
In one scene, early on, the US police were seen assaulting a group of black people with a powerful water-jet. It was a grim prefiguring of the scenes from the United States today in which heavily-armoured police are brutally dispersing crowds demonstrating at the callous on-camera killing of a black man, George Floyd, by a white policeman. Ninety years on, and nothing has changed.
Online, the next day, Pentecost Sunday, our priest gave a sermon which imagined a triptych. In the first panel was the Tower of Babel where language caused confusion and bred suspicion. The second showed how, at Whitsun, language brought unity and insight. The third panel, he suggested, was the one we are painting today of our contemporary world.
The mass was in English but the songs were in Ibo and ki-Swahili. That is one part of our painting. But in another Donald Trump was using tear gas, rubber bullets and baton sticks to clear his path to a church before which he posed holding a Bible as though it were an object to swear on rather than a message to take to heart. It was the kind of scene which made the religious dystopia imagined by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale seem suddenly not so far-fetched.
George Floyd was in Minnesota, where he died, as part of a church work programme in which he hoped to gain a licence to drive a heavy goods vehicle while being, in the American parlance, ‘discipled’. He had been sent there by his pastor at the Resurrection project in Houston where Floyd was “loved, admired, and served as a father figure to guys in this community”.
His death, the Revd Patrick Ngwolo said, was “an inflection point” after which “we either master racism, or allow it to master us”. The blood of an innocent victim cries out for vengeance but also speaks of the possibility of redemption. It is for us to choose which it would be.
An angry protestor on the street echoed that dichotomy more bleakly. “For half a century we have tried Martin Luther King’s way of peace – and it has not worked,” he raged. “It is time to try the way of Malcolm X”. Violence, as Dr King observed, is the language of the unheard.
We should not make the mistake of reassuring ourselves that the grotesque cartoon politics of the United States do not obtain here. In our own land black people are ten times more likely to be stopped and search than whites. They are three times more likely to be excluded from school. They have the highest unemployment rate of all ethnic groups. They are dying in disproportionately high numbers of COVID-19.
Public Health England this week published a report which confirmed that. Indeed it showed people of Bangladeshi ethnicity had double the risk of dying from the virus, compared to people of white British ethnicity. The question now is what are the government, and the rest of us, going to do about it?
from the Church Times 5 June 2020
Let’s give the poor world 2% of what we spend saving ourselves from the virus – so that they can fight it too
It was hardly a surprise to be told that we are in for three more weeks of lockdown. A fortnight ago we were told that the peak of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic would occur around the middle of this month. Now the experts are shifting it forward another week or two, with deaths continuing at a high level for some time.
Of course, the lockdown is causing problems – physical, financial and psychological. But it was chastening to read this message from an Indian doctor in the UK: “Social distancing is a privilege. It means you live in a house large enough to practice it,” he wrote. “Hand washing is a privilege too. It means you have access to running water… Most of the ways to ward off the corona are accessible only to the affluent. In essence, a disease that was spread by the rich as they flew around the globe will now kill millions of the poor. All of us who are practising social distancing and have imposed a lockdown on ourselves must appreciate how privileged we are.”
Aeroplanes are not necessary to the transmission of plague. The Black Death in the 1340s showed that as it swept across Europe killing as many as half the entire population. Modern methods of transport have undoubtedly accelerated the speed with which pandemics can proceed. But the responsibility of the rich to assist the poor in combating this disease is not rooted in our culpability for air travel. It is a question of both moral imperative and enlightened self-interest.
Anyone who has travelled through the favelas of South America, the slums of India, or the vast shanty town of Kibera outside Nairobi – where more than a million Kenyans live cheek by jowl in homes which lack clean water and sanitation – will have some understanding of the way that this disease will spread like wildfire once it arrives there.
Tomorrow the finance ministers of the world’s leading nations are gathering, by video, for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. They will discuss a multi-trillion dollar strategy to prevent the imminent global recession from turning into an economic crisis as terrible as the Depression of the 1930s.
