…I might have studied.
I had my 41 week appointment today. There was a vaginal examination. I failed.
Basically, there’s a Bishop’s score of 10 – which indicates favorableness of induction, I got only a 4. That’s a bare pass at best.
What does this mean? It almost certainly means more waiting.
Cletus. Get out.
OK, it’s my birthday on Sunday – and we hadn’t really made any plans because, well, we’re expecting a baby.
But I know I’ll be disappointed if the Vol-in-Law doesn’t come through with some kind of thoughtful gift. Last year we took a print making course at the Wallace Collection, which was fun. I know I don’t want clothes and the ViL scoffed at a suggested of jewelry as he thought I had enough already (foolish male). My garden is chock full of plants.
Usually what I do is make some suggestions, and he picks from the list but I can’t think of anything.
Please help out the ViL with a few suggestions in the comments. I won’t peek. But please – don’t say “a baby”.
Growing up in the American South at the apogee of the Cold War, I was surrounded by knee-jerk anti-communist sentiment. Looking back, I still can’t be sure how much of that anti-communism, anti-socialism was knee-jerk and how much of it was a considered position. But I do remember wondering why this accepted wisdom was so pervasive. Occasionally I heard stuff about writers being silenced in Soviet Russia or people queueing hours for bread, clutching their string bags in the deep cold of a Moscow winter. But when occasionally one heard about the great strides in literacy or the abolition of true hunger or a greater sense of equality and fairness – and it was difficult to make an accurate judgment about the right or wrongs of communism. Particularly when those rights and wrongs were being judged by a young and idealistic mind. Why not focus on the true goodness of human nature – perhaps the right system could help foster that rather than encouraging the competitive, ruthless and essentially artificially harsh nature of the spirit under a capitalist system?
I certainly hadn’t met any card-carrying members of the Communist party. Even amongst the more radical kids I’ve met – most of them only espoused a sense of wanting some aspects of socialism introduced into the US to a greater or lesser extent.
Once in England, however, I did begin to meet Communists. Yes, card carrying members of the Communist Party. I met members of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Many of these people are very sociable and very nice, with nice clean middle class looking homes. Some of these were people who I would gladly have lunch with and might even discuss politics with over sandwiches and cups of tea.
At one such lunch I had with one of these CP or SWP members, at a bijou joint serving vegetarian soups and overlooking the picturesque ruins of Kenilworth Castle, we started talking about China. I can’t remember how we got started on that – but perhaps there had been a serialisation of Jung Chang’s Wild Swans – or another book which covered the period of famine during the Great Leap Forward. I remember expressing horror at the needless human suffering on a truly monumental scale.
My communist luncheon companion said so cooly and dispassionately “Sometimes there must be sacrifices in order to make progress.”
I was revulsed. I really didn’t know what to say. I think I said something about not wanting to be one of those individuals sacrificed – but whatever it was it was completely inadequate. Yes, I’d heard the concept before, and on the face of it – it makes sense. After all, I must sacrifice expensive work day lunches if I want to go on a nice vacation. But that’s not the kind of sacrifice we were talking about and she knew it. Along with Mao, she had consigned millions to the charnel house of history in her defense of hollow Communist ideals.
By this point, the Great Leap Forward had been so sufficiently identified as a failure that the any sacrifice hardly seemed worth it. I was then of the belief that Chairman Mao didn’t know that millions were starving each year, but that because of the nature of the system his underlings in the know were too afraid or too callous to say so. I had never, ever heard anyone defend the deaths of millions of Chinese people. This was an important moment for me. To me this would have been like saying, – you know all those Jews and Gypsies that Hitler killed – well, sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater unification of Europe. Absolutely horrific.
It wasn’t until a number of years later that I read Jung Chang’s family history – Wild Swans which was her grandmother’s, her mother’s and her own stories as intertwined with 20th century Chinese history – arguably among the most tumultuous of our times. I could read about the effects of Maoism on one family and the complete failure of Maoism to deliver anything like improved literacy, ending hunger, etc.
Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday, have since published Mao: The Unknown Story. This provides evidence from previously hidden sources about how much Mao knew about the effects of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The book has been criticised for painting Mao as a cardboard cut-out version of evil, and I’d certainly agree that there were opportunities for painting a more nuanced picture of Mao. This was a man certainly not without talent for political machinations and for population control. One has to respect that kind of genius, much like holding awe for the destructive power of a hurricane. The authors don’t seem to want to grant him any credit for a monumental (though monstrous) achievement – getting to and staying at the top of the world’s most populous country.
