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World of the News

~ For the universal in today's top stories

Tag Archives: Authority

#117 Advent and Fall, 2016

November 6, 2016

Alveoli of swelling smoke: people in the region round Mosul are glad-ioli, learning to breathe again after ISIS retreats; but it’s a rasping hard coming they have of it.

Oilfields burning: skies overcast by black cotton wool; horizons hidden. Meanwhile many women are lifting the veil from over their eyes.

Coming again to the wider world. But who comes for them, if not in nihilism? No point in denial-ism: here in the West we’ve got nothing for you.

Too busy this election season, chasing swirls of brown leaves spotted with age; and at the same time throwing petrol on the bonfire of our vanities.

#109 Clowning Around In Camden Town

September 18, 2016

Phone video footage is circulating of an altercation between police and a young black male car driver in North London.

It’s ridiculous – the fresh-faced police officer acting like a juvenile delinquent, except the term itself’ s too old for his tender years.

First pulling at the car window then hitting it; stepping back screeching before taking his truncheon to the windscreen.

A dozen blows to smash about a quarter of the screen; a tantrum that shocks because it’s bathetic.

And all because the kid behind the wheel won’t get out of the car; ‘kid’ because the 25-year-old driver who’s locked in and refusing to come out, still contrives to speak youth so the grown-ups can’t comfortably understand.

He needn’t have bothered. On this showing, the adult world just isn’t there to hear him.

Never mind misread him.

#108 Thinking Behind Mindless Killing

September 17, 2016

The Catholic church around the corner is dedicated to a Portuguese peasant girl whose visions of the Virgin Mary prompted the following declaration of her faith:

My God, I believe, I adore, I hope, and I love you. I ask pardon for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not hope and do not love you.

These words are addressed not only to God himself, nor are they simply an intercession on behalf of those who lack faith in him; the girl’s prayer is also a personal statement of her self-belief.

Our Father who art no more nor ever was.

They would say that, wouldn’t they? I mean the teenagers who’ve been hanging round The Stow, the post-war shopping precinct in Harlow, chalking up plentiful police reports of anti-social behaviour (month after month, and for so long the original cohort must have moved on and grown up by now).

Surely they would say something like this, if disposed to speak of the faith and the self-belief that’s been disposed of (behind their backs, without them knowing, despite them trying to appear all-knowing all the time).

Are you kidding? Is this a gang of juvenile Kierkegaards, struggling for belief in a God of Uncertainty. Nothing could be further from theological discourse than the killing of 40-year-old Polish factory worker, Arkadiusz ‘Arek’ Jozwik, who died in hospital two days after he went out for takeaway pizza….and took a blow to the head instead. The only Sorens are the ones who were arrested.

Or, maybe that’s how they vented it – their aggravated sense of loss, and hating themselves for failing to locate, locate, locate anything other than their own paltry existence.

Chunky chap, low centre of gravity – can’t have been a complete pushover. Four years in the meat factory since he came over from Poland, whereas you’re not sure you’d last four minutes before running a mile. read more

#105 Mothers’ Day

September 4, 2016

‘Gentle as a dove, cunning as a snake.’

Popeye for the ‘poorest of the poor’,

Saint Mother Teresa was canonised today.

She played her innocence impeccably, implacably.

Now her vow of poverty is upended in papal pomp and ceremony.

Beautifully…he went home to God,

She said of the beggar who’d told her

(Quoted in her acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize),

‘I lived like an animal in the streets but I am going to die like an angel.’

I know it’s churlish of me to ask,

But does it have to be ambrosia?

Is there no mezzo soul food to sup?

Neither scraping and foraging

Nor brutalised then flipped into blind faith.

Away from playing Mother to the Squeezed Middle,

The Other Theresa is hanging on in Hangzhou.

Despite the measured tone of her contralto voice,

At the G20 summit Britain’s position is vulnerable:

She could be squeezed until the pips squeak.

This Mother Theresa must forage in foreign affairs,

Calling in favours, hoping to scrape by.

Closer than she’d care to think

To the man of the streets who reportedly died in a state of grace.

Note that neither Mother has so far managed

To speak to us in a language we could call our own.

#102 Memo To An American Police Officer

August 27, 2016

Was there a moment of shock when it came to you?

A sharp intake, the rasping breath of realisation?

Or simply relief at surviving your rookie shifts,

Then boredom and danger cocktailed into queasy routine.

So you wanted to be a police officer.