It is important that they do not forget the world’s poorest people. African nations were due to make $44 billion debt repayments in 2020. These must be frozen or entirely wiped away. Aid and cheap loans of $100 billion have been promised; that figure needs to be doubled. Poor nations also need new digital data systems to spread accurate health messages to mobile phone users, collect data on symptoms, keep track of outbreaks, target cash to the hardest-hit sectors, and monitor how aid is being spent to prevent corruption.
Can we afford to do that at a time when our own resources are so stretched? All that would cost just 2% of what rich nations have spent on the stimulus packages which have already been put in place worldwide. Without it millions, not just tens of thousands, of deaths could follow, and a movement of refugees could ensue which would dwarf recent migration flows. Can we afford to help? Can we afford not to?
My Church Times column for 17 April 2020
(posted early to lobby the IMF/World Bank meetings on Fri/Sat.)
There are photographs in our local paper of the Blue Lagoon, a beauty spot less than an hour’s drive away, up in the Peak District, where the police have poured black dye into the water to make it less attractive – in order to deter visitors. The black substance, which was poured in by officers wearing hazmat suits to protect themselves, spread out across the turquoise water like great ugly jellyfish.
It’s been portrayed in the popular press as the latest example of ‘coronavirus correctness gone mad’ – along with police use of drones to name-and-shame walkers taking their dogs out on the high moors and council environmental health officers telling corner shops that they could not sell Easter eggs as these are ‘non-essential items’. They widely quoted the former supreme court justice Lord Sumption who proclaimed this week that excess enforcement of the official guidance on self-isolation and social distancing was in danger of turning Britain into a “police state”.
The distinguished judge was undoubtedly correct in pointing out that there is an important difference between behaviour which is, on the one hand, unwise and, on the other, illegal. The police have no power to enforce ministers’ preferences but only legal regulations. They exceed these when they rule that the law restricts people to exercising outside only once a day or in a certain place.
Good policing depends upon consent and relies upon the common sense of the public. In the main that is in evidence. But, as the scenes of panicking shoppers elbowing aside old people in supermarkets – or stealing from the cage containing other shoppers’ donations for food banks – reminded us there are always a few delinquents.
More commonly there are those who can’t or won’t understand the advice to leave a six-foot gap while queuing in the local mini-market, despite the staff having marked black-and-yellow crosses on the floor. “No need to get heavy bro,” as one joint-smoking youth riposted to an agitated pensioner. Society needs to find ways to discourage such behaviour – after repeat offences the staff barred the youth – and occasionally the police may have to be involved.
Police chiefs have responded by getting together to agree common guidelines to avoid the inconsistency of Lancashire police having issued 123 enforcement notices in less than a week while Bedfordshire police issued none. They will tell officers that they must enforce the law and not the off-the-cuff pronouncements of individual politicians.
That said, circumstances differ from one place to another. The decision by Derbyshire police to discourage walkers on the high moors came in response to the previous sunny weekend when visitors inundated the Peak District National Park crowding into villages populated mainly by elderly residents – and emptying their local shops.
As for the Blue Lagoon, what most of the press failed to ascertain is that the use of black dye there has been a common tactic by the police over the years to discourage daytrippers from bathing in the alluring waters – whose colour comes from the calcium oxide used in the quarrying process which created the beautiful pool. It has left the lagoon with a pH not far short of ammonia and bleach as the signs around the pool make clear. But common sense is sometimes a singularly uncommon quality.
What Spike Milligan has to say to Stephen Byers
PAUL VALLELY
There are interesting parallels
between laughter and lying.
Both subvert the truth and are
infectious. So how does one
liberate and the other stultify?
