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It’s happening again: every year, the town of Tralee (co. Kerry) holds its annual Rose Of Tralee festival. Before I say anything else about it, I first want to quote what the official website I just linked to has to say about the festival:

The Rose of Tralee International Festival celebrates modern young women in terms of their aspirations, ambitions, intellect, social responsibility and Irish heritage.

The official application form gives the following as one of the eligibility criteria:

Be born in Ireland or of Irish origin by virtue of one of her ancestors having been born in Ireland.

Am I the only person in Ireland who finds this just a little disturbing?

Reading between the lines, I see a claim of racial superiority: to be of ethnic Irish origin is something to be proud of, and celebrated. I had a hopeful suspicion that I might be wrong about this, and in previous years there may have been more ethnic diversity, but looking at this year’s International Roses was not reassuring. Each girl’s blurb details her county or counties of origin, and explains her surname when it is not obviously Irish. The hair colours were varied, but that was about all. They all just love Irish dancing, of course - at least the ones I looked at.

This is not some obscure provincial festival: for the next week or so the Rose of Tralee festival gets prime time coverage on RTÉ1, the main channel of the state broadcaster. (This is the same broadcaster who charges a license fee and shows advertising.)

In case it wasn’t obvious: I live in Ireland, but I’m not Irish. I’m Scottish, and knowing a bit of Scots history, that means there’s a fair chance that I have some “Irish blood” in me. I would not be concerned about that, however, mainly because I know there’s no such thing as “Irish blood”: Ireland was but one stop on a longer Celtic ancestral trail that goes back to Africa, possibly via ancient Egypt. “Irish origin” is, to be blunt, a transient delusion in historical terms.

More importantly, I don’t place much stock in one’s ethnic origin, not in this world of mass emigration and immigration. I’ve written before about my Scots heritage, which I identify as more of an attitude, or a way of viewing the world. It is the attitude that produced the Scottish Enlightenment, and I do not know or care whether David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Burns or James Watt were of “Scots origin”. I know that William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), was born in Ulster, but he made his home in Glasgow.

Why is it so laudable to be Irish? Wikipedia carries lists of Irish-Americans, created by its users. Everyone knows that John F Kennedy was of Irish Catholic stock - his father Joe made sure everyone knew - and the Irish papers are quick to latch on to any hint of Irishness in a celebrity. (It’s highly selective, naturally: legendary comedian Spike Milligan, and delinquent rock “star” Pete Doherty, were known as English with Irish parents, but which do you think has the Irish label attached in news reports?)

By way of contrast, how many Americans know that the steel magnate & philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, whose generosity established Carnegie Hall and Carnegie-Mellon University, was Scottish by birth? Heck, even fans of the TV show Dallas - a Scots name, just like Houston and Austin - failed to notice the Scots ancestry of the Ewing family, despite the fact that the family patriarch was nicknamed “Jock”.

I don’t see what the Irish have to be so smug about: the shadow of Tammany Hall still darkens the mayorship of New York, and when director Martin Scorsese shifted his focus to Boston, in The Departed, he found stories of Irish organized crime to rival the worst Mafia excesses.

I can understand the need to celebrate Irish culture. It’s this celebration of Irish ethnicity, of Celtic racial purity, that offends me, by what it is, and by the way it is seen as harmless. In my view it is representative of the Irish government’s institutional racism, which reflects a superiority complex that the Irish have exported to all corners of the globe. I simply don’t see what they are doing to justify it.

Since the middle of last week I’ve been feeling a lot better, and as the previous post hinted, the belated arrival of Spring in Dublin is also serving to lighten the gloom. So, let me take a little time to put down a controversial idea I’ve had for some time, but which I need to express carefully.

In my view of the world, one where religion and other beliefs are no justification for anything that harms anyone else, Israel is a major destabilizing force in the Middle East today. It is held together by the sheer will of a vigilant Israeli people, who have resisted onslaughts from all sides - military, political and economic - with the material support of the United States in particular. It is a country in which most young people - men and women alike - serve in the military, actively and in reserve.