Protect and serve; defend and provide for.

If it’s not changing the world, you said to yourself,

At least I’ll be putting the bad guys away.

Instead all you Blues were recruited to the war on drugs.

In designated neighbourhoods your new assignment is to enter

As many perps as possible into the judicial process, if only

For possession, leaving little time for traditional policing priorities

Such as catching killers. In these districts nine out of 10 killings

Now remain untried and unpunished, unless you count

The unlawful acts of recrimination which have all but replaced

The intervention of the state in the expectations of local people.

Of the three guys on the corner, you’re the only one

That ain’t got his own. Dealer knows his job. Users, too,

Have a particular role to play. But you’re the little lost boy

Whose dotted line went off in unexpected directions.

Within your ranks there’s a hard core who might have done it

Anyway, at any time. But the not knowing who you are,

Not exactly sure what or who you’re there for

Must have been a factor in some of your folks not knowing

How to react, therefore emptying the magazine as if that means

Rubbing out a few pages instead of tearing into the flesh and bone

Of a fellow human being. Who knows whether all those ID checks would have

Gone so badly wrong if the policeman’s lot had not been re-cast without telling him?

#95 Un/Certainty And The Widow Sertcelik

August 1, 2016

When he didn’t come back, of course you were……

When you found his body in the makeshift morgue, of course you were…..

But now what are you?  Now that the call your husband answered with his life

May have been as crooked as the coup he died resisting.

‘In this house there are three more lives to give for this country.’ Sema Sertcelik remains resolute. Her taxi-driver husband Akin (41) died for a noble cause: in defence of Turkey’s elected head of state, President Erdogan; in defiance of the attempted military coup which might have toppled the government on the night of 15th July 2016 but for the thousands of Turks who came out onto the streets of Istanbul and Ankara to stand in front of the tanks and block their progress.

Some of these demonstrators stopped soldiers’ bullets with their bare hands. There is silent footage of them dancing with rifle shots on the Bosphorus Bridge – swept off their feet, hopping on their haunches like Cossacks and ending with the signature move known as ‘biting the dust’. Akin Sertcelik was among those who bit the dust.

If further sacrifice is called for, the Widow Sertcelik will not hesitate. Same goes for her children, she tells a BBC reporter. But Irmak (17) and Hamza (10) say nothing.

Maybe they don’t agree. With thousands of arrests and hundreds of news outlets suppressed in the weeks following the failed coup, perhaps they consider their mother unduly loyal to an opportunist president who has seized the moment afforded by the failure of the coup and used it to incapacitate a whole range of political opponents; in flagrant breach of the democratic principles which he exhorted others to defend at all costs.

Or is it that Sema’s seeming conviction is only the flipside of suspicions she herself has come to share, but doesn’t dare admit to? read more

#94 Song Of The Impatient Brexiter

August 1, 2016

Uninvited…..can’t complain. Repeatedly ignored……what good would it do?
In thirty-odd years, we’ve learned to make a life out of little things;
That’s what the lesser people have come to – if not you, also.

Normally we stand back to let you do the talking. Not completely different
From before, though in days of yore the bastards were
Our bastards – that was something to even the score.

How shocked you were when the numbers came in. Had to laugh
When we saw your face. Took it we’d Remain in our place, didn’t you?
Set yourselves up for a put-down; now you can’t accept the message with good grace.

Don’t make a point of saying you’ve ignored us.
Dog bites man, sanfarian: you try telling yourself what you already know.
And the new ‘listening’ sounds like therapy – dear God, deliver me.

We’ll end by saying simply this:
If you can’t act accordingly……
Just let us alone.

No 80 Fromage And The Future Of Western Civilisation

May 1, 2016

In Trafalgar Square on Tuesday 19 April, Mayor of London Boris Johnson unveiled a scale model of the Roman arch of triumph which had stood tall among the classical ruins of Palmyra, Syria, until Islamic State (IS) militants destroyed it during their 10-month occupation of the ancient city.

‘Palmyra’, sounding something like ‘Ikea’. And thousands of lightweight copies wouldn’t look amiss on supermarket shelves.

Imagine: for easy self-assembly, user-friendly semblance of the lost art of moral authority; models of a model which arches from hommage to…..a cheesy rhyme on the c-word that can’t be said.

Western Civilization – let’s call an ace, an ace – was never pure and simple. The eternal city gave us rule of law, but the IS death-cult wouldn’t look askance on the legion of death-displays during the Empire Days of Rome.