The last time I saw Spike Milligan was in a taxi at 2am somewhere in the middle of Birmingham. We had been for a meal in a curry house which ended so late because every time a waiter came to the table Milligan invited them to join us. It had begun when the comedian asked the first member of staff his name and discovered it was Patrick. The restaurant was run by a family from Goa, the one part of the sub-continent where, thanks to Portuguese colonialism, you stood a good chance of meeting Indians who were Catholics. Since Milligan too was a Catholic who had been born in India the opportunity was too good to miss. We ended up with five waiters sitting at the table. Service, as a consequence, was very slow.
After the meal he gave me a lift to my hotel. As I reached the front door a trumpet appear from the taxi window and played a spectacularly ear-shattering fanfare. Then came Spike’s head. “Announcing the arrival of that celebrated journalist Paul Vallely, Esquire,” he bawled into the quiet night air. After a wild cackle of laughter the cab roared off leaving me to face the consequences of the music as the hotel staff opened the door.
Milligan was always like that. On another occasion I was with him at a local radio station. The programme on-air was being piped through the building so staff could keep in touch as they rushed from office to studio. It was even in the lift. Spike, however, got it into his head that this was muzak and therefore an intolerable invasion of his personal space. In the lift Milligan stood directly in front of the station manager, and placing his mouth only an inch or so from the hapless manager’s began to sing, can belto as Harry Secombe used to put it, directly into the poor man’s face. “See how you like it,” Spike said, without further explanation, as we left the lift.
There was a disjunction between reality and fantasy in Spike Milligan’s head. It was what made him a comic genius. The borderlines between truth and fiction, satire and surrealism, blurred in his head, producing the most unlikely juxtapositions – and not always to his advantage as I found when I discovered him in tears after one performance where the audience had laughed at “the serious bit” he tried to do on the seal fur trade in the middle of his otherwise absurdist act. The more he railed that this wasn’t funny, the more they had laughed.
Recalling Milligan at his death this week made me think again about Stephen Byers. For there are interesting parallels between laughter and lying; deception is there in both, or at least a wilful process of jumbling what is true with what is not.
Religion can be very po-faced about this. Let your Yes be Yes, and your No be No, as the Bible has it. And some secular philosophers have taken just as hard a line. Lying, Kant said in his Metaphysics of Morals, is “the greatest violation of a human being’s duty to himself.” The principle of truthfulness must be upheld whatever is at stake.
Traditional moral theology has been less rigid. We are only obliged to tell the truth when the person we’re addressing has the right to the knowledge. Thus if a newspaper asks about your sex life, you can lie with moral impunity, unless it touches on a matter of the common good as it arguably did with President ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton.
But what about Stephen Byers? Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt – and presume that his dissembling when interviewed on television by Jonathan Dimbleby was not for the low motive of saving his own skin but was inspired by the desire to protect the best interests of his troubled department, of his party, of the Government, or even, and this is stretching the point, the travelling public – could his lies ever be justified? Moral theology offers all manner of caveats to excuse lies for a greater good. But none of them seem to apply to a decision to lie to the general public about a matter of common interest. And though telling the truth in the House of Commons after lying on tv may be a political mitigation it is not a moral one.
The bigger problem, as the ethicist Sissela Bok, points out in her seminal Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, is that lying – even when it is done in the name of some greater good, like national security – spreads like a disease and threatens to infect the trust and integrity which are the very foundations of all social exchange. Yet the legal, moral and social sanctions society has traditionally employed against deception – perjury, libel, sin, guilt, shame and embarrassment – today seem increasingly to have less purchase. In a world where the stress on individualism, on competition, on achieving material success generates intense pressure to cut corners we are, it seems, becoming desensitised to lying.
What both Spike Milligan and Stephen Byers have done this week is draw our attention to the way the accepted order of things can be subverted by being cavalier with the truth. Only with Milligan the result was liberating, exposing our mechanisms of deception and mocking them, while with Byers it was another nail in the coffin of our society’s moral stultification.
