Watching Doctor Who before the Easter Vigil...

'The God Complex,' last night's Doctor Who episode, was interesting, and I was amused by someone tweeting in its aftermath to say:

'That was fun: people getting attacked by the god of Feuerbach, with a cameo by David Walliams as a sort of alien LibDem.'

This, of course, set me to frowning at my failure to have read any Feuerbach, as I don't really think it's good enough to read about people; you have to read what they actually said themselves. It's obvious that the current crop of celebrity atheists are pygmies riding on the shoulders of the likes of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietszche, and Freud, and it bothers me that I've read so little of those four. None of Feuerbach, as I've said, and far too little of the other three. They're serious thinkers, and require serious engagement.

This evening, Paul Cornell -- whose written some fine episodes of Doctor Who in his own right -- said that he'd got around to watching it:

'Just saw last night's Doctor Who: excellent stuff, and, maybe surprisingly for that subject, a positive portrayal of a person of faith.'

The person in question was Rita, the intelligent young doctor who responds to the Doctor's surprised question, 'You're Muslim?' with a simple 'Don't be frightened.' She comes across very well, a fine example of how faith and reason can work in harmony, rather than in crude opposition. Still, I found it kind of surprising that  he thought a positive portrayal of a person of faith to be surprising in Doctor Who. 

He'd not be alone in holding that view, though, as the Guardian's blogpost on the episode makes clear:

'In the end "The God Complex" was funny and thoughtful: Doctor Who is by nature a secular show, but this didn't hammer you over the head with an atheist agenda; until her faith got the better of her, Rita was presented as being empowered by it. It was blind faith, of course that emerged as dangerous.'

Aside from the lazy conflation of secularism with atheism -- they're very different phenomena, in that that though plenty of atheists are secularists, there are plenty of secularists who aren't atheists and there have been plenty of atheists who most certainly weren't secularists -- I found this an odd statement. Is Doctor Who really a secular show? Indeed, given how the Guardian commentator seems to see little difference between secularism and atheism, is it a normally an atheist show?

Secularist, but not Atheist...

My feeling has long been that Doctor Who might be a secular show, but it certainly isn't an atheist one -- how could it be, given that its principal character is somebody who has a habit of giving his life for those he loves, sacrificing himself to save the world, and then returning to life again?

And yes, I realise that the two most recent show-runners for Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies and Stephen Moffat, are atheists, but the reality seems to be that if you write a messianic character, then in our post-Christian culture it's hard to pull this off without Christ shining through.

And sometimes it's very obvious. Did you notice how the Doctor was betrayed with a kiss in the recent 'Let's Kill Hitler' episode? A poisoned kiss, as we were later to learn, with the TARDIS informing the Doctor that:

'Your system has been contaminated by the poison of the Judas Tree.'

Yes, slain by a kiss from the Judas Tree. Shades of Gethsemane, anyone?

Check out Mark 14:45, for starters...

An Easter Hero

The Doctor as Christ motif has been unmissable in Stephen Moffat's two series, the first of which began on Easter Saturday 2010, the second on Easter Saturday 2011. Given the Doctor's messianic character, as a sacrificed and risen saviour, that these series should have launched at Easter looks fortuitous, to say the least. Moffat, as an exceptionally skilled writer, seems to have loaded both 'The Eleventh Hour' and 'The Impossible Astronaut' with Paschal imagery.

Watch, for instance, how the pre-credits sequence to 'The Eleventh Hour' saw the Doctor having an encounter with a cross...

Look on top of the spire. Plotwise, is this necessary?

And how the after the credits we're taken to young Amelia Pond praying in her room, with her prayers seemingly being answered by the TARDIS crashing in her back garden. The first words we heard spoken by Amy -- the first words we hear in Stephen Moffat's run of Doctor Who -- are the following prayer:

'Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils, and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you, but -- honest -- it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know it's not. Because at night, there's voices. So please, please could you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman. Or -- back in a moment -- Thank you, Santa.'

For what it's worth, we'll later see that she has a large cross on a drawing in her room.

Yes, I know that she's praying to Santa rather than God, but we live in a confused world nowadays. And don't gloss over the fact that the pet she received is a fish either; it might seem a chance reference, but I really don't think it is. Even without the references to them, we'd know Amelia had dolls and pencils, as much later on we see the drawings she's done and the dolls she's made of the Doctor and herself. The fish, which we'll never see, is the most ancient symbol of Christianity -- indeed of Christ himself, and this passage let's us know that the sequence isn't merely shown at Easter; it's set at Easter, which will make the following scenes all the more significant.

She rushes out into the garden, this redheaded girl, where she meets, as someone rising from his tomb, a man who has saved the world, and died, and been restored to life. It's worth noting that Mary Magdalene, apostle to the apostles and first witness to the Resurrection in at least a couple of Gospels, was invariably represented in medieval art as a redhead. Lest you think it's silly to read any significance into that, keep in mind too that Eve was often also construed in medieval thought as a redhead -- because Adam was made from red clay, and she was made from Adam -- and that in early Christian thought, the entire Passion story was regarded as the story of Eden recast.

But I'll get to that in a bit.

Anyway, Amy brings the Doctor inside as he's hungry, and it turns out that the only thing he eats is the improbable combination that is fish fingers and custard. Yes. Fish. Again. But take a look at Luke's gospel, where Jesus addresses the dumbfounded apostles, still incapable of believing that he was physically present among them, by asking whether they had anything to eat, and then taking some fish from them, and eating it. It's his consumption of the fish that proves he's really there, that they're not imagining him.

Important to the story too are Annette Crosbie's character Mrs Angelo and her grandson Jeff. Two angels, so, just like in Luke 24 and Acts 1.

It's not a straight point-for-point allegory, by any means, but rather an Easter tale that plays in a polyvalent way with Paschal ideas and imagery. Other aspects of the Passion and Easter story show their faces in the episode, most notably his promise to Amy -- just before his 'ascension' -- that he'll return, the darkening of the sky during the day, and the very odd moment when, triumphant over the episode's serpentine villain he spreads his arms wide and cries 'who da man?'

Who da man? Behold the man, more like it. With arms spread like that in a moment of triumph over the Devil, he embodies the Christus Victor principle.

And yes, I said the Devil.


Two Gardens, Two Temptations...
Early Christian thought put a lot of weight on the Protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15 and of Paul's description at 1 Corinthians 15:22  of Jesus as a new Adam; it saw the whole story of Christ's incarnation, and in particular his passion and death on the cross, as a recasting of the drama of Eden. Jesus was the new Adam, Mary the new Eve, Gethsemane the new Eden, and the Cross the new Tree.

Well, if Easter carries within it the imagery of Eden, it probably shouldn't surprise us that lots of the action in this episode should take place in a garden, that there'd be a couple of scenes where nudity appears as somehow simultaneously natural and shameful, and that there'd be a memorable moment where our redheaded Eve would give our Adam an apple...

I know, in the Bible it's simply a generic fruit, but still, in our culture we've always thought of the fruit as being an apple. Amy gives the Doctor an apple, but unlike Adam he doesn't eat it; instead like Christ, the second Adam, he'll eat fish.

And, of course, the diabolic villain's a serpent...

The Eden story is, of course, the story of the Fall, of how the world goes wrong; it's an idea that occurs in other myths too, perhaps most famously in the Greek myth of Pandora's box. It's curious then that Prisoner Zero will eventually taunt the Doctor by saying 'The universe is cracked. The Pandorica will open.'

More tomorrow...

An Uncharacteristically Gentle Vincent Brown...

