They Might Be Giants: Birdhouse in your Soul

Human decency, not

I recently praised Italy for its attitude towards castaway immigrants, in this post. Unfortunately, the Italian government’s response to need isn’t always this rapid or, in the short term at least, effective.

At the Gleneagles G8, Bono and Bob Geldof managed to persuade the credibility-hungry leaders of the seven most powerful countries of the world (the eighth, Russia, wasn’t asked to play) to participate in their Make Poverty History campaign (Today poverty, tomorrow the worldd!!). Promises and commitments were made, photographs were taken, Bono edged ever closer to that Nobel Peace Prize that has so far, ungrateful planet, eluded him.

However, according to Madeleine Bunting in today’s Guardian:

What was hailed as the most ambitious G8 commitment ever made is now looking dangerously close to a sham. It was agreed at Gleneagles to double aid to reach $50bn by 2010. But instead of aid rising, it actually fell in 2006 for the first time since 1997. The figures have been massaged to look better than they should by adding in massive debt relief for Iraq and Nigeria. Strip those out, and aid fell from five of the G7 countries (Russia is not included in the aid statistics) in the year after they had made historic commitments to increase it. At the current rate, there will be a shortfall of $30bn by 2010; more than half of what was promised in 2005 shows no sign of being delivered. G8 promises aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.

So who are the villains? Well, it’s a change from the usual story of US infamy because the core of this problem lies in Europe. It was European countries which made the biggest promises and which are proving so lamentably bad at implementing them. That’s why what happens in Heiligendamm – the last G8 in Europe for several years – is so crucial. If Germany comes up with some money then it will pile the pressure on the worst offenders – France and, above all, Italy. Aid fell in the latter by 16% last year and unless something changes fast, it will deliver a paltry $1.4bn of the $9.5bn it promised by 2010. France’s shortfall is running at 50% of its 2010 aid promise. Even the UK, which prides itself on its exemplary commitment to the developing world, is falling behind. If European countries got their act together, the Gleneagles agreement would be back on track.

Read the full article here.

Bunting also notes that this year’s campaign is far less successful , by which she means visible, than the previous one. Compassion fatigue, perhaps. I’d be inclined, though, to put it down to Bono and Bob Geldof fatigue. They’ve been eclipsed by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, royal couple to the world. Angie and Brad are better-looking than either of the other two, manage their tax affairs more discreetly than Bono and, unlike Geldof, actually have careers.

The Scent of Cinnamon: fourth review

More of a flattering mention than a review, but still… Thank you, Rebecca Oppenheimer.

Nel mezzo del cammin…

If you really have nothing better to do with your time, why not take Dante’s Inferno Test? It’ll tell you where you’re going to go when you die!

This is where I’m headed. Phew! (And if you run the cursor over it, it lights up and glows orange in a suitably infernal way, just to give you a taste of what’s in store.)

Level 6 – The City of Dis

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You approach Satan’s wretched city where you behold a wide plain surrounded by iron walls. Before you are fields full of distress and torment terrible. Burning tombs are littered about the landscape. Inside these flaming sepulchers suffer the heretics, failing to believe in God and the afterlife, who make themselves audible by doleful sighs. You will join the wicked that lie here, and will be offered no respite. The three infernal Furies stained with blood, with limbs of women and hair of serpents, dwell in this circle of Hell.

And if you want to know even more you can try the Seven Deadly Sins quiz. It’s a hoot! I come out very low on envy and very high on lust. Which sounds pretty accurate to me.

Suffer the little children…

Last Thursday, Annozero, a current affairs programme on Italian state television (RAI 2), was dedicated to the presence of paedophile priests in the catholic church. At the centre of the transmission was a documentary made by the BBC, which had already been shown in Britain and is widely available on the net. The usual brouhaha from the right and, to a lesser extent, from the church, preceded and succeeded the transmission, as you’d expect.

But the most shocking moment for me wasn’t in the documentary, but after, when a woman described her experiences as the sex slave of an Italian priest from the age of ten to the age of twenty-five. What made it so shocking was less the abuse she suffered – already appalling – than the way in which the priest used his authority to ensure the child’s compliance. The authority vested in him not only by his role within the institution but by the faith itself. How did he do this? He forced the child to suck him off by telling her that his sperm was the Eucharist, and that to refuse to ingest the body of Christ would be a mortal sin.

