WOMEN DRIVERS - IN SPACE

First female Doctor Who and Tardis - but can she drive it?

I only watched two television programmes on Christmas day and both in different ways brought into focus the role of women: Doctor Who and The Queen’s Christmas Message.  I had also been intermittently following The Crown series and I almost wondered if the real queen would live up to the performance of Claire Foy who portrayed her as a young wife gradually approaching middle age while holding down an uniquely demanding career.

In fact, the Queen’s annual broadcast to the nation and (importantly for her) the Commonwealth is usually a tepid affair with very little that is original or challenging in it.  That is probably no bad thing: you do not want to divide your people, especially at Christmas and, for everyone who praised her boldness for speaking out on some issue, there would be at least as many who criticised her.  Her Maj has perfected the art of seeming to care about her people without worrying overmuch about the issues which affect them.  The danger for monarchy is not that they do not get involved, but that they forget the importance of neutrality for a head of state, something that the Queen’s uncle Edward VIII (later Duke of Windsor) did when he hobnobbed with the Nazis and which Prince Charles occasionally show signs of doing, albeit on a far smaller and safer scale.

After the Queen and Christmas dinner we watched that other Christmas insitution Doctor Who.  I loved it as a kid and was genuinely frightened by what now seem laughably crude special effects. Later I grew bored with it before coming back when the series was regenerated by Steven Moffat and actors such as David Tennant and Matt Smith (who has done excellent service as Prince Philip in The Crown).  I was starting to get bored with it again but knew that the new programme would end with the first female Doctor being introduced and thought I would like to be present as history was being made – along with several million others.  The first thing Jody Whittaker did as she appeared was to press the wrong buttons in the Tardis and get thrown out of the door into space, instantly fatal for any human but not for a Time Lord, who presumably will survive and reappear when the next series starts, just as Carrie Fisher playing Princess Leia did in the latest Star Wars film.  Cue lots of jokes about women drivers.  In fact, government statistics invariably show that women are much safer drivers than men.  Lewis Hamilton need not worry, however.  I wrote 'safer' - not more skilful.  You are far less likely to have an accident with a woman at the wheel, also less likely to arrive before a car driven by a male driver.

The Last Jedi has the same concern with diversity as Doctor Who with a largely female crew and a diverse cast including a couple of rogue heroes portrayed by a black male and a Chinese female while the ‘bad guys’ are all white and male.  The reassuringly presence of Harrison Ford, who portrayed Han Solo an unreconstructed chauvinist, albeit one who sides with the ‘good guys’.  (They actually use those terrible phrases in the movie.)

Action films, in which ‘good’ characters can waste as many ‘bad’ ones as it takes to get the job done, have until recently been the last preserve of aging male movie stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger who still kill lorry loads of their enemies, conveniently lining up to be offed and unable to shoot straight or move fast enough even when confronted by action heroes who are now lumbering into their eighth decades.  Recently, however, there has been an increase in films in which the killing is done by women.  

I do not care for ultra-violent films like these and have little desire to see Angela Jolie or Charlize Theron join this line of licensed psychopaths who emerge with barely a scratch after killing off multiple anonymous villains who, whatever their motivations, are human beings with a living to earn and a family to support.  Curiously enough it was in an Austin Powers spoof film that this issue was confronted.  In one scene family members of victims mourn the loss pf a loved one as Powers makes increasingly desperate puns about the methods used to bring about their demise.

Is it a victory for female emancipation to see women taking charge of spaceships and sending shedloads of fellow human beings to their doom?  Or is it just females trying to act more masculine?  Shouldn’t women try to change the agenda rather than just adopt the worst habits of men?  As James Bond has shown there is a lot of money to be made from characters who can drive fast and kill without remorse. Unsurprisingly women and minorities want to get into this act, once the preserve of urbane white heterosexual men.  

Good luck to them.  The latest Star Wars has done well enough at the box office to survive any churlish objections that it was too anxious to appeal to the politically sensitive in its audience.  There are still plenty of shoot outs and explosions in it, although the female characters might have done more good if they had managed to use their non-macho skills to effect some sort of compromise between the forces of dark and light, just as the Queen does.  She is good at bringing people from different backgrounds together to enjoy what they have in common rather than what divides them. Female power might even produce a shades of grey solution – even if that suggests a semi-pornographic novel in which the man in the story is triumphant thanks to the power of his penis.  Sometimes women cannot win.