Looking for my Dad on the D-Day beaches
Photograph after black-and-white photograph of the D-Day landings have appeared on our television screens, in print and on countless internet sites in recent days. Scanning the faces I realised I was doing more than absorbing the grim reality of the largest seaborne invasion in history and the turning of the tide of the Second World War. I was looking for my father.
He was at Dunkirk, I knew that. He had been with his regiment, the Royal Engineers. But he was later attached to the Commandos and had been involved in actions behind enemy lines about which he remained stonily silent until the day he died. Towards the end of the war he had been posted to Palestine, for we had his olive-wood photo album. But in between, I had long wondered, did he take part in the Normandy landings. I was just 16 when he died, and never found a mood in which he could be enticed to break that silence.
There was a moral ambiguity to killing which my Dad, a good Catholic, was not prepared to cheapen to satisfy the curiosity of a child. But there was nothing ambiguous about the cause for which the men of his generation fought, nor about the courage with which they steeled themselves to the frightening fight.
Last week his comrades-in-arms did speak, and it was with the venerable understatement of a previous age which was all the more moving for its quiet modesty. “There was a job to be done.” But the tears of the old men, the bewildered admiration of the great-grandsons they had brought with them for this last pilgrimage to Normandy, and the heartfelt handshakes of the middle-aged French women who grasped their hands in greeting, all of that spoke with eloquence. These were the men, as one older relative put it to me, who “were all that stood between us and the prospect of a Nazi tide which, if it swept us aside, would go on to conquer the whole world”.
It is hard to imagine what cause might unite the present generation in such an enterprise today. And that is not just because the present is always more muddled than the past. The war against Hitler, his fascist ideology and his genocidal death camps had a great narrative of good versus evil. Its outline had a shocking clarity. In our post-modern epoch, we are constantly told, all narratives have equal validity. The phrases which fell from old men’s lips on Friday – about camaraderie and esprit de corps – sound alien to modern ears.
Nazism was outlived by Communism but, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, American capitalism confidently pronounced The End of History. That reckoned without the tenacity of nationalism – which broke out like a virulent rash all across eastern Europe – and fundamentalist religion which quite shattered the old world order with the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.
Our wars since then have seemed a good deal more confusing. The self-righteousness of our invasion of Iraq has ended in a murderous sectarian quagmire. In Afghanistan we seemed uncertain of the purpose of our military engagement against the Taliban who had earlier been armed by the Americans in order to drive out the Russians. The war on terror ended up with the insupportable detention without trial of Guantanamo Bay. In Syria we have backed the opposition to Assad only to find that it includes al-Qa’ida affiliates whom many fear as a greater evil.
There is one clear grand narrative. Next year China will overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy. But in most other respects the picture is fractured. The European Union was set up as a “never again” bulwark against a war in Europe but, for some, the grand European project has begun to lose traction, as the rising Ukip tide has shown. In its place the European Right is raising panic against what it calls “the Islamisation of Europe”. France has banned head-scarves in state schools, Belgium the full veil, Switzerland minarets on mosques and there are campaigns in Norway against circumcision and halal food.
In none of this is there the kind of idealistic cause which inspired volunteers such as George Orwell to go off to Spain to join the International Brigade to fight fascist Franco – unless, of course, you count European jihadists going off to Syria, which is not the kind of idealism about which we really want to hear. Ukraine’s fight against the insidious and unpredictable behaviour of its neighbour Russia inspires a vague and general hope for peace. But it inspires no nations, or volunteer individuals, to put their boots on the ground.
A year before the US entered the Second World War President Franklin D Roosevelt set out a vision of Four Freedoms to ensure world peace after the conflict. They included “a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point… that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbour”.
Barack Obama sounded a good deal less utopian on Friday when he advised our own age “whenever the world makes you cynical – stop and think of these men”. Yet only the hard-hearted would not have felt emotion at the rheumy tears of those whose comrades gave their tomorrow for our today. But they were clear about what had to be done when faced with Hitler’s tyranny. They fought for freedom. Today we are a lot less clear about what freedom means. And what we need to do about it.