It's a weird feeling, being referred to in the Irish Times and not being able to tell people because it's as 'Thirsty Gargoyle', rather than my actual name. Not an unpleasant one, just a weird one -- last time I didn't have this problem! It's nice to be cited too in connection with one of my favourite Stewart Lee routines, embedded as my quote from it was in the middle of my long Q&A post on Cloyne.

So, there was something about Thursday's Tonight with Vincent Brown that's niggled at me since yesterday, so I watched it again this morning. I've finally figured out what it was.

You'll remember how yesterday I pointed out how flimsy Alan Shatter's explanation of the Taoiseach's most notorious allegation about the Vatican was; well, it turns out that its absurdity was demonstrated later in the programme.

As we've already seen, the basic problem with the plausibility of Shatter's explanation is that it's fundamentally at odds with that ventured by the office of the Taoiseach in July; back then it was said that the Taoiseach hadn't had any particular incident in mind and was speaking of a cumulative effect, whereas now it's maintained that he did have, above all, one very particular incident in mind.

Without seeing the full unadulterated texts of the letter sent in 2009 to the Nunciature by the Murphy Commission and the Nunciature's reply, it's wrong to insist -- as Minister Shatter does -- that the Commission wrote to the Nunciature as an expression of the Vatican, rather than as an entity in its own right, or that it sought all documents or merely those it wouldn't be getting from the Diocese. In fact, section 2.11 of the Cloyne Report at least suggests that the Commission dealt with the Nunciature as a discreet entity, rather than as an arm of Rome, and makes it very clear that the Nunciature expected the Diocese to co-operate fully with the Commission, as indeed it did.

Why did the bishops claim that the Framework Document was official policy?

Amidst all the fog and confusion, Marie Collins raised a very good question, and one which I think Vincent Twomey failed to address adequately. He tried, but in fairness to him, it's hard to correct Mrs Collins' misconceptions or even answer them properly without coming across as someone who cares more about ideas than about people. Somehow accuracy comes across as cold, just as following procedures can come across as unsympathetic. Given that Marie Collins is obviously a very decent person who has in the past suffered terribly through the actions of Irish clergy, the danger is you wind up looking heartless, even when you're nothing of the sort. Marie Collins' question was as follows:

'Why then did the bishops lie to us for ten years, and tell us that that framework document was set in stone, it would be implemented in every diocese, that they were implementing mandatory reporting, and bragged about the fact that their guidelines -- their policies -- were stronger than the civil law, when in fact they didn't even consider it an official document? And the Vatican says, in its response, that the letter didn't affect anything, that the Government hasn't proved that it affected anything. And I'd like to quote something from the Murphy Report that the Government commissioned, and it's Monsignor Dolan who was a civil lawyer and administrator of the Dublin Diocese, and he told the Commission:

"Monsignor Dolan went on to say that understanding behind the Framework Document, was that each diocese or religious institute would enact its own particular protocol for dealing with complaints," this was after it was published. He said, "This in fact never took place because of the response of Rome to the Framework Document."

Because of the letter! Now, that is concrete proof that that letter did have an effect.'

That Monsignor Dolan says the bishops felt hamstrung by the 1997 letter is an important point, and one certainly worth digging into. It doesn't prove by any means that opponents of the Framework Document took solace from the letter, but it does at least suggest that it didn't make life any easier for the bishops. Of course, we know that. The Vatican is hardly a monolith, as John Allen spelled out very clearly in his fine 2004 talk on the 'Top Five Vatican Myths', and it seems clear that there must have been serious divisions in Rome during the 1990s on the how to handle the issue, these matters only being resolved -- in the main -- with the decision in 2001 to have all abuse allegations channelled through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. So, yes, while Monsignor Dolan's opinions aren't proof that he was right in his analysis, let alone that anybody took comfort from Rome's attitude to the Irish guidelines, they at least invite questions.

In Cloyne, of course, the problem wasn't that Magee and O'Callaghan didn't try to implement the guidelines as they feared Rome would later overturn disciplinary decisions; it was that O'Callaghan was opposed to dealing with things in a disciplinary and consistent way, and that Magee didn't care how O'Callaghan handled things. It's a bit like Chesterton's famous line about Christianity: it's not that the procedures were tried and found wanting, it's that they were found wanting and left untried.

As for Marie Collins' question, I think it's a good one, being both fair and understandable, and I think it deserves a decent answer.

The answer surely lies in the fact that irrespective of opinions expressed in 1997 by one Vatican department, the Irish bishops were still entirely free to implement guidelines on an individual basis within each individual diocese, and every single bishop indeed made a public commitment to act in accord with those guidelines, such that the guidelines were indeed official in each diocese.

It's a complete exaggeration to say that Vatican had forbidden the bishops from implement the guidelines. On the contrary, rather, one Vatican department had merely cautioned the bishops against implementing the guidelines in such a way as could conflict with canon law, thereby potentially leading to disciplinary measures against abusive priests being overturned on procedural grounds.

Were the guidelines followed? The answer is that we don't know. It appears they've been impeccably followed in Ferns. It seems they have been followed in Dublin, albeit with some difficulty. It's clear they weren't followed at all in Cloyne, despite the bishop of Cloyne having been publicly and officially committed to them.

Did the Nuncio withold the 1997 Letter from the Commission?

But anyway, here's the thing that brings it back to Shatter's nonsense. In connection with his claim that the Nuncio had been asked to furnish all information the Vatican had about the handling of abuse in Cloyne, he elaborated with reference to the 1997 letter, saying that when the Murphy Commission wrote to the Nuncio in 2009, the Nuncio could have responded by, among other things, furnishing the Commission with that letter. Well, all else aside, think for a moment about Marie Collins' question. She was quoting from section 7.13 of the Dublin Report, which itself quotes Dublin's Monsignor John Dolan quoting from the 1997 letter:

'Monsignor Dolan told the Commission that the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome had studied the document in detail and emphasised to the Irish bishops that it must conform to the canonical norms in force. The congregation indicated that "the text contains procedures and dispositions which are contrary to canonical discipline. In particular mandatory reporting gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature". Monsignor Dolan said that the congregation regarded the document as "merely a study document".

Now, Dolan's quotation, at least as recorded by the Commission, leaves out an important chunk of the 1997 text, notably the bit which explains why the Congregation for Clergy was concerned: that the application of the guidelines could potentially clash with canon law, such that bishops trying to stamp out abuse could subsequently have their efforts overturned on purely procedural grounds, which would be obviously be a bad thing (C4.21).

For all that people claimed in January that we'd had no knowledge of the 1997 letter before January of this year, it was cited in the Dublin Report, which was published in November 2009. The Commission had clearly been aware of the existence of the letter when conducting its first report. In light of how the Dublin Report covered the period 1975 to 2004, the letter would obviously have been very relevant to the work of the Commission, which began in 2006. Are we really to believe that it didn't take a look at it then? You know, before it approached the Nuncio in connection with the Cloyne Report? It was obviously important, and it would have been deeply remiss of the Commission to have overlooked it. No, it seems certain that if the Commission was doing its job properly, there would have been no need for the Nuncio to supply this letter, and the Nuncio would have known this. The Dublin Archdiocese must have had a copy, as the Cloyne one obviously did.

A Most Peculiar Programme

It was a strange show, all told, and not just because it featured a Government minister.