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Edwin Lerner - my other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

THE RELUCTANT PROTESTANT

Martin Luther, the troublesome monk

There is a certain irony in the fact that it was in a Roman Catholic church where I first learned the full facts about Martin Luther. He did not, apparently, nail those ninety five theses onto the church door at Wittenburg 500 years ago (there would not have been room) but sent them to the local bishop. Within weeks they had spread through Germany, within months through Europe and reached as far as little old England. Although Henry the Eighth – like Luther – considered himself a good Catholic until the end of his days, his break with Rome would not have been possible without the writings of the German monk and the fuss which followed. In another of those ironies it was Henry (and his successors) who proudly carried the title of Defender of the Faith given him by the Pope for persecuting heretics.

I was in the church to hear the writer Peter Stanford talking about his book Martin Luther: Catholic Dissenter.  The talk was scheduled to start at 7:30 and I had endured a long day and was not best pleased that it was delayed by the evening service running late. I convinced myself that the priest was taking his sweet time to put these godless Protestants in their place.  In fact, there were just a lot of people there for the service and he was not going to rush them. Saving souls was more important than stimulating intellects.  Fair enough – it was a house of God after all.

We learned that Luther hated the term ‘Protestant’ and thought he was actually doing the Pope a favour by highlighting the abuses which came from the selling of indulgences to finance the building of ever grander churches.  People were promised a quicker route to Heaven if they dropped a decent donation into the box and helped the church pay its bills.  The net result of this German monk speaking his mind and saying that salvation came from God’s grace not from good works was, in the short term, tens of thousands of people dying in the wars which followed and, in the long term, the division of Christianity into those who stick with the original Catholic creed and those who look for something different from the Protestant reformation.  Once you allow freedom into an institution it does not stop operating and the Protestants themselves have divided into an almost comical number of sub-sects. 

Stanford was brought up and remains a Catholic, I was brought up in a sceptical house and embraced atheism in my teens but later found it wanting and began to wander back into the church. (My work as a tourist guide has taken me into a lot of churches and some of it obviously rubbed off on me.)  If anyone asks, I describe myself as having the piety gene: looking for the solace of religion but unable to take the leap of faith into full scale belief. 

It would always be a Protestant church to which I would go in this search for God, even if I disagree with Luther’s idea that Heaven is attainable through faith not works.  If such a place exists – and I have great difficulty in believing it does – surely He will not exclude our souls from it without giving us a chance to prove our worth in this life.  Should a bad believer jump the queue in front of a good sceptic?  Can someone born in the wrong hemisphere or century be excluded from salvation because he or she did not have the opportunity to be or become a Christian?

Maybe Luther’s most famous action actually contradicts his philosophy.  If faith alone is enough to get you to Heaven, why bother to undermine those who tell you to do ‘good’ things to reach there – even if such actions are merely lining the pockets of those who run the show on earth?  Of course, Luther could not lead a life of quiet obedience, letting God alone decide who was to be saved.  He was a born upsetter of applecarts – “Here I stand, I can do no other,” he proclaimed even though he knew that doing so might condemn him to the flames in this world, if not the next.

One who did suffer the flames was William Tyndale who, like Luther, translated the Bible into his own language.  Tyndale was betrayed and executed by the Catholic hierarchy for the terrible crime of enabling the ploughboy to know the Bible as well as the pope. At the time the church was determined to keep its hold on the words of the Bible and would not tolerate translations which allowed people to think for themselves.  He was not actually the first English translator of the Bible.  That was John Wycliff who, unlike Luther and Tyndale, managed to keep his head down and survive. His body was later dug up and destroyed in an act of petty posthumous spite by the church authorities.  Luther would have suffered Tyndale’s fate if it was not for his powerful friends.

Tyndale’s is the translation we know and love in England with its great ringing phrases like ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ and ‘the salt of the earth’.  It is phrases such as these which are heard today in the Catholic churches which often boast a larger congregation than their Protestant rivals.  The Latin mass has long been sidelined by all but a few stubborn traditionalists who defy a church no longer allowed to burn them at the stake.  So, in a sense Luther got his way with people of all faiths encouraged to know and read the Bible and not merely to rely on the man (Catholic) or person (Protestant) in the pulpit wearing the robes and leading the service.

I doubt I will ever square the circle and reconcile my scepticism with my need for belief.  I do know that atheism is not the answer and, to all those wo say that religion causes wars and bloodshed, I would reply that the great mass killers of the twentieth century were all atheists – Hitler, Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot.  At least with religion you are expected to behave better.

