In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

  • If the People is Sovereign, Lying to the People is High Treason

    As 2016 comes to an end, I want to present an argument which I believe follows from the year’s events. Different elements of the argument have already been touched on here in recent posts.

    I must begin with language and those first words of St John’s Gospel. In the beginning was [and was always] the Word. This Christmas, as usual, Christians are celebrating the birth of the Word incarnate, the entirely vulnerable human child. Is the hope which that ritual implies still viable ? Was it ever ? It is undeniable that the capacity to form and use words is at the core of being human.

    Yet we know all too well that humanity can also pervert and make nonsense of language, as it does so much else in Creation. Sometimes we speak to each other as fellow witnesses to reality and – as best we can – to truth and, through the trust thus created, make connection and community ; for in the cause and acknowledgement of our common being, language is a gift and helps us reach out, to connect, to share in revelation.

    But equally, and it seems more commonly, we use language merely to manipulate, to bend people to the will of Me and Mine, mine by blood or ethnicity or cause, by commercial or political or religious or tribal interest or loyalty or enslavement. In the cause and worship of self-interest, language becomes just a means by which to obscure, distort, bewitch, defraud. Just a vehicle, a medium, for the Lie.

    Inevitably, language forms part of the essence of the societies we make and how they function. And truthfulness in language is a basic requirement of any democracy, our best hope for the upholding and defending of individual rights and freedoms under law. For democracy’s survival depends absolutely on there being sufficient trust between individuals across society, and between the individual and the institutions which govern that society. For instance, what validity can democratic elections have if they are just contests between liars, deceivers, fraudsters of the word ? Just verbal street-fights between sly hooligans, meaningless, truthless, and lawless ?

    Therefore, if it becomes acceptable and universal practice across society to use language merely as a tool for deception and manipulation, for sell and spin, democracy founders and fragments. Or simply crashes. Democracy crashed in 2016. The crash had been coming for quite a while. In 2016 it arrived.

    One further point on language, or rather, an image for it. If we see language as an essential binding and tool of human society, and honest language an essential element of democracy, then we can fairly equate it to the more obviously material currency of money. Honest language and honest money are both elements of connection, a means and circuit of exchange. They are what we deal in and a healthy community relies on. But there is a striking difference. People caught forging money or defrauding others of money, are rightly seen as felons, enemies of society, worthy of punishment. They pay fines. They are sent to jail. The tabloids rage that they do not suffer enough, once there. But what about the politician who lies deliberately to win votes in election, or referendum ? What about the tabloid editor who bends the facts in order to win over the readership to his paper’s, or owner’s, rabid point of view ?  In this era, we continue to jail as criminals people who commit felonies with money ; and yet we vote in as leaders, and  respectfully interview as if honest citizens, people who keep committing far more grievous felonies with words.

    Onto the next stage of my argument here. Towards the end of 2016, in the UK, we were faced with an important question : where in our contemporary democracy does Sovereignty reside ? Until a few centuries ago, it resided largely in a crowned individual, our actual sovereign, king or queen, informed – it was supposed – directly by God. But slowly our society has evolved from that simple pyramid shape, and the actual monarch became “constitutional,” our kings or queens largely symbolical and without executive power. Instead, sovereign power has been extended to the People, as represented in Parliament.

    But how and from where does the “People speak” ? From which position and by what means does the People exercise the dreadful responsibility of its sovereign power ? Through its elected leaders in parliament, as constituted and accountable ? Or by referendum, millions and millions of lone answers to a yes/no question, formatted as an empty box, on a single sheet of paper, distributed by the million across the nation ?  And what did the 48% mean when they put their mark against  ‘Remain’ ? And what did the 52% mean when they put their mark against ‘Leave’ ? How much did any of us who voted really know about the issues involved ?  “Take back control” – but of what ? And who of us will be taking it  ? A lot of billionaires, racists and rabid right-wingers seem happy this Christmas.

