THE MARKET BOYS

This Israeli documentary about the plight of young Palestinian men trying to cope by having to find menial work in an Israeli market is, I suppose, well meant. But it also displays that curiously gentle and evasive tone that supposedly sympathetic Israelis seem to possess. While sympathising with the Palestinian youths there is never any criticism of the Israeli government policy dictating their plight.

I appreciate the glimpse into this sordid world. The young men affect a jauntiness, which is the right of all young people, but there is a long silent moment when we see in the eyes and visage of the main protagonist his deep and utter despair. It is the still centre of the entire documentary.

The Israeli employer of this young man is decent enough in his way. He pretends a father/son relation. He feels for him. He has wife trouble and apparently no children and this young man means something to him. When the authorities make it impossible for the Palestinian to work in Israel, the employer shows human sympathy. But not once does he criticise his government. Instead the usual blurring of the truth by wishing for peace without acknowledging that Israel holds 95% of the power to make it. This wilful act of innocence.

A KIWI VOICE: ROGER FOWLER

I've been in many campaigns at a community level. We had a picket of probably 200 people and Muldoon came out and I happened to be in the way and he threw a punch at me and I can still picture him standing in the middle of Queen Street yelling out: I'll take you on one at a time! Yeah, I've been involved in some pretty hairy events over the years.

It was certainly a tragic stand-off in the last peace flotilla, but our hope is that there be so many people involved the Israelis would be extremely stupid to do anything outlandish. It's pretty scarey, yeah, and it just shows you the desperation that the Israeli military sometimes will descend to.

We weighed up the pros and the cons, and the pro was here were one and a half million people in a desperate situation. On the other hand were the big cons, a whole lot of reasons, really good reasons why we shouldn't go or shouldn't do anything about it. Of course, we come down on the side, yes, we have to go.

This is going to be an international convoy and it's important that Kiwis are part of that. I was very apprehensive [when my son wanted to join up] but I respect his wishes and, yes, I'm extremely proud of him.

My personal feelings and anxiety don't even come into the picture compared to the desperation of the people of Gaza. There's one and a half million people there living in a tiny sliver of land which is as big as East Coast Bays here in Auckland, up to Browns Bay. That's how big it is. Everywhere you look it's completely desperate.

Some consumable items are allowed in. It takes a long time for them to get in and they're only dribbling in. The people of Gaza now have the luxury of being able to get chocolates and mayonnaise and things of that nature, but I'm sorry, their need is much more desperate than that. I mean, the country's been bombed to shreds. They can't get building material to rebuild their houses. They can't even get a bag of cement.

It's one of many [pressing issues the world faces] but the main thing that differentiates this issue from everything else is that it's a man-made issue. The people of Gaza are suffering, and suffering every day, 24x7, as a direct result of Israeli government policy, and that can be changed.

It is definitely a stand. We also know about our peace flotilla in Auckland which changed the situation where we were having unwanted nuclear warships visiting our harbours and we were able to turn that around.

All packed and ready to go. I would hope that one day if my grandchildren ever ask me what did you do Poppy to try and stop the wars in this world, that I'm not going to be stumped for an answer.

A KIWI VOICE: NICOLA ENCHMARCH

I'm not used to the sound of gunfire and I hope I don't hear it again. As a New Zealander and coming from a peaceful country and not being exposed to such violence you go back and think wow actually that was all a bit crazy being up on the upper deck with the bullets flying around everywhere.

There was nothing in our planning that involved any form of defence or violence. We knew something was going to happen. We thought they may have just tried to block us. [Israeli boats were] chasing. It is one memory that I probably won't forget and stands in my mind is the sound of the engine of the Mavi Marmara accelerating before I even reached up to the upper deck. At the same time the helicoptor started hovering over the roof of the boat.

[The sound of weapons] penetrates into your hearing so deep. You're trying to work out what's going on. It's very disorientating. It's very hard to tell where it's coming from. I know it's coming from the zodiacs and I know it's coming from up in the roof and it's coming down the starboard side of the boat which I was standing on. There was so much noise. They were landing everywhere.

I thought I had [taken cover] by going near the top of the boat so the helicoptor was obscured behind it. I'm automatically thinking there's no way they would attack this flotilla using live ammunition. It just doesn't even enter the head that they would use live ammunition. I'm thinking rubber bullets.

The first fatality was a photographer. He was holding his camera up to take photographs up on the roof and he received a bullet in the forehead. So I knelt down next to him, put my hand under his head, not thinking, and then I realised the extent of his injuries. This was the realisation that things had got crazy. He was still breathing. I understood the sound of the breathing from when my grandfather died. So I knew he didn't have long. I just held his hand. I just thought his family wasn't there. I thought this brave man, who was only taking a photograph, is alone and it's his last moments.

What we went through on that flotilla, from being shot at, killed, bound for long lengths of time, this is what the Palestinians live with every day. Every day.

This blockade has to stop. It can't go on. These people have the right to rebuild their lives, rebuild Gaza.

I can speak for myself, and I can speak for my colleagues, and I can speak for the people who were also part of the Viva Palestina convoy, is that you are fixed on that goal, that's all you think about, breaking that siege and getting into Gaza and delivering humanitarian aid, having the world understand that this is not acceptable.

