Why do
different rules
apply to women?
Hamish Mackay
Those Oban fireworks
She had the eternal youth
that an inquiring
mind possesses
Judith Jaafar
Wake up, Arab world
Hamish Mackay
Charmed by editor Kenneth Roy’s supremely graceful apology to the extant Shirley Temple, I have every sympathy with him on the vexed issue of jumping to conclusions.
Quickly scanning (as we seasoned hacks do) the Scottish Review, I noticed a piece by my old mucker, Alan Fisher, now senior correspondent of Al Jazeera English’s Washington bureau, headlined : ‘The "oops" that was heard around the world’.
Delving quickly into the intro, I seized on the phrase ‘in just 53 seconds’, and always mindful of good copy about media matters for my contributions to other august organs, I immediately surmised that Alan was writing about the Oban fireworks fiasco.
That 20-minute scheduled bonanza was very much a case of premature combustion – all over in just 50 seconds – and has attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers via YouTube to a video captured by the Oban Times newspaper of the big bang
Actually, the erudite Alan was penning an incisive piece on how Rick Perry somewhat spoiled his chances of being the next US president with an unfortunate memory lapse on a vital matter of policy.
I feel for Rick. Well, don’t we all have our senior moments? My close shave could have been the bonfire of the inanities.
Chin up, Kenneth. Sackcloth and ashes are but transient things – appurtenances!
The Cafe 2
John Cameron in his article (10 November) about Britain’s economy urges the democratic participation of parliament, local governments, the City and the unions. I am afraid he is in for a long wait for I have yet to encounter institutions less democratic. Although there may be a slight thread of democracy running through the unions, some are still too bonded to the idea of ‘them and us’.
I happened to hold the position of a union FOC in the mid 70s but gave up this role as I was appalled at the ‘power-building’ excercises indulged in by the top strata of the union. Democracy was the last thing on their minds. The only union ‘high heid yins’ I have come across in the last few decades who were men with any sort of democratic principles were the late Jimmy Reid and the recently departed Campbell Christie.
Robert Smith
Who do
different rules
apply to women?
Rose Galt
I
Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s brilliant and distressing film ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’ is currently on general release. It chronicles the dysfunctional relationship between Kevin and his mother Eva and its devastating consequences. It offers much to think about and debate but I have been disturbed by the reaction of many male commentators – and men I have spoken to – that it was all Eva’s fault. She had a career; she was ambivalent about parenthood; she was a bad mother. This interpretation totally ignores the inadequacy of the father, Eva’s close and loving relationship with her daughter and indeed the evidence of the narrative. Nevertheless ‘cherchez la femme’ seems to be the male default position.
Look at Amanda Knox. She was convicted of murder almost solely because her behaviour, post-event, failed to conform to the exacting standards of her male prosecutors. She cuddled her boyfriend; she failed to weep; her eyes ‘looked evil’. The prosecuting lawyer spoke in court of ‘the intrinsically evil side of women’ and claimed that no hard forensic evidence was needed since he knew she was guilty ‘by the look in her eyes’.
I have no opinion either way regarding Knox’s guilt or innocence. My point is that different rules seem to apply to women in murder trials. Knox has been acquitted on appeal but continues to be vilified in the gutter press across the world for, among other things, planning to write a book. This ignores the fact that some 19 cash-in books/articles are already out there, written largely by men.
Knox is not unique. Remember Lindy Chamberlain who claimed that her daughter had been snatched by a dingo at Ayers Rock in 1980? She spent six years in prison before forensic evidence proved she was right. More recently in 2001, also in Australia, the British backpacker Peter Falconio disappeared after being kidnapped at gunpoint from his vehicle. Despite a man being convicted and losing a subsequent appeal, Falconio’s girlfriend, Joanne Lees, who escaped, continues to be regarded with suspicion.
Then there is Sally Clark, convicted and imprisoned for murdering her children on the discredited testimony of Dr Roy Meadows. She was released after more than three years in prison and died of acute alcoholic poisoning in 2007. Maybe we all need to talk about misogyny.
II
Books have been in the news quite a lot recently which can’t be bad. A campaign has been launched to encourage reading in the young, particularly boys. The news item I particularly remember claims that football players travelling to matches in buses, whatever the duration of the journey, never read and worse say that they would be too embarrassed to do so. What a shame. When I taught English I constantly stressed the link between reading and writing well, the almost osmotic transmission of correct usage. Admittedly the writing efforts of the boys often bore the strong imprint of the back page – people were always ‘running out worthy winners’ – but it was a start. Principally I aimed at encouraging reading for enlightenment, stimulation and sheer pleasure. The power of books to awake the imagination was summed up by a wee boy on the radio who said he preferred the Harry Potter books to the films because the films ‘got his voice wrong’.
Still on books I enjoyed the stushie over the Man Booker prize short-list, criticised for the criteria of ‘readability’ and ‘zippiness’ imposed by the chair, Stella Rimington, former chief spook and herself now a writer of spy fiction. Only one finalist, Julian Barnes, was a writer of distinction and thankfully he won. ‘The Sense of an Ending’ is a beautifully written and intensely moving examination of our relationship with the past, our own and other people’s. One of the other contenders was a thriller called ‘Snowdrops’, a first novel by AD Miller. I regard myself as connoisseur of the crime/thriller genre so I’ve started to read it. I am struggling through its turgid prose with great difficulty. It’s set in Moscow so I have been comparing it to two other brilliant, Russia-set novels, ‘Archangel’ by Robert Harris and ‘Gorky Park’ by Martin Cruz Smith. I would have cheered to the echo if either had won a literary prize, so I don’t go along with the anti-thriller snobbery.
The Man Booker is surely about literary quality. I offer two short quotations. From ‘Snowdrops’: ‘I had that drunk feeling, half nervous, half rash, like I was acting, like I was living in someone else’s life’. And from ‘The Sense of an Ending’: ‘We had a history lesson with old Joe Hunt, wryly affable in his three-piece suit, a teacher whose system of control depended on maintaining sufficient but not excessive boredom’. QED.
III
My Chilean son-in-law Adrian is currently in Catalonia shooting some scenes for the film he is making about his family’s experiences in Chile in the early 1970s. Adrian was born in Brazil to where his parents, supporters of Salvador Allende, had fled before Pinochet’s 1973 coup. Some members of the family were less fortunate. Two of his aunts and their families were arrested and imprisoned. The children were removed and their parents told they were dead. However a young Pinochet guard, appalled by the new regime’s treatment of its opponents, told the parents that the children were alive. Eventually they were reunited and released and now live in Spain, as does the guard under a new identity. He is still afraid, long after Chile has returned to democracy. I hope Adrian finds him and that he does agree to be interviewed because his is a voice that deserves to be heard.
We too readily forget the realities of dictatorship. My deep hatred for Margaret Thatcher is as much to do with her fawning adoration of Pinochet as with her contempt for the miners. Chile survived the best efforts of Thatcher and Reagan to emerge as a thriving and vibrant democracy with one of the most successful economies in South America. Sometimes the good guys win.