After centuries in the wilderness of Diaspora, the state of Israel was founded in 1948, and since then has been the focal point of Islamic aggression. America’s support for Israel is an oft-given reason for the rise of Al-Qaeda terrorism. I have no patience for Islamic theocratic imperialism, the Allah-given drive to subjugate the world under the Mullahs. Though I am not keen on Nationalism in any form, I fully support the rights of the Israeli people, as any people, to self-determination, independence, and a homeland they can call their own.

But why, oh why, did they have to put the homeland there?

The answer is, of course, religion. One of the founders of Zionism in the United Kingdom, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, was a chemist whose process for mass production of acetone made a huge difference to British arms production in World War I: it was a major component of cordite, used in smokeless gunpowder. It gave Weizmann friends in high places, and direct influence over David Lloyd-George (Munitions Minister, then Prime Minister 1908-1915), and Lord Balfour (former Prime Minister, and Foreign Secretary 1916-19).

The Balfour Declaration of 1917, produced after a decade of urging by Weizmann, expressed Britain’s support for a “National Home” for Jewish people in what was then called Palestine. As reported in Lord Balfour’s biography (quoted in the Wikipedia article), Balfour had actually asked Weizmann, back in 1906, “why there”? His reply cited the historic connection of the Israeli people to the region, and he also said “anything less would be idolatry”. A curious turn of phrase: “idolatry”, as in “false worship”? As in Islam, this reverence for a mere piece of land explains much.

The wording of the Declaration is cautious, even conservative, insistent that no harm was done to existing non-Jewish people in the region. The idea of a sovereign state was played down at the time. Palestine was a British Mandate from 1920 to 1948, but Britain gradually lost control as their tacit approval of an Israeli state led to mass immigration. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the fallout from the Holocaust and further migration of Holocaust survivors in to the region, and Israeli attacks on British forces in the region, led Britain to call in the newly-formed United Nations to manage their abdication of control over Palestine.

The 1947 UN Partition Plan map is a mess, to be blunt; a compromise that tried to please everyone, and ended up pleasing no-one. The Wars of the next 30 years were the obvious instances of trouble, but there is a different kind of bomb ticking in Gaza; a demographic bomb. The Gaza Strip has a very high birth rate, and extrapolation of the 2005 UNESCO figures predicts a 44% population increase in 10 years, to over 2 million, with a population density approaching Hong Kong’s (5,700 per km²).

Today, I am concerned that the United States, having squandered most of its political capital in the Middle East, will leave Israel more exposed to attack. I thought the Hezbollah attacks on Israel in 2006 were insane, unrealistic, poorly planned and totally counter-productive; but they happened anyway. Israel will not be seriously endangered by such tactics any time soon.

No, my real concerns are long term; 10, 20, 50 years from now, when the USA may be hampered by oil shortages and domestic turmoil, and politically estranged from its allies far away. What happens when Egypt’s swing to the right puts an anti-democratic caliphate in place? When Saudi Arabia, its crude oil pipeline to the USA drying up, no longer needs to curry favour in Washington DC? When Lebanon becomes an extension of Syria, and Palestinian extremism distracts Jordan?

The fate of a small nation, isolated among enemies, without powerful allies, is a game that has been played out many times before, on paper, in computer simulation, and on the cold ground. The resolute Allies saw to Germany in World War II, but a more apt example is the Roman destruction of Israel in 66-73 CE; the impersonal, crushing response to a Jewish rebellion over religion.

I don’t know what the answer is; but if I was in charge of Israel’s long-term defence, I would be looking at every option, and a strategic withdrawal of the Jewish people from the region would be such an option. Then again, I am not one to invest a piece of ground with holy provenance; I would be left with mere history, and “I was here first” is no defence against an enemy who is equally tied to the same ground, for equally religious (i.e. irrational) reasons. An enemy who, by sheer birthrate and irrational blindness to consequences, has much to gain from Israel’s removal. I don’t like it - but that is no shield against reality, when it arrives.

If, like me, you have an interest in demographics and the state of the world, Google has just the tool for you: The Gapminder. Basically, it plots demographic data on a chart that is animated to let you plot changes over time.