I don't think I've ever seen Vincent Brown treat his panellists with such respect. Alan Shatter was given a free platform to, in effect, make all the prepared statements he wanted, and Vincent Brown, who's spoken more of the SAVI study than any other Irish journalist than I can think of, never once challenged him as to whether or not the government is doing anything to protect the overwhelming majority of Irish victims of sexual abuse, these being those abused by people within the family circle. Marie Collins was, understandably enough, not challenged on anything by Vincent Brown, and given the obvious danger of seeming churlish, Vincent Twomey seems to have had some difficulty correcting misconceptions.

Having said that, he made good points. It was very clear from what he said that the problem at Cloyne didn't lie in the Church's procedures, but in the fact that the Cloyne authorities were unwilling to follow those procedures. The best procedures in the world mean nothing if the people whose job it is to implement them will not do so. It's pointless of Alan Shatter to claim that we've no evidence -- no assurance -- that everything's perfect in the Church today. It's simply impossible to tell. Nobody can ever give a confident and honest assurance that rules will not be broken or that crimes will not be committed.

In connection with this, Vincent Twomey's pointing to the Church having appointed a Presbyterian, Ian Elliott, to head the Church's own child-protection agency was important; leaving aside his professionalism and integrity, Elliott's Protestantism blocks him from any instinctive or otherwise ingrained tendencies towards clericalism, and I basically look forward to his coming reports on the dioceses. If things are being handled well, we can all start to breathe comfortably. If they're not, well, then we'll know we have to take action. 

I think the issue of who decides whether or not Elliott's reports should be published is a red herring; it would look staggeringly suspicious if any diocese refused to publish a report, and if any did so because it had something to hide, I'm confident that Elliott would resign in protest. Having said that, I'm glad Vincent Twomey said he believed that all the reports should be published, and I'm glad too that he said he thinks it would be best overall for the credibility of the Church if Cardinal Brady were to resign, simply because this could help the Church and the Country to progress.

Indiana Jones and the Monasteries of the Air

Chatting the other day to a philhellenic friend of an archaeological persuasion, I was pointed in the direction of an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles set in 1910 in which our youthful hero visits Athens, and indeed travels rather further north. I was advised that, although funny, the film is something of a qualified success in terms of its aim to be an educational show.

It's hard not to be impressed by the ship's amphibious capabilities

Their ship sails from Odessa to Constantinople, on to Thessaloniki, and from there makes its way south, apparently cutting across Euboea and overland to Athens, rather than following the traditional route around Cape Sounion and into Pireaus. As their ship approaches Athens, Henry Jones Senior summons his son, points, and says 'See the minarets over there--' just as the camera cuts, rather inexplicably, to a nice shot of the Tholos at Delphi, followed by an even nicer one of Delphi's Athenian Treasury, which had -- interestingly enough -- been reconstructed only a few years before this episode supposedly took place.

You'd need impressive eyesight to see this from Athens

Given that it's two hundred miles from Athens to Delphi, and no part of this story is set there, I'm not quite sure why we're treated to sights none of the Joneses get to revel in, but still, onwards with the tale.

Ascending the Acropolis, Jones Snr starts upon a description of the Parthenon, at which point young Indiana bolts up through the steps of the Propylaea and past the Temple of Athena Nike until he stands looking at the Parthenon itself. They don't stay long, with Mrs Jones needing to hurry back to their hotel, and while there the plot kicks in: Jones Snr and Jnr shall be going north, to Meteora, there to spend a Spartan weekend translating Byzantine transcripts of Aristotle.

As you do.

And no, contrary to too many websites, this is NOT an amphitheatre

Anyway, once they've packed, Indiana and his father head of by horsedrawn carriage to the theatre of Herodes Atticus, where Jones Snr proceeds to give his bemused driver incomprehensible instructions in ancient Greek, delivered with a Conneryesque burr, before trotting off to show the theatre to his son.

'I bet there were lions and gladiators,' exclaims Indiana, swishing his stick.
'Junior,' says his father, 'lions and gladiators were Roman, not Greek,' apparently oblivious to the theatre having been built by a Roman senator.
'Oh, well I'll bet Alexander the Great cut off some poor fool's head right here,' says Indiana, slashing downwards.
'Junior, this was not a barbaric slaughterhouse,' corrects Jones Snr, neglecting to mention that Alexander died almost five centuries before the theatre was built, 'we are standing in a theatre, a temple of great poetry, drama, and philosophy.'

Onwards he warbles about Socrates and Aristotle, somehow winning over his sceptical son, who doesn't seem to realise that his father, the great scholar, is in fact a charlatan who believes a second-century AD theatre had been the site of numerous fifth- and fourth-century BC philosophical debates.

Off they head, then, back to the wrong carriage and off to travel -- it would seem -- by horse and cart to Meteora, burbling about syllogisms in a manner that'd cause Aristotle's corpse to turn like a gyros spit. Even if things had gone smoothly, I can't think this would have worked out for them, given that it's just over 200 miles from Athens to Kalambaka, the main town in Meteora. For what it's worth, it'd be just south of the 'O' in 'Thessalonike' on the map above.

For what it's worth, they could have got the train, as a shiny new line had been built only the previous year.

Well, soon tossed out of their cart -- and they can't have gone more than a mile or so from Athens at this point -- they start to walk, wittering about Cynicism as they stroll through a desolate landscape in the vague hope that a bus might appear. As the day wears on, they sit resting under a tree until they cadge a lift in a passing cart, laden with peasants and chickens, with Jones Snr taking the opportunity to teach his son about Stoicism.

At some unidentifiable spot they have to get off and Indiana suggests they go back to the hotel; his father refuses, saying that they weren't to know that the cart wouldn't go the whole way -- two hundred miles, remember -- and they'd just get another ride. Feeling that as dusty as they are they're unlikely to get a lift, so they resolve to wash their clothes, bathe, and continue.

Next we see them swimming, nakedly, in the sea, having presumably washed their clothes in sea water and left them to dry, salt-encrusted, on bushes along the shore. Given that they should be heading inland, in a generally north-westerly way, this seems to be rather off-course for them, but such geographical inconvenience is as nothing compared to what happens next, with a flock of sheep stealing their clothes.

This whole episode looks plotted by someone with too many Joseph Campbell books, and no maps

With nothing but a slight briefcase -- itself containing pens, paper, and it would seem everything young Henry had been told to pack back at the hotel -- and some branches to hide their nudity, they approach an ancient yaya, whose startled shrieks summon her daughter and granddaughter, thus creating a wonderfully archetypal scene whereby our heroes are transformed into Cretan shepherds by a Classic representation of the three-fold Goddess, maiden, mother, and hag.

Off they trot in their new clothes, being shunned by passing tourists in a car but soon being given a third lift since leaving Athens, this time by a man called Aristotle with a donkey called Plato. Cue much comic misunderstanding and a discussion of Plato's Republic. In the course of the confusion, Jones Snr gets out in a huff and Jones Jnr stays in the cart, as they continue their journey to Kalambaka and what Patrick Leigh Fermor, in Roumeli, calls the Monasteries of the Air.

Pictures really don't do justice to how astonishing Meteora is. You have to go there.

Approaching a monk as he comes out of an elaborate cage, Jones Snr addresses him in contemporary -- rather than ancient -- Greek. Like Odysseus, I suspect he'd learned a lot from the three women he'd met, though rather peculiarly he begins his conversation with 'Kalispera,' meaning 'Good evening,' and then bids the gentleman farewell by saying 'Kalimera,' which means 'Good morning.' I think we can take this as further evidence of his deep mastery of an esoteric pseudo-Hellenism.

Still, up they're winched to the monastery, where the monks greet them, with one -- presumably the abbot -- saying 'We waited for you all morning.'