    Soon the High Court of the UK will deliver its judgement on where power and responsibility lie in this small nation on the edge of a continent. Is a close referendum result based on a simplistic Yes/No, In/Out response on a vastly complex subject, (following disgraceful, dishonest and irresponsible campaigns by both “sides”), is this truly “The Voice of the People” ? The court’s deliberations are being conducted under the menacing gaze of a phalanx of loyal employees of far right billionaires, claiming (while daily abusing) the title of “Free Press”. In doing so, they are acting yet further to threaten the fragile balances that go to make up a healthy, open, generous, inclusive and life-enhancing democratic society.

    For, of course, sovereign power must reside in Parliament where issues can be examined and explored with sufficient time and knowledge, in a manner fit and responsible. As the doctor is required to ensure that his or her patient is given every opportunity to make an informed decision on which treatment to follow, so our democratic systems must ensure that the People are properly informed before these momentous decisions can be arrived at, which will affect all our lives and all our deaths.

    But whatever the Court decides, wherever sovereign power is understood to reside in a modern society, the question that matters even more is how do we defend our nation’s sovereignty and integrity and how do we identify and punish those who would attack them ? How do we defend our democracy and our language, perhaps even our lives, from the Lie ?

    For, in the past, there was a crime defined in law as High Treason. I don’t know of any definition of “Low Treason” but I understand High Treason to mean an act or attempted act against the nation’s sovereignty, its essence, its essential identity, its foundation stone, the word “High” denoting the dire implications and consequences of such an act. Thus, in the reign of King James 1st, Guy Fawkes was found to have conspired with others to blow up the Houses of Parliament with gunpowder. He was found guilty of High Treason and was sentenced to be publicly hung, drawn and quartered (but managed to avoid experiencing that dreadful sentence in the living flesh by throwing himself off the scaffold and breaking his neck).

    So now the strands of this argument come together. A democratic society’s reliance on language, and on trustworthiness in language, is absolute. Honest communication through words is how that society works and has its being and its sovereign power and responsibility cannot meaningfully be exercised without trust in language as sound currency. Since the nation’s essential processes rely on honest language and the nation’s sovereignty rests with the People, then the People must be spoken to in a manner which befits, and this includes truthfulness. If a public figure, in a position of trust, a “public servant,” misuses language, abuses truthfulness, in order to sway the People to his or her own will or self-interest, that person is depriving the People of the essential means by which to exercise power and responsibility in the real world. That public servant is therefore guilty of High Treason and is a felon, an enemy of the State and of the nation’s integrity and sovereignty, its due process and essential being.

    Recently, Tory Communities Secretary Sajid Javid came up with a proposal that civic and political leaders should ‘lead by example’ and this could include swearing an oath to abide by “British values”. I don’t know what Mr Javid means by “British values,” (I suspect the term, in the present climate, as a self-interested red,white and blue dog whistle), but I shall end this piece with my own proposal for an Oath which includes identifying the Lie as a crime against our Society. As all those aspiring and preparing to be doctors are required to sign the Hippocratic Oath, binding them to a code of ethical professional conduct to which they are henceforward accountable, so all present and prospective public servants, politicians, their assistants, and also the  journalists who report on their activities, should be required to sign their own oath. That oath should focus on the use of language and on telling the truth in language, with the term “truth” defined sufficiently closely to ensure that transgression will be fiercely punished in law, as befits the crime of High Treason. That Oath should be framed and enacted by statute in Parliament.

    Posted:

  • Naming the Beast of the Year

     

    This beast has our country’s contours

    written all over it.

    It has leapt from out of the ruins

    of the city, those hollow squares,

    and from the great labrynth below ground

    where the thread got tangled,

    and from the wi-fi and the wires

    through which we do not speak

    but intone like digital toys

    or just snarl, just howl.

    The rough beast is uncaged at last.

    It stalks across the burnt horizons.

    It stretches its claws

    it grows into itself.

     

                                                                Rogan Wolf, December 2016

     

     

    Posted:

  • Presidential Election Night November 2016

    All night, the great tree raged outside our windows.

    It wanted to give way to the wind, but could not.

    It wanted to fly over the hill on the wind’s crest

    lashing our house as it passed,

    smashing the roof, bursting each window.

