Charles Moore thinks we should campaign for the abolition of the television licence:

[The] BBC Charter is once again to be renewed for another 10 years, and the licence fee (at present £131.50 a year) will have its increase announced next week.

It shows amazing docility on the part of the British people that we accept it. Perhaps this is to do with the fact that people over 75, who still have the habit of voting, get their licence free. People under 30, who have virtually no interest in the BBC, seldom bother to vote...

The BBC remains dominant in our public culture, and its dominance is bad.

First, there is the bias, or perhaps mindset is a better word.

If (God forbid) you spoke to 100 journalists on the BBC, you would find that more than 85 were anti-American, pro-green and opposed to the war in Iraq. They would be happy making a programme about lying tobacco companies and unhappy making one about too many immigrants.

Virtually every single attitude can be predicted. This week, a new year memo by the BBC's Middle-East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, was leaked. He described the situation in Palestine as "the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriation and settlement-building – and the financial sanctions imposed on a Hamas-led government".

What about the fact that Israel has actually left Gaza, that Palestinians have misappropriated aid, that "militants" (as the BBC likes to call them) have murdered Israelis, or that a Hamas-led government with Western money might not be a very good thing? Is nothing the fault of Palestinian leaders?

Look at the BBC history website's entry on the Provisional IRA. It fails to mention the fact that they killed actual people, whereas that on the loyalist UVF (rightly) gives the number of victims and uses words like "vicious". The BBC never surprises.

As someone who is rather more pro-American than pro-EU, pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian, pro-tax cuts than pro-higher public spending, and a lot more pro-Britain than pro-its enemies, I don't like underwriting a religion I don't believe in. It's like being frogmarched into the pew, preached at against your will and then having your wallet emptied.

This preaching provides us, the British public, with the dominant narrative of everything on which we are not, personally, experts. Perhaps even more damaging than the view it peddles is what it leaves out.

If you had to depend on the BBC alone, what would you understand of the changes in our times? Would you have a grasp of why Britain has become so much richer in the past 25 years, or the nature of the war within Islam, or what China is doing in the world, or why our hospitals and schools work so badly, or how the internet undermines state power, or what Christians believe?

It is time for a big political party to argue for the abolition of the licence fee. None will, of course, because all are frightened of the power of the BBC to do them in. That, too, shows how, by its very existence, the BBC acts against the public interest. Time for a revolt.

The bias against Israel is undeniable (Think of weeping Barbara Plett, although a complaint against her was upheld.) As for the rest, what Charles Moore says is undoubtedly true of the news and many current affairs programmes. Many, but not all - Melanie Phillips appears regularly to give a more sensible analysis. The BBC produces some excellent documentaries, drama, history and comedy. I would be sorry to see it go, although I would dearly like to see it reform.

"God wot..."

A phrase to be determinedly brought back, especially as it appears  in two lines plucked a poem from Nicholas Breton,  to make an appearnance as an epigraph to a chapter of "Middlemarch":

"Much ado there was, god wot,
  He would love, and she would not"

or the same couplet with slight changes rung upon it:

"Much undo there was, god wot, 
 He would love, and she would not"

which depicts a swain trying to undress his resistant nymph

or

"Much above there was, god wot, 
 He'd undo, but she would not."

(And now it appears that he's already half out of his own clothes, while she continues to keep hers on) 

or 

"Much ado there was, god wot,
 He'd above, but she would not."

which tells us she's clearly a Modern Girl.

This game can go on forever.

And it does.

We've heard the ridiculous speeches from University Presidents earning ridiculous sums. Now let's briefly examine course currently being taught at one these over-priced institutions of higher learning. This one is from George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. You might ask yourself if buying your child a copy of Dr. Johnson's Rasselas would be a better investment. From the New Duranty Times:

The class was taught by Todd Kashdan, a 32-year-old psychology professor whose area of research is “curiosity and well-being.” Kashdan bobbed around the room or sat, legs dangling, on his desk beneath a big PowerPoint slide that said “The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness” as he took the students, a few older than he, through the various building blocks of positive psychology: optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope, spirituality. Though the syllabus promised to “approach every topic in this class as scientists” and the assigned readings were academic, the classroom discussion was Oprah-ish. The students seemed intrigued by the research Kashdan presented mostly in relation to their own lives.

The focus of Kashdan’s class that day was the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure — they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill — and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness. The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. They approached the first part of the assignment eagerly. One student recounted having sex with her boyfriend 30 feet underwater while scuba diving. Another said he “went to Coastal Flats and got hammered.” A third attended a Nascar race in North Carolina, smoked, drank and had sex. Some also watched favorite TV shows; others chatted with friends.