For a sample of what makes this an engrossing tool, try the following:

• select Population on the x-axis, and Life Expectancy on the y-axis;
• hit Play to animate the chart over the period 1960-2004;
• watch what happens during the early 1990s; a little dot plummets to the bottom of the chart, then pops back up again;
• what country is that? Scroll the chart till the dot reaches bottom, and select it;
• the country is Rwanda, the stats for the point you select are shown on the axes.
• Play the chart again: Rwanda’s basic demographics are plotted as a line that bucks the expected upward trend.
• Not only does the Life Expectancy plummet to just 24 in 1992, between 1990 and 1995 the population drops from around 7 million to under 5½ million.

The dip in Rwanda’s population is, of course, the Rwandan Genocide; that is now part of history, but Zimbabwe’s Life Expectancy has been in the news. Mugabe’s repressive regime puts the Leader and his Ideology over all other concerns, including the basic health of Zimbabwe’s people. Sure enough, selecting Zimbabwe on the map lets you follow the country down, to a Life Expectancy of just 34 in 2004.

There are more stats in there now, and surely more to follow. I ought to find up some positive stats too, just to stop me getting too fatalistic, but positive stats are going to be hard to find in there. OK, Ireland now has the highest per capita earnings of any country in the world - but do I see any of that bounty?

Before I talk about some recent news reports, let me relate a story from my past that came to mind.

I spent my last two school years in a town different from where I had grown up, having left behind the kids I grew up with, and making a bunch of new friends. We were the nerds, the unpopular crowd; not because we had done anything particularly antisocial, more because we had other interests than working to acquire popularity. We were a motley bunch, with different attitudes, and guys coming and going.

One Monday morning, halfway through the last year, one of the “irregulars” called us together during the first break to relate some important news: he had gotten laid on the previous weekend. Details followed.

The reaction from the rest of us was hardly what he was expecting. Perhaps he had seen one or more “frat house” movies such as Porky’s, where horny students swapped war stories and made complicated plans to further their exploits, and thought that was reality. Most of the guys were indifferent, but I remember getting rather annoyed, asking “why are you telling us this” and “isn’t that supposed to be private”?

This was dismissed as jealousy on my part, but the experience he described hardly inspired envy. I considered telling the guys about my own experiences, from before I moved to that town, before I met them, but that would have been lowering myself to that level. It’s enough to say that I was cured of any romantic expectations by that time.

I did wonder about my reaction, though, and why I wasn’t happier for the other guy, regardless. I think family had something to do with it, having seen, first-hand, the damage caused by indulging in sex too young. By that time I was either an uncle already, or soon to be; I had also seen how passion led to rash decisions, and chronic problems that ruined whole families. At the time, however, I did not know what was wrong in such detail, and experienced only an acute unease. “What is wrong with me? Why don’t I get this. Why do people act so stupidly out of lust? Am I low on testosterone?”

The hormones explanation was the best I could come up with, and while I didn’t believe it fully, I could use it to laugh off questions such as “why don’t you have a girlfriend?” or “are you queer?” (No.) By the time I finished that final school year I had seen a few more unwanted pregnancies, and heard of some abuse: the “cherry on top” was doing some informal counselling for a female friend of ours who was pregnant with an additional complication: the father was a teacher at our school.

After that I just went to work, and by the time my parents got divorced, just over a year later, I had really had enough of dysfunctional families, horny teenagers, and irrational decisions, so I concentrated on my work, living in my company’s bachelor quarters. On my rare visits to bars and other social gatherings, I watched women responding to the guys who wouldn’t take no for an answer, who would chase them, cajole them, do everything short of clubbing them over the head and dragging them out by their hair. I didn’t care: I was the guy you always find “in the kitchen at parties”, cleaner-upper of the mess, the good listener, the shoulder to cry on. I was “sitting out the game”, since I had seen the prize and didn’t want it, and was happy to have avoided a “trophy”.

It wasn’t until much later, after more education, experience and observation, that I could put my concerns in to words. A throwaway remark I made, in the pub, somehow stuck with me: “guys who chase women aggressively are aggressive in general”. That was my problem: I wasn’t “aggressive” enough. Hormones again, or do I just think too much before I act? The correlation is positive, in my observations: I wish women were more discriminating, and less susceptible to aggressive approaches, because I have come away with the strong opinion that the guys who are more forceful in “hitting on you” - a worrying term on its own - are the guys more likely to use force against you.