    What agony to be pinned like this, bound by the feet,

    earth-bound by tendon, tendril, a century

    of rooting down. An owl sounded just before dawn,

    quavery, tentative. From far distance

    came answer, quietly. Then stillness and first light.

                                                                          Rogan Wolf

     

    Posted:

  • Dorset in View

    From above, this region is a quilt

    of all colours, covering a vast

    and restless sleeper ; each week

    the colours have shifted, wrapped

    in season. No pause here. No holding still.

    The tractor driver spends all the daylight hours

    and more, lonely in his cab, changing

    a field’s colour inch by inch, precisely

    row by row. A young deer, ears up and pointed,

    grazes watchfully nearby, safest

    at centre, sharply in view.

     

    Rogan Wolf, October 2016

     

     

     

    Posted:

  • The Dance of the Emperor who Wears no Clothes

    The Brexit dance continues. And in London, a court case has just come to an end, in which lawyers have been debating whether or not Parliament should have influence over the Brexit process. We shall hear the result of that court case in the near future.

    But its implications are profoundly important and the discussion belongs beyond the court of law and even beyond Brexit itself. For there is surely a constitutional issue here, and it concerns sovereignty in the UK.

    But also, perhaps, religion in the UK. For, since the UK’s EU referendum, irresponsibly and incompetently conceived and disreputably conducted as it was, the phrase “The People” seems almost to have a religious ring to it when it is spoken by the present British Prime Minister and by individuals who campaigned for Brexit, for whatever their assorted reasons. “The People have spoken” they say reverentially, referring (of course) to the referendum “result” – as if the speaker has just returned from the top of Mount Sinai, carrying tablets of stone. Although the “People spoke” not with thunder, not even with a still small voice, but with a bewildered, incoherent, misinformed and choking splutter, on this subject of such vast and almost impenetrable complexity, although the result of this ridiculous charade has no validity or integrity whatsoever, we must obey it, we must dance to this tune. The People’s Splutter is our command, O Master.  

    It is a self-inflicted fiasco and farce, of course, with fiction now piling upon fiction. A few people appear to be profiting from it and recent editions of the Daily Mail suggest that those people are quite frantically determined that the farce should continue, this dance of communal death.

    But now, let’s look at what’s going on, among all this disreputable fiction and manipulation – a real and valid dispute about Sovereignty.

    Where in a Democracy does the Sovereign Power reside ? In other words, who makes the final decision ? Is it Parliament, (ie the elected representatives of all the People (or those of the People willing to vote at election-time) ? Or is it “The People” themselves (ie the Executive, sitting on the shoulders of the 52% of the electorate who voted “Leave,” many of whom have now changed their minds about Brexit, many of whom believed the lies the campaigners told them) ?

    But the same issue, or question, is being struggled with elsewhere, perhaps with greater integrity. In the agonised Labour party, whose voices count most ? Its new and large membership who overwhelmingly support Corbyn ? Or its members of parliament, elected by their constituencies across the country, who must work with Corbyn, but by and large do not support him and do not see him as an adequate leader ? It is a similar issue – and carries some of the same elisions and divisions and ascribed meanings – we the People vs our own leaders and representatives, we these many here vs those few over there, we “commoners” here vs that “elite” there, we “ordinary hard-working people” here vs those “so-called experts” there.

    Does sovereign power reside with the chosen leaders or with the choosing led ? And – just as important – by what means and with what integrity of information are the decisions arrived at by this sovereign power, whatever it may be ? Does correct information, or knowledge, or expertise even matter  ? Or do we take Mr Gove’s advice and take no heed of the experts ? Why bovver ? Just listen to Mr Gove, the common man, one of Us  – anti-elitist, anti-establishment and anti-expert. In the rushing, careless and unjust world, we can trust Mr Gove. He’ll sit with us in the bomb shelter, he’ll stand beside us at the barricade, in the welfare benefit office, in the food bank. Him and Dacre and Bo-Jo the Foreign Secretary and Crosby OBE, Murdoch from Down Under and Lord Rothermere from the Upper Crust. But don’t forget to watch your back.