When it came time to talk about the second part of the assignment, the students were excited, too. The Nascar attendee, who was afraid of needles, gave blood. Another collected clothes from family members and donated them to a shelter for battered women. The boy who had gotten hammered bought a homeless person a 12-pack of “Natty Ice” at a 7-Eleven, wondering if it was the right thing to do. A fourth gave her waiter at Denny’s a $50 tip. At times, Kashdan, who ran the class in the nonjudgmental manner of a ’70s rap-session leader — he used the word “cool” a lot — would compliment them on their behavior and pull out a moral. In this case, as one student wrote in a summary she submitted to Kashdan, comparing “a day at the spa covered in really expensive French” stuff and “a day of community improvement covered in horse” manure, the smile on the community organizer’s face “beat out the smile on the masseur’s face any day.” That is, she had learned that doing good is good for you.

Hugh, who seems to know what’s what when it comes to knots and whatnot, is right about “God wot”. This expression is a lovesome thing, God wot, and should be revived.

Googling around, I came across the following:

The phrase may seem a little obscure to us now but it was used in a famous (some say infamous) poem by T. E. Brown where he wrote "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!"  Now, had he penned this line in, say, 1393 his turn of phrase might be deemed excusable but his poem was written in 1893 when the phrase was known only to students of archaic expressions.  This gave rise to another term: godwottery which could mean either "an affected use of archaic language" or, appropriately, "an over-elaborate style of gardening".  The English newspaper The Guardian (18 Aug. 1969) carried this delicious curmudgeonly description: 

Godwottery, the sentimental preconception of what a garden should be, results in a very strange collection of elements... Cotswold stone retaining walls; vaguely Spanish wrought iron gates; "crazy" paving, nowadays often coloured yellow, green, and pink; plainly irregular ponds, now usually of pale blue fibre-glass, fed by streams of impossible source; gnomes, fairies, and animals, usually plastic.

While out of place in our modern language, God wot was so common in Middle English that it was often written as one word: Goddot.  No, that is not where Samuel Becket got the title of his play "Waiting for Godot".  That Godot is assumed to be a French diminutive of God formed along the same lines as Charlot, "Charlie".  By the way, Charlot is how Charlie Chaplin is known in French.  We tend to use only its feminine form, Charlotte.

So harlot, with its silent t, is the masculine form?

… would be a better investment – and a better route to happiness - than the course at George Mason university in Rebecca’s post.

Students learn about optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, hope and spirituality in a “scientific” way, with a role-playing exercise:

The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. They approached the first part of the assignment eagerly. One student recounted having sex with her boyfriend 30 feet underwater while scuba diving.

I would have thought this belonged in the second category. Indeed a more interesting exercise would be for people to have sex with a stranger (of either sex or transgendered) and then to guess whether consent was given out of selfless kindness or for pleasure.

In case anybody missed it, this New Criterion article on the Modern Language Association, linked by Robert, is a must read for those concerned what passes for education these days. If you don’t know what “heterotextuality” is, now’s your chance to find out.

David Lodge parodied this kind of thing years ago, in his creation of Morris Zapp, of Euphoria State University, USA. “Textuality as a striptease” was one of Zapp’s themes, as I recall, no sillier than the reality:

Believing with Professor Garber that everyone should do his bit to avoid the “false unity implied by a transcendent queerness” (isn’t language marvelous?), we left “The Epistemology of the Queer Classroom” to peek into “Henry James and Cultural Criticism.” Alas, we missed “‘A Queer Confusion of Yearning and Alarm’: Disavowing the Family Fiction in James’s ‘The Pupil.’

Why can’t these idiots learn something useful like plumbing? With its ballcocks and its stopcocks, the art of plumbing is rich in heterotextuality, and it pays well too. To the lavatory with you – the writing is on the wall.

Richard John Neuhaus glances at some of the responses to the President's Iraq speech:

A fascinating analysis, published in the Wall Street Journal a day before the speech (subscription only), is Edward Luttwak’s detailed walk-through of the various Sunni and Shia factions and sub-factions that are at war, and the complicated consequences in the realignment of states, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Syria, and others. This is Realpolitik with a vengeance.

Luttwak concludes that Bush is achieving by accident a reconfiguration of the balance of power in the Middle East that cannier statesmen have long sought. I have no idea whether Luttwak is right, but his description of the many factors in play is both intimidating and instructive.

I confess to being haunted by the recent observation of Bernard Lewis that the retreat of the United States from Iraq will establish throughout the world the perception that “America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as an ally.” Such an outcome cannot be good for America and cannot be good for the world.

