The Damaskinos Report

People tend to be so used to the idea of obese opera divas that we often use the analogy of "the fat lady sings". We often assume that only women who are physically large can deliver the strong, booming voice required of singers, especially those doing demanding soprano roles. Names like Jessye Norman and, Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas comes to mind on this front. Even relatively slender stars like Angela Gheorgiu are, well, quite round by the standards of what people might normally expect from celebrities.

Of course, that has not always been the case, particularly in more recent times. Singers as Maria Ewing were, in her heyday, truly slim. There are now also increasing pressures for female singers to look the part (most lead roles involve female singers playing young beauties). Indeed, a well-known American opera singer called Deborah Voigt was dropped by the Royal Opera House from a Strauss opera in 2004 when she was deemed too fat to play the supposedly beautiful Ariadne in "Ariadne auf Naxos". At the time, she weighed around 25 stone.

Since that time, Voigt had stomach stapling surgery and now weighs around 10 stone. She has even been welcomed back to Covent Garden to sing in lead roles. From a recent interview she had with The Guardian, it seems that she has mixed feelings about the fact. On the one hand, she enjoys the improving health, more varied roles and generally greater fluency in movement. But on the other hand, Voigt laments her current inability to enjoy food and the sexism which made it unacceptable for her to be fat but forgivable for lead tenors to be overweight.

So is the move towards slimmer singers a good thing? I would say it probably is, provided that the same standards are applied to male and female leads. I have never been convinced by the idea that opera performances should only be about the singers' voice. If that is the case, why do we bother with opera? Are we not better off just having oratorios and cantatas, which do not involve elaborate staging, costume, and most importantly, acting?

Opera is both a musical as well as a dramatic art. Drama is both about the quality of a performer's acting skills and the extent to which he/she looks the part. Much as Luciano Pavarotti can sing "Nessun Dorma" beautifully, surely he struggles to convince as the supposedly handsome prince Calaf? Further, to draw an analogy with stage plays, they do not generally tolerate performers that are out of shape unless a particular role (eg Falstaff) calls for it. Even during Shakespearean times, when males played female parts, they had to be made up to look like females.

Alas, in the world of opera, lead roles are almost always supposedly beautiful looking characters. In that case, even if the singer himself/herself is not good looking (after all, audiences can't see their faces properly anyway), they should at least not be grossly out of shape.

In any event, weighing 25 stone cannot possibly be good for the health and agility of these singers. Look again at Pavarotti and all his health problems. Much as we want great performances from these people, surely we do not want to see people killing themselves doing it (and in any event there is no conclusive proof that being fatter makes your voice better).

Finally, having figures who can hardly move shuffle abjectly around a stage in heavy costumes surely is not music drama - at most it can only be called music. Again, if music is all we want, we don't need the opera format. Why bother forcing singers to pretend to act when the singers' bodies can't do it?

Just when everyone is going on about the failure of so-called Islamic communities (which are in fact as disparate as, say, the Catholic or the Lord of the Rings Fan Club communities), here's a little piece about Muslim enthusiasm for a great Australian pastime.

Where have all those people who claim that Muslim migrants know nothing about Australian life gone? And why is this dressed up merely as a "human interest" article as if the the Sheik is some kind of a freak show?

As has been widely reported in the press, the head honcho of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai has been dismissed for allegations of corruption and embezzlement of state pension funds. The report linked here suggests that "there was no public response" from the former head.

Small wonder. Other press reports suggest that he and others have now been detained by the disciplinary unit of the CCP. Funny how it's not the police or any law enforcement agencies that is detaining the man. Indeed, it appears that the "official" criminal investigation has not even begun. Once again, this is yet another example of the CCP being above the law and above due process.

But that is not the point of this post, interesting though a thorough discussion of the rule of law in China might be. Rather, the present dismissal and detention is a brilliant example of the potential for Chinese politics to be turned into a Reality TV show.

I can immediately hear you say, "but couldn't all politics be treated as Reality TV"? In a sense, that is true. But "politics" in the western sense is no more fun than, say, Survivor or America's Next Top Model or The Apprentice. Like these shows, the winner in western politics gets fame and a prize, whilst the losers are shamed and made to look even more like idiots than the winners. Indeed, in some of these shows, the contestants are a hell of a lot more attractive than western politicians. That's why western politics can never make for good Reality TV relative to other products on the market.

But Chinese politics is different. It's like an ugly men version of "America's Next Top Model" meets a lethal version of "It's a Knockout!". As a contestant, you have to be able to work in teams like a member of "The Apprentice", but at the same time destroy your teammates and opponents alike.

