This & That: Take 23

By AM Thursday, September 5, 2013

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Finite Resource

Ariel Castro, the Clevland man who kidnapped three women and held them captive for 10 years, has taken his own life in prison a month after being sentenced to life without prospect of release.

Despite the confinement he was prepared to subject others to it was a condition he was not prepared to endure for long. The hands of gaolers are never nice clutches to fall into. When the game-hunter became the game, the game was effectively up and Castro didn’t want to play anymore.

Although he exercised one of the few freedoms left to him as a human being, asserting personal autonomy over his body and determining - deleting might be a more appropriate choice of word - his future, few will have sympathy for either his self induced plight or the outcome that emerged from it. His crimes were simply too great. Besides, the well of human compassion is a finite resource.


Protecting Leadership from Leaders

A month or two back I came across a report of a protest movement in Brazil. It is the Sao Paulo's Free Fare Movement and the objective of its activism was to secure free public transport for all citizens. Although initially started by 400 left wing activists 8 years ago, as a result of police violence the movement spread like wildfire throughout Brazil this summer to incorporate multitudes of Brazilians angry at government corruption and police brutality. 

Douglas Belome, one of the activists said, ‘it was a surprise. We've been working for eight years on this. This year, we expected big mobilizations, but not 100,000 people in the street.’

It is hardly comforting to know that the PSNI is not alone in terms of violent policing.

Images of journalists shot in the face with rubber bullets at point-blank range and bystanders being harassed by roving bands of military police were splashed across both social media and the traditional press.

Much of the protesting was organised over the internet, that bane of both the censorious mind and its Rottweiler thought police.

The group described itself as being a horizontal organisation with no set in stone leadership. Any member of the group could speak to the press about anything they wanted to whenever they liked; something democratic centralism with its love of hierarchy and stratification could never abide by. Republicans who still believe in the potential for a republican revival might think it worth looking at. Vertical leadership monopolised by a caudillo and his cabal helped destroy the republican project to the point where it has become administratively absorbed into the British state.

Every organisation needs leadership, not to be confused with permanent leaders. The first task of those seeking to both build and give leadership is to acknowledge that leadership is so important a concept that it must be protected from leaders. That would seem to be the key activist organisational question of our day.


More Bollix from the Bishop

The Bishop of Meath Dr. Michael Smith has read the riot act to his priests and told them that they are to prohibit any poems or eulogies during funeral masses that are not specifically religious. Apparently the ‘integrity of the mass’ is under threat from grieving loved ones.

The bishop should give his head a shake and rid it of its pomposity. The late Denis Faul once said of French Catholics that they are of the hatch, match and despatch variety: baptised, married and buried. Beyond that they prefer to be left to their own devices. Neither churchy nor greatly interested in the finer points of theology, they are content to avail of the funerary ritual offered by the Church. Grieving relatives want to be allowed to bury loved ones in peace without some egocentric bishop sticking his oar in telling them how it should be done. The funeral service is not about his needs but theirs.

Bishops don’t like women or gays and now seek to vent their bile against mourners. Ban the dead from the Church and soon there will be no one in chapels at all.  After all death is the optimum state of being for listening to bishops.