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Christianity, when properly understood, is a religion of losers

April 3, 2015MusingsAnglicanism, Article, Christianity, Cif belief, Comment, Easter, Editorials & reply, Giles Fraser, Life and style, London, Loose canon, Main section, Opinion, Religion, The Guardian, UK news, World newsdiana Stone

A thought for this Friday

This article titled “Christianity, when properly understood, is a religion of losers” was written by Giles Fraser, for The Guardian on Friday 3rd April 2015 11.00 UTC

When he was nothing but a suspended carcass, dripping with his own blood and other people’s spit, there were no worshippers around clapping their hands and singing their hymns. They were long gone. At the very end, ironically at the moment of greatest triumph, he had no followers left. That says something profoundly counterintuitive about what a successful church looks like. For if the core of the Christian message – death first, then resurrection – is so existentially full-on that nobody can possibly endure it, then a church that successfully proclaims that message is likely to be empty and not full. Which is also why, quite possibly, a successful priest ought to be hated rather than feted. For here, as elsewhere in the Christian story, success and failure are inverted. The first will be last and the last first. The rich are cast down and the poor are exulted. The true king is crowned with mockery and thorns not with gold and ermine.

Christianity, properly understood, is a religion of losers – the worst of playground insults. For not only do we not want to be a loser, we don’t want to associate with them either. We pointedly shun losers, as if some of their loser-ness might rub off on us. Or rather, more honestly, we shun them because others might recognise us as among their number. And because we secretly fear that this might actually be true, we shun them all the more viciously, thus to distance ourselves all the more emphatically. And so the cock crows three times.

But it is true. Deep failure, the failure of our lives, is something we occasionally contemplate in the middle of the night, in those moments of terrifying honesty before we get up and dress for success. Ecce homo, said Pilate. Behold, the man. This is humanity. And the facade of success we present to the world is commonly a desperate attempt to ward off this knowledge. At the beginning of Lent, Christians are reminded of this in the most emphatic of ways: know that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Those who used the period of Lent to give things up are invited to live life stripped bare, experiencing humanity in the raw, without the familiar props to our ego. This has nothing to do with the avoidance of chocolate and everything to do with facing the unvarnished truth about human failure. There is no way 100 top business leaders would endorse the cross. It is life without the advertising, without the accoutrements of success. It is life on a zero-hours contract, where at any moment we can be told we are not needed.

But here’s the thing. The Christian story, like the best sort of terrifying psychoanalysis, strips you down to nothing in order for you to face yourself anew. For it turns out that losers are not despised or rejected, not ultimately. In fact, losers can discover something about themselves that winners cannot ever appreciate – that they are loved and wanted simply because of who they are and not because of what they achieve. That despite it all, raw humanity is glorious and wonderful, entirely worthy of love. This is revealed precisely at the greatest point of dejection. The resurrection is not a conjuring trick with bones. It is a revelation that love is stronger than death, that human worth is not indexed to worldly success.

In a world where we semaphore our successes to each other at every possible opportunity, churches cannot be blamed for failing to live up to this austere and wonderful message. The worst of them judge their success in entirely worldly terms, by counting their followers. Their websites show images of happy, uncomplicated people doing good improving stuff in the big community. But if I am right about the meaning of Christ’s passion, then a church is at its best when it fails, when it gives up on all the ecclesiastical glitter, when the weeds start to break through the floor, and when it shows others that failure is absolutely nothing of the sort. This is the site of real triumph, the moment of success. Failure is redeemed. Hallelujah.

@giles_fraser

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I was Paloma Faith’s support act – but politics can’t reach the parts music can

April 1, 2015MusingsArticle, Comment, Comment & debate, Culture, Main section, Music, Opinion, Owen Jones, Paloma Faith, Protest, The Guardian, World newsdiana Stone

Nope sadly it can’t anymore: Perhaps it is just apathy? Or is everybody really happy about the way things are now?

This article titled “I was Paloma Faith’s support act – but politics can’t reach the parts music can” was written by Owen Jones, for The Guardian on Wednesday 1st April 2015 06.00 UTC

Music can inspire, move, even devastate, like few cultural forms. Its functions and roles differ: making that morning jogor an afternoon of exam revision bearable, the backdrop to millions of unforgettable nights out, the comfort blanket after the traumatic end of a relationship.

Music can date our lives like the rings of a tree trunk. We sometimes listen to a song because it conjures up a period of our lives. And because of its raw emotional power, music has the potential to make us contemplate social injustice more effectively than any column the likes of me can churn out. Yet this function has been neglected – partly by circumstance, partly by conspiracy.

When I told friends or acquaintances that I was going to be the Brit award-winning singer Paloma Faith’s support act, the response was a mixture of bafflement and concern that either my career or life was going to end in a volley of bottles at London’s O2 arena. I shared their nerves, though comforted myself with the positive response I received when I took to the stage at Glastonbury to rail against injustice and nuclear weapons in 2013. This audience would be rather different, it was pointed out. Faith was taking a risk, too, but her courage and strength inspired me. The daughter of a Spanish immigrant, fed up with the scapegoating of those at the bottom and the failure to hold those at the top to account, concerned that a disillusioned electorate would not use their hard-won democratic rights, she wanted to find new ways to engage her fans. But here’s what moved me: she wanted to rebuild a link between music and politics that was once strong, but which has been heavily eroded.

