spinoff

The IRA has called off its war. It seems horribly fitting that, as one era of bloodshed starts in the UK, another should come to a close.

The Provisional IRA was formed in the late ‘60s after the Original IRA was deemed ineffective by a generation of young, angry republicans who felt let down by an organisation that was weak in the face of the invader. The running joke - “IRA” stood for “I ran away”.

Back then the message from the Provos was stark and simple; they wanted full withdrawal of the military from their lands, and the creation of a new, unified state.

Thirty years of bombings, shootings, disappearances, kneecappings, beatings and robberies later and those same young angry men have realised that in fact, their ultimate aim was power. Now they have it, the bombs can go.

Now we are faced with another organisation that wants a full withdrawal of the military from its lands, and the creation of a new, unified state. This organisation also uses bombs.

Will this new conflict continue for 30 years? Or is there a politician or government brave enough to address effectively the problem that exists at the root of these suicide bombings – the vast global imbalance of power?

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Death is banal. Who expects it? Nobody. And everybody. The people murdered three weeks ago in London, and the many more people killed in Iraq that following weekend or Egypt this weekend could not predict their own deaths. Everybody continues their lives not considering how or where they might die because it so terrifying to contemplate as to be almost meaningless.

The people who die in suicide bombings are on their way somewhere, to meet a friend or a date, to get to work, in a pissed off mood, annoyed at a colleague. And so are the people run over randomly in the street, the people who have a sudden heart attack. What goes through their heads as they die? Their lives? Family? Regrets?

Whateverit is, you can be sure they never expected that moment to be the end. One minute, thinking ‘drat, I meant to pick up some peanut butter’, next minute squashed by a bus. A quick, surprising end.

Are these people who are surprised by death therefore lucky? This Spinoffite assumes so. Several weeks back, the obituary of a man who was an inspiration to us all was published on this site. He died in a way that nobody would wish to die. He had a long and terrible illness, which was more painful for him than he would ever let any of us know.

But his family was grateful to get to know him before he did pass away. He had been an ephemeral figure for them, travelling for much of his life, and during the last months many members of his family said how they valued spending time with him at the end of his life. 

Death is inevitably banal. This Spinoffite is just trying say, late on a Tuesday night, that life might feel banal sometimes. But it is never more banal than death.

Make as much of it as you can.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

(The author of this piece takes the tube from Edgware Road tube station every morning.)

One of the abuses of power we do not talk about enough is the vile way that humans treat animals, whether wild or domesticated, whether on farms or in our houses. Experiments with communications with higher apes, especially Bonobo monkeys, have shown that they can be taught communication, that they generate their own grammar and that, once they can communicate, they can convey one of the real mental skills that makes us human – the ability to put ourselves in the place of others and see the world as they see it.

This is not anthropomorphism: higher apes, at least, are ‘people’: and who, therefore, is to say that the rest of the animal kingdom is not capable of a human-like understanding as well?

Through my letter box this morning dropped a piece raising money for a sanctuary for abandoned baby bears in Russia. It has the usual heart-tugging little stories, pictures of bear cubs looking cute and confused, and all in all is the usual fluffy animal charity mailing. I’m used to heartrending little appeals, and I’m used to prioritising my support to those places where I feel strongly.

This particular piece comes from an animal charity I neither like nor trust, a vast, immensely wealthy and slightly shadowy organisation that is very high profile on fund raising but seems to be low profile on actual work. But I shall be giving money to this appeal, not because I think it will do any good, necessarily, but because of a long standing feeling of guilt I have over the treatment of bears.

I used to live in Turkey, and spent a lot of time in Istanbul. Once, going down the hill towards the new palace, the name of which I’ve forgotten, on the side of the Bosphorous, I saw a man with two bears chained together – one, a large brown bear, one a cub. The brown bear was doing the clumsy shambling dance they do (which, incidentally, they are taught by being placed on hot tin plates whilst music is played, so they associate music with having to prance their feet up and down to avoid getting burned).

And I gave the man money for the bears, money that was of course going straight into his pocket and would do nothing to alleviate their pathetic little lives. A Turkish man took me to task a moment later: ‘If you tourists give these people money, they will never leave, and people will think that Turkey is a primitive country’. He’s right of course. Turkey is a European country and deserves to be treated like one, and my couple of hundred lire perpetuated the old image of Ottoman decay just a few seconds longer.

And I’m sorry for that. And I got guilt tripped by a vicious man who abuses animals, and I’m sorry for that too. But the reason I’ll be giving money to the bear cub sanctuary is because I need to assuage my guilt, which I still feel fifteen years on, of having looked in the eyes of the bear cub that day on the Bosphorous.

For one reason or another, I’ve spent a lot of time in the developing world, and I’ve seen a lot of people in genuine suffering. But I’d never seen anyone in Hell before I looked in that bear cub’s eyes. The larger bear had, I think, probably lost it by that stage, demoralised beyond all hope. But the cub wasn’t. And I wish, I really wish, I could have done something to save him from his handler.

I loathe the attitude of many people that animals are less deserving of sympathy than people: since animals do not have independence of action and are subject to human power, we should be more considerate to them than to other people who at least have the ability to get out of the way or fight back if attacked by other people.

So if you want to see real misery, look in the eyes of a suffering animal. And – for my sake – do something, even if it’s only supporting a charity that, ultimately, may do something to relieve that suffering. Giving its owner ten pence out of guilt, incidentally, does not count: something I remind myself of to this day.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

A few moments to spare? Then have a look at this. Glimpsing into other people's heads is, yes, voyeuristic, but god it's fascinating.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

There are plenty of good sound reasons for continuing to love cricket. It’s a sport of skill and patience, requiring strategy and tactics, endurance and the ability to move swiftly, a game of frequent grace and elegance. Australians are very very good at it (see the comprehensive shafting dispensed at Lord's this weekend).