'We got delayed,' replies Jones Snr, looking embarrassed as he adds, 'It's a long story'. My guess is that he just that moment remembered that there was a train he could have caught, but I really don't think he had any reason to feel sheepish. After all, the two of them had covered more than two hundred miles by donkey and on foot in just one day, even finding time to swim, wash their clothes, chase some sheep, and get transformed into authentic Greeks by a mysteriously iconic trio of Greek women.

Why, Sean Connery himself, first and greatest avatar of Henry Jones Snr, could tell of just how valuable eventful Greek journeys can be.

Dinner follows and a night's rest, and then, after morning prayer, they settle in the library, where Jones Snr sends young Indiana off to banish his boredom by immersing himself in a study of Aristotelian causality; he's helped in this by Nikos Kazantzakis, who makes some good teleological points about oranges but doesn't give any real indication of what he's doing in the monastery.

Further shenanigans of decreasing probabilty follow when the lads try to leave, but I don't want to spoil the story for you. You should seek it out. It's a rather better introduction to Greek philosophy than it is to Greek geography or to how time and space relate to each other in the Mediterranean world.

Ireland Through A Glass, Darkly

I'm a huge fan of The West Wing, and have watched it so often that I tend to recognise lines from the show being echoed -- Jason O'Mahony, for instance, in the context of a sensible and concise discussion of the death penalty, seems to be channelling a very good point about drug barons that Leo McGarry -- as distinct from Patsy McGarry -- makes in the third episode of the show:

'Oh, then you are just as stupid as these guys who think capital punishment is going to be a deterrent for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day to day lives under the possibility of execution, and their executions are a lot less dainty than ours and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process.'

In writing about Cloyne, David Norris, and sex abuse in general I've thought often of 'Two Cathedrals', the spectacular finale to the show's second season, which is structured around the funeral of President Bartlet's executive secretary and very old friend Delores Landingham. In a series of flashbacks, Bartlet remembers her trying to persuade him of the injustice of women in the school he attended -- and where his father was principal -- being paid less than the men.

'Numbers, Mrs Landingham,' he says, 'If you want to convince me of something, show me numbers.'

In the aftermath of her funeral, wrestling with the storms that surround him, he imagines her with him -- or he's haunted by her ghost, but let's run with the former -- as he wonders what to do.

'God doesn't make cars crash and you know it,' Mrs Landingham says. 'Stop using me as an excuse.'
'The Party's not going to want me to run,' insists Bartlet.
'The Party'll come back. You'll get them back.'
'I've got a secret for you, Mrs. Landingham, I've never been the most popular man in the Democratic Party.'
'I've got a secret for you, Mr. President. Your father was a prick who could never get over the fact that he wasn't as smart as his brothers. Are you in a tough spot? Yes. Do I feel sorry for you? I do not. Because there are people way worse off than you.'
'Give me numbers,' he says.
'I don't know numbers. You give them to me.'
'How about a child born this minute has one in five chances of being born into poverty?'
'How many Americans don't have health insurance?'
'44 million.'
'What's the number one cause of death for black men under 35?'
'Homicide.'
'How many Americans are behind bars?'
'Three million.'
'How many Americans are drug addicts?'
'Five million.'
'And one in five kids in poverty?'
'That's thirteen million American children. 3.5 million kids go to schools that are literally falling apart. We need 127 billion in school construction, and we need it today!'
'To say nothing of 53 people trapped in an embassy,' adds Mrs Landingham.
'Yes.'
'You know, if you don't want to run again, I respect that,' says Mrs Landingham, getting to her feet, 'But if you don't run 'cause you think it's gonna be too hard or you think you're gonna lose - well, God, Jed, I don't even want to know you.'

So what's this got to do with sex abuse in Ireland?

As a country, and despite all the newspaper headlines, we simply haven't got to grips with the reality of child sex abuse. We've got some understanding of how damaging it is, because we've heard the heartbreaking stories of deeply brave people like Marie Collins and Andrew Madden, but we have no concept, collectively, of how prevalent it is, of how many people have experienced it, of how many people have committed it, of how many people know about it, of how rarely its perpetrators have faced justice, or of who the perpetrators actually are.

When it comes to child abuse in Ireland, most people haven't a clue. The problem, when we get down to it, isn't primarily within the Irish Church; it's within the Irish people. Truth be told, until very recently I don't think distinctions between the two are meaningful: given the huge numbers of twentieth-century Irish families with priests, brothers, or nuns in their ranks, I don't think we can speak of the twentieth-century Irish Church as though it was somehow discrete from the twentieth-century Irish Nation. I don't think we should discuss the abuse of thousands of children by Irish priests as though it's somehow a different phenomenon from the abuse of hundreds of thousands of children by other Irish people, and I don't think we can discuss the Irish Church's historical lack of will in taking action against child abuse as though it's somehow different from the Irish Nation's historical lack of will in taking action against child abuse.

And yes, I'm fully aware that not everybody in independent Ireland was Catholic, but insofar as the overwhelming majority were, I think we have to face the fact that the Church wasn't separate from society so much as it was a facet of Irish society, and one that reflected wider society, with all its vices and virtues. I've wondered about this kind of stuff many a time in the past, and friends have responded with disbelief, saying that while they realised that most Irish sexual abuse happened within the home, it was surely obvious that priests abused far more than other people. And then I raise the figures from the 2002 SAVI Study, and they look very doubtful.

The good, the bad and the ugly: Media coverage of scandals in the Catholic Church in Ireland.

There's a very pertinent article by one Michael Breen in the Winter 2000 issue of the Irish Jesuits' journal Studies. Breen was then a priest and head of the Department of Communications and Media Studies at Limerick's Mary Immaculate College, where he is now Dean of Arts. In this article he argues that:

'As well as setting the agenda for public issues, the news media can also set the agenda for themselves by their repetitious coverage of a single event and their definitions of newsworthiness. People, including journalists, cannot pay attention to everything; they are selective. They take shortcuts by relying on the most accessible information sources. Frequent repetition of a given story at a national level focuses journalistic attention on that issue. The framing of a news story, therefore, is of critical importance in terms of the ultimate impact of a story.'

Breen recognises that the Church should be grateful to the media for it having exposed the horror of child abuse within the Church, thereby forcing the Church to deal with the issue. However, he also notes the anger of those who feel that the media in Ireland had created a narrative which convey the impression that the primary perpetrators of child sex abuse in Ireland are Catholic clergy. For example, with reference to the Irish Times, which certainly would not be the worst offender in this regard, Breen claims that between August 1993 and August 2000 -- at which point, presumably, he wrote the article -- the term 'paedophile priest' was used 332 times. In contrast, he says, the term 'paedophile farmer' was used just five times, and such terms as 'paedophile parent', 'paedophile teacher', and 'paedophile journalist' weren't used at all.

Central to Breen's argument is the idea that the general media failure to alert people to the fact that the vast majority of child sex abuse occurs within the home does child protection a grave disservice, and that this is exacerbated by 'a media concentration on clerical abusers to the virtual exclusion of most others'.

How bad was the situation ten years ago?

I first came across Breen's article when reading the 2002 SAVI Study, which alludes to the article once or twice. The Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland Study, which I've mentioned a few times in recent weeks, was a huge survey, conducted in 2001 by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. More than 3,000 people were interviewed in depth about a range of related issues such as whether they'd ever been a victim of sexual abuse or violence, the nature of that abuse or violence, the relationship they'd had with those who had abused or assaulted them, whether or not they'd ever disclosed their experiences before, and whether their experiences had been dealt with through the courts. The survey had a high response rate, and should be regarded as authoritative; to put it into context, in contrast to the more than 3,000 people interviewed for the SAVI Study, a typical political poll in Ireland is based on a sample of 1,000 people.