I’m going to come back to the issue of authority in child abuse in a future post. But maybe oral sex between men of the cloth and children shouldn’t be such a surprise. It’s actually enshrined in monotheistic practice, as you can see from the following passage, From a catholic site called, rather oddly, Fish eaters. Those of a squeamish nature should read it quickly, or not at all:

The Biblical rite of circumcision, called brit milah (or brith milah or bris milah), entailed the trimming of just the very tip of the foreskin, only that amount that could be pulled down over the tip of the glans. It did not destroy the entire foreskin, it did not affect normal sexual functioning, it was not the brutal rite that baby boys undergo today. The procedure was so less intrusive than what is now practiced that many practitioners of the Old Testament religion could, by pulling on the foreskin that remained, easily make themselves appear to be uncircumcized — and many did (1 Machabees 1:11-15, 1 Corinthians 7:18). Around A.D. 140, rabbis reacted to those men who did this and instituted two procedures to follow brit milah. Thereafter, a brit peri’ah and a brit mezizah were to be performed on the child after the Biblical rite. All of these procedures are described like this in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia:

Milah:
The child having been placed upon a pillow resting upon the lap of the godfather or “sandek” (he who is honored by being assigned to hold the child), the mohel [the circumcizer] exposes the parts by removal of garments, etc., and instructs the sandek how to hold the child’s legs. The mohel then grasps the prepuce between the thumb and index-finger of his left hand, exerting sufficient traction to draw it from the glans, and places the shield in position just before the glans. He now takes his knife and with one sweep excises the foreskin. This completes the first act. The knife most commonly used is double-edged, although one like those ordinarily used by surgeons is also often employed. [Ed. This is where the Biblical procedure ends. What follows is from the Pharisees’ Talmud.]

Peri’ah:
After the excision has been completed, the mohel seizes the inner lining of the prepuce, which still covers the glans, with the thumb-nail and index-finger of each hand, and tears it so that he can roll it fully back over the glans and expose the latter completely. The mohel usually has his thumb-nail suitably trimmed for the purpose. In exceptional cases the inner lining of the prepuce is more or less extensively adherent to the glans, which interferes somewhat with the ready removal; but persistent effort will overcome the difficulty.

Mezizah:
By this is meant the sucking of the blood from the wound. The mohel takes some wine in his mouth and applies his lips to the part involved in the operation, and exerts suction, after which he expels the mixture of wine and blood into a receptacle provided for the purpose. This procedure is repeated several times, and completes the operation, except as to the control of the bleeding and the dressing of the wound.

And we are here as on a darkling plain…

The situation for gays in Eastern Europe is getting worse, and we’re nowhere near the end of it, as can be seen from this article, which describes the growing homophobia in Latvia, Poland and Russia.( See my posts below, Protecting children, Polish style and To Moscow and back (sharpish) for more examples of this madness).

Sam Harris, in The End of Faith, argues that the real problem is not fundamentalism, but the respect given to the moderate voices of irrationality, which legitimise fundamentalism by asserting that even though the acts of individual fundamentalists may be abhorrent the belief system on which they’re based has god-given validity.

I find Harris’s argument convincing. And I’m convinced that, when it comes to homophobia, the fundamentalism of these people in eastern Europe is sustained not only by the usual religious suspects but also, for example, by the decision of the Mayor of Milan to withdraw the city’s patronage, after 21 years, from the Gay Cinema Festival. It’s a small thing, barely a blip on the cultural calendar of Italy, let alone Europe, but that’s all the more reason to support it. The Mayor of Milan, Letizia Moratti, one of Berlusconi’s most unpopular ministers during his ‘government’, is often spoken of as a potential leader of the centre-left when the corrupt buffoon finally hands in his mason’s hammer and resigns.

Vittorio Sgarbi, motor-mouth, art critic and assessore per la cultura of Milan council, who was all in favour of the event, says that denying patronage is counter-productive and only draws attention to the festival. This may be true. But it also, and this is far more worrying, legitimises anti-gay feeling. Each time a figure of authority behaves in this way, the irrational hatred of rabid gangs of gay-bashers (see photograph) receives implicit backing.

Moratti also refused to support a gay tennis open last year unless the word gay was removed from the poster. It might have been more appropriate to remove open. On the other hand, as a member of Forza Italia, she’s used to misleading publicity.

Revealed truths 4

Cranks in the Czech Republic are using information from a higher source to wrap children in duct tape and leave them to dehydrate on bare floors. An article in today’s Independent – titled: Chance discovery of abused child reveals bizarre Czech grail cult (you couldn’t make it up, could you?) – begins like this:

A flickering image of a small naked boy, lying tied-up on the bare floor of a room, was the clue that drew the Czech Republic into a tale of child abuse, obscure sects and a mysterious vanishing girl that has shocked and baffled the nation.

The picture was spotted by a father keeping an eye on his baby, when his video monitor received a stray signal from a similar device being used in a neighbouring house in the quiet town of Kurim, close to the south-eastern city of Brno.

You can read the rest of the article here.

The Scent of Cinnamon: third review

You can find it here.

Commonplaces: Dementia

… on emerging into the open air once again, I was saddened to see, in one of the otherwise deserted aviaries, a solitary Chinese quail, evidently in a state of dementia, running to and fro along the edge of the cage and shaking its head every time it was about to turn, as if it could not comprehend how it had got into this hopeless fix.

The Rings of Saturn
W.G. Sebald

Illustration to previous post