Though I haven't read Luttwak's piece, it sounds interesting as described here.  Reallignment by default, the luck o' W.  Can't say I share Fr. Neuhaus's feeling of being haunted by Lewis's observation.  Is there any nation on earth, surveying Iraq, that would think our presence there has been harmless?  And which "allies" now feel betrayed?  The ones slaughtering the Shia or the ones slaughtering the Sunni? 

From The Telegraph

Sister Wendy is that nun who says sometimes surprising things about art on television. (and in her books)She is a surprising kind of nun, for her unusual vocation is to be a hermit. In 1971 she started to live alone in a small caravan in the walled grounds of the Carmelite convent at Quidenham in Norfolk. She had already spent 20 years as a nun teaching children, but she had a deep conviction that the two half-hours of prayer allotted to her in her daily timetable were far too little.

Now she spends seven hours a day in prayer, starting at 1.30am, devoting the remainder to work and a walk for her health's sake. She does not mix with the Carmelite nuns at Quidenham, who have kindly given her the quiet she needs. Her life is regular; each day she has the same meals of cold vegetables.

This is a rare vocation, but a new book by her, Sister Wendy on Prayer (Continuum, £12.99), says things on the subject that apply to everyone. Interest in prayer is very widespread. When I write here about news, or architecture, I receive a few letters from readers. If I write about prayer, I get a torrent.

Mind you, Sister Wendy warns that "reading about prayer, talking about prayer, longing for prayer and wrapping myself more and more in these great cloudy sublimities" can be a refuge from doing "anything rather than actually praying".

At the same time, "prayer is prayer if we want it to be". At a practical level this requires us to make a slice of time available each day. Not seven hours, but "most of us can manage a 10-minute silence. It may have to be in the lavatory, or the bath, or the car, or standing at the station, or when the baby's just gone to sleep. If you can spend it sitting quietly, I rejoice with you."

Perhaps, too, we might have developed a romantic idea of what "peace" means for nuns or monks who dedicate their whole lives to prayer. They are still human, troubled by sickness and nagging worries. "Your prayer may be tormented by the thoughts of your mortgage, of your child's problems at school, of your headache and backache. All too often people say, 'I was too sick to pray,' or, 'I was too worried to pray.' Rather we should say, 'My prayer today is of a sick and worried person.'

"You bring these tensions to your prayer and turn away from them to God. That may mean a turning away at every second. It will not be a restful prayer, but it is a peaceful prayer, because that is your choice. The essential you – what makes you tick – wants only him, and will never be damaged."

Sister Wendy spent 20 years in practical work teaching. And now with her prayer she and other contemplatives support those of us who need it for whatever reason.

Several of the comments to the article are the usual scoffing nonsense one has come to expect when people are reminded that there is something bigger than them, but I always find her to speak good sense. I have been held up by the prayers of friends and complete strangers (the Nuns of Stanbrook Abbey in Worcester) during a time of trouble. Never underestimate its power.

All of that can be criticized, and should be.

But the program of domestic surveillance is the one thing the Bush Administration is doing more or less right. Anyone who attacks that is weakening his right to attack what needs to be attacked -- the wasteful wrong-headed continued presence, beyond early 2004, of American troops in Iraq.

The measures taken to date, here and in Western Europe, have by historical standards been so mild as to seem ludicrous. Think of what was done by the FBI in World War II, or during the Cold War. Think of how citizenry reacted to those who had been pro-Nazi before the war. They had to shape up at once: that is why Lindbergh tried desperately to help out, and why he was so frequently rebuffed. Think of those who had been Communist sympathizers in the 1930s and 1940s, and how difficult life became if sympathy for the Soviet Union were detected -- or even if it was thought to be detected.

And now think of how all over the Western world those who support the Jihad, in one way or another, now swagger about, largely unperturbed, and shout down pro-Israeli speakers on campuses, and intimidate all sorts of others, and do not hesitate to hold demonstrations, cry "Death to France" in the middle of Paris and "England will be Muslim" in the middle of London, and the leading imam of Australia (or is he a mufti) says that Australia rightly belongs to Muslims because, unlike the native Australians of English stock, they (those Muslims) paid for their own tickets, and were not merely the descendants of those English people who had been transported.

The measures undertaken so far, in domestic surveillance, and the attitudinal change that is so necessary so far, have not been nearly enough. Witness the absurd outrage over the comments of one administratio official who quite rightly pointed out that those white-shoe law firms falling all over themselves to defend Guantanamo inmates should bethink themselves, and perhaps helped to do so by the expressions of outrage from corporate clients.

