Across the pond

(This is an extract from the first chapter of a novel.)

 

Bonzo woke up on that Monday morning in February feeling shabby and ashamed. On Sunday morning he had jumped out of bed full of zest and jumped on to his laptop before breakfast, writing a half humourous blog entitled, ‘Flog the Archbishop’. He ignored his own misgivings while he wrote it. He knew even as the words fled off the keys that he was doing what he didn’t ought to do. He was using over the top humour to make a serious point, and in doing so making fun of no less an authority figure, than that deeply serious man, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

 

In the United Kingdom that Sunday morning less than a million people would have been getting up to go to pray in one of the thousands of Church of England churches that still dominated the landscape in so many towns and villages in 2008. But the British constitution still rules that the CoE is the established church. So the job of whoever is the Archbishop is to be the spiritual head of all the British people. And that includes all the thousands of Poles and Russians who were flooding the country in the naughties to do the nation’s plumbing and take over part of the prostitution trade. And all the Hindus and Muslims who rushed here for refuge from dictators in some of the dicatorships in countries of the newly independent parts of the old British Empire in the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century. And also all those West Indian blacks who came in their thousands from the 1950s, to escape poverty in their own lands and to drive the nation’s buses.

 

 

His job is an impossible job. And he deserves some sympathy for trying to do it well. But it is also no different in kind to the job thousands of teachers in the British primary schools are doing every day. They are struggling to control the class and get them to behave properly. They are also struggling to understand the diverse backgrounds of their pupils and give them the confidence to be who they are AND to fit in with the laws and mores of

Britain.

 

So the Archbishop’s speech and long interview with the BBC last week was designed to promote harmony in all the land, and specifically to get people to understand the good things that underly sharia law in the Muslim culture. Given the fact that some muslim countries are using sharia law were using sharia law in 2008 to justify the stoning and even execution of young women caught out in adultery that is not an easy task. Particularly when the national and international launchpad is not a pulpit, but the television screens and the tabloid newspapers, whose journalists translate the Archbishop’s message into a form deemed suitable for the mass media.

 

So it is not at all surprising that the archbishop’s attempts to pour oil on troubled waters resulted in what happens when you sprinkle petrol on the embers of a fire. The resulting fire was still raging on Sunday.

 

Bonzo no longer goes to Church. And on this Sunday his good mood continued as he drove out of London down to his bungalow on the

Dorset coast. The evening sun was cutting a path though a calm sea when he arrived. Though the central heating had been turned off and the outside tempartures were only a few degrees above zero, the house was still warm when they arrived, heated by the sun shining through the double glazing. And even though he had forgotten to double lock the front door the computer and the television had not been nicked. All those teenage criminals he reads about in the press must have spent the weekend idling on the beach.

 

It was a peaceful end to a lovely day. Until he and Maria began to discuss which room to start decorating when the redecoration of the main living room is complete, hopefully in two weeks time. As they pressed their different preferences his wife’s voice escalated in volume to the level it reached when she was teaching secondary in the

East End struggling to get adolescent boys to learn French. And Bonzo found the volume being turned up on his own rather fog-horn voice, despite his reasoning mind. He realised that what was bubbling up inside was not only anger it was full-blooded rage, whose roots he could only guess at.

 

If he went on he would explode. So he stopped trying to win the argument and fled to the computer, where he occupied his mind and his emotions by playing the card game Hearts, who has been available as a free extra, courtesy of Bill Gates, ever since Windows was introduced to Microsoft Computers. In the latest version, which comes with

Vista, the program tells you what your record is for all the games you have played on this computer. When he started out with Vista Hearts was even getting a score of 55 per cent. But as he played more and more games he was steadily ground down by the superior stamina and stored brain power of the computer. When he sat down that Sunday night, his score was 48 per cent.

 

He lost the first game, making a stupid mistake due to his seething emotions. He recovered to win the second but then lost two or three in a row. His score was now 47 per cent. He took a grip on himself, played carefully and got the score back up to 48 per cent. And then he stopped because however carefully he plays he has not managed to do 50 per cent or better since the first few days of this game.

 

Which does not matter of course. Because it is only a game. But now he realised that the rage had vanished. So he went into the next room, where Maria was just about to watch the 10 o-clock news. One of the first images he saw was of Rowan Williams being jostled by a media crowd. He was tight-lipped and sad eyed. One mighty unhappy Archbishop. And the voiceover told Bonzo that he was still sticking to his guns and determined to resist calls for his resignation, when he addressed the Synod, the church’s parliament of bishops, vicars and lay people, the following day.