And before anyone complains about it, sports televised on television recently include: snooker (dull); bowls (dull); ballroom dancing (what?); celebrity ballroom dancing (what?); darts (watching paint dry. Slowly); poker (for crying out loud); and, soon, celebrity poker (oh…. Pah). So let’s have none of the usual complaints about cricket being slow and boring, because it’s neither. Alright?

But there’s an especial reason for welcoming televised cricket at the moment. Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff – the most promising British cricketer since Botham, a determined and skilful bowler, a tough and gritty batsman, and possibly one of the most attractive men on British television. Not since the entire Sussex cricket team of 1992, a bunch of stud muffins in whites if ever there was one, has cricket been quite so important to what used to be known in the Goon Show as ‘the areas behind the lines’.

So why is Freddie so wonderful? He’s huge, for a start – well over six foot, and built to match. Yes, he had a bit of a weight problem a few years ago, but he’s sorted that out now, and now he’s just big. And he’s blond, which always helps. Watch his face closely – he’s got a bright smile when things are going well, and a look of intense concentration when he’s under pressure. Oh, and he’s from the North, which means that when he’s interviewed, his accent just sends shivers down your spine.

And watch him move! He lacks the natural grace of, say, Nasser Hussain, but he’s got the strength, litheness and power of a cross between a tiger and a shire horse. Watching Flintoff’s arm and hand releasing a ball, targeted straight at the wicket, and you’re seeing something both impressive and visually striking.

This particular Spinoffite confesses to an interest in cricket, though not the geeky ability to emulate a walking Wisden of one of his colleagues, and confesses that one should not watch England play solely to see Freddie Flintoff lope across the infield. However, it’s a reason that works for me – and for many others (there’s more fan sites for young Mr Flintoff than for most other British cricketers).

Have a good look next time the cricket’s on. You’ll know which one’s Freddie – he’s the big blond bloke with the happy smile; and the only one with the fan club watching his every move. But get in the queue…

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Sirens continue to wail, and helicopters burr overhead.

But now that the police have shot a suspect five or six times to make sure he was dead, it is hitting home how much things are never going to return to what they were.

New York, yes. Moscow, yes. Violence by the state is part of the fabric of these cities, their police are well documented for repaying force with force. But London? Not until now.

Before all this started the police in London had a reputation for being polite, and freshfaced. OK, so they’ve sometimes been overkeen to stop and search non-whites, and racism has been exposed as an issue which attention.

These people are clearly not pussycats, but shooting a man dead on the tube in front of the public? This is no mere chase - no attempted stop and search. Was the man a muslim? What was under his unseasonally warm padded jacket? We don’t know.

When we read the reasons that some of the bombers gave to friends and family explaining their actions, violence and hate against muslims, wherever in the world, is pretty much #1. Guantanamo Bay. Iraq. London.

If this man was indeed muslim, innocent or not, it will feed the fire, which increases the feeling that it is never going to stop. This first police killing appears to be a sign of things to come.

If that doesn’t scare you, it is quite likely that nothing will.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

The war in Iraq, it was suggested today, has made the United Kingdom more at risk from terrorism than before. Jack Straw immediately jumped up to claim that this conclusion by Chatham House was a load of nonsense.

To borrow from the great M Rice-Davies, he would say that though, wouldn’t he? Any suggestion that the government’s actions have made us a terrorist target would be disastrous. Mr Straw is bound to disagree. This is perhaps reason enough to dismiss his comments out of hand.

There are currently two views on terrorists’ motivation.

The first says that they are evil, motivated by hatred, are brainwashed and cannot be reasoned with because their demands are not subject to reason. They are born that way, the act that way and they will die that way. It is our job to kill them all.

The second says that these people are the product of a concatenation of events [Israel, Palestine, Chechnya] and are shaped by the attitudes that arise from these situations. Therefore fighting terrorism involves attacking the root causes as musch as the terrorists themselves.

The truth is of course a synthesis of the two. The boys with the backpacks were certainly motivated by hatred – idiot killers duped by a false world perspective – but at the same time they were also products of attitudes acquired in Pakistani Madrassas.

To suggest that the London bombers’ actions were in no way motivated by outside phenomena would be absurd in the extreme. Of course they were. It is impossible for them not have been moved to act by outside stimuli.

And once you realise that there must have been external motivation for this act, then to exclude Iraq as a possible motivating factor is indefensible.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Sometimes, writing a blog feels like talking to the wind. Is there anyone there? Is anyone listening to this?

If there is – if there is anyone listening, and if those people listening have a conscience, and if those people with consciences have any friends that are in any way sympathetic to the events that have gone on in London today, then please, tell them this.

That if you are acting on faith, if you are acting in a way that is meant to bring about a moral change for the better, if you are trying to bring about a change that will benefit all people and bring them closer to an ethically sound way of living, then killing will not show you as morally superior.

Why would an omniscient power bring individuals into existence purely so they can be killed by other individuals? Is existence nothing more than target practice? Is the nature of being nothing more than spotting the deviants and killing them?

It is?

Then what happens when the deviants are extinguished? Does existence end when there is nothing left to kill?

To echo the words of another Spinoffite; we are not afraid.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

It is not difficult, as you can probably imagine, to wind up a Spinoffian. We are people of strong views, strongly expressed, who refuse to let other people form our opinions for us unless we have argued them out in some depth. Things like representative democracy, social justice and equality matter to us (as does, for some reason, the welfare of animals fluffy and scaly, cute and ugly. Though we like the cute fluffy ones best. Especially the funny ones).