This brings me to the news, about some disgraceful behaviour last week, see BBC News: crowds of horny men in Cairo, chasing women in the streets and ripping their clothes off. There is no suggestion that these were women were scantily-clad Westerners, so the Muslim clerics can’t use that excuse, like the Australian Imam who described women as “uncovered meat” last week.

This ties in to a wider theme I have touched on here before; in societies that value sons over daughters, the result is a a harder life for men, because of the competition for women. According to the article, many Egyptian men can not afford to marry, such is the effect of population pressures in Egypt’s limited arable land and urban area. Their demographic problems pale in comparison with those in China or India, but aggression is one result.

It’s Evolution, Baby: aggression gets you laid, you get to be a father, and pass your genes on to posterity. The most effective procreators are the most aggressive, the men not content to father a few children with a single woman, but who are pushy enough to spread their seed far and wide. The pointless violence and thrill-seeking seem to be mere side effects in the long term. In a recent article by “Fred” this tendency is bemoaned, but that is missing the point: sex is the overriding concern of young men and old Mother Nature alike.

Me? I’m not prepared to accept the side effects of sexual aggression on my part, so I expect to remain a childless bachelor. Just as well: if the likely futures of this world are overcrowding and violence, idiocracy and devolution, I wouldn’t wish them on any child of mine.

For years I’ve been a little worried about a demographic trend that has the potential to stop “positive evolution” in its tracks. By “positive evolution” I mean the idea that evolution leads to better, smarter people. Perhaps it’s considered elitist to wish for such a thing, and I know that assuming it would be a fallacy, but one may hope, may one not? After all, we don’t have another life to look forward to, so it’s natural for me to wish for more from this one.

I’m hardly the first to wonder where the human race is heading - as any Devo fan will know - but the trend that worries me is the falling birth rate in the developed countries in general, and among the most intelligent and educated sections of society in particular.

Unfortunately, in the absence of education and intelligence, it’s back to “survival of the fittest”, in my estimation. Today that seems to mean “breed like bunnies”. In poor countries this seems to imply “have many children, because some will die, and who will look after you in your old age?”. In the lower demographic strata of Western societies, especially Europe, this is read as “have many children, because the government will pay you and do what you can’t do for them”. I won’t get in to the politics, but this is compounded by poor education and awareness of family planning, which religion sometimes plays a part in. The Catholic ban on contraception is the obvious example here.

I keep in touch with various people I’ve met over the years: many of them are not married, and those who are have families of one or two children. One friend has a third on the way, which is very much the exception. I’m not exactly “high class”, whatever that is, but my acquaintances are all professional, working people, the “salt of the earth”.

Compare and contrast that with the poorer countries of the world, and the less-educated parts of the developed countries: Africa, Central America, the US South. I was shocked to see the 2005 statistics for Afghanistan, which had a birth rate of 46.6 per 1000 per year, and a 20 per 1000 death rate, that still leaves them which a 2.67% growth rate. I have all the stats in a spreadsheet, so I can sort them by the different factors, and they make sobering reading. The poorest countries - nearly all in Africa - are growing the fastest, thwarting any attempts to improve their living standards.

In the USA, this trend has not gone unnoticed by Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead and Office Space, whose new film Idiocracy was belatedly “dumped” in US cinemas and has not made it to Europe yet, if it ever does. It imagines an ordinary man who spends 500 years in stasis, and emerges in to a world that has gone downhill, intellectually, leaving him the smartest person in it by far.

In my view, even if things don’t go all the way down that road, we are still facing a “cap” on the intelligence of the human race: with the smartest people the best at reading the signs all around them and having small families, while the lumpenproletariat* think only of their short-term needs and desires, and not about how their world will be affected by their profligacy.

I am well aware that talk of “improving the human race” carries all sort of negative connotations, from elitism to eugenics, and I’m not suggesting any kind of direct intervention in what I perceive as a negative trend. However, what strikes me as most relevant to this forum is the way organized religion prevents individual people from realizing their potential in many different ways. Wilful ignorance of leaders, obstructions to family planning initiatives, education sabotaged by religious beliefs… those are the areas where I hope Prof. Dawkins’ book can make a difference, perhaps eventually proving me wrong!

* I’m kidding! Please stop hitting me with copies of Das Kapital!