The Study, of course, dealt with both the abuse of children and of adults, but given that we're talking about child sex abuse now, the key findings are -- more or less -- as follows:

• Roughly 27 per cent Irish adults in 2001 had been the victims of child sexual abuse. Given that the adult population in the following year's census was 2,904,172, this means that there must have been something of the order of 780,000 adults survivors of child sexual abuse walking around Ireland.
• Just under 65 per cent of child abuse victims had been abused whilst under the age of twelve.
• Over 48 per cent of abuse survivors had never disclosed their experiences to anyone before being surveyed.
• Just under 52 per cent of abuse survivors surveyed had previously told family, friends, or others of their experiences.
• Only about 5 per cent of abuse cases had at that point been reported to the Gardaí.
• Just 16 per cent of 38 abuse cases reported to Gardaí had gone to court; of these six cases, only four had resulted in a verdict of guilt.
• In other words, little more than 10 per cent of reported abuse cases had by 2001 led to a criminal conviction.
• More broadly, only about 0.5 per cent of abuse cases had at that point led to a criminal conviction.

I said 'more or less' there because it's sometimes difficult to make the figures add up. I'm not sure why, but it seems that not everybody surveyed answered every question. Still, let's stay with that figure of 780,000 adult abuse survivors. I think we'd have to agree that that's abominable: it means that more than one in four Irish adults suffered sexual abuse when in their childhood or adolescence.

Now, one question we need to consider, if we want seriously to engage with Breen's argument that the media's excessive emphasis on clerical abuse is both misleading and dangerous, is the issue of how many victims of sexual abuse in Ireland were victims of people who they knew as priests.

Tables 4.10 and 4.11 of the Report give us the most important data in this regard, though, as I've said, the overall numbers don't quite add up, in that these tables seem to refer to just 722 people, whereas it seems that 844 people who responded to the survey said that they'd experienced child sexual abuse. So, combining the data from the two tables into one table, here are the facts as they stood in 2001, when the Study was conducted.

It seems, then, that in 2001, out of a sample of 722 self-identifying abuse survivors, 12 said that they'd been sexually abused in childhood by people they knew to be priests. Of course, it's possible that some of the 'strangers' were priests too, but given that it seems that clerical abusers abused their positions in society in order to gain access to children who they harmed, it seems unlikely that they'd have hidden the fact of their priesthood. That would have been their best way of ensuring their crimes were kept secret.

So, 12 out 722 seems to be the real figure for clerical abuse in Ireland, that being just under 1.7 per cent, and from a time when there were no specific child protection measures anywhere in Ireland, when there were far more priests than there are now, and when priests had a social status and an access to children that they haven't had in a very long time.

Are things really different now?

I think they are. Unfortunately, the State hasn't done a second SAVI study, but given how the findings of the first one seem to have had no impact on the national consciousness or official policy -- Vincent Browne, in a May 2010 Irish Times article, referred to it as 'the seminal but largely ignored report, Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland' -- I'm not wholly convinced that there'd be any point in doing more work in this precise area.

(Browne, it should be pointed out, has probably pointed to the Study more often than any other figure in Irish public life, and it was presumably in connection with this that he claimed in April 2008 that there are 'literally hundreds of thousands of paedophiles at loose' in Ireland. I don't think anybody was listening.)

Having said that, it rather looks as though it's not merely that 'most child sexual abuse happens in the home' so much as that 'almost all child sexual abuse happens in the home.' Maeve Lewis, on taking the helm at One in Four back in 2008, said that her organisation would be attempting to tackle sexual abuse in familes, saying that 'the most dangerous place for children is in the extended family,' but I'm not sure what they're doing about it. The Irish Times ran an article in February 2009 in which one Mick Moran, a Garda Detective Sergeant working with Interpol in fighting internet paedophiles, said that 85 per cent of child sexual abuse takes place in the family home or in the family circle. Perhaps even more horrifyingly, in November 2009 the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland revealed that 97 per cent of those who had been sexually abused as children and who had sought the help of Irish rape crisis centres in 2008 had been abused either by a family member or a friend of the family. What's more, a 2003 conference of the Irish Association of Care Workers was told that a third of all sexual abuse in Ireland was committed by adolescents, and indeed, there seems to be a fair amount of scholarly literature out there on the phenomenon of sexual abuse by adolescents.

This doesn't seem to be the impression the media gives...

I think most reasonable people will readily concede that most abuse happens within the home, and that the reporting of clerical child sex abuse is somewhat disproportionate, but will think that it's not wildly so. The thing is, I don't think the numbers bear this out.

For starters, how many people in Ireland have even heard of the SAVI Study? There was an excellent comment the other day which asked what the reaction to the SAVI Report had been, considering the reaction to the Cloyne Report, and this got me thinking, because I couldn't remember any reaction at all. I'm not even sure when I first heard of it, but  I think it was in passing about two or three years ago.

So, I went to the Irish Times website, and started trawling through its archives as best can be done without access to them, using its 'search' function to see how many articles and letters since April 2002 had mentioned the SAVI Study. I searched for 'SAVI' and for 'Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland', and looked at each partial result as best I could, and in the end came to the conclusion that between April 2002 and the other evening, the SAVI Study had been mentioned in total 63 times over the last nine years, often in connection with the rape of adults rather than the abuse of children. The most recent piece mentioning it was a letter on 13 June. To put this into context, I'd challenge you to find out how many articles or letters have featured the word 'Cloyne' in the last month alone. At least according to the Irish Times' own search facility, it comes to 163 pieces.

That's 163 articles or letters in just one month in connection with a report which told us that two people who had been in positions of authority didn't follow their own guidelines, as compared to scarcely more than 60 references over more than nine years to an report that told us that more than 750,000 Irish adults were sexually abused as children. Is it any wonder that people don't know about the SAVI Study?

And I very much doubt that the Irish Times is the worst offender in this regard; it certainly won't have been the most sensationalist, but given how good a paper it is in other respects, I think it should be better than this. The media may not decisively influence what we think, admittedly, but it surely has a huge influence on what we think about.

Breen's Figures, Updated: Or, how do the numbers stack up now?

The SAVI figures showed that for every victim of clerical child sex abuse, there were sixty victims of child sex abuse by people other than priests. The hints at modern figures I've been able to glimpse in statements from the likes of the RCNI and Mick Moran suggest that nowadays the gap is even more stark.

This makes sense:  we're very careful about strangers and people outside our own families and close friends, and we're especially so around  Catholic priests; indeed most priests are themselves scrupulously careful around children; however inadequate or however imperfectly followed they may be, churches, schools, health authorities, sports clubs, scouting organisations and so forth all tend to have child-protection policies, and indeed to have designated people to look out for children's safety.

Unfortunately, these realities don't seem to be reflected in the media. Again, wholly relying on the Irish Times' search facility, and without access to its full archive and without time to do the serious work even if I had access, what can we say about how the Irish Times has reported on child abuse since Michael Breen commented on how things stood up to August 2000? Well, bearing in mind that this isn't as systematic an analysis as I would like to do, and hoping that a proper media student will do the real legwork at some point...