    Let us remember Runneymede, and the Magna Carta, when exasperated Barons confronted an unworthy King and set some limits on his power. Fast forward to the Tudors, by which time there were a representative Parliament (of a kind) and independent law courts. And in that era, wonderful and electric encounters recorded between Monarch and Commoners in the House, both sides noble and worthy of attention as they tested and explored their respective powers, duties and rights. Onto a church in Putney, London, in times of tumult and fracture across the nation, where passionate and urgent debate sought to establish to whom the vote should go and where sovereignty should lie. One speaker said that the franchise should be extended to land-owners, for – literally – these had a personal stake in the land and so their decisions would be trustworthy, their collective voice a responsible one. Then onto the nineteenth century and the belated elimination of the Rotten Boroughs and other such relics and corruptions and the enormous steps taken in that century to extend the franchise across Society.  

    What have those centuries of struggle to secure a functioning democracy really been about ? Surely, in essence, they have been about where the power should lie for essential freedoms and rights and justice to be established and protected, and how that power should be regulated ; in other words where the nation’s sovereign power should reside, so that tyranny and injustice can be resisted and defeated.

    And what is Parliament ? It is the final court of law in the land ; it is where there is open scrutiny, examination and consideration of all measures proposed by government ; a place where the executive can be held to careful, close and expert account ; a place where new law is constructed and instituted, policy decisions made, and budgets presented and passed (or rejected). Through the centuries, Britain’s two Houses of Parliament have undergone review and evolution without cease, to catch up and keep up with Society’s developments, to refresh, renew, reform, revitalise, attune. The  need for reform and revitalisation has rarely been more pressing than now.

    In the last year or two, the anachronistic House of Lords has – confusingly – been excelling itself on behalf of the people, resisting inexcusable measures proposed by the Cameron-led Executive.  The House of Commons, on the other hand, is in the doldrums, distrusted by and disconnected from the electorate. And in the process and in our disillusion, we the People have made ourselves more and more vulnerable – for a host of reasons – to the dishonest salesman, peddling phoney products and facile solutions, and to the demagogue, peddling hate, intolerance, fear and the hollow glorification of self. As Trump seeks to win American support for building a futile medieval wall against the world, so the Brexiteers have won British support for building a wall against the continent of which it is a part.

    Democracy disintegrates without trust. But in these times of social breakdown and stampeding developments, what institutions and decision-making processes are worthy of our trust ? Where lies the true sovereignty ?

    Once, it does seem that the “People,” lacking a voice, looked to Parliament to speak on its  behalf. In that sense, Parliament was the People. First, it was the means by which the People could negotiate with and check Royalty ; later, it became the means by which the People could hold the Executive to open account.

    But now there is disconnect of some essential sort. Too many of the People see Parliament as speaking only for itself. It is we of the People who do the speaking now and we say anything we like. But we talk only to each other, weaving magic spells and fantasies on Facebook. The Executive is delighted. It turns to the demagogues and the hooligans, the hate-pedlars, tax-dodgers and the plutocrats, the escapists and the lie. It seeks their alliance against scrutiny and care, truth and reality.

    And that is why the nation’s sovereign power needs to remain in our Houses of Parliament. We cannot do without accountable experts, having time and care to examine closely and without prejudice what is best to do in these fraught times, what the Executive is proposing we do ; we cannot do without informed and honourable leadership for guidance through the huge complexities of these years and the issues they throw up. For the fantasy solutions, facile scapegoating and shrill and cheap propaganda of the demagogue and Grub Street war lord will not help us.

    But Parliament and People need to connect again.

    As the disgraceful Brexit dance continues, I shall end this piece with a comparison. More and more, the Brexit process reminds me of that children’s story by Hans Christian Andersen – the Emperor’s New Clothes. A vain fool of an emperor allows himself to believe some fraudulent tailors that his nakedness is actually a very fine suit of clothes. He walks out naked, glorying in his delusion. And the People roar their acclaim of the Lie, presumably seeing it as being in their best interest to do so. But then a little boy perks up, who isn’t in on the lie. “Look at his willy !” he cries. And then the story stops, to spare us the sight of the crowd turning on the little boy and lynching him.