Finally: some scientists are looking beyond ways of slowing down or stopping global warming, and are starting to address the questions of how humanity will cope. I’ve asked, in these pages, why people continue to build their homes in low-lying areas that are subject to flooding, when a little geographic knowledge will let them understand just how dangerous it is.

In most cases, of course, people do not have much of a choice: they need to be somewhere, within the borders of their country, and when their country is e.g. Bangladesh - most of the country less than 10 metres above sea level - they can assume they will be affected by floods even before global warming kicks in. A sea level rise of just one metre will submerge an estimated 10% of Bangladesh - already one of the most densely-populated countries in the world.

Once again, we come back to the question of population: people producing more children than their country can support. It doesn’t make sense even at this time, far less if you are to look at the known problems facing any particular country in the future. Once again I find myself saying: if people don’t take care of themselves and their futures, by planning their families, Mother Nature will take care of them.

I don’t have any children, and parenthood is looking even less interesting to me, over time, than it ever was. Today the BBC has been discussing discrimination against women who become pregnant. The Open University has a plain-speaking article on the financial cost of parenthood, which lays down some possibly unpalatable truths for prospective parents.

I don’t think I’m the best person to be talking about this topic, starting with my position on the male side of the gender divide that polarizes discussion on this topic. I tend to think that, since the Sexual Revolution freed women from unplanned pregnancy, they were free to make choices about whether to have children or not. I see many women exercising that choice, by having children later in life, or not at all.

If you want to build up a career, you can not expect to walk away in the middle of the process, with no guarantees that you will ever return to your previous enthusiasm or ability, and expect there to be no consequences. By way of comparison: if a university student missed the whole of her third year, because she stopped studying to have a child, would she expect the university to grant her the degree as if she had done the work?

I’m not disputing that having and raising a child is work; of course it is, and bloody hard work it is too, but it is not useful work in the context of the society and economy we live in today. It is a decision that people make for their personal fulfilment, and the world does not need any more people - it is already overloaded. Since the decision to have a child is your ticket to twenty years of financial burden and daily aggravation, it is not one to be made lightly, or forced on parents through ignorance or coercion. In an ideal world, that is.

People have noticed how much harder it has become - you only need to look at the demographics in Europe to see how birth rates are falling in general. Most of this decrease can be attributed to the educated classes of society, who are tending to stop at one child, maybe two, if they have any. The lumpenproletariat continue to breed as before, heedless of the cost.

This article has a more detailed analysis of the financial situation affecting working people throughout Europe, and places the blame squarely on increased taxation, which can be traced back to the socialist policies of European governments. With 70% of under-30s in Italy still living with their parents, because it’s too expensive to set up their own homes, is it surprising that the average birth rate, per person is 1.2? (A “replacement level” that keeps population steady is about 2.2.) So much of their money goes into funding the elderly, via the social system, that there is little left for this generation.

This relates to today’s discussion, because support for mothers, to offset the financial disadvantages of having a child, comes from taxes on the rest of us. Why should I pay for someone else’s children? I have friends with children, and they all seem to have gone in to parenthood with open eyes, and seem to me to be getting much more out of it as a result.

Sometimes I read stories that make me think the world is becoming a better place. Today I read that women in Kuwait will be allowed to vote from now on; what is surprising is that the change was decreed by Sheikh Jabir al-Ahmad al-Sabah back in 1999, but had been blocked by Islamic elements in the Kuwaiti parliament until today.

Then there’s this story on boing-boing today. A woman living in a hard-line Islamic regime, racing cars and beating men at their own sport? If it can happen in Iran, it can happen in Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes too.

When I visited Dubai, a fairly liberal Islamic country, I saw many women walking around in normal clothes, and not just visitors either. Yet a majority still wore the djellaba, even with full face mask. I’ve been told it’s a question of familiarity as much as law; it’s what they’re used to, and it has its advantages, such as comfort, secrecy and perhaps even voyeurism. (I can see them, but they can’t see me!)

Like the soft drink and sanitary towel commercials say: women, like men, can be free to do whatever they want. It doesn’t mean they’re going to go there, of course, but it’s important to know that the door is unlocked. If there’s one thing that Islamic societies can learn from the West, it’s that societies can be largely self-regulating. Imposing the kind of control they do can be self-defeating and disproportionate, since the majority don’t need written laws to behave themselves. If sex and the city was any guide, a New York woman’s bible is the latest issue ofVanity Fair, not any religious tract.

