G.K. Chesterton on Belfast

G.K. Chesterton by David Low.

[UPDATE - Read here and here for G.K. Chesterton on Unionism and Home Rule respectively]

The Protestant turned Catholic G.K. Chesterton wrote 'Irish Impressions', published in 1919 he shared his thoughts with great contemporary relevance on his time in Ireland. He devoted a chapter to the Ireland's leading industrial centre, 'Belfast and the Religious Question,' in which he wrote scathingly of the superiority of the northern Protestant creed. He began with thoughts on Ireland and poetry:

"Of that cloud of dream which seems to drift over so many Irish poems and impressions, I felt very little in Ireland. There is a real meaning in this suggestion of a mystic sleep; but it does not mean what most of us imagine, and is not to be found where we expect it.

The Calvinist Ulsterman is more of a Catholic Irishman than is commonly realised

Cartoon by Ian Knox

G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book 'Irish Inpressions':

"The Calvinist Ulsterman may be more of a Catholic Irishman than is commonly realised, especially by himself."

The "weirdness" and "freak show" of apartheid education in Northern Ireland

Cartoon by Ian Knox (@IanKnoxcartoon)

Ninety-three per cent of children in Northern Ireland attend segregated elementary schools. Causing what the New Yorker's Patrick Redden Keefe called, "sheer weirdness." Jude Whyte said:

"Politics has replaced the gun and the bomb yet in many ways I feel that we live in a more segregated society than ever. We live apart, educate our children apart... while sport (the source of such unity in the world) remains sectarian, poisoned and divisive."

The vanity and narcissism of the small difference in Ireland

Thomas Nast, ‘St. Patrick's Day, 1867--'The day we celebrate.'’ Harper's Weekly, April 6, 1867.

[UPDATE - Interesting and relevant comments from David Trimble and Daniel Hannan here and here.]

Tomorrow the world will celebrate Saint Patrick's day. Tomorrow the Irish in the troubled Northern region will continue to celebrate and cherish the minutiae that divides them. John Hewitt, Ulster protestant and Irishman, wrote:

‘St Patrick’s Eve,The country came to wake him, men and boysSmoking round the hearth’

AWIT - 'Articulating What I Thought'

'Portrait de poètes' (1942) by Serge Ivanoff: Yanette Delétang-Tardif, Maurice Alphonse Jacques Fombeure, Jean Follain, Rémi Masset, Eugène Guillevic

When I read Orwell, I am reading someone who has written what I'm thinking. I read:

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is war minus the shooting."

And thought, 'finally someone has expressed and articulated exactly what I felt about sport and the culture around it!' Seamus Heaney wrote:

"One perceptible function of poetry is to write a place into existence." 

That is the role of the writer and poet: to put reality and the everyday experience into words. Jean Follain, friend of Francis Ponge, who Ciaran Carson introduced me to, said:

"Le mot fait corps avec la chose." (The word makes body with the thing)

Roddy Doyle, deviating a little, said:

"Like a lot of writers, I knew I wanted to write but I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. When I wrote The Commitments, it clicked. I felt this was the world that was familiar and I could make it a bit unfamiliar and sparkling."

But the point remains. The role of the writer is to articulate what everyone thinks; doing it in a way that adds spice and energy. They make it everyday but with excitement. They make the mundane profoundly readable.

Except the funny thing was that while I recognised this phenomenon I didn't have the words or terms to express this phenomenon.

That represents a great irony. So I propose 'AWIT' - Articulating What I Thought.

The editorialisation and alteration of sincerely held religious beliefs

The pope by Ralph Steadman

We're told that the religious have sincerely held religious beliefs, unalterable convictions and an indivisible conscience. 

Grayson Perry - If loyalists want to remain loyal to Britain they’ve got to move on too

A banner by Grayson Perry, in the mould of an Orange Lodge standard, following a visit to British loyalists in Belfast 

The cross-dressing potter and artist Grayson Perry said during a 2014 trip to Northern Ireland:

"[Loyalism is] rooted in a vision of Britain that perhaps doesn’t completely gel with the modern 21st century idea of Britain we have nowadays."

And continued:

"If they want to remain loyal to it they’ve got to move on too and it’s all about embracing what Britain stands for today as much as what Britain stood for in the 1950s."

My previous posts on loyalism can be read here. Previous Tumblr notes on loyalism here. 

Andrew Sullivan and the conscience clause

My illustrated tribute to Andrew Sullivan I drew for the Huffington Post.

Paul Givan, theo-unionism and the ecumenical religious right regard gay people as the greatest threat to religion.

Our Patron Saint: Patrick

By Isaac Cruikshank, 'Saint Patrick's Day in the Morning'.

Glenn Bradley is a writer and a member of the Board of Interaction. He wrote on EamonnMalle.com about Saint Patrick, explaining that Ireland's Patron Saint is a figure for unity, not division. Saint Patrick is for everyone, "Catholic, Protestant, Dissenter, Republican, Unionist, Nationalist, White, Black, Asian - it doesn’t matter." Here's Glenn's essay republished in full:

James Joyce on Home Rule

James Joyce by Ronald Searle

In an earlier post I looked at a 25 year old Joyce who wrote about 'The Last Fenian' John O'Leary. In the same year, 1907, he wrote, ‘Home Rule Comes of Age’. "From a hasty study of the history of Home Rule," Joyce made two deductions, one:

"The first is this: the most powerful weapons that England can use against Ireland are no longer those of Conservatism, but those of Liberalism and Vaticanism. Conservatism, though it may be tyrannical, is a frankly and openly inimical doctrine. Its position is logical; it does not want a rival island to arise near Great Britain, or Irish factories to create competition for those in England, or tobacco and wine again to be exported from Ireland, or the great ports along the Irish coast to become enemy naval bases under a native government or a foreign protectorate. Its position is logical, as is that of the Irish separatists which contradicts it point by point. It takes little intelligence to understand that Gladstone has done Ireland greater damage than Disraeli did, and that the most fervid enemy of the Irish Catholics is the head of English Vaticanism, the Duke of Norfolk."