 

Bonzo went to bed and was blessed with a good night’s sleep. But when he woke the following morning he was troubled by his own ‘conscience’. Now his yesterday blog did not seem like a bold stab at an authority figure. It seemed an ignoble act, not at all gentlemanly. It is called hitting a man when he is down. But as his mind went through all the arguments again he came to the same conclusion as when he wrote his blog. The Archbishop should resign and let someone else have a go at fulfilling this impossible role.

 

Bonzo then went on to cogitate about the explosion of anger between his wife and himself. The nuclear family is well named.  Which is why most of the murders, rapes etc take place within it. We are all at more risk from those we know very well and see often, than from the hardened criminals and psychopaths, who occasionally cross our paths. It made me realise that we are  both control freaks, though we conceal it from ourselves and others by spending a lot of time persuading them to do what we want, and even  giving up some of our own objectives in order to achieve the most important one.

 

Control freakerry is mostly talked about in terms the attempts of the control freak to order the chaos he finds in the world and to protect himself from the storms and tornados and the destructive behaviour of other human beings. But deep down in all control freaks the rage is still the rage of the infant, whose own needs were frustrated long before he could articulate them. And however loving the parent not a day passes without that parent frustrating what the infant wants to do, or does not want to do.

 

Adults can only speculate on the source of the rage of infants, be they individuals trying to recover how it was for them in those years or psychologists developing theories from observing infants, trying to understand they are behaving in the ways they do, and developing theories to explain it.

 

Following this line of thought Bonzo remembered the last time he had lastexperienced rage about a serious matter which was when he was locked up in a mental health ward because he was deemed a manic depressive who was a ‘danger’ to himself and other human beings. Bonzo did not quarrel with the diagnosis (which actually labelled him bi-polar but he preferred the older label) because the doctors had failed to realise that he had learnt to control the extremes of his manic depressive moods to minimise the danger to himself and others.

 

At the time he was locked up he was in a long manic phase, where he was using the incredible energy such moods bring to influence the course of events in his work place. And thus bringing himself into conflict with those who wanted to do things in different ways. But that did not get him locked up. He was locked up when the long Christmas vacation had already started and he had diverted his energy, by allowing full rein for his manic sense of humour.

 

That sense of humour can bring lots of laughs, but it always leaves some people upset. Not surprising when you think that sense of humour can suggest the Archbish should be flogged!

 

Now Bonzo would be the last to deny that manic depressives can be a terrible nuisance to those around them, but on blissfully sunny February Monday morning he suddenly  realised that the control freak within is potentially a far greater danger to others.

 

And of course the control freak in other human beings.

 

The Archbish has caused a huge rumpus by his speech. But he has not sparked off a wave of human beings killing each other. His speech was in part his own effort to get

Britain’s multi-cultural society working harmoniously together. He has made it clear in earlier speeches that he was not in favour of the Iraq war and what he was advocating in terms of encouraging the Muslim community to establish sharia practices here was an attempt to tell them, and all of us, they could have the freedom in this country to follow their own traditions. In the hope that their children would develop into contented and happy citizens rather than suicide bombers.

 

Contrast the control freak within George W. Bush, who has unleashed the full power of American high technology to rid

Iraq of that nasty controlling dictator, Saddam Hussein, who massacred many of the majority Shia Muslims and minority Kurds. Now

Iraq is ruled by an emergent democracy where the majority Sunnis are in charge. But where Shias and Sunnis are still killing each other on the streets. Where the ancient tensions between the Shias, Sunnis and Kurds are still rampant, making it not easy for them to live together.

 

And even more important, there is the tension between all three religious and racial groups, and the heavy dose of American consumer capitalism, which has been administered in large doses to

Iraq in recent years. On top of the doses of British Empire capitalism which created

Iraq, with a little help from British Petroleum.

 

If

Afghanistan after a much longer intervention by the western powers, the Taliban seems to be getting stronger. Most of the Muslims I have met loathe the Taliban but neither are they keen on the dominant culture of  American consumer capitalism.

 

So Bonzo,  before he walked down to the ocean, prayed in his secular way. He prayed that American electors when they went to the polls in November would not

elect another control freak like George W. who wanted to make the world safe by bombing it.