I find it very difficult to rationalise how you can be self-defending when you are the one that's committing the attack. So the Mavi Marmara and the other boats in the flotilla were on course. They were in international waters. There were no arms in these boats.

I have seen the images that the Israelis have put out of knives. Those knives came from the kitchen of the boat. They've sticks. Every passenger is part of the instruction, quite categorically were told under no circumstances must they take on board anything that is remotely conceived as a weapon.

I was searched and then I was handcuffed and then I was taken up to the upper deck. Already outside on their knees, hands bound behind were two rows of men that were already bound. Some were blindfolded. So the decks started to fill up with all of these people, all bound, were yelled at, told to shut up, we have the guns pointed at us. We were detained outside the boat, on the decks, in that position, for several hours. As the sun came up, while we were out there, they were trashing the inside of the boat. So everyone's luggage was opened, cameras, money. We saw possessions being taken out, video footage, everything.

[Then] to be shoved into the prison van that can only hold three people, and being locked in there and not being able to do anything about it.

It was horrendous that nine had to die on a humanitarian flotilla. They were aid workers, humanitarian aid workers. There was a boy of nineteen years old, he was at the beginning of his life, he was shot five times.

I don't look [to die for this cause]. I don't think my mother would appreciate it! I would give the most that I can. I believe that you don't stop trying. You've got to keep trying with this.

I get a lot of lectures when I go home. Don't do it again. But we are. We're doing another land convoy.

I'm just committed to believing that the Palestinians have a right to exist as you and I do.

TROUBLED WATERS

Troubled waters. A rather whimsical title for the content it heads up. Almost romantic. Mills and Boon. Gentle and evasive. The title for an Israeli documentary about two of eighteen Jewish families who live on Palestinian land in Gaza around 2000, and who fish from the same beach as Palestinians.

These Israeli settlers are not fanatics, one father is a professed left-winger, but nevertheless the parents possess this gentle and evasive self-centredness. A quiet will to dominate. If the fact of illegal settlement is completely overlooked it is so easy to blame the Arabs. Superficially there is this hail fellow well met friendship with the Palestinian fisherman. They sit on the beach and eat together. But it is all completely phoney.

The larger political scene brings into being the second Intifada. Immediately one father demands of the military that they destroy Palestinian crops. Those bastards want to harm innocent children. If they take something of ours, we will take something of theirs. If they harm us we will harm them 10 times over.

Meanwhile aerial bombardment of Gaza is compared to Palestinian gunfire. When they shoot at night and the kids are terrified we don't feel safe. Meanwhile there is devastation in Gaza following helicopter assault. With satisfied looks they watch TV showing terrified Palestinian children and learning that there is one dead and over fifty wounded. Let them fear a bit.

Then one of the women phones a Palestinian fisherman. Why? Is it some undetected need to fraternise? Is it a hidden wish to hear that the other suffers? The Palestinian gives nothing away. The woman then applies guilt. You have turned us into paupers, we have no money. Things could be better you know.

That war criminal Sharon comes into office and these few settlers are given increased security, funding and flasher homes with swimming pools. Still they complain while Palestinian agriculture remains erased from the land. Having just made them comfortable Sharon then decides to embark upon his scheme to lock up Gaza and focus on the West Bank. The settlers have to leave. They wallow in increased self-pity.

An unmarried man lives with one of the families. He us quite glad to be moving into Israel. Why? Apparently more chance to get married. Picking grapes with one of the children he asks: You know whose vines these are? Arabs who used to live here. Their homes were demolished. They had the cream of the land out here. Now it's ours. Is he teaching the child to pity or to gloat? The ambiguity encompasses both possibilities at the same time, resulting in moral stultification.

But a ray of hope. One of the daughters tells her father that she has no problem with the Arabs. When she was younger she saw more of them than Grandma. Left-wing father says to her: This is Israel. She replies: No it is not. He responds: This is Greater Israel. May that young woman retain her genuine integrity and not be smothered by national conditioning.

At the very end as they leave one of the women declare: All of this goes to the Arabs. As if it was not theirs before and should not be theirs in the future.

THE ISRAELI TAKE

The Israeli Take was an imported "in-depth" news item shown last night on NZTV Sunday programme. Previously we had had a home-grown item interviewing Nicola Enchmarch, a real Kiwi hero, who had been on the Mavi Marmara. She had attended to a dying man who had been shot numerous times, including the head. She did not hide down below with other women, she was obviously not an extremist, and she had important things to say about what happened. But she had a wonderful Michaelic will and focus for what had to be done for the people of Gaza.

The Israeli Take threatened to be a complete excuse for the Israeli military, but surprisingly the voices from two or three persons on board the Mavi Marmara were included. Perhaps in the interest of "balance", for the whole item was the usual ambiguous establishment news item in which no firm journalistic stance was taken. It was an essentially disgraceful piece of work which chose not to deal with the relevant issue of the blockade. Instead time was wasted on wondering who started the hostility, as though - yet again - we are dealing with two equal and morally equivalent forces.

