Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Today, Daisaku Ikeda the leader of a Buddhist group Soka Gakkai International wrote a warning to members in the newspaper about scams.  A lot of people in his area have suffered from scammers, especially older people, who were more trusting.  Workmen pretend to offer services around the house, they might see that your roof needs mending or tell you that the next time it rains you’ll get a serious leak. Old people imagine being wet and catching cold, and they are frightened. Feeling as if they should act quickly, they give money for these scam builders to buy materials. Contracts of course are worth nothing unless the person who signs it is honest. A criminal will sign a false name and disappear with your money.

However much we warn people, ‘If it seems too good to be true, it probably is’, hope somehow still triumphs over both experience and common sense. Although I am very sensible, and my Dad taught me from an early age not to buy from a cold seller, I sometimes find that I am reproaching myself for not buying a lottery ticket or phoning an expensive phone line.

     ‘You can’t win,’ I tell myself, ‘If you don’t enter.’ The odds are stacked against me nonetheless, and it would almost certainly be a waste of my money. Almost certainly. It’s the almost that gets us!

In previous communications, Daisaku Ikeda has advised us to ‘gargle regularly in order not to catch colds’ and to ‘get home early on dark nights’.  If only I had taken heed of the former! For the past week I have been unable to speak, with a sore throat, a virus I caught from the hundreds of children I see each week when I’m teaching.  Most years I do follow his advice, on the basis that it seems sensible. This year I outwitted myself again and decided that, since I never get throat infections, it must be because I am lucky, as oppose to because I usually do what he says and gargle, ‘just in case.’ Like the rest of mankind, I am my own worst enemy.

As I was cooking yesterday, my husband found himself delirious with married bliss. He now has a wife who is unable to speak or make any noise. I can barely tut. All I can do is cook and do the washing, and am easily satisfied by his occasional trip to the chemist to get more throat medicine.  I am trying to perfect a silent glower, as famously used by my mother in law when she finds spare particles of dust on the shelves for example, or realises we’ve bought the kind of washer-dryer that Which magazine expressly told us was the worst one, and complain that it keeps breaking down.

To return to the main point of this week’s article, what is the role of a religious leader? How can you tell if someone with a position of authority within a church, mosque or temple is a genuine spiritual person, a cynic just doing their job, a megalomaniac after political power, or a genuine but inadequate person, perhaps experiencing doubt or difficulties themselves at the present time? After all, we are all human beings, just the same (except the Pope, of course, who is divinely inspired).

In the past your local religious leader would control most areas of your life. You would, for example, take advice on how to live happily married before the wedding.  People did this even with priests who could never marry, as if they would have good advice on marriage!

In England, famously, as the novelist Jeannette Winterson repeated gaggles in her magnificent novel ‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’, the protestant church required that married couples had sex through a sheet (you need scissors to prepare this. I have never tried it but it sounds quite kinky, although I think the intention is to avoid taking pleasure from the flesh).  They insisted for centuries on the ‘Missionary Position’ (man on top) and not because it is the most pleasurable, but the most pragmatic to conceive a baby, which should be the sole reason for sexual activity among Christian folk. It is still illegal in some American States to use any other position.  I can’t help but imagine policemen who regularly patrol bedroom windows to keep a check on this sort of thing.

Although generally we modern people would rarely consider it the religious leader’s role to advise us on how to ‘do it’, some religious groups still have extremely detailed stipulations about what constitutes immoral homosexual practise for example, including that it’s OK to think about it as long as you don’t intend to ever do it, which strikes me as a hypocritical and also mentally unhealthy position to adopt (sic not intended).  In deference to my readers, however, we will let that drop, as I know some of you don’t like to think about it, and I wouldn’t want you to waste any more time writing hate mail on my account.

No religious leader in history has ever held any opinion about ‘women on women’, because religious leaders are usually male and can’t really imagine it. Being completely outside society’s scope is one of the advantages of being a member of the weaker sex.

I always expect religious leaders to oppose war, on the basis that most religions disapprove of war and killing, or expressly forbid it. Buddhism doesn’t actually ban killing, it just reminds us that every cause has an effect, so we mustn’t expect to get away with it. Christianity, however, is absolutely straight about this, as Jesus was against violence in all its forms, even though his country was occupied by a foreign army (the Romans). He bad Peter to put up his sword and not save him, and refused even to defend himself with words at his trial. So I always expect Christian Bishops and so on to oppose wars, but they never do. I can’t think of a Pope or an Archbishop who disagreed with his country about war, and how can this be?

As in the case of scams, perhaps, people are astonishingly able to deceive themselves when they think they themselves will profit, evben when they still consider themselves to be part of a faith which says the opposite. The clearest example of this in recent perhaps is our very own Tony Blair, responsible personally for more wars than any other Prime Minister in British history, yet professing to hold deep Christian faith. His conscience nevertheless must have led him to convert to Catholicism after he left office.

 I suppose that, rather than spouting rules at us which they themselves may or may not give us a good example of, a true religious leader would probably be someone who encourages us to be ourselves, to have the clarity and courage to think clearly about how to live our own life, for ourselves and others, according to our understanding, and to take care of our own life, our family, and our community.

 So, with the best of intentions, may I remind you to beware of scams, my dearest reader, and gargle daily.

1207 words

Jill Rees

17 November 2008 

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At this time of year the wind and the rain make you pull your warm winter coat closer round your shivering body, layered as it is with vest, shirt, cardigan, waistcoat, jacket and outer coat. Men chase their runaway scarves across the street and women battle with wind-wrung umbrellas. On the news, a family were trapped in their car overnight and had to be rescued from flood water by life raft, and the rain shows no sign of abating.  As the nights draw in, and daylight weakly peeks down at us for only a few hours in the middle of the day, we wonder if we will survive the long winter months to come.

Last week this all ended as we celebrated Carnival. Bridgwater Carnival is the third largest in the world, after Notting Hill and Rio, and people come from all the Continents to see it. Visitors this year include people from as far afield as Canada and Australia, from Brazil and from Africa. One young Ugandan visitor Sam Kiggundu from Kampala, who runs his own Media Studio helping youngsters in Uganda to learn media skills, tells us the Carnival is shown on TV back home.

150,000 people visited this year to watch the 150 carts parade through the town centre. Normally, the battle is against the elements, as cold blasts from the north east drive us back into to shelter of our homes for warming mugs of tea caressed between ungloved hands, before braving the storm once more. This year, however, luck was with us. The wind died down, the moon came out bright and clear. We crowded eight deep along the side of the route, eating hotdogs from the stands, sweets, smoking cigarettes and youngster sucking on throat lozenges, risen from their sick beds where they spent the week battling against the extremely common cold.

The atmosphere was friendly and warm, with chatting, laughter among families; streams of teenagers marching Indian style single file up the street then back down the street again, in the hope of bumping into friends. Men turned up carrying freshly bought beer, and neighbours huddled in darkened first floor windows to get a good view from the warmth of their bedrooms.  Late but welcome, the show began.

Started 406 years ago to celebrate Guy Fawkes night, Carnival is the hub of town life. Almost every local family is part of a Carnival club, bound by a fierce loyalty. The process of raising money to build your club’s themed cart begins as soon as last year’s procession ends.  Taking a theme, perhaps Pirates of the Caribbean, Ghost Riders, Cleopatra, Showtime or Vampires, a moving illuminated float is built. Some 22,000 light bulbs, illuminating moving parts, swirl and twist in the spotlight and people in costume dance or pose on the trailers, pulled along by tractors, huge generators bringing up the rear. Children take part in the dancing and miming to the thunderous pop music backing the action, held on by belts and clipped tightly to the float.

Roads into town close in the late afternoon, and traffic stops. Local families harry down the streets carrying survival gear and accompanied by excited children snuggled up in variety woollen hats and thick anoraks. Strategically placed stepladders help families to see over the heads of the 150,000 others who come to see the spectacle. relatives from Canada, friends from London, spies from other Carnivals to be held later in the area, Granddad and Grandma come over for the day, new boyfriends and new babies, all crowd in to this small town to see the world-famous show.  

It started in 1605, when Guy Fawkes plot to blow up Parliament was foiled in Westminster. Protestants in the West Country felt more keenly than anyone how lucky they were, and wanted to celebrate extravagantly by encouraging all local people to parade colourful themed carts through the town.

Bridgwater in particular, was the town who provided most of the manpower for the doomed Monmouth Rebellion a generation later in 1685, and this still open wound has made the celebration of freedom even more enthusiastic.

During the Monmouth Rebellion, when Bridgwater residents joined the forces of the ill-starred Duke of Monmouth to fight the King across a nearby field, local men were slaughtered in the battle, or subsequently deported to the West Indies to work as slaves and exiles. Others were hanged by Judge Jeffries, known as ‘The Hanging Judge’ and no doubt had they been able to fit them all on the scaffold they would have.

To this day, the local area is not allowed to have a Cathedral city, or a university, or any regional power to rival the Queen’s. It is even said that when her Majesty rode through the town on the train recently, she pulled the blinds down as the train passed through Bridgwater. It is still a town of rebels, and Carnival is an excuse to let off steam about an unforgotten and unforgiven past, and, it has to be said, an unrepentant past. Bridgwater folks are wild!

When the floats have finally run through town, townsfolk gather in the centre with long poles, the end of which are laden with gunpowder, and do a kind of strange dance with the lit poles. This is known as ‘squibbing’ and is a Bridgwater speciality. Squibbing is part of the ‘adult’ element of Carnival. It takes place late at night and only those who have survived the cold, often with the aid of shelter in a pub as the evening went on remain to take part. 170 squibs were lit this year, held inside lines of burning oil along the High Street.

Traditionally Carnival was held on the Thursday nearest Bonfire Night, when Guy Fawkes defeat is officially celebrated in the country, and ‘Black Friday’, the day after Carnival, the town remained closed for ‘recovery’, i.e. many ‘tails of the dog’ and daylight drunken episodes as pubs remained open but shops and banks were closed.  Now however Carnival is held on Friday, and on Saturday night, the town field holds the firework display. Bangs and blasts send dogs scurrying under kitchen tables.

Thousands of pounds are raised during the night, with most of the money going to local charities such as BIBIC, which looks after disabled children. For the next few days, floats crawl home down the local roads, and are dismantled and displays stored for next year. Tractors and trailers are returned to the fields, and life gradually returns to normal. Clubs get together in their local pub to debrief after the show. Did they do well? What went wrong? Why was the winner better than them?  Over a pint, plans begin for 2009.

Armed with bright images of light still burning in the backs of our eyes, with memories of blasts from the fireworks and heat from the squibbing and the fires on which lovingly-made effigies of Guy Fawkes, sometimes made up to resemble unpopular politicians and dignitaries, are set alight, we settle into the rest of the long, dark, cold and drawn out winter, believing that maybe, just maybe, we will survive until celebrations begin again with Christmas and the New Year.  

1,209 words

© Jill Rees

11^th November 2008

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In the last 2 weeks, US planes have bombed towns in Pakistan, claiming that there are ‘Al Qaida’ forces hidden among the locals. These ‘terrorists’ have crossed from Afghanistan where the US troops are, rather astonishingly perhaps, legitimately at war.

The Afghanistan question, as it happens, was a second invasion led by Bush’n’Blair, sanctioned somewhat reluctantly by the United Nations Security Council, whose Headquarters are in New York.  From the point of view of the TV-watching public, Tony Blair persuaded us that we had to get in there and enable women to liberate themselves from the headscarf.

To date, despite several towns being annihilated and innumerable civilian deaths, not one woman seems to have taken off the headscarf.  In fact in Turkey, where women are required by law to remove the headscarf at work, they endlessly protest the right to keep it on!

Putting details and civilian deaths to one side, the reason for the war in Afghanistan is that the brains behind 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, is supposed to be holed up in a cave in the Afghani desert, and the Afghani and Pakistani people refuse to blow his cover.

Osama Bin Laden disguised as God  

Bin Laden’s group, ‘Al Qaida’ then, led by a man in a cave, seems to have long arms, stretching as it does from Pakistan on the Indian subcontinent to Western Sahara on the Atlantic coast of Africa. A recent shooting on the main highway in Mauritania was blamed on Al Qaida factions ‘trained in Algeria’. (Clue – Algeria produces oil). The perpetrators turned out to be a group of local unemployed lads who were in a gang, had just left one of their grandfathers’ house where they had been staying. A tragic, but straightforward murder, and the police quickly caught the criminals. This didn’t stop the US Press having a field day.

There, in the Sahel, on the edge of the vast sands where men can hide, ancient peoples travel and trade with their camels, anarchic and ill-fit to our CCC-TV eye all-seeing world.  Driving through the area myself, I saw buildings disguised as local Arab and Berber hangars and habitations. You could tell they were false because they all stood in line, and were clean and modern. A good place to store tanks, I thought to myself. Then I saw a sign hammered sardonically by the road: ‘Baghdad 2’. I was surprised to find US troops slinking around the desert, until I heard about the money that had been pumped into Mauritania.

Between the shifting sand –dunes, hidden somewhere between the oil wells and water holes, lies the Algerian border. Algeria is one of the fastest economically enriching nations of the world, because of its oil reserves. The CIA constantly insinuates that there are ‘Al Qaida’ forces in Algeria, hiding in the desert, ignoring experts on the area such as Jeremy Keenan, who accuse the Americans of muck-raking in fact, the people of the western Sahara loath Al Qaida and all things Arabic, having been invaded by the ruthless Arab Empire in the 7^th century. Memories are long in the desert, and I would be surprised to see a Berber or a Touareg who is sympathetic to an Arab cause. But then, I didn’t think the Arabs who rule Mauritania would be snuggling so closely to George Bush either, so who am I to judge?

My question is: who are these ‘Al Qaida’ groups who keep popping up everywhere? Let’s look at the evidence.

Bearded and robed, ruling with seemingly infinite power over the entire world, threatening to destroy whole swathes of civilisation because of its decadence and sin. It rules its earth mission from an invisible and untraceable cave in the desert, communicating with men through the disembodied technology of radio and video broadcast.  

To my mind, reports about the ‘Axis of Evil’ and the ‘Terror’  bear astonishing resemblances to the Bible story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where God couldn’t put up with human beings seeking only pleasure, wealth and material treasures, instead of the more spiritual treasures of the heart, any longer.

Global capitalists surely have forsaken religious and moral tenets. The West is under siege again from that mysterious condemnation from the desert. Worst of all, it feels as if it is true, as we pile our hard earned taxes into saving the big banks. (Does anyone else want a tee-shirt blazing ‘Marx was right’, selling like hot cakes on ebay?)

Instead of the Lord himself booming out in righteous indignations against our folly from the desert wastes, we have bin Laden’s crackly videotaped messages, his word of damnation the technological version of God. Once again, man has invented God in his own image, the image of his guilt. Oh but look what we are thinking we look like deep down!

Could it be that the leaders of the West, men who claim to be Christian in the main, yet clearly fail to act on the morals so clearly stated in their religion, have subconsciously created a terrorising, punishing all-powerful wrathful being that they are at the mercy of, but is, in reality, the echo of their own ragged conscience?

‘I am a jealous God’, says the voice George Bush and Tony Blair both claim to hear on those long dark nights of indecision, ‘You cannot worship both global greed and worship me’. In their masochistic (some have said homoerotic) obsession, the cause of the ‘war on terror’ is not some Oxbridge dropout from a wealthy family weakly lying on his sickbed in some peasant’s hut, but the terror which is the conscience of the real evil men of the present time.

As George Bush exits centre stage, with Blair already gone, we can only reflect that we are well rid of them, and hope that Obama, who understands Africa, can make more sense out of the world, for all our sakes.

980 words

 Jill Rees

04 November 2008

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naşir yanında jill üstünde saygın 29th, 2008 içinde şiir.

benim imam

gevrek ısı doğmak üstünde su,
harem- mavi lekeli- cam
kupür belgili tanımlık soluk numune
-in benim sinir kalp,
veering yuvarlak impassioned
trafik üstünde Taksim dördül,
sallamak yanında yaşlı şarkı içinde yeni yorum.
saçkıranlı- silâhlı men gülmek aynı derecede
onlar gözünü dikerek bakmak kusur bulan ve aç
vasıl Frenk sarışın. senin kaş
çalılık sen -e yargıçlık etmek bkz. judgment
ve bulmak o eksik.

I am a kadın -in a bin ard arda geliş,
almak –dan benim kıskanç ev
yanında işsiz bilseme. senin’ a adam
-in düş ve sert mahkumiyet.
I oturmak içinde belgili tanımlık dolmus düşsel
senin ateşten kıl cereyan
arkaya sen karşıdan karşıya belgili tanımlık ova.
benim dolmus kırılmak aşağı
ve I am muhafız ev
yanında a kar-capped adam
kim anlatmak Türk mihmandarlık.

başka muharrir gülümsemek ve güçlükle solumak
vasıl haram kitap, Jane çetin zor
ve hapishane tümce.
içinde benim us sen kaldırmak
senin savaş silahları üstünde belgili tanımlık minare
ve ses çıkaran seslenmek belgili tanımlık şafak:
‘dua bkz. be daha iyi –dan uyumak’.
ayaklanma kırmızı arkaya kule kütük parçası
belgili tanımlık günbatımı’ rüzgar azılı ani patlama
senin cüppe. içinde korkmak ve titrek
sen ayakta durmak sert,
ve I istemek -e doğru ayakta durmak yanında senin yan
(içinde senin kalp kadın milleti are değil haram,
benim imam) ve kaldırmak
belgili tanımlık bora -in değişmek,
şarkı hürriyet içine belgili tanımlık
zindan -in belgili tanımlık enterrored
aynı derecede onlar kavramak onların yara izi;

ve I, I was esmek burada
içine senin savaş silahları.
 

if you can make a better tranlation please add as comment

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Well who would have seen that coming? Palin’s home electors in the Alaskan newspaper Anchorage Daily News have said they’re gonna vote Obama, Republican Colin Powell has come over from the dark side, along with many former Republican black voters. People who never voted before, young and old, black and white, they’re switching, and they’re switching in public, proudly.

A leading online newspaper asks, if Obama were Republican and McCain a Democrat, who would you vote for?  At least among the media, the issue of Barack Obama’s colour has gone out of the window. Not only is he being compared in quite serious circles with Christ and Superman, but he is more realistically being compared to John F Kennedy.

 Young, idealistic, making few promises they thought they couldn’t keep (including, strangely perhaps, the promise early in the Campaign that he would ‘stop the sea level rising’, presumably through finally signing the Kyoto protocol.) Obama makes people believe. In his closing speech in Canton , Ohio he said:

‘I ask of you what has been asked of Americans throughout our history. I ask you to believe, not just in my ability to bring about change, but in yours.’ They believe in him, and because of the way he speaks, they believe in themselves at the same time.

When Obama sombrely descended from his plane coming into Hawaii to see his very sick Grandmother, you thought the script was honestly being written by God Himself. The hope of America, the light at the end of the dark tunnel for the rest of the world, cared more than anything for his Grannie, the woman he said ‘poured everything she had into me’. Republicans who made snide remarks about publicity stunts were hushed by a shocked public. Obama, as his campaign draws to an end, has the confidence to be genuinely warm-hearted, and all America loves him for it.  

Even the finance for the Obama campaign has something of the people about it. Anyone who wants to can log in to his website and make a donation. Unlike previous elections, and unlike the McCain campaign, people who have very little are donating small amounts, but millions of small donations make the richest Campaign in history, and Obama isn’t beholden to any big companies or sectors for it. his million dollar advert on prime TV this weekend is one of the benefits he can reap from the public’s generosity.

In his speech this week, the last full week of campaigning, Obama speaks of a family whose son is ill with a debilitating and incurable condition, who cannot get the proper treatment because their private health insurance turned down his case. The mother  Robyn wrote,  

"I ask only this of you — on the days where you feel so tired you can’t think of uttering another word to the people, think of us. When those who oppose you have you down, reach deep and fight back harder."  This mother of a dying son believes that thinking of her suffering will be enough to encourage Obama. In other words, she believes that Obama really really cares about her family. That is his secret; people believe that he genuinely cares about them.

Compare this to the reaction to Sarah Palin’s admirable sentiments about supporting special needs children, where the reporter merely points out that while her words are pleasant, she actually opposes amendment 51, which would provide funding for the project.

‘We’re not outa the woods yet,’ as Palin might say, in her jokey ‘Alaska girl’ way. Thousands of black voters have allegedly been handed leaflets warning them that should they try to vote, they will be arrested for any loose legal ends, unpaid parking tickets and so on.  In other areas, voters are expected to queue for over 4 hours, making it more difficult for women with families to vote, if they have to pick up children. As usual, voting is on a working day, so employers may make things difficult for staff hoping for time off to queue up. We saw these tactics and more in 2000, when the tragedy of losing Al Gore as president was not then fully realised.

Let’s say when we wake up on Wednesday, Barack Obama is president. We who watch anti-CIA conspiracy films all know that it isn’t the President who runs America. As well as potential assassins, there are plenty of enemies for Obama policies on health, education, green policies, pulling out of Iraq and so on. Even Obama’s running mate Joe Biden has warned there will be a testing period for the new president. Those of us who totally believe in all the CIA conspiracy movies (and we are legion) are not above worrying if a home-grown president-weakening crisis might be in the planning stage right now.

Obama could do with a bit of luck if and when he becomes President. We hope that the relief the world will feel at the end of the Bush era will encourage certain ‘rogue’ elements to make him a peace offering, to help him onto a firm footing. Steps towards appeasement with the US in Iran, in Palestine, and in Pakistan would help enormously.

We are hoping Obama will turn out to be a world leader we can all trust, but we should remember that, although he may be the first ever national leader apart from Obafemi  Awolowo who knows what it is like to live in a little African village, it is the United States of America he will be President of, and his first allegiance is with his own people over there.

947 words

Jill Rees

27 October 2008

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