I finished the book some time ago and have been meaning to post about it for quite some time (the original draft of this post is dated 25 March). But my thoughts on the matter are complex and convoluted and a little difficult to pull together. I’ve retrieved this post because last night I watched a documentary called Mao’s Bloody Revolution: Revealed – it was about the cultural revolution. This was a slightly more balanced approach to Mao though acknowledging that the Cultural Revolution was violent, destructive and chaotic. But it bought into the radical line that destruction must be achieved before we can re-construct a better world – though we may need near-perpetual revolution before that’s achieved. Actually, I’m not sure Mao had in mind a better world at all, I think he revelled in the unending meat-grinder. And that’s basically the argument that Jung Chang and Jon Halliday put forward. Mao was a monster.
About the book
Mao: The Unknown Story is very long, very complex and though I know this sounds terribly ethnocentric there are so personages with difficult to remember Chinese names (I feel bad saying it, but it’s kinda true). But it was gripping. I started to carry this brick of a book with me on my daily commute despite the fact that weight was beginning to tell in my developing pregnancy.
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Mao: The Unknown Story – reviews on other blogs
The scales fall from student’s eyes.
An Israeli sees Chang and Halliday speak on a book tour.
Chiang Kai-Shek a revised hero and nice guy? (Not sure about that!)
Anglofille had a post about the tolerance of (Islamic) religious fundamentalism by some of Britain’s leading politicians. I’ve been meaning to comment on it – but I’ve been quite distracted. All I can think about is baby, baby, baby – why are you so late?
I guess I’d like to say that I broadly agree with her points in the main post and in the comments section – so do go read it. But I’d like to add additional nuances to the argument, but sadly all I can think about is baby, baby, baby – why are you so late? (With the occasional, I feel really uncomfortable and moody thrown in – see I don’t have a one-track mind).
Here’s some of what she wrote:
I’ve been shocked to read about how Tony Blair and London Mayor Ken Livingstone have embraced certain Islamic fundamentalists here in the UK, men who have expressed vile and disgusting views. Under normal circumstances, I imagine that Livingstone would condemn a person who, for example, was a raging homophobe. [And if the person were Jewish, he may even call them a Nazi.] But apparently if you’re an Islamic fundamentalist, you can trample all over the liberal values these politicians supposedly hold dear. How is this possible? The mind boggles.
I’m not so certain about Tony Blair – although top people on the left have certainly accepted Saudi-funded, Wahabi-style, politicised fundamentalism with abhorrent views of women and homosexuals as the “mainstream” Islam. Ken Livingstone is certainly guilty of literally and figuratively embracing the leaders of Islamist movements – like Yusef al Qaradawi – a most nasty chap by almost any account.
Maybe Blair and Livingstone don’t have much experience of fundamentalism in their own lives and don’t understand how it operates. They associate it with “foreign” people and tolerate it on their home turf because they don’t want to appear racist, perhaps.
Racism is seen by opinion formers here as “the worst thing in the world”* and in order to get the same protection and promotion as the anti-racist agenda – some Muslims have quite pointedly played up the race element of Islam. (Anyone can be a Muslim, but it so happens that most Muslims in the UK have their ethnic origins in the Indian sub-continent.)
But I think we are getting into seriously dangerous territory when we associate thought, behaviour and belief (religion) with race. If we can’t discriminate against people because of the way they behave, then we’ve lost our standards. After all, Sharia (Islamic law) is essentially a discriminatory framework based on religion and behaviour (fair enough, though I disagree with it) and gender (not so fair). If I can’t say to the fundamentalist/literalist Muslim as well as to the fundamentalist/literalist Christian “I think you’re wrong about evolution – and this wrongness leads me to doubt your approach to other scientific matters,” then there’s something not right.
Anglofille then writes of her own experience:
As an American and someone who knows a thing or two about religious fundamentalism, I worry about the threat religious extremists pose to British society. I see it as a very real and dangerous threat
I think she touches on an important point. I don’t think it applies to Tony Blair or Ken Livingstone who are men of the world. I think Livingstone embraces Islamism as part of his cynical Trotskyite self-loathing and destructivist tendencies (just as he embraces Chavez and Castro to the cost of London taxpayers).
But I do think it applies to vast swathes of London upper-middle class policy makers and opinion formers and the mass who form “general public opinion”. Their experience with church and religion has been cursory at best (at worst?). They have no idea what it’s like to live in a community dominated by one prevailing and strongly religious world view. Well, I’ll tell you what it’s like as someone who grew up in the buckle of the Bible belt. If you’re a natural non-conformist – it sucks. It’s oppressive**. And that’s exactly the kind of world that Qaradawi and political Islamists want us to live in.
Trouble on the left?
I consider myself something close to a classical liberal. And oddly this makes me pretty right-wing in the UK. But there is a movement on the left which recognises the danger of extremism.
I’ve written a little about that here – when I still had brain.
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* I agree that racism is bad and harmful and ill-informed, but I’m not sure it deserves the “cause of all evil” status that it seems to have in UK society.
** Yet at the same time, religion can support good behavior and vital social structures and provide a comforting and useful moral framework. Go figure.
The Vol Abroad 