Think about the huge size of countries like South Africa, Russia, and the USA; in remote areas there are no police to tell you how to drive, what side of the road to drive on, what speed to go. For all practical purposes, remote roads are unregulated, yet the majority of drivers stick close to the rules. When the occasional driver goes low-flying down the freeway from Cheyenne to Spokane at 120mph, the chances of harm to anyone but themselves are low, and a properly-trained driver will know what not to do.

“Put Foot” was a bit of slang I occasionally heard in South Africa, one which came across clearly in Afrikaans too; the equivalent of “floor it” or “put the pedal to the metal” in the USA - it’s not just a driving reference, it’s an expression of a wider freedom. If I was in the USA I might be called a “libertarian”, though it’s a lot more complex than that, I think. We do need rules, and governments, to set a baseline of structure and support for the minority of society who can’t take care of themselves. You could call it a bell-curve theory of society.

Before modern governments and taxation, the Church fulfilled some of that function in the West, or Emirs and Chieftains in other parts. I’m not advocating a return to any archaic method; I’m saying there are things we can learn from the past regarding the self-sufficiency of societies without tight regulation. The idea of the “nanny state” is a relatively new one, and not entirely successful, if we can find three generations of a family, none of whom have ever held a steady job, in parts of the UK. I’ve written before about Germany’s problems, the way over-regulation has led to the current unemployment crisis.

This is why the current regime in the USA is the cause of so much concern; as expressed in the US Constitution, the power of the Federal government is clearly proscribed, yet it is now being expanded into areas where was previously excluded. The Department of Homeland Security is implementing Total Information Awareness processes, trying to break down the information safeguards that were in place between different government agencies (FBI, CIA, ATF, MVA etc) and the private sector (banking, insurance etc).

OK, there’s a long way to go before the US regime becomes as restrictive as Iran’s, but if Democracy is on the wane in the USA, what the hell are they doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? Answers on a postcard, please…

Today, I’m going to write a little about breasts.

No, I’m not kidding.

There’s a documentary on Channel 4 at the moment, My Breasts Are Too Big, which I didn’t plan to watch, but it’s morbidly fascinating, and not at all prurient. The first shock, for me, was a statistic quoted by a manager at Rigby & Peller, the company who supplies underwear to HM The Queen. She says that the average bra size in the UK is now 34E, which - in my limited experience - is filed under “huge”.

First question I ask: “aren’t you in pain?” Tonight’s documentary was about the extreme cases, where the answer is definitely “Ouch!”. One woman reported shooting pains down her sides, back and neck problems, “athlete’s foot” under the, um, overhang, and men who talk to her chest, rather than to her face.

The documentary follows three women heading for surgery, two of which really need it, and get the surgery for free on the NHS for medical reasons. The third, however, is a 19-year old medical student who should have known better, and had to pay for it herself. Getting a plastic surgeon to agree to it meant counselling first, but she was not to be dissuaded.

Another woman’s surgery is shown in great detail, with the removal of a pound of flesh from each side. It seemed to go well, but recovery was complicated, a lung collapsed and she landed in intensive care. A month later she’s still tired, house-bound, but optimistic and already feeling the benefits.

Why is there such a huge variation in breast size? It’s most obvious in young societies such as the USA, where Will & Grace is a huge TV hit. Grace, played by Debra Messing, gets at least one joke per episode about her tiny bosom, especially compared to Karen (Megan Mulally). I find myself at odds with the apparent male preference for pendulous udders: I actually like the way Grace looks, since she’s athletic - well, athletic-looking - and it’s all in subtle proportion.

Maybe it’s my engineering background, but I’d rather see her than the women who seem physically unbalanced, structurally unsound, forced to wear girder-stayed hammocks, to stop gravity stretching the skin until her knockers knock into her knees!