    When Theresa May said “Brexit means Brexit” she might just as well have said “Lynch ‘im means Lynch ‘im.” And when a disgraceful referendum campaign full of manifest lies and fraud worthy of imprisonment ends with a result of 52/48, what have the People really said ? The People have really said that they are split essentially in two and are in a conflicted muddle – not surprisingly. And, in truth, Brexit means nothing coherent at all. It is just a significant shriek, a fume, a symptom of our trouble. And Theresa May is Prime Minister of this split nation and it behoves her not to join any lynching parties. In this case, the little boy is half the nation.  And what our troubled nation has really said in its entirety is that we need some true leadership now, able to make us whole again ; and our democracy needs some rapid fumigation.    

    Posted:

  • Autumn UK 2016

     

    Today our skies evicted the swallow

    and the swift was banished weeks ago

    and in Dorset the house martin

    whose tiny mud globes once crammed the eaves

    was simply absent all year.

     

    And last week Putin, unrestrained,

    bombed hospitals in Aleppo

    and Trump continued

    his debasing of America

    and Theresa May declared the date

    of Britain’s embrace of the lie.

     

    Rogan Wolf, October 2016

     

     

    Posted:

  • The late David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham

    Following the death of David Jenkins on September 4th, I want to bear witness in my own small way to his great stature as a man and true priest.

    The first obituaries I read gave prominence to his Virgin Birth and Resurrection “denials.”  And of course, in his time, he was called “The Red Bishop” by our tabloid press.

    All caricature and falsification.

    He was a far larger, more potent and more significant figure than those cheap and dismissive labels and caricatures imply. (If Christ began talking now, they’d hang “Red” on Him too, of course. And they’d attack and sneer at Him for consorting with “Immigrants” and “Benefit Scroungers”, wouldn’t they ? We all know how the story would play out).

    Here is a link to a truer portrait of David Jenkins, made during the time he was Bishop of Durham, up to the day of his retirement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Yb6wuX81UQ

    And what I think he meant in speaking of the issues of Virgin Birth and Resurrection was that his faith and stance in life were not based on the superstitions, opiate sops, fairy stories for the children, those bits of (possibly super-imposed) magic at both ends of Christ’s life. The truth doesn’t need magic tricks. And Jenkins had a burning truth to tell and reality to bear witness to and  – as the tabloids’ puerile attacks on him demonstrated – “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” That’s why we crucified Him.

    Under Thatcher’s stewardship, the false and fearsome gods Mè n’ Mine and Thè Marr Kett were busily at work all round him, destroying communities and human heart. In the middle of all that, from his base in the city of Durham, Jenkins did his work of witness with immense honesty, courage, charm, wit, warmth, intelligence and generous passion. For a while, he seemed in his own solitary person to be acting as Her Majesty’s Opposition. And he provided a rather more appealing and talented and human voice of opposition than most others we hear in parliament, especially at our present time of bewilderment and fragmentation and robot slogan.

    The passage below comes from a speech he gave to a social work conference in the late 1980’s. But I think his insight does not just apply to social workers. It applies just as much to anyone who works to nurture and keep our community together in a state of health, including teachers, doctors, nurses, prison officers, counsellors, priests, even police …

    “Social workers are a group of people who are being called upon to live dangerously at many of the pressure points in our present confused, confusing and increasingly divided society. As such you are the objects of, and therefore presumably in your own persons and reflections the subjects of, a great deal of confusion, anxiety and uncertainty. Your position is highly ambivalent and ambiguous and therefore both actually painful now and potentially promising with regard to the future of our society and, indeed, of human beings on this earth.”

    I have tried to track down the rest of that speech, without success. Apparently he did not read from prepared script, or record his words. Out they came, straight from where he stood, reliably valid and brilliant.

    We talked together at a conference, having corresponded earlier. He was one of the invited speakers, amongst various MP’s and other significant movers and shakers of the time. He was by far and away the most impressive speaker and participant there, his mind racing, his words flowing and tumbling out, his ego absent.