If I put aside the fact that the Israelis have no right to own a good deal of the eastern Mediterranean and do just what they like there, and were therefore "starting" the "fight" - having already started it by setting up Gaza as a concentration camp - if I put these facts aside, the programme itself seemed to answer this question for me. The Israeli commander was heard to warn the Mavi Marmara that it was entering an area of hostility - that is, an area made hostile by the presence and intentions of Israeli forces. But the programme makers chose not to notice this.

Instead I think we were shown men on the Mavi Marmara sawing lengths of metal from the railings, as if this was the moment which started the fight. It was also the moment at which the programme makers seriously took the side of the Israelis by implying that it is not OK to take steps to defend yourself from a pirate in uniform. As if it is not quite the done thing to actually be serious about the objective of the flotilla. As if it was indeed just a stunt. The Israelis - and presumably the British programme makers - do not accept the right of others to resist.

When I see men making weapons out of a ship's railing I draw the conclusion that essentially they did not have weapons. When I realise that not a single Israeli soldier was killed this conclusion is reinforced. When I learn that firearms taken from Israeli soldiers were not used against them, even the moral standing of the flotilla is reinforced.

This was a programme which enabled the Israeli perspective to be given. What did we get? Surprisingly little. We saw flotilla men justifiably manhandling - but not killing - soldiers who assumed they had a right to board a vessel. We saw men making those metal bars. We saw - note this well - Muslim men having an anti-Israeli meeting. Surprise, surprise. With an adversary capable of any crime it would have been just one way to bolster courage. We heard Israeli soldiers claiming they were being shot at. Did any of them receive gunshot wounds? The Israelis and the programme failed to say.

We were told that the Israeli commandos fired paint-ball guns, as though they were carrying out an exercise in benevolence. An example of Israeli humour perhaps? The programme told us that the very first person shot was shot by a paint-ball. He was one of the persons from the Mavi Marmara who was interviewed, but curiously he was not asked - for the viewer anyway - to confirm that his seeming agony on the ground and the red patch on his body was due to a paint-ball. It would have been so easy to have cleared this matter up.

Having been thumped by establishment media for presuming to resist tyranny, the flotilla was then trounced with the accusation that they were not so much humanitarian, as political. How dare they also presume to take part in the political process. The writer William Trevor was once asked if he was a political person. He replied that he took a concerned interest in matters that occurred in the world, but this did not make him political. I take this as a starting point and from this one's concern is made to be political by others who really are political. If you are concerned and do nothing about it you are not political. If you do something about it you are forced to be political. Yet you have as much right to be political as any other human being set up as an agent of state.

Once again time was wasted on the intentions of the flotilla, rather than the obscenity of people in a concentration camp. There is absolutely no shame in saying that the flotilla was both humanitarian and political. The people of Gaza needed to be strengthened and the state of Israel needed to be weakened.

This accusation of political action was reinforced by the programme makers by making fun of some of the items eventually delivered to Gaza. Wheelchairs which appeared to have been damaged in transit from helpful Israel, and out of date medicines. The programme did not wonder why so many wheelchairs were in bad condition. It did not imagine that perhaps any medicine is better than none and that only the comfortable worry about expiry dates. No, these two amusing items reinforced the supposed hypocrisy of the flotilla mission, rather than perhaps its ability to do the best it could with the resources available.

AMERICAN TALK

I confess that apart from three exceptions my view of American talk is dictated by on-screen programmes and their participants. Americans talk a lot. Any one of their documentaries can be exhausting in its verbiage without being exhaustive in its incisiveness. American talk appears to be designed to conceal rather than to discover the truth. It seems very difficult to call a spade a spade.

An example recently was an American television documentary on the fiery deaths of seven American astronauts. The programme was designed to show what happened and what was done about it. Within the space of 60 seconds somewhere in the programme it became very obvious that what happened was a piece of foam coming off and ripping a hole in one wing. You could see the hole and it was significant. Upon re-entry this hole allowed the fire to begin.

However, the programme and its participants spent the entire time showing how heroic the leader of the ground team was, how they went through all the planned procedures with strength and courage - and yet how they had to suffer failure at the end. It became very apparent that the ground team and the programme pretended that the hole in the wing was not significant. There was a wish to blank out the implications. This may have been due to the fact that in their arrogant planning failure was not an option, and there was nothing to be done. But American talk can be based upon such spurious assumptions and shortcomings.

Then the inquiry into the disaster by yet another American hero, while blaming organisational failure, failed in itself to be specific with the public. Or perhaps it was the programme makers who had to be non-specific with us, so that a spade could not be called a spade and the wooden-jawed leader of ground crew kept his job. But we can be assured that there was much talk analysing and explaining irrelevant factors.

As for the three Americans who visited me, I had been warned in advance not to speak about American political matters with them. He was Republican, she was Democrat, and the daughter was apolitical, but it made no difference. After all the tears of joy and hullabaloo about Obama he was beginning to show what a flop he was, but we had to close our eyes to this unwelcome fact and not talk about it. Just as the ground team had closed their eyes and not talked about the hole in the wing.

KIA ORA GAZA

Six New Zealanders - Kia Ora Gaza - will be taking part sometime in September 2010 in another movement by land to subvert Israel's illegal and medieval blockade of Gaza. They have my full support. They are far more true heroes than the first New Zealand fatality in Afghanistan whose body has arrived back amid a sickening political and media hype. He was merely doing a job he loved and was paid for which potentially if not really involved killing civilians.

Presumably after Israel played its passport game in New Zealand some years ago we have been blessed with the absence of an Israeli embassy. Now it is back. The very evening Kia Ora Gaza was announced on New Zealand establishment television news we had to put up with the sight and sound of the Israeli ambassador being allowed to comment. He had the temerity to say that Kia Ora Gaza is not the Kiwi way. This is from a person who comes from a country which does not share the same values as Kiwis, who wish others well, are tolerant of people of other cultures, religions and governments, and who hate bullies.

Israel cannot continue to keep playing the same card. More people see that it is a domineering, trouble-making bully, with one set of rules for everyone else and none for itself. Without the United States it would disintegrate, having brought this on itself.

Does Israel imagine that it can continue on its current path indefinitely? It has become the most despicable nation on earth. Why? Because it should know better. But it is as if the state of Israel has been established and led by low class thugs. Israel has little to do with the best in Jewish culture, thought and activity. It actually represents the worst - that tendency to materialism, spitefulness and lack of compassion.

NEW WORLD OF INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE

Noam Chomsky and voices from North, South and Central America. There are four interviews with Chomsky in which he infects the reader with a sense of optimism. He quotes Gramsci: we should live by pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This has to be the right stance in which to live in these times.

Chomsky refers to optimism of the will in local communal activity in South America, as well as in national political behaviour. He pays tribute to it and conveys hope.

Unfortunately, the voices representing optimistic activity are deadeningly sociological and anthropological. No passion, no direct description of activity, just dead intellectuality. Perhaps these voices do not belong to the people doing the actual work. Chomsky has very little comment to make on these contributions, the bulk of the book.

Hope is dashed by those who are meant to exemplify it, creating a dysfunctional book.

Rating: Fair

ATWOOD, MARGARET. THE SHADOW OVER ISRAEL

This article appeared in Haaretz to mark Israel's book week. She is refreshing in her no-nonsense descriptions of the Israeli "situation". She speaks without baggage, ethnic or religious. Just a straight seeing novelist and poet with an independent mind.

The Shadow over Israel is not the Palestinians. It is Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and the fear and self-pity this engenders in many Israelis. It is tempting to think Wow! There is some awareness here. But ten minutes later it hits home Oops! Hang on a minute. Does this not sound like a Woody Allen movie?

There is no motivation or impulse to go beyond the personal angst, apparently. We do not hear or see significant demonstrations by Israelis against the apartheid nature of their state, or the atrocious behaviour of their army. The appalling power of their state mechanisms deters them, as it does not deter Free Gaza flotilla humanitarians.

There are no American Jewish activists in large numbers as there were during the Vietnam War, or on any issue then and now besides the issue of Israel. The Shadow that is Israel. There are just a few brave and wonderful Jewish individuals in and out of Israel who are beacons of humanity in the world.

Margaret Atwood spoke of a country in trouble when it feels the need to ban the likes of Noam Chomsky. She spoke to my heart when she referred to the vindictive pettiness of Israeli domination over the Palestinians. On the one hand killing children in Gaza and aid-bringers on boats, but on the other forbidding writing paper or pizza.

TRUE HEROES

I know that the people of Gaza will honour those international citizens who took part in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla May 2010, and in particular those who have lost their lives. Beneath the sorrow there will be a kind of joy that others in the world care enough to be injured or to lose their lives for them, out of love and concern for them.

You have the unreal heroes of Hollywood, but the real hero is physically helpless against evil and yet steps forward and lays his/her life on the line regardless. Jesus Christ is the epitomy of the true hero. He was oppressed both by the power of empire and by the corruption of the Jewish establishment yet courted their violence by having another vision.

Whatever the ethnicity and religion of those on the Flotilla they have all acted in a Christian way, some laying down their lives for others. The true hero is a true Christian.

There would have been those on the Flotilla who knew very well that Israel was capable of anything and yet they did not allow their sense of foreboding and vulnerability to deter them. This is true heroism. When you know that you are up against implacable power and refuse to back down you are among the best that the world can produce.

The foreign minister of a nation which is a master at provocation described the Flotilla as a provocation. The foreign minister of a nation which is supreme at manipulating public perception described the Flotilla as a publicity stunt. Yet for a mere provocation and publicity stunt this sick nation of Israel determines that at least 9 international unarmed civilians must be killed and at least 50 injured.

If this is a picture of Israeli behaviour toward the citizens of other countries only God knows how the people of Gaza manage to cope. There must be many true heroes among them.

BAROUD, RAMZY. MY FATHER WAS A FREEDOM FIGHTER: GAZA'S UNTOLD STORY

Like Abdel Bari Atwan, Ramzy Baroud was born and lived in an Israeli concentration camp in Gaza, from where with the selfless effort of his father he also has managed to breath and write about his people and the Middle East. He is editor of PalestineChronicle.com

What is plain enough for me for the first time is that the state of Israel was already well on the way to being established regardless of the holocaust. The Zionists had been intent upon this for decades while the British and others allowed the terrorism to happen. Zionism is to the Jew as Nazism is to the German. They are both race-based, hate-filled ideologies. The Palestinians were set down for catastrophe long before any holocaust in Europe.

Baroud draws a loving picture of his father and gives an understanding of Palestinian and Israeli politics. As with any society, the elite were always essentially corrupt and collaborated with the occupiers. When a real democratic election occurred in 2006, a real choice, for which Baroud's father with a sense of liberation voted for Hamas because they were decent people, the United States and Israel were incapable of any action other than vengeful and immoral blockade.

Rating: Very good.

ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA

It is heartening to find one's own insights given expression by prominent commentators one respects, but it is somewhat disconcerting to find that there are those in the establishment media who are also perfectly aware. So here in New Zealand John Campbell who normally twitters on in a most irritating fashion suddenly shows a genuine knowledge and admiration in an interview with Robert Fisk. Or some right-wing morning radio journalist switches to a real knowledge and appreciation in an interview with Dahr Jamail. They are living a double life, normally happy to espouse an antithetical establishment viewpoint.

The election of Obama was a good example which showed that members of the establishment media know the truth perfectly well. In New Zealand they decided to awake from their cowardice and begin to express hopes for necessary change in the world. Suddenly it was OK to publicly hope that the United States would be more reasonable in the world, that it would take Israel by the nose and force it to behave decently. Statements mildly critical of Israel surfaced; sympathetic items about Gaza and the Palestinians occurred. Iran or Venezuela or you name it escaped irrational villification.

However, the media establishment manoeuvres ponderously. The Gaza war crime had already occurred. It was already too late. The real nature of the new man was revealed in one telling scenario, but the media wanted to miss it. In the midst of the international crime, Obama was shown playing golf, a vision horribly reminiscent of his predecessor. He said not a word then on the subject nor thereafter.

But now the establishment media has rushed back into obedient silence and untruth. It has seen again that the truth cannot be revealed and will not be acted upon by this unsavoury new president.

A HOUSE WITH A VIEW

In 1970 we moved into our house in a street of group housing. In those days (in any days?) everyone was expected to be the same. If you did not like noisy vehicles or parties, or having your privacy invaded in any way, you were uppity and peculiar and subject to harassment. As a result we built a six foot fence and within the fence we grew small trees which blocked the environment.

Decades have passed, some have moved, others have aged and there now exists a kind of truce, even neighbourliness. We decided to replace some trees with sunshine and having removed them discovered what we had been missing all these years: a view. Or to put it more correctly a view truncated by the roof-line of the house next door below. What an imposition and an aggravation!

If this were Israel - God forbid - and I was an Israeli Jew and my neighbour a Palestinian, I could probably go to the local authorities and get something done about my lack of a full view. I know that we could trump up some story about the illegality of my neighbour's dwelling, how it does not conform to this or that. How he did not do the right thing when he moved in to it.

Now I am a reasonable man and I would be willing to compromise even though I know my neighbour would not possess the qualities necessary to appreciate my humanity. I would not require that his house be completely bulldozed - after all we are civilised people - but just that his peaked roof be sliced off and replaced with a flat one. Then everyone has to be happy; he has a house and I have an uninterrupted 180 degree view.

There is just one small added benefit in that I could save on rubbish disposal costs, for his flat roof below me would be an ideal spot for me to deposit all my rubbish.

WENDELL BERRY AND ME

I have just read some more essays by Wendell Berry (The Gift of Good Land). This extraordinary ordinary man, an academic who farms in Kentucky, grapples with the problems facing family farming and what we like to call subsistence farming elsewhere in the world. These problems are primarily caused by agribusiness and its governmental allies. Berry is concerned with agricultural and horticultural health. Ecology is long-term economics: farming and gardening based only upon economics can be short-sighted and destructive. A previous generation had fine individuals like Sir Albert Howard and Friend Sykes, leaders of a movement involving healthy farming, composting and soil associations. We have Wendell Berry.

I marvel at the fact that I enjoy reading Wendell Berry so much, a practical intelligent man who works in a way that I do not. Although I have had a persistent relation to working with the soil that is greater than the majority of people in my society it has also been a strange relation. I have done the work with enjoyment but also as if under duress. It is good work to think about other things when doing, whereas my inclination to plan and think about the soil work itself is weak. Men like Howard and Berry are philosophical toward working with the soil, whereas I shirk and try to be philosophical about other things.

Why have I been so involved with working with the soil? I remember helping my father with potatoes on his allotment. You planted them a certain way and then you dug them up and enjoyed eating them. He also grew berry bushes as well as other vegetables. Even in his day, although he belonged to an association of allotment growers, he was unusual in his application. Before him his father was an agricultural labourer before he married and had a large family and worked in a factory (although he then spent his evenings gardening), and before him my great-grandfather was an agricultural labourer.