If time ran the wrong way, mischievous Caligula might even copy the cultists: stringing up the decapitated corpse of Khalid al-Asaad (83), Palmyra’s retired director of antiquities, placing his bespectacled head on the ground between his feet, and, noting thick black frames below the badger-brush of white hair, only adding a line underneath:

‘So it’s goodnight from him’.

But they couldn’t make it up, these barbarians. They couldn’t have, because we did the spadework for them. Based on banality, the pantomime savagery of so-called ‘so-called Islamic State’ is mainly a magnifying mirror of Western regression since the 1960s – always ready to scale back on the story of human achievement, presenting instead the model village version (as did the Mayor in Trafalgar Square last month), downsizing to meet the diktat of the day.

We aced our own civilisation; and as we scale it down, they step up the bar-bar-barbarism – all for the cameras, of course. read more

#78 Kim Versus Cameron In The Ring Of Truth

April 12, 2016

‘Admit anything you safely can…deny everything else…and you’re all right.’

(1) Trippingly off the forked tongue of Harold Adrian Russell Philby, also known as Kim, thereby concluding his address to the assembled bureaucrats of the Stasi, also known as the East German secret police.

Philby, formerly a high ranking officer in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. Converted to the Communist cause in the 1930s (greatly Depressed decade of disillusion with capitalism), for decades he routinely passed on top secret information to Moscow contacts.

He lived a further quarter century on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where he was accorded privileges pertaining to a KGB officer but also regarded with suspicion. Some of Kim’s ‘comrades’ saw him as a turncoat who had never fully turned.

Beginning his speech with a True Brit bit of self-deprecation (no public speaker am I; my whole life spent avoiding publicity), Philby’s speaking voice is the baritone of Britain’s ruling class (pater governed millions as district commissioner in India, before ‘going native’ and turning to Islam). Frequently fruity with occasional Noel Coward cadences – syllables rising like soufflés above their stationary function.

But for all the variations, gradations between sonorous and sylph-like, Philby’s delivery remained consistently theatrical, deliberately demonstrative – until the final four words:
‘And you’re all right’.

These words are lighter, less commanding. Not propelled as in previous pronouncements but drifting like smoke in the direction of Philby himself. As if in that moment he is talking mainly to himself, reassuring himself or trying to that decades of double cross could not have been all wrong.

But jaw muscles tightening, fidgety fingers more mouth-hiding than chin-stroking; such involuntary gestures mirror his private uncertainty. read more

Authority in Crisis (4)

October 27, 2012

Farewell then, Sir Norman (aged 56 and three-quarters) ‘So as George Dixon used to do – he used to sign off by giving a cheery smile and a salute – I’ll do that now and look forward to your questions’. Top cop’s right arm sweeps out so that the fingertips of his straightened hand can come back in and graze his eyebrow. In the YouTube clip, the camera closes on him holding the familiar gesture. Introducing an online Q&A session with the Bradford contingent of the Police and Communities Acting Together scheme (ePACT), which took place in 2011, West Yorkshire chief constable Sir Norman Bettison adopted the mannerisms of PC George Dixon, UK television’s first fictional policeman. Sir Norman took us back to his own boyhood, in the days of chip butties and cup cakes for Saturday tea, when, pre-Dr Who,Dixon of Dock Green was the best thing on and there were only two channels to choose from, anyway. Despite receding hair and a mouth thinned out by 40 years of tight-lipped policing, the chief constable wants us to know he’s the same Yorkshire lad who looked up to George Dixon from his parents’ through-lounge in Rotherham, and policing is not much changed neither. That flat accent (‘water’ rhymes with ‘matter’), as if Dixon himself had re-appeared in a Hovis advert. Boots on the streets, Dixon-Hovis insists, that’s what counts, same as always. Bettison, for it is he, means the size 9s of a cheery constable. But Yorkshire folk remember the jackboots of an occupying army during the miners’ strike of 1984-5, aka the English Civil War. Liverpool FC supporters won’t forget the same approach being applied to them at Hillsborough in April 1989, resulting in the death of 96 fans. They hardly need reminding that it was Bettison who led the police propaganda campaign in the wake of this disaster. But there will be no more salutes from Sir Norman. Earlier in the week he said ‘vale’ instead, and resigned his post with pension still intact. A local boy who made his way through the ranks – this chief petty officer has outlived his usefulness, along with his style of command. read more

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