What’s behind the growth trend? General weight gain is part of it, but I think I see a more insidious trend: evolutionary selection. If I’m right, then: men in some cultures, over the centuries, have acted on their preference for large-breasted women, with the result that every new generation of daughters outbats their mothers, and we end up with the situation I see some “old” societies such as the UK and Ireland, or Russia. Yet China and Japan are as old, but haven’t gone the same way, which says something about those cultures, I think. Big boobs make as much sense as a peacock’s feathers, or the red bit around a baboon’s bum. All in my opinion, of course.

When I returned from South Africa, in late 1991, the country was still an international pariah state, thanks to “apartheid”. I could compare the way the country was portrayed in the media, first from the inside, and with the view from the outside. While I learned a lot, I came to some conclusions that might surprise some.

In the English-speaking community, not only were we well in touch with the way South Africa was viewed, we didn’t think or act in a racist fashion, and we could see the inevitability of change. The “white” community in South Africa was never united in favour of apartheid; my last two years of school were in a large town, big enough for multiple schools, and mine was definitely British, both in language and culture. Even among Afrikaners, the divisions were clear, with a liberal Afrikaans press taking regular pot-shots at government policies, though it was rare to hear openly anti-apartheid rhetoric there.

The business community can take more credit, for the end of “apartheid”, than any number of politicians or protesters. Money talks, and business interests such as the Anglo-American Corporation - who I worked for and still hold a few shares in - were publicly pushing for change. By 1992, President F.W. de Klerk had released all the political prisoners, notably Nelson Mandela, and pushed through the repeal of the laws that formed the legal basis of apartheid. By 1994, the ANC was in charge, after the first elections to include all citizens.

My work for Anglo-American (late 80’s) was for the Highveld Steel company and subsidiaries, and the workforce was divided; but it was more a class division than a racial one, at that time. We had three obvious working classes - management, skilled, and unskilled - which you could take as a reasonable model of the country’s population. The first two were mostly, but not exclusively, white, but improvements in education meant that my fellow apprentices were of all colours, and management was starting to go that way too. Meritocracy was, in principle, the order of the day.

The unskilled majority were unionised, and walked out a few times, once with fairly serious consequences. The rest of us weren’t unionised and didn’t understand what the strike was about, so we were quite happy to keep things going, scoring overtime and bonus pay as a result. Over one memorable fortnight, just two of us ran a whole division of the factory at night, with a manager occasionally dropping in to check on us. It was mostly manual work, mainly controlling conveyors for loading of coal into coking furnaces, that produced carbon monoxide to fuel the steel furnaces. We didn’t find it too difficult, and actually got in a few hours sleep in the middle of the shift - but it took about 20 workers under normal conditions.

The experience brought home an essential point about the role of the company as an employer: these unskilled workers needed the work, and far more of them were employed than were actually needed. The company played a larger social role, offering adult education, health care, and other social benefits. It’s not surprising, looking at it from that angle, that their wages were low; yet their grievances were, if I recall correctly, related to pay and employment security.

This to me is the true legacy of apartheid, one that will take many more years to correct: a huge under-educated majority is not something that can be sustained in a modern economy, and the last decade has not seen sufficient improvement in education standards and availability - the major challenge facing South Africa today. Factories such as the one I worked in are huge concentrations of employment, so much so that many workers are migrants, far from home; they were once prevented by law from settling in “white” areas, and even though the legal restrictions are now gone, the economic problems barely make life any easier today. The fact that South Africa has not yet gone up in flames, due to economic unrest, is laudable, but the long honeymoon is almost over, with so much more still to do.

Back in London, however, I found an incredible wilful ignorance about the complexities of the South African situation, and the ties to British colonial history. (For example, the word “kaffir” is a racial pejorative, yet it comes from the Arabic “qafir”, meaning “unbeliever (of Islam)”. It was once benign and was used in a official capacity by the British government long before it became insulting.) Instead, all I found was blind prejudice and soundbites, and an assumption that anyone who lived there, even a Brit like myself, had picked up racism and carried it with them like a virus. The opposite was true: I was not brought up as a racist, and didn’t feel I had to go to extraordinary lengths to fight apartheid visibly, or preach loudly against it. We just got on with life, did the right things, and that was enough.

Today brought the news that South Africa is to host the 2010 World Cup Soccer tournament: a signal that South Africa is now truly accepted in the international community, in a way they haven’t been for as long as SA has been a country at all. The year is significant and may have played a part in the decision, even though I didn’t hear it mentioned: 2010 will be the centenary of the Union of South Africa, the first time that all the major provinces came together as one country.