What makes this game unique is not, however, this fact. It is the stakes involved. You win, and you can be the resident bully. You get the money. The houses. Multiple concubines/consorts. The untouchability. You lose, and you'll be in jail for a long time with everything confiscated. That is if you are lucky. If not, you lose your life and you will lose it quickly.

Now then, what if you, as the contestant, want to do the "western politics" thing and play for compromises so that you live moderately happily ever after? Surely you can then enjoy in greater safety but in less extreme forms some of the attributes of a winner in this game? Even if others don't want to compromise, surely you'd only look stupid for trying?

Forget it. You play for compromise; others don't. Others will worry that you will change your mind eventually. Better you lose your life or liberty before you're competitive than for them to lose theirs if you do compete and beat them. Try compromise (as opposed to pretending to compromise) and you will be crushed.

Thus, you only have one option in this game - fight to the death. And fighting with bare knuckles at all times whilst grinning at your opponents.

So there you have it. A game show with a simple, compulsory strategy yet complex manoevres. Blood and guts will always be the fate of losing contestants. This is more ruthless than "The Apprentice", more bloody than boxing, and easier to understand than the complicated games that "Survivor" contestants play.

The show is.... Chinese Politics... come on down!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By faith I am a Roman Catholic, though not a particularly devout one. More on how some bloke from a few thousand years back managed to convince me some other time when the occasion calls for it.

Today I am onto something slightly different. I came across this book review involving the nature of life, universe and the divine. As I have not read these books, I cannot really comment on them. But I have, years ago, read previous books by two of the authors covered in this review, namely Richard Dawkins and Paul Davies.

In Dawkins's case (I digress: I think it is most unfortunate that nowadays most people think that singular words ending with "s" should have an apostrophe at the end without an extra "s" afterwards - so in this case my bosses would correct my "bad" English and turn it into Dawkins'. But they all seem to forget a certain London attraction called St James's Park!), the book in question is "The Selfish Gene). As for Davies, it's "The Mind of God". Comparing their views with conventional views of the divine (whether we are talking about Abrahamic faiths or other faiths), I thought of the following analogy with Government:

1. Dawkins, claiming that there is no divinity and everything happens purely by random chance, is tantamount to saying that we live in an anarchic system of life and universe.

2. Davies, by contrast, claims that whilst there is no God in beard watching over everything, but given the wonderfully logical way in which rules of physics, biology (there are even rules covering probability of random events, or how random shapes and matters develop), there does seem to be a higher order involved with those rules, if not the outcomes. In "The Mind of God", Davies suggested it's a bit like someone inventing the rules of chess but then does not dictate the outcome of the game. To me, that does seem very much like divinity acting as a legislature of sorts.

3. Then there is the view of most conventional religions, which seem to have God (or, in some cases, Gods) operating like Chinese mandarins outside the Imperial Court (those in the Imperial Court have legislative power as well). That is, God exercises a mixture of executive power (by discretionary interventions in individual lives and events) and judicial power (by deciding on the rights and wrongs of individuals and rewarding/punishing them accordingly).

For my own part, I fall somewhere between 2. and 3. Obviously I am biased, but I think Davies's point regarding the beauty and structure of rules of life and universe to be compelling, compared with Dawkins's anarchic perspective. But I think Davies's view is also incomplete, in that he takes a highly positivistic view of these rules, in that they are what they are, without attaching any value to it. Taking his chess analogy, for example, and one can see that the rules of chess operates with a certain set of assumptions about real world hierachies and powers. Similarly, real life legislatures make laws according to a set of values or ideologies.

Against this setting, I think two things can be said:

1. If the rules did indeed come about with an underlying set of assumptions, then there must be every intention for these underlying assumptions to be enforced at some stage. Hence, whilst I find stories of lifetime judgments such as those found in the book of Job to be fanciful, I can see force in arguments about life-end judgments (whether you are consigned to the scrapheap with no afterlife, or you are judged in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic way, or whether you are judged by where you go in your next life).

2. Rules governing random developments is a bit like laws giving an administrator discretion to act, with the random developments being the exercise of that discretion. I can hear you administrative lawyers out there yelling "but wait, isn't that reviewable for failure to exercise discretion by allowing random events to happen by themselves within this structure?" My answer would be that the divine (in whatever form it takes, depending on your faith) is a bit like a minister in that it takes charge over policy and need not bother itself with micro exercises of discretion. Thus, the Carltona exception to the "failure to exercise discretion" rule applies here.

These views are preliminary and are subject to further development as I read more and think about the issues further. But hope you do not find them too mad.