• The word 'paedophile' seems to have appeared in 1,320 articles or letters since September 2000. In 295 of those pieces, the term 'paedophile priest' was used; putting it another way, despite the fact that just 1.7 per cent of survivors of child sex abuse in Ireland were abused by priests, 22.3 per cent of all  Irish Times pieces mentioning paedophiles use the term 'paedophile priests'.
• Compared to the 295 uses of the term 'paedophile priest', the term 'paedophile teacher' has been used three times in the Irish Times since September 2000, while the term 'paedophile journalist' has not been used once.
• The phrase 'sex abuse' has been used in 2,295 pieces, but in 1,056 of these pieces, it appears as part of either the phrase 'clerical sex abuse' or 'clerical child sex abuse', such that 46 per cent of all Irish Times articles on sex abuse appear to explicitly link it with the clergy.
• A search for 'child sex abuse' brings up 1,190 results, but of these pieces, 579 use the phrase 'clerical child sex abuse', such that 48.7 per cent of all Irish Times articles on child sex abuse appear to explicitly link it with clergy.
• Of the last hundred articles to use the phrase 'child sex abuse', in 61 cases the phrase 'child sex abuse' was preceded by the word 'clerical', and a further 28 cases used the phrase in connection with the Catholic clergy, such that 89 per cent of the Irish Times' most recent articles or letters mentioning child sex abuse did so in relation to the Catholic Church.

Again, I'm not claiming that these are formal figures; they're ballpark ones, based on simple searches of the Irish Times' own electronic archive. You can and should check them yourselves. A real researcher could do important and substantial work on this. Still, even as a crude survey, I think they give a pretty strong indication that Ireland's newspaper of record has played no small part in fostering a popular belief that the institutional Church is a singularly malign force in Irish life.

By doing so, it bears an enormous responsibility for having distracted the Irish people away from the horrific reality that the overwhelming majority of child sex abuse happens with the family circle, being committed by family members, neighbours, and friends. In this it's not alone, and I believe the Irish media in general is effectively endangering Irish children even now, facilitating their abuse by diverting attention from the fact that it's happening. The prevailing narrative that the Irish media has pushed for years, concentrating on elderly clerical abusers and largely ignoring the far greater dangers in the Irish home, diverts attention from the fact that huge numbers of Irish children are being sexually abused across the land every day, and they are not being abused by priests.

So what's going on?

In an Irish Times article in June 2006, Breda O'Brien quoted Hannah McGee, Chair of the Department of Psychology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and one of the original authors of the SAVI study, as saying that 'We like our scapegoats, we like our simple stories.' 

The problem, basically, is that it would be easier for us all if we could single out clearly-identifiable groups in our society as being  responsible for most sexual abuse. Unfortunately, the horrendous reality is that we can't. That's like cursing one tree when we're standing in a forest. Child sexual abuse has been -- and may still be -- endemic in Irish life, such that, as the article says 'it is so pervasive as to be almost beyond comprehension'.

We have to figure out a way of dealing with this. Scapegoating priests and pointing fingers at other people isn't the answer. I'm not sure what is, but it's certainly not that.

Stewart Lee, or When Comedy's Medium is its Message

I've been a fan of Stewart Lee's for a long time, ever since one of my closest friends introduced me to Pea Green Boat, that hilariously and horrifyingly mesmering blurring of the boundaries between comedy and nightmare. I haven't liked every thing I've seen or heard Lee do -- one routine in particular left me very uncomfortable, though I could see why he did it -- but on balance I find him the most relentlessly intelligent comedian I've ever experienced. And I say that having been to see him twice, and with five DVDs, two CDs, and a book of his work sitting on my shelves. I loved his latest TV series, which I think was even better than the previous one, and was fascinated to watch routines mutate from a full version in one live show into a much shorter version in another live show, into a briefer and highly modified version when performed in Ireland, and then be released, tuned to perfection, on television.

One of the most impressive things about his work is how he draws attention to the craft of comedy -- indeed, he does so to such a degree that a lot of his work is comedy about comedy, what I might, if I were feeling pretentious, call 'metacomedy'. But I'm not, so I won't.

It was odd to see him in the news in recent weeks, with a line from one of his shows being put -- wholly devoid of context -- to an obviously embarrassed Michael McIntyre. Of course, as every good Evangelical will tell you, a text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text, and it's utterly meaningless to rip one phrase out of a whole show, especially a show as tightly-written as Lee's tend to be. I was glad to see his response, forwarded to me by a friend a few days back. As one would expect, it's a scornful dismantling of the British media and its tendency to conjure up stories from little more than whimsy and bile.

Lee's fascination with the craft of comedy is at the heart of his superb 2010 book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, and it leads him to see others through the prism of the performance of comedy. For instance, starting on page 156 of the book, he says...

'I suspect, reluctantly, that the actual business of being a priest isn't that different in some ways to the business of being a comedian. My wife took me to her church in Gloucester. I always listen to the way the sermons are pitched with interest. It was a mixed audience -- old Irish fellers, lots of displaced Filipinos, Poles, general Catholic diaspora, many without English as a first language. Tough crowd. And the Father's out of the pulpit, down in the aisle, shouting, jumping around, working the room. The priest that did our marriage course in Stoke Newington faced a similar problem of playing to an incredibly varied demographic. His approach was to speak softly and calmly about some incident or personal story that seemed a million miles away from religion, then, having drawn the punters in, to clobber them with a theological right hook. Most priests are rubbish performers, though, and one wonders how an organisation as wealthy as the Catholic Church, for example, can't spare some money to school the poor sods in a few basics of stagecraft. That said, the good ones are an inspiration, and let's not forget a lot of them are turning over a new twenty minutes each week, which makes even the stalwarts of the Comedy Store's Cutting Edge Team look lazy.'

It's a book I really can't recommend enough, not least because its structure and mannerisms are impressively akin to his shows. We know that the 'Stewart Lee' of the performances is to some extent a construct, a distilled version of aspects of Lee's own character, but what of the 'Stewart Lee' who introduces and comments on the scripts of the three shows discussed in the book. We see the irony and the mechanisms, the repeated jokes and the call-backs that are at the heart of his work. How much of this are we meant to take seriously?

But then, I like the idea of a book about comedy being itself -- in effect -- a comedic performance, especially given that Lee's comedically dissecting his own comedic dissections of comedy and other comedians. It's probably not surprising that I'd like this, given my love for comics about comics, or of Vermeer's painting about painting. I like it when media discuss themselves; it just shows what they can do. I like it when the medium and the message admit that they're one and the same.

Lee's not for everyone by any means, but his latest TV series was a perfect example of comedy can be about comedy, and how it's perfectly possible to be extremely funny and deadly serious at the same time. I'll look forward to getting the DVD before the year is out.

'Rules get a bad rap, but the rules are what define the Muppets'

I am, as far too many friends of mine are painfully aware, a huge fan of the Muppets. I've blogged about them here a couple of times, whether listing and linking to some of their finest ever sketches, or else linking to a screenshot of Cyndi  Crawford dressed as a Frogeteer and singing alongside a Muppet shamelessly based on that old fraud L. Ron Hubbard.

There's a fascinating article by Elizabeth Stephens over at The Awl, entitled 'Weekend at Kermie's: The Muppets' Strange Life After Death'. I don't by any means agree with everything she says but she certainly raises some good points, starting from her springboard that is the new Muppets film, which she certainly admits is an exciting prospect. To be fair, how could it be otherwise, combining as it does the Muppets, Jason Segel, and the ever-watchable Amy Adams?

Stephens thinks the film, no matter how good it is, has some massive hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is that the Muppets aren't who they once were, or, at any rate, they don't sound or move like they once did. I started to wonder this recently, when someone queried my Kermit the Frog impression and seriously tried to argue that Kermit sounds more like Bert than Ernie. 