Perhaps, in a few years, I wil feel ready to go back there for a visit, preferably when I have learned to drive. Like America, the cities alone are not the main attraction, and though I have seen the Rockies and the Alps, I will have no trouble recognizing the Drakensberg when I see them again. JRR Tolkien, who lived in the area as a child, hadn’t seen them for years before writing The Hobbit, yet the “Dragon Mountains” are a clear inspiration for his descriptions of landscapes.

Well, that was the week that was. Not very productive, as it turned out, but I think I’m fairly chilled out by now, which makes it worth it.Today I finally succumbed, and have spent half of today watching The West Wing from Series 1 Episode 1 on. It is seductive in a particular way, portraying a world in which real people do real things, but also act in ways not normally seen in this world: they say what they mean, do what they say they will, follow through on commitments and actually think about what they’re doing. Pure indulgent fantasy, in other words.

The ideas I wrote about eight days ago are still setting sparks off in my head, and there are more where they came from. I have a theory I want to expand on later, but I’ll put it down here for future reference. It involves the basic principle behind technology in all its forms: starting with how the harnessing of energy led to the use of force to reshape the world. Our modern world runs on one major principle: the targeted and controlled release of energy, whether in the internal combustion engine, or just by flicking a switch to let electricity flow through a light bulb. Progress has also put force in the hands of almost anyone who might want to use it against anyone else, in the form of weapons such as guns and explosives.

My point is that I see no way to get off this slippery slope of technological progress: even without ethnic, religious and cultural differences, there would still be population pressures to cause friction, with any one person now able to cause a frightening amount of death and destruction.

There is a surplus of young men in the world, and what are they all good for? We don’t need the muscle; technology has repackaged the energy they used to provide into machines. Only the best are needed for breeding purposes, the rest, like me, are surplus to requirements. Taking a hard view, that leaves one outlet for all this frustration: War. It worked for all the ancient cultures, after all, and the basic principle hasn’t changed.

What a great thought to end a holiday with, eh? Back to work.

“Male bonding”: what the hell is that? (See yesterday’s entry on The Devil’s Own if you’re wondering why this bugs me.) This seems to be a particular invention of Hollywood; if, for example, British crime films of the 60’s (The Ladykillers, The Italian Job, Get Carter etc.) had been made in Hollywood, I shudder to think how the characters would have been asked to behave. One of my all-time favourite films, Heat, is slightly compromised by this, in its subtext depicting how both police and criminals exist outside polite society and have more to say to each other than to “normal” people. The main protagonists, played by Al Pacino and Robert de Niro, even hold hands at the end.

Why are we told that people always “bond” in difficult situations? My experiences tell me that the opposite is true. If I found myself in a life-or-death situation, I would be all too aware that it’s “every man for himself”, and even if there were other men on my side, I would hardly want to get up close and personal with anyone. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t be civil, or even joke about it. It’s well known that being in mortal danger gives one the urge to confess, to share, to get it all out, but that doesn’t require any particular person to actually be there. You might as well be talking to the wind.

I tried looking up “male bonding” up in my Britannica 2001 encyclopaedia, and it pointed me at ancient Sparta, where warriors took “male bonding” to its ultimate extreme. Current Western culture mandates acceptance of homosexuality in all its forms, from the camp imagery to the messy reality. Expressing an opinion to the contrary leads to immediate accusations of homophobia, as if one’s disapproval was covering a hypocritical male fear of rape.

Well, I disapprove of homosexuality as a practice. When it comes to individual people, though, I don’t need to know or care as long as they don’t project their desires onto me. Yes, I have a problem with the, um, physical aspect, but I also have a strong philosophical objection. Gay culture very often involves worship of the male form, which is just too narcissistic for my taste. No, I’d rather look at someone very different to me - as different as possible.

I’m sure what I’ve said here (and elsewhere in this Blog) could be analysed to reveal “character flaws”, but I don’t care. Do that in private if you must, but don’t bother telling me. I find psychoanalysis, amateur or professional, to be arrogant and insulting. Nobody on this planet can claim to know anything important about me, unless I am prepared to tell them that of my own volition.