    Among all the pretenders and juvenalia, the egos, all that fruitless posturing, the well intentioned as well as the ill, I said to him, in frustration and disappointment : “I just can’t get into this.” I was appalled. The conference was being held in St James’ Church, Piccadilly. I had thought its subject was of central importance and could take us somewhere new and desperately needed. I had expected to feel at home and afire here. In hindsight, I think that the problem I could not solve was mostly in me myself.

    He answered reassuringly, in his slightly fastidious way : “You are loitering with intent…” Even in the middle of all this, filling a very crowded public space with his urgency, eloquence and vision, making all these waves, he could attend to me and my inarticulacy and turn that common judicial phrase upside down, and make a brilliant joke of it, with a serious point. Soon afterwards, I wrote a poem from that joke, making the same point. See below.

    But first, another and shorter poem. This one too came from his words. These are difficult times, he said. You must endure. Don’t allow yourselves to be reduced or cast down in isolation. Help each other. Form “communities of endurance”. To be always ready in case of better times. And seek to help bring those times about, as and in all ways you can.

    I think David Jenkins was one of the great Englishmen of his era. His faith, his church and his nation all have cause to be proud of him, grateful to him, and presently and properly attentive to what in his life he was saying.

     

    Keeping Station

     

    The Late “Red Bishop” proposed to several congregations

    a new and active strategy for hope and creation

    in the 3rd millennium. He called it

    “Communities of Endurance.”

    He meant (I believe) that people who keep heart open

    in times of frenzy

    are likely to know themselves outcasts –

    a debilitating experience the human race can ill afford.

    The keeping station

    the holding on

    go better when you’re not alone.

     

                                                                            Rogan Wolf, 1998 (revised 2016)

     

    Loitering

     

    Here I loiter

    with kindly intent

    tip-toeing from fragment to fragment

    stray world to stray world.

     

    I believe today I almost met someone.

    For just a few moments, possibly,

    the whirring edge of me

    disturbed some surface of attention.

     

    Perhaps in time I’ll risk being still enough

    actually to meet a whole person.

    I wonder would either of us survive

    the awe and enormity of true encounter.

     

    I loiter here between lines of thunder

    poised for the sudden break

    the momentary opening

    my own hushed moment of interruption.

     

    I must learn to do without lines.

    As soon as a line is drawn

    defeat there becomes possible

    and even perhaps significant.

     

    There is no excuse for defeat

    and significance is wasted there.

    To be invincible

    you need do nothing

    but dance at all times.

     

    I must learn to loiter

    lightly and with precision,

    poised for flight.

     

    If I am light enough

    you cannot throw me down.

    If I laugh with sufficient joy

    you cannot shame or break me

    halt or silence me.

     

    I loiter here in my fragility

    quick to respond to stray invitations

    to meet, just for a moment,

    in some carefully scouted side street cafe.

    What need for secret police

    when fear seeps

    like a poisonous cloud

    through every door ?

     

    How can we plan the way to save ourselves

    when we cannot even place in words

    the value of our distress ?

     

    I loiter here

    with love’s intent

    tip-toeing from fragment to

    fragment, stray

    world to stray world.

     

                                                                                             Rogan Wolf, 1995

     

     

     

    Posted:

  • Poems for… Self at Sea

    Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmtDPbcyves for a new collection of 30 poems on mental distress. Various authors have contributed, some of them psychiatric in-patients, one a prisoner. The video is a recording of my voice as I read each short poem. You can see the text of the poem onscreen at the same time.

    It has taken several years to put the collection together. It was funded by NHS Westminster and launched in Bristol last Autumn by the charity United Response.

    How to publish/display/promote the collection ? United Response has produced a booklet. And of course the separate pdf posters can be enlarged from A4.

    But this latest audio-visual combination is a newer possibility. It has taken us a while to produce it, but suddenly a few days ago we had the finished article.

    Might someone find this collection useful during Mental Health Week ? The poems can be projected onto walls, outside or inside, displayed one after the other. The sound can be switched off. Or kept on.

    You need to run it with the High Resolution option active. Click on the cog shape along the base of the Youtube screen on the right. Then click on “Quality” and choose the top option from the list provided there.

     

     

     

     

     

    Posted: