There was a little man and he had a little gun

So your son has a birthday coming up; you know he hates black people, so what better present to give him than a gun with which he can go out to a celebrated church with a devout  congregation, and shoot as many of them as he conveniently can. Everyone happy? Well, not perhaps everyone.

The thing is that the father lives in a country where it is as easy to buy a gun as it is to buy a plate of Kentucky fried chicken (maybe easier, in some districts). And the main problem is that so few people think there is anything mistaken or irrational about the situation, and that a minority body which favours it is so efficiently organised and so rich and influential that candidates for political office are convinced (perhaps rightly) that they stand little chance of being elected if they oppose it – and that after election so many continue at the very least to be uncritical of it for fear of losing their seats.

Personally, I have never in all my eighty-plus years held a gun in my hand, wanted to do so, or known where or how to buy one, and have been perfectly happy with that situation. Madmen fixated on one overwhelming conviction are always going to find a way of getting a gun and using it, even in the best-regulated countries. If the most recent deranged individual had not been given his birthday present, he would have had no difficulty in getting hold of a gun by some other means.Well administered gun laws of course cannot prevent all gun crime; but statistics make it perfectly clear than they can diminish the chances of multiple killings. The problem is the ease with which this is possible in the US, and the difficulty with which decent folk are faced when they want to change the situation.

It will be interesting to see what effect the most recent tragedy has on the American public – whether for instance Hilary Clinton’s impassioned plea for gun control will have any greater effect than those of poor President Obama, whose almost every move to improve life for his citizens has been so effectively demolished by Congress. My guess is that the gun-lovers of the NRA – so clearly in a minority, so good at getting their own way - will again prove that there are some situations in which democracy will always lose out.

Stormin' Sydney

Sydney is celebrated for its storms, and presumably was even before the ships of the First Fleet unloaded their cargo of convicts, who were immediately almost flattened into the rain-sodden earth by a downpour the like of which none of them had ever experienced. ‘What a Terrible night it was last of thunder lightning and Rain – was obliged to get out of my tent with nothing on but my shirt to Slacken the tent Poles’, wrote Lieut. Ralph Clark. The deafening thunderstorms which, it seems, used to be pretty regular at certain times of the year seem almost to have gone away; but periods of tremendous rainfall haven’t – ironically, all too often while half the county is in drought the other half is under water.

Just as the sunlight in Australia is of a different quality to that of Europe, the rain here is of a different quality to that of the UK. The light is a revelation. On the first morning I awoke in Australia and looked out of a window in Perth, even the remembered light of the South of France seemed grubby compared to the light which, it seemed to me, must resemble that of pre-industrial Europe; but perhaps not even that. The quality is difficult to describe to anyone who hasn’t seen it. Similarly, the rain which falls in torrents on a really wet day is like nothing one has ever experienced even in the wettest English county. I remember scurrying across a street in Sydney during a rainstorm and understanding for the first time what is meant by ‘sheets of rain’ – and I still can’t resist standing in the shelter of the porch and watching the street turn into a river, with refuse bins tumbling along in the full force of the water. However, the bright side is that even on the wettest day the sun can burst through the clouds and at least a patch of bright blue will appear. Doesn’t happen in Shepherd’s Bush.

On the game

Can it actually be the case that some governments – from local councils to Parliaments – really believe that it’s ever going to be possible to stop women selling their bodies to men? No country in the history of man- and womankind has ever succeeded in doing this, and none ever will. The question is how you deal with the situation in a civilized manner.

Every solution has its problems and difficulties, the main ones stemming of course from the money which is to be made by organizing the business of prostitution, and which attracts gangsters of every shape and colour. In a way, the individual woman working from home is in the ideal situation, being precisely in the positon of any woman selling a skill of any kind – except that it seems inevitable that unless she is extremely fortunate or careful she is likely to attract the attention of some man who will attempt to extract money from her in one way or another. The ideal situation for individual women might well be a legal licensing system which would regard her as a private businessperson, subject to taxation and the full protection of the law. A problem is of course that a young woman coming into the business cannot always afford to rent a room in a reasonably safe area. Maybe a government small business grant?