At the age of about eleven I became employed on a local small-holding on Saturdays and during school holidays. It took only five minutes to walk from my Council house to what I experienced as countryside where this small-holding was situated. Here I worked very hard picking fruit, cleaning out the hen barn and pig styes, building the manure heap, watering the seedlings and tending to the vegetable plants (celery on frozen mornings), working in the glass-houses, sterilising soil with wood-fired steam, plucking chickens. Then close by there seemed to me to be an enormous field in which long rows of planted brassica had to be hoed in teams. This was all naturally organic. There was the camaraderie of work-mates but there was also the ability to think about other things, about the latest TV adaptation of a literary classic, and to foster my interest in literature.

Then there was New Zealand and choosing to leave university and work in Wellington parks and reserves department, tending to flowers and flower-beds in various parts of the city. Why I did this I cannot remember.

Then there was marriage and finishing university, Jacqueline and I wanting to have a garden, to compost and to grow our own vegetables, joining the local soil association and overseas research associations, subscribing to Rodale journals, visiting organic and bio-dynamic farms, meeting with other individuals, and reading, reading, reading. We kept bees and hens, which involved the whole paraphernalia of honey extraction in the kitchen, and an interest in and knowledge of the various hens. There were the truckloads of commercial compost delivered steaming on the front path, the trailer-loads of various manures - chicken, cow, horse and goat, the bales of hay or straw for mulching and the continual collection of firewood for the open fire-place in the living room. All this on a suburban section of one sixth of an acre. Jacqueline had even less previous experience but 100% motivation.

Now that we have fed our family and they have grown up physically healthy I take some pride in what Jacqueline and I have spent our time doing. We have been doing work that Wendell Berry advocates with such cogency. It is work that is becoming trendy, although often on a small and impractical scale, almost like a life-style accessory rather than a really necessary alternative life-style. It requires a certain philosophical input, lots of hard work and bears a certain spiritual fruit, regardless of the worker's personal qualities.

This way of living has felt like a compulsory training for me. It does not require the profit motive. It is no guarantee of a good or happy life, but it is perhaps legitimate to say that it has been a decent way of life.

ERASMUS. PRAISE OF FOLLY

I am going to be really childish and say that if there be any person in history I would have wished to have been in a previous life the primary candidate would have to be Erasmus. He possesses those qualities I wish I had, or more correctly which I believe are important in life. He is an independent thinker. He is a humanitarian Christian who is free of Christian institutions. He is a Christian humanist who places absolute emphasis upon the Gospels. He is respected on the European intellectual scene and has like-minded friends such as Thomas More and John Colet. He is civilised in the sense that he is moderate and middle-of-the-road, upsetting the Catholic hierarchy on the one hand and the crude Lutheran protestantism on the other. He is sharp and witty, honest and clear-sighted. The message of Christ is essentially a call for a charitable outlook and behaviour. We must act according to the spirit of the Gospels. To act according to the letter of the Law Erasmus terms Judaism.

I want to be childish again and say that if I had to choose one book to keep with me that book would be Praise of Folly. It is relevant for all times and places and circumstances where there is society. Folly makes the world go round. Sometimes it is wicked, sometimes it is charitable. A thoughtful person sees the folly that most others are subject to, but recognises also that it is very easy and disagreeable to be a wise fool. There is magnificent and justified satirical treatment of obvious targets such as rulers, politicians, lawyers, theologians and churchmen, including monks. Yet folly enables the world to go round, whereas intellectualism can be devastating.

The thinking of Erasmus is flexible and unconditioned, the language sophisticated yet clear and uncluttered. His expression is remarkably timeless, unlike other writers of his period (early 16th century). Here in a short and unique satirical work of literature is the essence of how life works.

BECKETT, SAMUEL. MURPHY. WATT.

I am trying to give Beckett another go and read all his novels. As a young man I could read Patrick White even though I thought he put the reader in a coffin, leaving the lid open. But I could not read Beckett because he put you in a coffin and nailed the lid down. Now that decades have passed perhaps I am old enough to appreciate him.

Well I have read Murphy and most of Watt and I am beginning to founder. It does not appear to be a matter of the reader's age at all. Indeed for me there is something of the precocious adolescent in Beckett. (I find the same in Joyce).

There are some laugh out loud remarks in these novels and in Murphy some valuable comment upon establishment psychiatry and its practices, but what I can only describe as computer language takes over and swamps Watt.

Here is a sample taken at random: "With regard to the so important matter of Mr. Knott's physical appearance, Watt had unfortunately little or nothing to say. For one day Mr. Knott would be tall, fat, pale and dark, and the next thin, small, flushed and fair, and the next sturdy, middlesized, yellow and ginger, and the next small, fat, pale and fair, and the next middlesized, flushed, thin and ginger, and the next tall, yellow, dark and sturdy, and the next fat, middlesized, ginger and pale, and the next tall, thin, dark and flushed, and the next small, fair, sturdy and yellow, and the next tall, ginger, pale and fat, and the next thin, flushed, small and dark, and the next fair, sturdy, middlesized and yellow, and the next dark, small, fat and pale, and the next fair, middlesized, flushed and thin, and the next sturdy, ginger, tall and yellow, and the next pale, fat, middlesized and fair, and the next flushed, tall, thin and ginger, and the next yellow, small, dark and sturdy, and the next fat, flushed, ginger and tall, and the next dark, thin, yellow and small, and the next fair, pale, sturdy and middlesized, and the next dark, flushed, small and fat, etc." This is about a quarter of the sample. The infinite computations presumably involved in one person's perception of another is interesting, ho-hum.