Politics and music once blossomed. When the US was convulsed by struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s, music reflected many of the contemporary traumas. Marvin Gaye’s anguish at the social ills of the era was voiced in songs such as What’s Going On. “Vietnam, police brutality, social conditions, a lot of stuff,” he said at the time. “With the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?” I remember singing Pete Seeger’s pained anti-war anthem Where Have All the Flowers Gone at primary school; little did I know how he and other politicised musicians such as Paul Robeson were hounded and persecuted by the McCarthyites for speaking out.

There was Bob Dylan, of course, capturing the upsurge in challenges to the US social order in 1964 with The Times they are a-Changin’. He was consciously allied to the insurgent struggles for emancipation, saying later: “The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.” The blue-collar hero Bruce Springsteen was radicalised by Ronald Reagan, and – rather like Paloma Faith – railed against the demonisation of immigrants. Hip-hop is often portrayed as corrupted by hyper-commercialism and rampant individualism, but Public Enemy incited rebellion among US youth in the late 1980s.

The marriage of music and struggles against an unjust status quo is a global phenomenon, of course. Chile’s Victor Jara – Latin America’s very own Bob Dylan – was part of the movement that culminated in Salvador Allende’s election. Shot dead by August Pinochet’s henchmen, he penned a poem in his final hours: “Silence and screams are the end of my song”. From the struggle against Nigeria’s military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, Fela Kuti founded the entire musical genre of Afrobeat. As if to underline the potentially subversive power of music, the Russian authorities had Pussy Riot locked up in 2012 for singing against Putinism in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

And then there’s the political music traditions of Britain too, of course. When Thatcherism stripped industry from swaths of the country, entire communities were left without work or hope. With despair growing, no wonder the Specials’ Ghost Town resonated in 1981. Red Wedge brought together musicians united against Thatcherism, including Billy Bragg, Madness and Paul Weller.

Yes, politicised musicians are still there, but all too often they are deprived of a mainstream platform. What happened? It’s complex, certainly. Like much of the media and popular culture generally, barriers have been erected that prevent those from non-privileged backgrounds from making it. From acting to journalism to music, it is those who can afford to live off the bank of Mum and Dad who are favoured: everything from the housing crisis to the benefit sanctioning regime help see off musical acts with limited financial means. The accelerated commercialisation of music hasn’t helped either: the big businesses dominating mainstream music are hardly sympathetic when it comes to musicians sticking it to the man. There’s fear: speak out, and the Daily Mail will retaliate with a series of hatchet-jobs on your personal life. And then there’s the general decline of the left: all those defeats under Thatcherism, the disappointments of the New Labour era, the unabashed free-market triumphalism of the post-Cold War era.

No era lasts forever, of course. That celebrities such as Paloma Faith, Russell Brand and Michael Sheen are speaking out about politics is symptomatic of a broader trend. There is a rich seam of disillusionment with Britain’s current social order, and it occasionally bubbles to the surface. It is often directionless, lacking a coherent alternative in which to invest hope and truth, and frequently contradictory. But it is there all the same.

The current election campaign will be marked by character assassinations, while the Britain of food banks, zero-hours, in-work poverty, housing crisis, job insecurity and young people facing a future bleaker than their parents will not be given the hearing it deserves. When I supported Paloma, no bottles were thrown: the crowd (some who I’m sure were pretty bemused) listened politely and cheered me at the end, no doubt with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Let’s be honest, though; even well-intentioned commentators and politicians fail to stir popular emotions about the great causes of our time. Music, though, can reach us where modern formal politics often does not: our hearts. Love and loss always have their place in music. But there are other traditions, too, and maybe our musicians should start rediscovering them.

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Cameron’s workers v shirkers scam has at last exposed the Tory law of benefit cuts

March 31, 2015MusingsAditya Chakrabortty, Article, Austerity, Benefits, Business, Comment, Comment & debate, Conservatives, David Cameron, Economics, General election 2015, Iain Duncan Smith, Main section, Opinion, Politics, Poverty, Social exclusion, Society, The Guardian, UK news, Welfarediana Stone

I think we have been desensitised as a nation or is it perhaps just good old fashioned brain washing? Whilst we continue to demonise people for what is often essentially bad luck like illness infirmity, sudden redundancy’s that leave people long term unemployed.

Why also is there so much stress on work above everything else? We work to live rather than live to work unless we are lucky enough to have a vocation of course. The fallacy that can all work our way out of any hardships is simply not the case. the universe doesn’t do equal opportunities, but we as human beings can control some aspects and even things up.

This article titled “Cameron’s workers v shirkers scam has at last exposed the Tory law of benefit cuts” was written by Aditya Chakrabortty, for The Guardian on Tuesday 31st March 2015 05.00 UTC

It was the raw early days of the coalition, and one of David Cameron’s lieutenants was giving a frank answer to my blunt question: what would it take for the government to pull back on its planned cuts? You didn’t need a Mensa membership to see that this topic would define the next five years.