Paul Vallely is visiting professor in public ethics at the University of Chester
Independent on Sunday, 8 June 2014
Donald Trump’s lies are not random and impulsive. They have a pattern and a purpose.
“Look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,” Donald Trump proclaimed before an adoring rally this week. Trouble was that nothing much happened in Sweden the night before, certainly not the terrorist incident the President seemed to be hinting at. The responses were dismissive. Twitter was filled with suggestions about disasters involving Ikea’s self-assembly furniture. The former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt asked of Mr Trump: “what has be been smoking?”
It turned out that Mr Trump had been watching the right-wing channel Fox News a few days earlier and seen an interview with an anti-immigration campaigner who claimed that refugees were causing a crime-wave in Sweden but that it was being covered up by Swedish police. There was zero evidence for this. But it fitted with Mr Trumps narrative of “the very, very dishonest press [that] doesn’t even want to report” on terrorist attacks.
This is but one example of the dangerous blurring of fact and fiction characteristic of the new US President who has told demonstrable whoppers on everything from the size of the crowds at his inauguration to the current US murder rate which he says “is the highest it’s been in 47 years” when FBI statistics show it is almost at its lowest point. There are so many Trump untruths that one White House correspondent is keeping a running list. There were 80 after just 4 weeks in office, but that was before the Swedish fantasy. He has even claimed the sun was shining at a time when it was raining.
Some of this is merely silly, a reflection of Mr Trump’s thin-skinned vanity which is unable to brook contradiction. Often leaves his listeners dumbfounded by the ridiculousness of his brazen lies. But there is a shameless quality to them which is unnerving. When one reporter pointed out the factual inaccuracy of one claim the President replied: “Well, I don’t know. I was given that information… I’ve seen that information around.”
It was with a similar shifty side-step that Donald Trump first catapulted himself into politics repeating the claims of far-right conspiracy theorists that Barack Obama was ineligible to be US president because was not born in America. Confronted with evidence to the contrary Mr Trump persisted, just adding the preamble: “A lot of people say that…” Belief replaces fact. His press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed that when he said of his boss: “he believes what he believes.” This is the politics of panto in which “Oh no it’s isn’t” is deemed a sufficient refutation.
Yet this is serious. The Trump lies are not random. They have a pattern. His fabrications fit his various narratives: he is right and the press are wrong; facts are fake news whereas his assertions are unquestionable; America is rotten, because of blacks, Mexicans, immigrants and liberals and the press is lying to cover it up. To justify his self-image as the national saviour Donald Trump needs to depict a country which is in need of saving. His lies are attempts to shape a new reality. The new US president is not stupid. He is sinister.
from The Church Times
Salieri, Iago, Eichmann, Donald Trump – Hannah Arendt and the voice of self-scrutiny
The name Amadeus means “he who loves God”. But in Peter Shaffer’s play of that name it speaks more of “he who is loved by God”. The subject of the play, nominally, is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart though the real protagonist is his contemporary Antonio Salieri. In Shaffer’s imagination, the older journeyman composer is so consumed with jealously at the talent God has prodigally bestowed upon the younger man that he sets out to destroy him.
In the current National Theatre production Salieri is played by Lucian Msamati who last year became the first black actor ever to play Iago for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The two portraits offer a study in contrasting malevolences. In both a fake bonhomie covers a steady duplicity. But Salieri has a vulnerable charm where Iago is driven only by a bitter nihilism. Yet what both share is a frightening self-knowledge which is unable to save them from their corrosive obsession.
Perhaps all great characters in drama, good or evil, share one characteristic. It is the ability to dialogue between their better and worse natures and do it in public before us.
