Many have been the debates about the source of war and aggression, and I’ve had a small insight into how conflicts stir myself. Since Christmas, an unknown motorist has been parking his or her vehicle in a spot I regard as “my” parking space. It’s not, legally, my space, but it’s a “t” line outside my garage doors (which are never used). A “t” line is a request not to park in that space, but it’s not legally enforceable, according to the parking wardens. But it’s my turf all the same. How dare the usurper take it!
That’s what I started calling the offending vehicle, whenever I saw it on that spot – The Usurper. And I could feel a sense of territorial outrage. I talked to a friend about it – a mild-mannered grandmother of a kindly cast of mind. “Have you considered bashing in the Usurper’s wing mirror?” she said. “Mmm,” I said. “How about superglue on the windscreen wipers?” “Or you could always scratch the paintwork with a key.” Of course, these weren’t serious suggestions. No need to alert the Old Bill to an incipient threat of vandalism. They were a light-hearted allusion to the vengeful emotions that lurk within our deep unconscious.
I could request the Usurper not to park on “my” territory, but they might retort that the request wasn’t legally enforceable. Instead, I just snuck my car onto the disputed spot, deliberately not moving it for days. It gave me satisfaction to think that each time Usurper would seek that parking place, it would be taken. Ha-ha. Solzhenitsyn said that: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” And in a small way, that can even be discerned through
parking wars.
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The Monaghan novelist Patrick McCabe – he wrote the acclaimed The Butcher Boy and has been nominated twice for the Booker prize – was talking on RTE radio last weekend about his early years growing up in a big family in modest circumstances. His mother, he told Miriam O’Callaghan, had hoped he might become a priest. And then he gave a rather quirky reason: “That would have been a step towards refinement.” Often people mention either, positively, holiness, or negatively, power, when they recall a mother’s ambitions for a son’s vocation.
But Pat underlined “refinement”. And that rang true for a generation past: a priest was educated, and often refined. Sometimes, in Irish country life, he might be criticised for not being refined enough. My own mother contrasted the beautiful chintz furnishings and silver-service tea service of the local Anglican rector against the simple rural lifestyle of the local PP, in his drab brown house. Pat McCabe did try to envision himself as a priest, but the calling didn’t occur, and he became a teacher instead – and a writer of linguistic distinction.
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Maybe the name “Trumbo” is a little too similar to “Trump” to be quite comfortable for some Americans. The movie Trumbo, starring the admirable Bryan Cranston, is about the Hollywood Ten blacklisted during the 1950s for being communists. It’s engaging and stylish – and Helen Mirren’s hats (she plays the poisonous gossip writer Hedda Hopper) – are gorgeous. But like many films based on an historical story, I thought it lacking in context. It was indeed scandalous that screenwriters and others in the performing arts were deprived of their livelihood for their political sympathies. Some came to England, like Joe Losey and Larry Adler, and never forgave America. McCarthyism was a distortion of justice, and I think it not irrelevant that Joe McCarthy was an alcoholic and a disturbed personality.
And yet, the political context of these events should be part of the background story. Stalin had double-crossed the Americans in 1945 over Berlin and Eastern Europe: he had made Eisenhower look over-trusting and naïve. The USSR seemed to be gaining ground everywhere, and the gulags were operating at full throttle. Meanwhile, as we now know, British intelligence was being penetrated by communist agents such as Philby, Burgess, Blunt and Maclean. It wasn’t unreasonable to be concerned about communism at the time. Just as it isn’t unreasonable to be concerned about jihadism today.
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