What about, aside from corporate clients, a simple sense of patriotism and of indignation? And to those who say that he "misunderstands" the American system of justice, and the need for counsel to be available, I have a question: does that "need for counsel to be made avaiable" mean that some of the best-paid and possibly most effective lawyers in America need to be so unseemly in their rush to defend, for free or at low cost, those Guantananmo inmates, and force the government to worry about how to adequately meet their challenge? Are they proud of themselves? Is this their finest hour?

Would they have behaved the same with Nazi sympathizers and agents, picked up in 1942, or 1943, or 1944, or 1945?

While this supposed documentary was farcical, from top to bottom, the appearance of Bernard Lewis was not the worst of it. One did not expect people of the level of Gavin Langmuir and Leon Poliakoff, but to have man-in-black Tony Judt, and PLO-propagandist (for that was how he got started back in Beirut, before getting that "degree" in Middle Eastern studies from Hourani's D. Phil. factory at St. Antony's) put in appearances was hard to stomach.

As for Lewis, a man more outwardly cultivated than wise, and who in his mass-audience "The Middle East: A History of the Past 2000 Years," devotes exactly three paragraphs, on one out of a total of 400 pages, to the status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule -- which is not distant from Le Pen's justifying his remark that the death camps were a "detail" of World War II, by noting that in some histories of that war that "detail" is discussed in a few pages), he keeps up this nonsense about how antisemitism was non-existent in the world of Islam, and is essentially a European import.

But this is nonsense. The Qur'an and Hadith are full of anti-Jewish remarks. The Jews were held to have been the most adamant (the adjective "stiff-necked" comes to mind) of Muhammad's opponents, and they were always the special victims of his aggression and violence (see the Khaybar Oasis, see the Banu Qurayza, see what happened to the family of his Jewish sex-slave girl, or to individual Jews who appeared to oppose him).

Had Lewis understood things better, had he understood how to frame them, had he been less intent on his self-appointed exculpatory task, perhaps influenced by his own mistreatment by English antisemites in the Foreign Office, and his own memories of Europe during the War, to be compared with how much he was made of in Turkey and not only by fellow Ottomanists, he would have said the following:

"There is not one but many antisemitisms. That of Western Christendom, with which we are all familiar, is different in its origins from that within the world of Islam. In Islam there is a general inculcated hostility toward all non-Muslims, and a belief in Muslim or still more accurately, Arab supremacism, but it is true that within that general hostility special animus is reserved, in the canonical texts, for the Jews. And while Muslims in the 20th century found a natural affinity with Hitler -- let's not forget the role played by Hajj Amin el Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, in encouraging Hitler and in turn, being encouraged by him, and his practical role in raising an all-Muslim S.S. force -- they did not derive their own antisemitism, rooted in the texts, from Hitler or any other European source."

That is what Lewis should have said. And he perhaps should have been, in the writing of his own book about "Semites and Anti-Semites," a bit more careful about his use of other Western scholars, beginning with Georges Vajda.

In an emotional appeal to jurors on Wednesday, Ashqar attorney William Moffitt likened Hamas to movements around the world led by such champions of human rights as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. --from this news item

Why not make the comparison to the Perfect Man, Muhammad? Why not say, truthfully, that one's client was attempting to conduct Jhad fi sabil Allah, Jihad in the way or path of Allah, just like the exemplary model, Muhammad? Why attempt to compare him to a Christian minister like Martin Luther King, given what is said about Christians in the Qur'an, in the Hadith?

On Sunday night,the night before not Christmas but Martin Luther King Day, I intend to have a dream.

Not a dream in which visions of sugarplums dance in my head. No, I intend to dream that somewhere in this great land of ours, some defender of the indefensible terrorists will resist making the monstrous suggestion that there is a similarity between his client  and Martin Luther King or, for that matter, between his client and any other respectable figure in history..

That's my dream. And I'm sticking to it.

In his bracing Jan. New Criterion essay (Reg. req'd.), "Islam, Western civilization & the nation state," Daniel Johnson sets out to answer the question that preoccupies so many of us, "Why doesn't Washington get it?"  I believe he supports the thesis he sets down thusly:

The relationship between Islam and the West is profoundly, multifariously, inescapably asymmetrical. In an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance this creates for a Western mentality schooled in the less complex oppositions of the Cold War, I have tried to distinguish ten types of asymmetry. This list does not pretend to be exhaustive or original. Taken together, however, these ten antitheses chart the extent of a confrontation that is still unfolding before the eyes of an intellectual elite that is astonished and affronted by the resurrection of religion as the defining factor in the future of humanity.

