Obama Negotiates
July 8, 2009
Soulmates
July 8, 2009
Refill?
July 8, 2009
‘It’s Safe To Come Out Now’
July 8, 2009
With Bitterness And Loathing For All
July 8, 2009
No Soft Landing
July 8, 2009
‘We shall stun them with our ingratitude’
July 8, 2009
Have you ever wondered why there were never any demonstrations against the building of the now infamous settlements? Can you imagine the PR value of a hundred little school girls, sitting in the road and blocking a bulldozer? The reason for the marked lack of protest against settlement building in the West Bank is because PA ministers own the construction companies that build those settlements. It’s been going on for years and only recently, has the matter been discussed in the Arab press. Sadly, ‘Cementgate,’ as the story was called is no longer on the Arab press agenda. Israeli settlements are being built by Palestinian companies, owned by PA ministers and big wigs. That is another reason the Palestinian at the top are in no rush for a peace deal- the Israelis pay. Arab nations that promise money do not. Besides, other Arabs might make unreasonable demands- such as accountability and transparency.
When it comes to money and aid to the Palestinians, the words of Charles De Gaulle come to mind- ‘We shall stun them with our ingratitude.‘
The View
July 8, 2009
The most difficult of all tasks is making sense of one’s own time. Often, the problem is trying to understand why people – especially institutions – continue repeating the same self-destructive things they have gone on doing for so long. Why, for example, did 14th-century French chivalry lose battles by sheer mindless bravado? Why did Crécy not teach them something when they assembled at Poitiers – or the Crécy and Poitiers experience as they faced the English over half a century later, at Agincourt? The general answer, no doubt, is that human folly results from people being victims of the wrong paradigm. The French chivalry were supreme in the arts of the tournament, and they thought that a battle was just a tournament on a grand scale.
It is also hard to understand one’s own time because the realities come encrusted within such a distracting array of circumstance. The Romans lived through the long and peaceful reign of Augustus, barely recognising, until Tiberius and Caligula, how, with the most delicate republican tactfulness in shuffling offices, he had equipped them, if not with a king, certainly with a master. Under Augustus, they had even developed, without quite realising it, some of the sycophancy needed to play the new game of despotism. Even changes of this kind in oneself can be hard to recognise, except in hindsight.
The question about our own time I want to explore is: why have the British (and to some extent other Anglophones) allowed family and school life to collapse so extensively? The collapse has not happened on all levels of society, but it is widespread enough to affect everyone. The statistics, for what they are worth, are remarkable. According to a Channel 4 Dispatches programme in January, a poll conducted for the teaching union NASUWT suggested that 97 per cent of teachers had disruptive children in their classes. Almost three-quarters (74.4 per cent) claimed to have problems with physically aggressive children, while almost half (45.5 per cent) noted that the disruptive behaviour of a minority was a daily occurrence.
A related change in British life is that school inspections are sometimes “finessed” by asking disruptive children to stay at home on inspection days. In a target-driven world, cheating brings benefits.
In some British primary schools, each class is equipped with women who function as Behaviour Support Assistants. They take over the disruptive children and thus allow the tranquillity needed for a little actual teaching. A difficult child, reported Dispatches, might be asked to choose – choose! – whether he was prepared to go back into class and behave, otherwise he would be shepherded into a “quiet room” without distractions, in order to cool down. These children are ten or younger, and the pathos of their being asked to “make choices”, when they have never acquired the integrated mentality needed for that sophisticated act, is piteous to behold…
Man Of Steal
July 8, 2009
Sox Fans
July 8, 2009