It should be the case, and to some extent is the case that a system of legalized brothels works well at least as far as the protection of the sex workers is concerned. But again the large amount of money to be made from prostitution attracts gangsters who force young women ‘on the game’ – often illegal immigrants or young women who have come to a country as refugees. A much more pragmatic and sympathetic approach by law-makers and the police is undoubtedly badly needed, as well as a more careful evaluation of the individual situation in various countries, which at present take very different views of the problem.

Those who oppose the legalization of brothels seem to me to fail to put forward a convincing case; but it’s a case made more understandable by the fact that those who do license brothels go on to take a very odd view of how they should be run and where they should be allowed to function, and situations vary from the huge brothels which have come into being in Europe to some small houses in Australia which are almost a cottage industry.

Local authorities agonize much about the problem of illegal brothels – massage parlours which often look externally perfectly respectable, but where ‘full sex’ is very often on offer from individual young women behind the closed door of the massage room. In a system where heavy fees are paid by legal brothels, a laissez-faire attitude to the massage parlours is questionable, but in some ways not altogether a bad thing, allowing a young woman to work as a perhaps ‘amateur’ prostitute as she would from her own room at home – but under safer conditions. The extent to which the management takes, or doesn’t take a cut of her additional income, and the tax implications is an open question.

Just one more thing to add: the public attitude to the problem, despite a general permissiveness where private sexual behaviour is concerned, is often unhelpful, and there seems no prospect of any improvement – if greater tolerance is considered an improvement, which of course is not always the case where the religious right is concerned. The ‘moral’ objection is easier to understand and deal with than simple foolishness – such for instance as a paroxysm of fury because a brothel is ‘too near a school’. Why anyone should think that infants at school would be affected by the sight of men or women entering or leaving a particular door near their school (unless of course it has a neon sign saying BROTHEL, is a mystery to me. Older boys and girls will presumably, in this day and age, know about prostitution – if they don’t there’s something wrong with the education system - and though they may have a prurient interest in the situation, it won’t be a harmful one. Indeed, inviting a young prostitute to come to a school and give a talk about her life and sex in general might be the very best form of sex education.

Now there’s a thought.

It ain’t, I fear, going to happen.

Give us a tune, Jay Lo

Changing fashions, if one lives to be, what, past sixty or so, become very confusing particularly in music and visual art, I find. I understood and somewhat appreciated the idea that rather than simply copying nature – landscape, conventional portrait, and so on – there is something to be said for an artist creating a vision that is the artist’s own – the artist as god, I suppose. The problem is that very few totally abstract paintings convey anything to me except perhaps some notion of the artist’s personal relationship with colour and form, which becomes pretty boring pretty soon, rather in the way that poésie concrète becomes boring because the shape is usually inimical to the language and really adds nothing to it. In music, the move away from what might be called ‘tunefulness’ seems to me to be deeply depressing – it’s resulted more or less in the death of jazz, which has now become so abstract that the genre has become deeply unfashionable and neglected (certainly in the USA), and in classical music has proved so unprofitable that composers are resignedly turning back to some idea of form and melody. (Though of course the music of a composer who really has something to say – say, Stravinsky – does almost always reveal ‘a tune’ in the sense of a cluster of notes which impress themselves on the memory and follow one around for days like a faithful dog). As for popular music – don’t get me started. Has anyone in the last ten, fifteen years or so written a pop song which can actually be whistled in the street? Well, maybe they have, but if so it’s eluded me; certainly it seems that the really vastly popular pop songs rely now on performance and lyrics rather than anything which could actually be called a tune. I have no objection to watching Jay Lo’s gyrations, or to her remarkable  wardrobe or lack of it – but I can’t be relied on to sing any of her numbers in the shower.

It’s now occurred to me that this is a deeply reactionary blog, in a tone which I recognise to be almost exactly the tone my parents adopted when talking about the Beatles.

Oh, dear.

Cruel music

‘It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony. And the essentially “pretty” colours of the normal orchestral palate are used to paint this extraordinary picture of loneliness. And there is nothing morbid about it. The same harmonic progressions that Wagner used to colour his essentially morbid love-scenes are used here to paint a serenity literally supernatural. I cannot understand it – it passes oveer me like a tidal wave – and that matters not a jot either, because it goes on for ever, even if it is never performed again – that final chord is printed on the atmosphere.’

- Benjamin Britten (in a letter).