If anyone thinks they suffer from depression, just read Beckett, and if you can read passages like this without skipping them, you are in a bad way. Just one of them may seem amusing, or clever, but this sample is one of very many, and they become overwhelmingly tiresome. If they make any point it is lost in the technique. In fact I would claim that this technique is the basic feature of Beckett's writing.

I hope to have the strength to keep reading Beckett in order to appreciate the fact that he received the Nobel prize for literature. Obviously I realise that he could be said to be giving expression to the nature of our civilization, a civilization which is in deep shit without a shovel, but strangely even a melancholic depressive like me cannot take it. Am I meant to thank Beckett for his awful honesty and to put him on the shelf like a picture on the wall? Books that I will never want to open. And is not an unopened and unread book like a festering evil?

DONNE, JOHN. NO MAN IS AN ISLAND : A SELECTION FROM THE PROSE

Unlike Seneca, John Donne appears to be subject to no controversy about his honesty and integrity. This could be due to the fact that he patently is a hypocrite. Or it could be because very few would be interested in his prose nowadays. It is shite. He is very lucky indeed that without his knowledge and consent someone published the verse of his earlier years for which he is now justifiably known.

When he was down on his luck, having misjudged the reaction of his rich father-in-law to his secret marriage, he wrote abject prose for about fifteen years to those who could help him. When he was given a job in the Anglican Church he becomes somewhat unctuous. Reading his letters it becomes obvious when this job occurs because they suddenly become full of holy sentiments and references to God and Our Saviour.

The tortuous turn of phrase which is an asset in his poetry is diabolical in his prose. He uses many tortured phrases to say very little. He invents arguments which have no cogency. He is a boring clever-dick.

As he rises in the Anglican Church and becomes known for his public sermons the reader gets a sense of the showmanship and grandstanding implicit in the performance, while the substance of the sermons can be trite and common-place. There is absolutely no originality of thought. Given that he is now a leading figure in a Christian church, the references to Christ are few and far between and when they occur there is a complete lack of grappling with the meaning of this spiritual individuality. It is all God and the Old Testament, fearfulness and death. His sermons, which are fearfully dated to death now, have no timeless value whatsoever.

Donne is the archetype for all mountebank preachers. From young man to elder church-man who staged his own funeral, from first to last, he is a complete tosser and toady.

SENECA. LETTERS FROM A STOIC

Seneca has a bit of a mixed press. Some of it brands him a hypocrite. Here we have a millionaire talking of the value of simplicity and poverty. How did he amass his wealth? Individuals I respect, such as Coleridge and Milton, do not think much of him. Others equally eminent throughout history look back to him with respect.

I can only think that if a hypocrite writes as much as Seneca he ought to be found out in his writings. All the hypocrites of our contemporary political life can be found out in their writings in a moment or two, quite apart from the fact that they would be incapable of even beginning to write with the cogent thoughtfulness of Seneca. Can you get hypocrites of a deeply philosophical nature? Would they exist more in the religious or esoteric arena?

In one letter Seneca arrives home to his country estate unannounced and the servants have not made preparations for him. He stoically maintains his equilibrium until they can attend to him. He does not criticise them. This is an uncomfortable example. Quite clearly if he maintains a spare diet and lives simply it is within a setting of material comfort.

On the other hand, when Seneca effectively ruled Rome for five years during Nero's childhood, it has been described as one of the finest periods in Rome's history. Perhaps he made his money because of his position in a way considered appropriate. Then he retires to lead a philosophical life.

Do I have to know whether or not Seneca was a hypocrite, whether or not I like him, in order to appreciate the thoughts he expresses? These thoughts fail to be self-serving or inhumane. I am left with the impression that the individuality which incarnated as Seneca around the time of the birth of Jesus is one of the most significant in the history of humanity. And this is despite the fact that for Seneca the emerging Christians were just one of a number of foreign religious cults. They meant nothing to him.

His significance is reinforced when I read his plays, which are so powerful and unique they seem to point to a future theatrical art form which in part finds its expression in Shakespeare and other Elizabethans. It seems inconceivable that Shakespeare did not know Seneca's work, there is just too much corresponding resonance. Then in the modern era Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, in part, seems to pick up on Seneca's techniques although full development still awaits some knowledgeable and able esoteric dramatist.

GOSPEL HALL

From the ages of 3-13 I was sent to Sunday School by my parents so that they could have Sunday afternoon to themselves. The walk from Council house to Gospel Hall would have been a good mile which included crossing a main arterial road. The Gospel Hall was in no way evangelical. Its superindendent was a caricature of a Church of England Sunday School superintendent: benevolent, elderly, white-haired and kindly Mr Fryor. His 2IC was a large rotund man who fittingly arrived in a Humber. We called him Jumbo. Both men in their ways were well-intentioned comfortable middle class administrants to the children, some of whom came from the wrong side of the arterial road.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. If anyone should believe in Me he shall have eternal Life.

I learned two things from this benevolent Sunday education, despite my rebellion. I came to know the Bible stories inside out and probably still remember them. And I learned that Christian life was all about the New Testament. The stories of the New Testament are completely different in tone from those in the Old.

The Old Testament stories formed an historical context only to the coming of the Son of God in the New Testament. The values of the New Testament given through Jesus Christ were an advance and improvement on the values of the Old Testament. A studious Christian can live without reference to the Old Testament but of course cannot do so without the New.

So when I hear high profile Christian leaders emphasising God and the Old Testament in the content of their sermons I believe that I am listening to someone who should belong to another religion. Literature of the 19th century, especially Dickens, is littered with cold and loveless individuals who in the name of God insist they are Christians performing some form of necessary tyranny against others. If they are not self-professed Christians they are rank materialists who believe in the over-riding power of mechanical science and industry. The segue between the two is minimal.

So long as Bishop Tamaki of Destiny Church spouts the Old Testament he can justify his tyranny and his materialistic success. He can think he deserves to become comfortable after all his industry. But he has to steer clear of the Spiritual Being Who after His hard work was very uncomfortably nailed to a Cross for His pains.

In the Gospel Jesus Christ comes incognito, isolated and homeless into Galilee and begins gathering His disciples. I can assure Bishop Tamaki that if He came today He would not arrive on a Harley Davidson taken from the garage of His material mansion. The unpretentious education of the Gospel Hall fifty years ago allows me to guess that the man Jesus would come from the nondescript people, and that his non-violent radicalism would be too much for the Tamakis and politicians of this world. He would be seen as a troublemaker, a dangerous loner gathering together a dangerous group, leading to only one inevitable outcome.

I thank the humble Gospel Hall for helping me to see clearly without effort the false prophets of our times, whether they come from within the Christian establishment, or from some supposed alternative, or from political circles. What allows Blair of the maniac glare to consciously carry out a crusade and criminally invade other countries belongs to the medieval Catholic Church just as much as to any petty Tamaki tyrant. And they all belong to the ethos of the Old Testament.

It is when I see odd individuals - and some of them may be odd - carrying out loving actions without beating any drum that I feel myself in the presence of the New Testament, in the presence of a true Christian.

JEWS FOR JESUS

I recently made the mistake of purchasing a DVD entitled 'Dylan: Busy Being Born Again - inside Bob Dylan's Jesus years. Dylan is neither a contributor nor a feature. Instead, a number of individuals chunder on about the topic, talking as much about themselves as the supposed feature, and presumably making money out of associating themselves with Dylan.

Most of the contributors appear to be Jewish, including Mitch Glaser who speaks for Jews for Jesus. On the face of it I assumed I was going to hear Jews indicate how they came to Christianity in some form, including their associate Bob Dylan, because it enhanced the limitations of Judaism. Not a bit of it. Their emphasis was on the fact that Jesus and his disciples were Jewish and that therefore it was not they who needed converting but the Gentiles.

What can I say? Without appearing anti-Semitic?

When the man Jesus was baptised in the Jordan something important happened. The spirit of the Christ descended into him. From that moment for the next three years of his life (and his mission) he was no longer Jewish Jesus but the universal Christ on earth. And it showed. The Jewish establishment did not like what he said and what he did at all and became the primary instruments of his crucifixion. They and their followers and descendants certainly needed conversion.

Paul began taking the universal Christ to the world which also needed conversion, and Christianity ceased to be a Jewish cult.

By concentrating on the man Jesus, Jews for Jesus and others are taking a superficial and materialistic view of Christ. The spiritual Christ is non-personal, but so long as you emphasise Jesus you can talk to him with closed eyes as if he is listening in the room next door ready to respond to all your ridiculous and ambitious expectations. To emphasise Jesus rather than the Christ is to emphasise the subjective feeling life of the soul instead of the objective thought-filled life of the spirit.

I can fully understand the wish not to be involved in Christian institutions and the Christian establishment, but this is not solved by ditching Christ.

Update. I have since found in the local library a new book on Dylan by a Jewish-American academic which is yet another fanciful manipulation of the subject in the author's own image. This one is a bit too distasteful. The author is intent upon turning Dylan into a fanatic orthodox Jew conversant with the mysteries of Judaism. Is there a movement to claim him before the man dies? The book is not worth reading in full, but on the principle of a drop giving a taste of the whole ocean, there is a wilful manipulation of complex facts to produce a limited ideological purpose and consciousness in the artist. So despite Dylan writing and speaking of his significant connection to Woody Guthrie, for example, who must not be Jewish, the Jewish academic sets out to destroy this fact with absurd and superficial argument. Gentile that I am, I like and admire Dylan on the basis of his being an unpredictable and independent artist whose stature in modern life is truly outstanding. Behind ethnicity, or nationality, or gender, or religion, or culture stands the individual human spirit and the true artist works from this and the individuality of the other responds. If either Dylan or any other wants to see his work in the conditioned terms of religion, etc. then the work will be rendered barren.