Radio 4’s In Our Time this week was on the Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt – whose book The Origins of Totalitarianism is enjoying a surge in sales with the advent of Donald Trump. Arendt is best known for her phrase “the banality of evil” which was succinctly explained by one of the programme’s academics by contrasting Shakespeare’s Richard III with Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat at whose trial Arendt coined her famous expression.
Shakespeare’s Richard III may have been the embodiment of pure evil but he has a gleeful awareness of his own subtle, false, and treacherous nature – a consciousness which only deepens the terrifying quality of a character who can descant on his own deformity. Eichmann, by contrast, is a representative of the “non-thinking self” – a man who lacked the capability to have a real conversation with himself about his conduct.
Eichmann was a man with an inability to think deeply, said Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway. He spoke in clichés, couldn’t follow a train of thought, lacked a sense of history, and couldn’t understand other people’s point of view. He was, in the fullest sense of the term, thoughtless. This was the sense in which he was banal. There was – for all the terrible scale of his crime – no satanic greatness about him. Rather he embodied evil as a privation, an absence of goodness.
Perhaps that is also the difference between evil in fiction and fact. It’s hard to imagined there is much in the way of inner dialogue in the mind of someone like President Trump. He seems so unaware of the boundary between truth and falsehood that when a court declared his travel ban unconstitutional he brazenly described the man who made the ruling as a “so-called judge”. There is more than a scruple of self-doubt lacking in Mr Trump. The voice of self-scrutiny seems absent too.
from The Church Times
How to handle Donald Trump: complicity, compromise and conviction
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an unfinished hero, according to Dr Vicki Barnett of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Many factions in the Church – from liberals to evangelicals and even to Trump-supporting conservatives – like to lay claim to the Lutheran theologian. They find in his stance against the Third Reich an endorsement of whatever issue they feel they need to take a stand upon. But theirs is “the Bonhoeffer of the T-shirt”. For the martyr has something more complex to teach us.
We should be cautious about analogy, Dr Barnett warned when quizzed about the parallels between the rise of Hitler and the growth of populist nationalism today. Others were less reluctant. The academic introducing her at the 2017 Bogdanow Lectures in Holocaust Studies this week acidly noted the irony of Donald Trump choosing Holocaust Memorial Day to announce his ban on Muslim refugees entering America to flee from war. It had echoes of the European Jews rejected by the US in 1939 and sent back to deaths in German concentration camps.
Certainly it was hard not to bring to mind the blistering pace of Mr Trump’s first week as Dr Barnett recalled that, when Hitler became German Chancellor, it took him just six weeks to transform democracy into dictatorship. Watching current events coalesce, she said, has “given me a greater understanding of the dynamics of all this”. Even as she spoke President Trump was sacking the serving Attorney General, Sally Yates, for declaring his travel ban unconstitutional.
Bonhoeffer was a man on a moral and political journey. He gave the Nazi salute when he deemed it politic. He declined to give Church burial to a relative branded Jewish by Nazi race laws. He was initially more concerned to resist the nazification of the German church than in taking a public stance against the wider persecution of the Jews. But he did work worked privately to rescue individuals. Later he became active in the German Resistance. Eventually he was executed for plotting to kill Hitler.
A similar interplay of complicity, compromise and conviction is at work today. The British prime minister opted for the former in her dealings with the new US president. It brought initial success on her visit to the US but crumbled when she was tardy in her repudiation of Mr Trump’s approach to Muslim refugees – and she showed poor judgment with her premature offer of a state visit for Mr Trump, an accolade never accorded to Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton and for which George Bush and Barak Obama had to wait more than two years. Compromise is the realpolitik for which Mrs May must now strive.
Conviction, meanwhile, is in great evidence in anti-Trump streets protests here and across the world, much of which, the prime minister may tartly note, is at no personal cost to the protestors. Yet Mrs May must find a way to accommodate that without giving insult to a US president with a notoriously thin skin and a propensity for retaliation.
Perhaps she should read a little Bonhoeffer.
from The Church Times