Here is one of the asymmetries Johnson pinpoints:

In the endless discussion of Islam and the West, a third asymmetry is usually passed over in silence.  Islam is not a civilization, and the West is not a religion. [...] Our cultural relativism leads us to suppose that Islam is compatible with Western civilization, but the historical evidence is rather against that proposition.  Islam has no tradition of living under what al Qaeda calls "crusader laws"; it is incumbant upon Muslims to persuade or oblige others to submit to Sharia law.

If one fears living under Sharia law—and what truly civilized person wouldn't?—then one risks being labeled Islamophobic.  Amen to that, I say.

"he [Bernard Lewis] is considered a foremost expert of islam by almost everybody."-- from a reader

No, he isn't. It is just that those who do Middle Eastern studies come in two varieties: the apologists for Islam, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who hate Lewis for knowing a bit too much about Islam, and for so intelligently attacking Edward Said. In other words, the espositos and the armstrongs and dabashis and khalidis and ernst-sells brigade all hate him.

And these apologists for Islam who have cleverly wormed their way into academic department after academic department, who have more or less taken over MESA Nostra and also now dominate the editorial boards of professional journals where they permit either Islamic propaganda about the Lesser Jihad (hypertrophied attention to "the Palestinians"), or anodyne articles on subjects sufficiently abstruse, so that Islam is seen not steadily and whole, but only this or that untroubling aspect (nothing about Jihad-conquest, nothing about the treatment of dhimmis), are so obviously awful, and so obviously against Lewis, that one wishes, and many have assumed, that Lewis is a tremendously learned (he is), and therefore reliable (he isn't) truth-teller about Islam.

Meanwhile, Lewis, who takes a generous interest in his students, has produced a cadre of acolytes who are not capable of recognizing when the gold-leaf on their idol comes off in their hands. And they defend him, and will not hear of attacks, especially attacks by those who are much cruder and ruder than he.

And then there are still others impressed by the fact of age, and unwilling to see someone over 90, with all his faculties intact, criticized for his enthusiastic support of the Oslo Accords, or for the Iraq venture, or for such his belated recognition of the menace of Europe's islamization which is then followed not by any intelligent setting out of Things To Do, but rather of seeming to support, yet again, the hopeless squandering in Iraq, for how else can one interpret that recent remark by Lewis that itself needs to be remarked upon, which was "Either we bring them freedom, or they will destroy us." What a statement. What an astounding thing to say,.

Try to imagine, in the middle of World War II, FDR or Churchill saying that "either we bring them [the people of Nazi Germany] freedom, or they will destroy us." The goal of Churchill and FDR was not to "bring freedom" but to destroy our enemies, so that they would lack the capacity to harm us, and so that they would be so damaged that they would lose whatever hold they had on the minds and allegiances of men.

Lewis has been so wrong, in his practical prescriptions and enthusiasms (Oslo Accords, Iraq as the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations), and in the end so unable or unwilling to recognize the full malevolence and menace that Islam exhibits toward Infidels, in its teachings, its attitudes, its atmospherics. And one feels at times that his friends and patrons and others who take care of him or lionize him, or seem to, in Istanbul or Ammann, have fed a personal vanity that has gotten in the way of the implacable and imperturbale scholar, and finally prevents Lewis from attaining to the heights, say, of Snouck Hurgronje, or Joseph Schacht, or Arthur Jeffrey. He has outlived all the people of the old school, and he may be considered their last representative. But this does not entitle him to be treated as a sage, and his many and sustained errors (not least about the fate of non-Muslims under Muslim rule) to be overlooked, or forgiven.

All this talk of doing good and suchlike put me in mind of Stevie Smith’s poem The Galloping Cat.

I’m not a huge fan of her poetry but this one is in an anthology of cat snippets someone gave me which is probably why I like it.  It begins

Oh I am a cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good
So
One day when I was
Galloping about doing good, I saw
A figure in the path; I said
Get off! (Be-
cause
I am a cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good)

and ends

Angels aren’t the only ones who do
not know
What’s what and that
Galloping about doing good
Is a full time job
That needs
An experienced eye of earthly
Sharpness, worth I dare say
(if you’ll forgive a personal note)
A good deal more
Than all that skyey stuff
Of angels that make so bold as
To pity a cat like me that
Gallops about doing good.

As this is not an anthology of cat snippets if you would like to read the poem in its entirety follow this link to Jeanette Winterson’s site (one of Mary’s favourite writers I believe) where she discusses some of her favourite poems. 

Meow.