St. John's Passion

Seeing as how my living circumstances have changed this year I only went to one performance in the Living Music festival. I went to none last year but it was John Adams and after having to sit through the RTE Concert Orchestra while they dragged their lazy arses through a soporific rendition of short ride in a fast machine I didn't feel like putting myself through it. Part should have been different and I would have gone to lot more if Back of Head wasn't in my life. I chose to go to the Passio on Saturday night in Christchurch and brought my mother as a Christmas present. I am vaguely familiar with the piece - I have the Naxos rather than the Hilliard ensemble recording and the presence of the Hilliard Ensemble was part of the reason to choose this rather than one of the other performances.

Hmmm.... they play it considerably slower. Glacially paced. Sure nothing much goes on in the music anyway but the pace, for me, exposed it's thinness. I love devotional music but rarely pay attention to the words. I often find myself walking down the road singing "chant down Babylon" but when I think of Babylon I think of Gilgamesh and rather appreciate its impact on world culture (apart from chunks of the bible being nicked from old Babylonian poetry. That's not so cool.). I digress. I had much time to pay attention to the words of this passion. The text comes from the latin version of St. Paul. It's a rum choice for a passion. The authorial interventions by The Evangelist (in the role of Basil Exposition) are many. And frequently elongated and monotonic. Jesus in this version is not a sympathetic character: he is aloof, a grudging participant in fate. And a smart arse "are you the king of the jews?" asks Pilate, "you say I am" Jesus replies. No Jesus, he didn't, he asked you a question, now tell him the answer and get out of there. The only attractive character, and played by the tenor who gets the liveliest musical line, is Pilate. He doesn't want to kill Jesus. He is forced into doing so by "the jews". This passion is a deeply anti-jewish text written as an apologia for Roman imperialism. Jesus was doing his job, so was Pilate: it was the nasty jews who weren't. It's quite obviously written for a Roman audience.

Most of these flaws are within the text itself. It does not lend itself to a sympathetic narrative of the passion. Its racism is out of tune with the modern world (if it was anti-roman we wouldn't really mind...) Its Jesus is almost old testament in his aloof disregard for creation, with only an almost modern Bart Simpson smartarse personality lending him humanity.
Po faced and solemn rather than moving and contemplative. I shifted on my wooden chair for the duration.

I don't care what Giovanni says - Arvo really does look like a hunched up Salman Rushdie.

I also wasted two hours watching Atonement at the weekend. If it wins an award for best supporting actor or something it should be the house that does it. The house was the best dressed, most interesting character in the film. The film was a strange mix of difficult and facile. The child was a proxy for the author in a crass way - her atonement was anything but. The exposition was sometimes so subtle as to make you feel a scene had been cut. Which it probably had.

What the civil war denied us the joy of...

News that the lovely people at the progressive democrats have fallen out with each other (and why wouldn't you? You have a viper in your midst.) has been greeted with glee tempered with dread round our way. Mary Harney has many faults - chief of which is being leader of a party which defends privilage and as morally correct and capital as something, the operation of which is beyond human interference - but I don't think she is a crypto fascist. McDowell is. That's not to say he personally believes in scientifically outmoded racial inferiority doctrines (for those not paying attention for the last fifty years or so the notion of a race among human populatios is derided by geneticists) but racist is as racist does and his constitutional referendum that he slipped by used the race card and people's fear of race. It redefines citizenship in a way which is not appropriate for a republic but one which is for a nation: in this situation McDowell chose not to follow the progressive model of the US but is instead heading the direction of Serbia. This is particularly ironic given the Minister for Justice is a disciple of all things American including their failed criminal justice system and their barbaric, expensive, and useless prisons. It seems to be no coincidence that a media panic about gang wars opens up on his watch. During all this the minister has an ever lengthening Criminal Justice Bill which will solve all problems. He just doesn't have any legislation passed ever. His bloated incompetence is further demonstrated by his aloof sang froid as the courts had no option but to reveal the unconstitutionality of our statutory rape laws. Their illegality is not his fault - it was pointed out to us in college about 18 years ago - but what is his fault is his failure to react when cases were in progress as had never happened before. So, we have a Minister for Justice that single handedly created a racist nation, failed to protect children from child abuse, who by his own admission is minister for justice during soaring gang crime that he believes needs much legislation to crack down on but who has introduced no such legislation (just reamended and deamended drafts) - in other words as abject a failure as a minister as has ever held a post in this country. Why should anyone worry? His stop-start career, built on media whoredom should be over. Unfortunately Harney had the nerve, the balls, the chutzpah, to take the post of Minister for Health - perhaps the most underfunctioning department in the government. She was always going to fail there. Her stock is crashed.

So why the stalled leadership bid? Harney is a link to the old school: to a time before it would have been acceptable for a man with the moral stink of McDowell to run for public office. His kind would be seen as the kind of beast that rose in central and Eastern European countries: no decency about him. The PDs under him could mutate, slightly, from the party of capital and privilage into an actual racist extreme right wing party thus able to, possibly, garner a popular vote (it currently has no sizeable electoral base and weilds power in great disproportion to its support) and move up a gear. What would possibly unite the very rich and the very poor other than having a classic old school extremist right wing party like we never had in Ireland? Naive class self interest is rampant in this country. Comments like "I'm a builder/nurse/pensioner Haughey looked after us", laughably naive (he gave back a bit of what he stole, like a porcine Robin Hood), are common stock. The poor are under the cosh. Their jobs have not got better wages and conditions over the last decade. They see them being taken by better educated immigrants who will move up and move on or just work like, well whatever hard working people work like these days, and take the money and spend it in another country where it's worth something. That is how they could give their allegiance to the party of the divine right of capital which has stolen their futures from them.

It is quite funny that the PDs were founded to break us out of civil war politics and they may just succeed. It's difficult to explain Ireland's political parties to someone from abroad. I usually say that left and right is only one axis. There is also the y axis of socially liberal and conservative. Then there is the z axis of republican versus unionist. The independence/ republican/ nationalist axis was at its most extreme socially liberal and left wing rather than fascist like in the rest of Europe so we never had an all out fascist party due to our civil war politics. McDowell's PDs, if he gets to run them, may change that. Finally a break from civil war politics will allow the creation of a fascist party that so many in this state will benefit from. In the old days he would have needed religious support for this. The beauty of the state we now live in where our rights are defined by our nature as consumers rather than as citizens and our aspirations by consumption rather than production is that this is no longer necessary.