This just in from the Department of You Couldn't Make It Up

You may have noticed recently that the Catholic Church in Ireland is in total meltdown. Dozens of priests have been caught sexually abusing children, bishops have had to resign for their parts in covering the scandals up and often moving these priests to new parishes where they carried on abusing, and large chunks of the young population were educated or simply locked up by the church with the approval of the state.

What's the answer to this widespread rottenness?

Why, it's to crack down on liberalism in the Church! Apparently being staffed with rapists isn't the core problem: it's priests who've allowed their congregations to skip confession, buy french letters and take communion while divorced. The sinners!

So if you've slacked off in church attendance because you suspect your priest's a child rapist, they have the answer: more pilgrimages and getting back to Benediction. For you, not for the priest.

The basic message from the Vatican seems to be 'it's not me, it's you'.

I don't know why I care, really. I don't live there and I don't believe a word of the dogma. I guess that this is the burden of the ex-Catholic. If only we could strip out the supernatural stuff and try the basic message ('carpenter's boy promotes kindness and being less judgmental'), we might all get along a little better. And fewer altar boys would be raped.

A very boring post which might save the world

Simple: read this article by Tony Judt. It's quite long because complicated ideas require lengthy exploration. It's a slowly dying man's attempt to relegitimise the state as a force for good in the face of decades of individualism and selfishness.

This is how he explains his status:

"Today I'm regarded outside New York University as a Looney Tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I'm … a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist … I'm on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable."

If you added a little more hard left authoritarianism, you'd reach my politics. Judt's a classic liberal: he believes in a balance between personal liberty and a state which works for the greater good under the direction of an enlightened electorate. Me? I've met Tories. They can't be rehabilitated. They belong in camps.

Still, in an ideal world, Tony Judt for President. Meanwhile, buy his book.

We have lost touch with the old questions that have defined politics since the Greeks: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society? A better world? The US and UK today are more unequal – in incomes, wealth, health, education, life chances – than at any time since 1914. Is this desirable? Is it prudent? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. Until we have learned – or re-learned – how to pose them, we shall go on as before.

And John Rawls' classic A Theory of Justice.

Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the 19th century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person", writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." 

Hailing Frequencies Open

I guess, as a man with a blog, that my attendance at Star Trek last night was somehow predestined. Despite being a bit rushed, and depending heavily on Oedipal themes (wit elements of The O. C. and 'bromance'), I loved it. There were plenty of in-jokes without excluding new viewers, the plot was suitably familiar but still well done, the action and effects were impeccable. I've long dreamed of a decent space opera on the big screen (some Iain M Banks? M John Harrison?), and this is the closest I've seen for a while.

I also particularly liked Hikaru Sulu, who volunteers for a mission demanding personal combat skills. Once on board, he confesses that his skill is fencing (though his fight showed little grasp of the discipline, partly because a good fencing bout is over in seconds without any blade contact, while a film fight demands clashing, to-and-fro etc.).

However, I received a considerable degree of ridicule, even from fellow nerds, for professing my preference for Star Trek over Star Wars. I certainly wouldn't want to defend Deep Space Nine or The Next Generation and haven't seen Enterprise, but the original series, some of the films and perhaps Voyager and all the themes tackled are so much more grown up and culturally significant than Star Wars.

Partly this is because Star Trek was a TV series, though it didn't last long. It could respond to current affairs that much more quickly than a film series, and it appeared in a tense moment in history. Through the two series of the TV show, you can detect themes of international relations (hence the presence of Sulu, a recent enemy for Americans and Chekhov - a current one), race (Uhura - black space secretary who gets kissed by Kirk) and war. Star Trek dealt with Vietnam while the war was going on - moving on from being reluctantly in favour to eventually strongly against. Sometimes the franchise has been plain wrong, at other times embarrassing - TNG was horribly touchy-feely bollocks, and sometimes interestingly countercultural (capitalists look very old-fashioned in Deep Space Nine), but it's never claimed that anything is simple and clearcut.

Which brings me to Star Wars. Appearing in the late seventies, you'd be forgiven for thinking that plucky rebels fighting a crushing, technologically superior Empire led by a corrupted leader was a parody for Vietnam with the Rebel Alliance being the North Vietnamese and the Empire being the US, lead by disgraced Nixon and the other presidents.

But no: it's an attempt to kick the Vietnam Syndrome by recasting the Americans as leaders of a disparate band of freedom fighters, looking back to the only time this was even vaguely true, the American War of Independence. There's something in the American psyche that clings on to this despite all the evidence piling up that it is an Empire in the mould of (but even more powerful than) the British and Roman versions. Having had their bottoms kicked by the peasants in Vietman, Spielberg appropriates the Vietnamese narrative to help the losing side feel better about itself.

In doing so, the universe is reduced to the moral equivalent of an old-fashioned Western of children's parable. Nobody ponders their actions, nobody possesses shades of grey - they're Good or Bad, give or take the odd deathbed repentance (which itself is desperately hackneyed). Say what you like about Star Trek's hokey liberal idealism, characters face difficult choices, often fail, and have to come to terms with the ramifications of their actions. This film lives up to those ideals (and has genuinely good jokes)

Given the choice between America as Star Wars and America as Star Trek, I say Beam Me Up.