On that sunny autumn afternoon, the newspapers were full of students besieging Conservative central office, but Cameron’s aide coolly judged that they’d blown it by picking the wrong target. Had they swarmed on Lib Dem HQ “that would really have put Clegg under pressure”. So what would change Tory minds? “The crunch will come when the Mail puts on its front page pictures of some Iraq war veteran in a wheelchair who’s lost his disability benefits.”

That ugly logic has underpinned this government. Cameron and Nick Clegg have justified social security cuts by reciting a litany of false oppositions. Strivers v skivers. Workers v shirkers. The bedroom tax, the arbitrary removal of benefits from those infringing some bureaucratic small print, the judging of sick people as fit for work – £17bn of cutbacks have been sold by ministers, and bought by the public, as falling on the undeserving poor: the mickey-takers on a gigantic, taxpayer-funded bed-in.

What my contact foresaw back in 2010 was that if this political link were ever broken, and money seen to be taken from the plainly deserving, the central plank of austerity would snap in two. However, that Mail front page has never appeared, and yesterday Cameron was able to warn of Labour “chaos … higher taxes for every working family to pay for more welfare”. Even so, the Law of Welfare Cuts has just taken two shattering blows.

The first was delivered by the Conservatives themselves, in the form of a leaked paper discussing options to make more benefit cuts. Commissioned by the Tories, written up by senior civil servants and already under discussion by ministers, the proposals include taking allowances from about 40% of carers for the sick; the scrapping of government compensation for those who’ve suffered industrial injuries; and the taxing of disability benefits.

The Conservatives have tried to stamp all over this story, and with excellent reason. Where’s the justice in taking cash off someone who’s mangled an arm on a construction site, or who’s had to cut back on work to look after a sick child? These savings manifestly break the coalition law of welfare cuts: that they must be seen to be fair.

And they don’t even save that much money. As with so many “reforms” since 2010, these reductions would turn people’s lives upside down, plunge some into debt and tear families apart – and in some cases raise little more than loose change. It may be that we have passed the high tide of public support for cuts in social security – and it would be for exactly the reason predicted by that Conservative aide in 2010. The Tories have set a goal of cutting another £12bn a year from welfare by April 2017. This target is so stupidly implausible that it will force any future government led by Cameron into ever more manifestly unjust benefit cuts. That fictional divide between deserving and undeserving poor may be on the verge of collapse.

How much of a fiction that divide really is can be seen in a new report published by academics at the LSE. Is Welfare Reform Working? is based on two rounds of interviews, first in 2013 and again in 2014, with 200 people who live in the south-west of England, from Plymouth to Bath to just outside Chippenham – where Cameron launched his election campaign yesterday.

In my years writing on this subject, I have read scores of reports and books on welfare reform – but I’ve never seen anything like this. Here are hundreds of people, all living at the sharp end of austerity. Every interviewee is a social-housing tenant of working age, which makes them the number one target of this government. Last September Iain Duncan Smith, in an interview with the Express headlined “We are breaking up Shameless housing estates”, boasted: “We’re making real progress into that stubborn part of the out-of-work group who are in housing estates …” The work and pensions secretary was talking about exactly the LSE interviewees – and this report allows them the right of reply: the LSE authors let their subjects do the talking.

The first thing to come screaming out of the report is how many of the interviewees didn’t plan to be out of work. They’ve got a disability, or they were caring for children or a sick parent, or they were just laid off. You meet Mrs Spencer, who spent seven years out of the jobs market to nurse her daughter through cancer. The daughter died two months ago and the last of their savings went on her funeral. Now her husband has been made redundant after 27 years of work. He’s 59 and has only one eye.

Well over half the respondents claim to be coping. This sounds like good news – until you discover what they mean by that. Getting by means falling behind on rent or into debt; managing means eating less or going without heat. “I’ve got a dog and I’ve got to make sure he’s OK,” one says cheerfully. “If need be I’ll eat his biscuits.”

Re-read that sentence, remembering that you and he live in one of the richest societies on the planet.

How has the government helped? The bedroom tax “is a tax on my disability”, according to one interviewee who used his second bedroom to take oxygen. Respondents hate the jobcentre, which just holds up ever higher hoops to jump through – or else it sanctions them. Another interviewee tells of how his sanction meant that he lost his home, and now sleeps on a sister’s couch.

These people represent a society that has been cut adrift by politicians of all parties: a society that will go unaddressed by the election campaign, and uncourted by any major party. And yet these people talk just like you and me; they just have worse stories to tell.

In that same Express interview, Duncan Smith claimed that he had moved the Shameless estate-dwellers from a “dependency culture” to independence. Here is a different version of events from one of the LSE interviewees: “My best friend committed suicide in March – she went through … relentless reassessments, and found the forms very confusing. She was disabled but they were questioning her over and over again. DWP hounded her for information. It’s a horrible feeling, knowing that your friend was pushed over the edge like that. I’m pretty certain that if these welfare reform changes weren’t going on, I’d still have her with me.”

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