'No, he doesn't,' I insisted. 'Kermit and Ernie were both voiced by the same person, both by Jim Henson; Bert was voiced by Frank Oz, he of Miss Piggy and Yoda fame. Kermit basically is Jim Henson's voice; Ernie is Jim just making his voice sound rounder.'

The problem, of course, is that I was almost as wrong as I was right. Jim Henson, to our enduring loss, died twenty-one years ago. He didn't voice Kermit in Muppet Christmas Carol, or Muppet Treasure Island, or Muppets from Space, and if Kermit ever appeared in Muppets Tonight -- I can't remember -- Jim didn't voice him there either. Steve Whitmire, who's also the voice of Ernie nowadays, did duty back then, so I suspect my friend heard my Henson-esque take on Kermit and felt it just didn't rhyme with Whitmire's Kermit, which he surely knows better.Stephens' feeling is that it's just not the same:

'From 1955 to 1990, Kermit the Frog was voiced and performed by Jim Henson. After that, Steve Whitmire, known for his smart-mouthed Rizzo the Rat, took over. Whitmire’s Kermit sounded a lot like Henson's, but his voice was a little thinner, and his singing more rhythmic and less melodic.

Let me preface my next statement by saying that I know it will seem ridiculous to the casual reader, inflammatory to a good many fans, and downright specious to the expert of rhetoric, but for me watching Steve Whitmire’s Kermit is akin to watching someone imitate a mythic and longed-for mother—my mother—wearing a my-mother costume in a my-mother dance routine. This person’s heart is in the right place, which only makes it worse. “You should be happy,” the person pleads with me, “Look, Biddy! Your mother is not gone! She is still here.” Now, no one would ever do that. No one in her right mind would think it would work. A child knows his mother’s voice like he knows whether it's water or air he's breathing. One chokes you and one gives you life. Strangely, I feel the same about Kermit. Whitmire is an amazing performer—especially as the lovable dog Sprocket on “Fraggle Rock”—but, when he's on screen as Kermit, I can feel my body reject it on a cellular level.'

Crazy? Maybe, but she has a point. Indeed, she has a lot of points, and most of them are good. Her overall thesis, though, is one I'm not sure of. She's basically saying that the Muppets were the work above all of one man, that they were of their time, and that they should be allowed die rather than becoming an anonymous product, like any other Disney property.

Well, maybe. If that were happening -- and there's an element of it -- I'd agree. Certainly I felt watching Muppets Tonight that while it was often very funny, it lacked the poignancy -- the heart, even -- of The Muppet Show. Rizzo the Rat, Seymour and Pepe, Johnny Fiama, all those guys -- they're funny, but they're not flawed. Henson once described his job as being akin to Kermit's, saying 'Kermit finds himself trying to hold together all these crazy people, and there’s something not unlike what I do.' That was really at the heart of the old show -- that Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo and others were all, basically, frail and damaged individuals, desperate for people to care about them. The show was hilarious, but somewhere in that levity was a sense of tragedy too, a sense that there are cracks in all of us.

Still, it was in the post-Henson era that I rediscovered my love for the show, and did so through a post-Henson show. I was babysitting my nephews once upon a time, and agreed to watch with them their video of Muppet Fairy Tales. Made in 1994, four years after Jim Henson's death, the Muppets' take on 'The Elves and the Shoemaker' is priceless. Kermit plays the shoemaker, with Robin as his grandson, and the elves all look and sound like Elvis, and make them loads of blue suede shoes; at the end, the shoemaker and his grandson provide them with new clothes, like in the story, save these clothes are white satin jumpsuits, and the lads don their new clobber and head off the Vegas. That was clever enough to intrigue me, but what really stuck in my head, and which I'll often quote to an admixture of horror and delight, was Miss Piggy's stunning performance as the clever pig with the house of bricks in 'The Three Little Pigs.' Watch it. Seriously.

And Muppet Christmas Carol is very very good, and Muppets from Space seemed to be exactly what the old show and films were about. It may have been a bit of a false dawn, but I think it showed that all wasn't lost.

And then, of course, there was that whole business with Sesame Street's Big Bird sitting side by side with television's most attractive woman on The West Wing.

Quite possibly the greatest moment in the history of television.

That was in 2004. There's life in the old frog yet. Roll on November. Like Jason Segel, I can't wait.

Joycean Turtles

Improbable though it may seem, oodles of episodes of the late 1980s and early 1990s cartoon Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles were made it Dublin, at Murakami Wolf which eventually became Fred Wolf Films; back then Dublin was a bit of a hotbed of animation talent, what with Sullivan Bluth making An American Tale and The Land Before Time there, and a brilliant animation school being set up at Ballyfermot Senior College.

Yes, I know, it's really Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, for so the original comic was called and so the cartoon was distributed in America. Still, my little brother watched it in Ireland, and for him it was called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles -- this was basically due to Ireland being lumped in with the UK for distribution purposes, and the Brits having an issue with ninjas. Back then, ninjas were seen as nasty. Now they're cool, from what I hear.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised the other day to learn that there was an episode of the series where the Turtles went to Dublin; I've managed to track it down, and found watching it an odd, and not unpleasant experience.

'The Irish Jig is Up', for so episode seven of series seven of the cartoon is entitled begins with a nice shot of Dublin, looking along the Liffey from the east, with the Four Courts easily recognisable, and what I think is a stylised version of the Liffey Bridge -- that's the Ha'Penny Bridge to most of us -- in the foreground. It's a nicely stylised take on the Quays too, for what it's worth, even if they can look more cartoonish in reality.

Anyway, the camera pans across the Liffey to where we can see the lads' van making its way along the south Quays, driving on the right, but, to be fair, given the eerie absence of any other vehicles on the Quays, they can probably get away with it. It's never made clear why things are so quiet -- I can only presume the Queen was visiting or something. Still, unperturbed by the Mary Celeste atmosphere afflicting Dublin, the lads decide they should pull over and walk around, so they take a corner at speed, hurtling past what appears to be an inexplicably-misplaced O'Connell Monument. 

In a convenient backstreet, the boys change into unobtrusive clothes so nobody will recognise them, clearly reckoning that Hawaiian shirts, shorts, sunglasses, and big hats are just the thing to help them blend in in sunny Dublin. April, sensibly, sticks with her yellow jumpsuit, and Splinter puts on a dirty mac and a false beard, presumably thinking that if he dresses as a random alco, nobody will notice that he's a rat. Frankly, I don't know why he's worried. It's not as if town is kicking. Off they stroll towards Stephen's Green, where just below a remarkably well-rendered Fusiliers' Arch Splinter says he'll tell them about Dublin's history.

It's good, isn't it? They even have Dublin's name right, as 'Eblana'. I've known people to fall at that hurdle in table quizzes back in the day. Anyway, they have a wander in the Green, strolling past a few stylised statues until they get to St Patrick, of whom there's no statue in the Green. No, really, there's not. I'm not sure if there's a public statue of him anywhere in Dublin, actually.

If there were, though, it'd probably not look like this.

Yes, that's Patrick, the Romano-Briton who spent years in slavery here, before escaping to Britain and training as a priest and then returning as a missionary to the Irish, here depicted on horseback, wielding two swords. Who needs a shamrock or a crozier when you can brandish two swords when astride a rearing stallion?

'Ireland,' explains Splinter, 'is a land of magical legends. One of the most famous is that of Saint Patrick. It is said he drove all the snakes and reptiles out of Ireland.'