Just when you think that Richard Nixon taught everyone to be careful not to commit sensitive material on tape, we recently had the bootlegged tape of Hungary's Prime Minister that led to two days of riots and counting.

And supposedly conservative English judges are no better with not letting obsessive vanity and/or record keeping get in the way of things, if the case reported by this article is any guide. This sounds even more sordid than the infamous "One Night in Paris".

Here's the next installment of my rant on the Middle East

What changed after World War II?

The thing that made the region so much more volatile was the fact that on both the Israeli/Western and Arab sides of the subsequent conflict, there was a mass of dispossessed people willing and hoping to fight, funded by a few wealthy souls who are able to back continued conflict. On the Israeli side the dispossessed came in the form of wave after wave of post-Holocaust refugees, whose conquering initiatives are funded by wealthy American and "old money" Jews (and sometimes by non-Jews hungry to get a foothold on access to Arab oil fields). On the Arabs' side, oil money directly or indirectly maintained the myriad of resistance groups who had been dispossessed by the birth and aftermath of Israel.

If money isn't at fault here, what is?

What can be done?

Looking at the news, it looks very much like the mess in the Middle East is entirely intractable. Well, it is and it isn't. I think matters have now reached a stage where the "locals" probably could no longer bring about peace. This looks like one of those rare situations (the Balkans being the other example) where a solution must be imposed externally.

To that end, I suggest below a number of slightly mad solutions that will probably never happen.

First, diplomats should stop talking about a "two states solution". Instead, the Israelis and the Palestinians should be given two options: either they merge into a single state called "Israel and Palestine" with a government structure similar to post-Milosevic Bosnia or the "Stormont" solution in Northern Island, or they both lose sovereignty, with the entire area being under permanent international rule as a tribute to the spiritual and religious value of these lands.

Second, monies spent by the west on troops in the Middle East are much better spent on a new "Marshall Plan" to create jobs, build infrastructure. Only if people have real jobs does the opportunity cost of being a suicide bomber or a militant rise sufficiently significantly as to make it "unprofitable" for the disposssessed and their families.

Third, stop backing the various Arab sheikhs and let democracy truely develop in the Middle East. People have a right to choose extremists if they want. But even extremists like money. See "Marshall Plan" above to keep them happy. After all, even bin Laden was the west's friend when money flowed freely to him.

There are other similarly weird ideas but these three are so off the planet that they deserve mention more than anything else.

My previous post contained a link to the Pope's lecture about issues as faith and reason which sparked an outrage across the Islamic world.

I have found the reaction to be yet another example of the hysterical climate in which we are currently operating in the world. A number of simple points can be made about the lecture and its aftermath:

1. The Pope was not in fact endorsing the view that Muhammed was "evil and inhuman". Rather, his point was that it is wrong to try and justify violence on the ground of religion. Indeed, his Holiness noted the Koran's injunction against compulsion in matters religious. The quote was in the context of the records of a highly intellectual debate between a Christian and a Muslim philosopher of the 14th century (I am always dubious when such debates are attributed to Emperors whose mindsets were, by necessity, normally much more temporal in nature). Reading it in that historical context, the 14th century debate was largely in a classical Hellenic form where strong rhetoric is used and reason and syllogisms are taken to extremes in order to test out points of contention.

2. The hysterical reactions we have seen to date does rather confirm the concerns raised in Ratzinger's lecture about the enforcement of religious doctrines by violence. Sure, the Catholic Church had been guilty of such violence in the past. But that does not make the current climate of fear (whether physical or political) instilled by the kinds of reactions and threats and demands that we now see. One does not have to agree with what the Pope said. It may even be the case that his lecture's underlying thesis was wrong or at best sloppy. People of good faith can have disagreements over things. But to start issuing threats and rounding condemning the alleged wrong as an asserted fact without tackling its substance is, to my mind, a real threat to free intellectual discourse.

3. In any event, some of the criticisms of the Pope smacks of hypocrisy. How can some of the critics throw stones when they live in or even rule over nations that routinely criticises, lampoons and persecutes those of other faiths? Comparatively, a single quote in lectures that is open to criticism and debate is, even if the points made are wrong or inappropriate, much more preferable to lives or livelihoods being threatened just for believing in something else.

4. As for those who claim that the Pope should choose his words carefully - why should he? For one, he is speaking out on the basis of his conscience. Even if we do not agree with him (this speech aside, I have always found Ratzinger's work during his time as the head of the modern equivalent of the Inquisition to be irksome at best), he is showing the world the importance of speaking out and not be cowed or scared by possible threats. As JS Mill had said, only by letting issues be debated without fear or favour in the "marketplace of ideas" could humankind move forward.