The greatest writers work with the same 26 letters, good writing is just putting one word after another

Philip Roth by Zach Trenholm

Writing is putting one letter after another letter; one word after another; one sentence after another. As Margaret Atwood said:

"A word after a word after a word is power."

Christopher Hitchens - "Islamic fundamentalism is not created by American democracy"

Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie

Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2001 in The Nation magazine, 'Against Rationalization', a counter to Chomsky and the Left, who, in response to 9/11, suggested that the attacks against America were the causal effect of American action in the Middle East. He said:

"I know already that the people of Palestine and Iraq are victims of a depraved and callous Western statecraft."

For Christopher Hitchens, islamic grievance long pre-dates the Blair-Bush intervention. He said:

Laydown liberalism

Cartoon by Martin Rowson

For Andrew Sullivan religion was at the heart of the Charlie Hebdo killing and that religion was Islam. He wrote:

"But Islam has nothing to do with this. There are just a few loonies who are suffering from false consciousness, and their real motivations are economic or personal or secular or just purely violent. You can believe that, if you want. Or you can pretend to believe it because it might be more pragmatic to do so. Or you can open your eyes. This is not to say that most Muslims support this kind of mass murder – and the global Muslim response was particularly encouraging. But it is to say that it is not a coincidence that so much terror and violence all over the world is currently being committed in the name of Islam. Some core parts of it are, quite simply, incompatible with post-Enlightenment thought and practice. And those parts have all the energy right now.

Is criticism of Islam islamophobic and racist?

On the racist question, Christopher Hitchens says no, and categorically so:

"You cannot be a racist by criticising the Islamic religion, by definition you cannot. There’s now a stupid term that’s trying to be imported into our culture, "islamophobia", as if to group it with racism in general. Nonsense. I won’t have it. I dislike Islam very much, just as I do all religions, and ive every tight to say that I think it’s an absurd and wicked belief."

Glenn Greenwald gives a slippery view to the contrary, saying that the label of racism for anti-muslim animus is a "rational view":

Politics is division by definition. Polarisation is what clarifies things.

Israel Shahak, Jewish critic of Israel and long friend of Christopher Hitchens

Sometimes you have to repeat it: politics is division by definition. You could forget it in the fog of media coverage pleading for unity and collaborative decision making. This is not what politics is about. George Eaton wrote in the News Statesman in 2010:

"In a culture where consensus and bipartisanship were viewed as unqualified goods, Hitchens stood out as a contrarian (a term that he perhaps unsurprisingly rejects) prepared to challenge the orthodoxies of both left and right."

Christopher Hitchens said during a 1993 panel discussion:

Art is theft, Ctd

By no means a copy or plagiarism, but the remixing of the visual idiom is interesting. Above is Ronald Searle and immediately below is Morten Morland.

Christopher Hitchens' regret - Not writing more to people

Christopher Hitchens by Martin Rowson

The combative and confrontational Christopher Hitchens died of cancer in 2011. In 2010 he spoke with Jeremy Paxman, reflecting on his past and politics. At the end he shared a regret: 

"In case you are watching this anybody, and you ever wonder whether to write to any one, always do, because you’d be surprised by much of difference it can make. Here’s a regret: I regret not doing it more often myself." 

Jack Kyle on Ian Paisley

Jack Kyle, rugby player and surgeon, born on February 10 1926. Aged 88 he passed away on November 28 2014.

[UPDATE - Read my essay on Jack Kyle and free speech in Northern Ireland published by Eamonn Mallie here]

We know him as the rugby great and for his work as a doctor. But Jack Kyle was also a man of letters and ideas. Throughout his life he shared comments on the Irish Question that were lucid, forceful and profound. 

On rugby in Ireland he said, "There was never any religious business about rugby. That was the wonderful thing about it." At more length, he said about Irish rugby:

"That was the wonderful thing about [Irish rugby, the absence of religion]. When the various unions were splitting up, the Irish Rugby Union said: “we play as one country”. Those of us from Ulster were very fortunate that happened. It was also a much greater honour for us to play for the whole country. I think it says a lot that during all the Troubles, never once did a southern side fail to come north or a northern side fail to go south."

Salman Rushdie - Avoid politeness, Ctd

Salman Rushdie by Ralph Steadman

In a conversation with Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie said that respect proper means that you can take someone seriously and still disagree with them:

"One of the most mealy mouthed pieces of language that has developed to justify this kind of behaviour is a kind of reinvention of the meaning of the word "respect". It seemed to me when I was growing up that respect meant that you took people seriously. It didn’t mean that you never disagreed with them. To respect someone is to say we’ll take on what you have to say and if I don’t agree with it I will offer a counter argument. The idea that it would be disrespectful to someone in any way disagree from this system of belief is a new idea, is a new meaning of the term "respect" and it seems to me to have nothing to do with respect. And what it actually means is I am too afraid to do it. So what you have is cowardice masquerading as respect. And that’s become more and more common. It’s very clear in the case of the [Danish] cartoons."

I'm a cartoonist, it's my job to create "brutal" and "bilious" cartoons

A self-portrait by Martin Rowson with a skewered Prime Minister, David Cameron

We artists live under a convention. We have a license to offend. A warrant and a commission to eviscerate people with a pen. Robert G. Ingersoll said:

"The instance we admit that a book is too sacred to be debated or even reasoned about, we are mental serfs."