'Bummer,' says Michelangelo, 'maybe I shoulda gotten us mammal disguises.'

'This is all very interesting, guys,' says April, who presumably has read her guidebook and doesn't believe a word Splinter says, not least because she may have noticed the bit about there being lizards in Ireland even now, 'but I'm supposed to do a report on the famous leprechauns of Ireland.'

'April, leprechauns are just mythical creatures,' retorts Donatello, scornfully adding, 'I can assure you that there are no such things as little green men.'

And with that the lads start throwing their hats around, clearly thinking that the complete absence of people in Stephen's Green gives them a golden opportunity to ditch their disguises and play frisbee, before heading off to their lodgings in the improbably well-preserved McGillicuddy's Castle, which looks rather more like Bodiam Castle in East Sussex than any castle in Ireland, and which is mysteriously dated by the gang to the sixteenth century*

I probably should have mentioned that this episode has a plot, shouldn't I? Basically, Shredder, or Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, has come up with a couple of gizmos, one of which enables him to lift up castles (yes, I know), and another of which can turn vicious animals into cuddly dwarfs and cuddly ones into savage monsters. Seemingly, Ireland has lots of cuddly animals, especially in Dublin Zoo, and so Shredder reckons that he can turn all the inhabitants of the Zoo's petting zoo into an army of monsters that will destroy Dublin. No, really.

I reckon from this shot that Shredder's up near the Magazine Fort operating his device -- it's certainly somewhere high, to judge by the topography, which gives us a view over Dublin and with the mountains in the background. He'd almost certainly need to be in the Phoenix Park to zap the Zoo with his machine, so I think the guys who did this should get marks for effort. Perhaps, given that they may well have been Irish they should have done better, but still. And no, I have no idea why Dublin has so many tall buildings in that shot, but, well, maybe the artists were feeling optimistic about the then embryonic Celtic Tiger.

Anyway, you can see the ray hitting the Zoo, and though this may seem unlikely, that's not a completely inaccurate stylisation of the old entrance to the Zoo. Sure, it's not thatched, and it is has a funny roof, and it says 'Dublin Zoo' rather than 'Zoological Gardens', but, well, it has a wide entrance in the middle and two small windows on each side of it.

The Zoo's interestingly rendered in the show. It has, at the very least, a rabbit, a chicken, a bull, and a lion -- which is a nice touch, as Dublin Zoo is famous for breeding lions, which it's done since 1857, with one of the MGM lions having been a Dublin lion. Perhaps most impressively, though, there's also a handful of people at the Zoo, which is a relief, as by this point, almost twelve minutes into the show, I was kind of expecting Cillian Murphy to show up in a nightgown.

Anyway, I won't spoil it for you. You should watch it for yourselves. Gripping stuff, I tell you. There is, however, one detail I want to draw your attention to, with the day that's in it. Remember how I'd told you about the lads putting on their incognito outfits just after they'd arrived? Well, it's worth looking just beyond Raphael.

Do you see the van? Do you see what's written on it? I'm not sure of the top word on the sign, but the other two, quite clearly, are 'James' and 'Joyce'.

Because it's Bloomsday.


* Note for potential tourists: McGillicuddy's Castle is made up. There are castles in Dublin, but they don't look like that. And if they did, they'd probably not be places you could just drive into in your van, there to kip in overnight while wondering at how the moat and drawbridge are so well-maintained in a place so otherwise neglected.

Polybius and the X-Factor

Unlike sixteen-and-a-half million other people in the UK, I missed the X-Factor on Sunday, and thus didn't see Jamie Archer being decreed the weakest link, as it were. Still, I was intrigued to hear that yet again the judges had failed to save anyone, and had left it to the people to decide. It's curious that unlike last week there's been no outcry about leaving this decision to the public.

There seems some confusion in X-Factor over where power lies, as was demonstrated in the recent squabble between Louis Walsh and Dermot O'Leary over who the programme's judges are; are they the formal judges, as Louis cried, or are they the voting viewers, as Dermot countered?

Leaving aside what the X-Factor is for -- making money for ITV and for SYCOtv, and, to a lesser extent, giving youngsters a shot at some sort of fame, I can't help but think that the game is more than a little fuzzy, with the rules being unclear and the participants' roles being muddled.

I think some Classical shtuff might help here.


An Ancient Greek Political Primer
Polybius, the second century BC Greek historian of Rome's rise to Mediterranean supremacy, attributes Rome's ultimate victory over Hannibal's Carthage in the Second Punic War to the strength of Rome's political and military systems. The genius of the Roman constitution, he believed, was that it was a mixed constitution, containing elements of the three main constitutional types, all of which, in their pure forms, were liable to become corrupted. As he saw it, Rome was somewhat democratic in that ultimate power in Rome lay with the people, whose popular assemblies made laws and elected magistrates. However, the legislative agenda was effectively shaped by the the state's aristocratic element, the Senate, an assembly of former magistrates whose role was theoretically advisory and who were responsible for Rome's foreign policy. The two most important magistrates were the Consuls, elected on an annual basis and, like monarchs, commanding the armies in the field. The Roman state, as he saw it, was a healthy mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and thus was unlikely to deteriorate into tyranny, oligarchy, or mob rule.

I know, I've oversimplified, and ultimately it all went wrong anyway, but that's the gist of his thesis. Now what's this got to do with the X-Factor?



Lloyd Webber and the Mixed Constitution
Well, take a look at the set of West End Selection shows: How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria?, Any Dream Will Do, and I'd Do Anything*. They all follow a similar format, which Polybius would regard as being almost perfectly balanced, and the framers of the American Constitution would probably agree.

Once the shortlist of finalists is drawn up by the expert panel, the final decisive stage in the process begins. Every week the finalists perform, and the expert panel express their opinions on them. Following their advice, the public cast their votes. When the public votes are in, the two least popular finalists have to perform again, and this time it's for Andrew Lloyd Webber to decide which one he has to save.

You can surely see how this rhymes with the Roman constitution, can't you? The aristocrats give their advice, the people pass judgement, and then the monarch has an opportunity to pardon one of the condemned. In the grand final, of course, the monarch has no such power, and it becomes a simple process of the experts advising and the people choosing.


Cowell and the Mixed-Up Constitution
X-Factor doesn't come close to this. The 'judges' - the experts in the X-Factor - have a stake in individual contestants, for starters, so their advice is hardly neutral: they don't necessarily have a stake in the best candidate winning; they have a stake in their candidate winning. Not merely does this generate the possibility of bias in their advice, it also generates bias in how they vote when each week's popular stragglers are revealed. What's more, there being an even number of judges means that the judges' decision is often a tie, making the popular choice final, and it's very easy for the final voting judge to choose to go for a popular decision if he or she thinks that will suit him or her than an expert decision. Don't forget too that one of the judges basically owns the show, and thus has interests and implicit powers that are very different from the others.

Leaving aside how the whole system lacks transparency through the voting figures beging kept secret from the voters and -- reportedly -- the judges,** you can surely see the problem here. Powers are anything but separate, and conflicts of interest are rife. Getting upset about it, as with the 3,000 people who complained because Simon Cowell allowed the public to decide on the whole Jedward issue the other week, is pointless. It's only a game, after all, and it's a game that's structurally unfair. Bias is built into it.

If it bothers you, don't watch it. You don't have to, after all. Three quarters of the British population skipped in on Sunday.
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* Which was brilliant, purely because it had Barry Humphries in it.
** Though given that Simon Cowell basically owns the show, you might be forgiven for wondering...