5. Further, popes have not really been political leaders since the 1929 Treaty of Lateran at the latest, but probably even before that, for it was in the 1870s when the Papacy lost its lands to the Kingdom of Italy. To the extent that people like John Paul II had been seen as "political" leaders, it was only an incidental externality to his role as a moral leader. Same with the current Pope. As a moral leader, he has a duty to proclaim what he thinks is right (even if we do not agree with him) without fear or consideration of consequences. After all, speaking out on issues cut both ways - those who are now criticising Benedict XVI are probably the same people who praised Archbishop Oscar Romero's courage in El Salvador in speaking out fearlessly against injustices there before being assassinated in the early 1980s. Why should one case of speaking out be lampooned as "well he should be more careful with his words" and another be lauded as courage of the highest order?

Herewith endeth my rant for the day.

Taking a break from my diatribe on the Middle East - here's a media beat-up that could have wide ramifications as more and more groups latch on to the comments made by the Pope. I am no big fan of Josef Ratzinger but I think what he quoted in his speech was taken totally out of context. See the text of his speech here.

Every now and again, I browse The Onion's website for its in depth and insightful coverage of the issues facing the world today (I say this without a trace of irony). Recently, I came across this article about the power of religious faith in keeping the peoples of the Middle East focused and optimistic even as one catastrophe after another hits them.

The article reminds me of a sketch I saw on television many years ago. It concerned a crime gang who was about to embark on a large drug trade and a group of corrupt police officers hoping to bust it, claim the credit and then keep the money too. Both groups prayed to God asking for success. At the end of the sketch, a caricature of God appears asking the audience who he should support and he is confused. In a way the "God" in the sketch was a bit like the last scene of Animal Farm, where "[t]he creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

But is religion really the issue causing trouble in the Middle East? I think not. And in saying that, I am not referring to all the cliches about how a small group of evil people are misusing the holy name of God to commit unspeakable atrocities.

Instead, I think it all comes down to one word: MONEY.

That may seem like a straightforward answer, but it often gets lost amidst the morally and religiously charged rhetoric surround debates over the Middle East. And no, I am not talking only about obvious things like poverty and joblessness amongst those resorting to terrorism. I list below some examples.

Bin Laden the religious fanatic?

First, for all the talk about competing visions for the future, Osama bin Laden and the US essentially broke ranks over money. The US bankrolled bin Laden and his mates to fight the Soviets in the Afghanistan. When that war was won and bin Laden wanted further funding to pursue both his business and politico-military activities, the US refused. All the years of hard work in mostly inhospitable Afghan terrain for no ultimate reward.

No money, no partnership.

Wider historical trends - pre-World War II

Second, Muslims were generally considered some of the most religiously tolerant people in the world. They fervently believed in one God but pretty much let others in their territories do what they want. Indeed, looking further East, the Mughal rulers of India managed to maintain a empire where most of the people did not share their religion. They were even fascinated with Christianity.

It changed gradually when the various Muslim empires started falling behind Christian Europe from 18th century onwards. The process accelerated after the "big brother" of Muslim empires, the Ottomans, were humiliated during the Great War. The change in economic and military fortunes were emphasised when the British took control or enjoyed hegemony over large parts of the Middle East.

The sense of loss and vulnerability was further reinforced when, Zionist Jewish migrants started moving gradually to Palestine en masse. Jewish re-migration to the Middle East was nothing new. After all, many did so in order to escape the ravages of religious pogroms in Europe and even Africa, and they were welcomed with open arms by various Muslim rulers. The difference with the post-World War I Zionists is that whilst previous escapees tended to reach the Middle East penniless, Zionist migrants consisted of sub-groups with a bit of money and a positive agenda to build a life for themselves in their new homes.

Down and out, others with more taking over, resentsent breeds.

But for so long as there is a "wealthier" and a "poorer" group, the resentment is kept in control.

It all changed radically after World War II.

[to be continued]

Contrary to appearances, I am not Greek. So where does the name come from?

The blog is named after Archbishop Damaskinos of the Greek Orthodox Church. He was the Archbishop of Athens during the Second World War, and was notable for his defiance of the Nazi occupying authorities and efforts to save Jews.

But the thing that made me name the blog after him is a story claiming that he was once threatened by the Nazis with death by firing squad. Upon hearing this, Damaskinos allegedly said, "According to the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church, our prelates are hung and not shot. Please respect our traditions!"

Now that's my kind of guy. Read a bit about him here.

I will write whenever I can on whatever I feel like - put up with it or else!