Edwin Lerner. (My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com)

For more on Peter Stanford and to order the book go to: peterstanford.co.uk

UNWECLOME AND UNWANTED

Weinstein - villain of the piece

I saw Harvey Weinstein at Heathrow airport once whilst waiting to meet a group.  He is the only living film producer I would recognise – and I regard myself as a modest film buff – and the only producer whose name might have encouraged me see a film.  Others were just names at the start of the credits, money raisers, facilitators, maybe actors who had lent their name to a project and were being rewarded for their support before the really important person, the director, was acknowledged.  He (usually) or she (occasionally) was the creative force, the person whose skills might make you cough up ten pounds.

Directors themselves know it is not that simple.  They need producers to greenlight their projects and help realise their vision.  The producer usually stays in the background but almost invariably retains control over what is known as the final cut, what people actually see on the screen.  If the director runs off on a path which is creative but not commercial, it is the producer who reins them back in.  Occasionally these tensions explode and a director dissociates him (again usually) self from the end product.  Later a ‘director’s cut’ is released which is more in tune their vision, sometimes overlong and self-indulgent.  One of my favourite films Blade Runner can be seen in several different versions and its director Ridley Scott got himself a producer credit on the recent follow-up.  He knows that the director’s cut concept is often just another way to make money. It was probably a producer who thought up the idea in the first place.

All this makes producers powerful and sometimes tyrannical figures.  Weinstein, in my short moment of watching him, gave off the aura of someone who was entitled to respect and used to wielding influence.  This burly unshaven male, who did not need to dress to impress, was accompanied by a young ‘assistant’, attractive and obedient.  It did not come as a major shock when it was revealed that he did not take his marriage vows very seriously and had for decades been systematically sexually harassing and assaulting women who needed his help and approval.

In situations like this I often feel perversely sympathetic towards the man (inevitably) who has being doing the bad thing and disapproving of the women who have been done to.  This is often just sympathy for the mighty figure who has fallen into disgrace.  Weinstein’s wife has left him, his children probably despise him and the list of former associates, clients and ‘friends’ who have disowned him is stretching around the block.  When Woody Allen, whose career was rescued by Weinstein when he had sexual allegations of his own to deal with, used the word ‘sad’ in describing what he felt about the fate of his rescuer, he soon had to backtrack.  There is no mileage in anything other than joining the bandwagon at times like these.

Having said that, I would have wanted to thrash and castrate Weinstein if he had done even one of things he has been accused of to my daughter.  She is someone who can look after herself in most situations but this is easier said than done when your career is at the mercy of a powerful man.  Weinstein’s legal team seem to have become past masters at silencing people who have tried to expose him and he was ruthless in hindering and even sabotaging the careers of those who rejected him and refused his advances – or stood up to him in any way.  Some even decided that these advances were a price worth paying for his help and are now taking revenge.

What struck me in reading some of the lurid revelations was how unsatisfactory so many of these encounters must have been.  Most of us have experienced bad sex at some stage in our lives.  A combination of lust and loneliness, often fuelled by that inhibition remover alcohol, have taken us to places which we later regret going to and which we decide never to revisit, sometimes unsuccessfully.  Shakespeare, as usual, described it best in sonnet 129, ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’.  This poem is surely enough to confirm that the sonnets are based on personal experience and that the great poet was not a faithful husband to Anne Hathaway.  Like many young men he had gone into marriage in a blaze of lust and found himself trapped and left to look elsewhere when the passion curdled.

Will learned to live together with his wife despite the loss of lust and decline of love because the demands of both parenthood and respectability enforced it 400 years ago.  Weinstein lives in an era when a marriage is not expected to last beyond the willingness of both partners to remain in it, which is often quite a short period in Hollywood.  I am not certain that this freedom actually makes us happier in the long run but, equally, I am certain that it is not one which we are going to give up anytime soon.  While most people do not lead totally chaste lives, most of us eventually realise that love is more important than sex in the end. 

There was no love, however, in the various sexual encounters this powerful man instigated and carried out in various hotel rooms with the knowledge and connivance of people unable to stand up to his appetites.  While he might lay off for a little while if a revelation threatened him he always returned to using his position and power to exploit women with his unwanted and unwelcome advances.  What seems most chilling about these episodes was how he seemed to get turned on by the fear they generated in the women.  While they might not technically qualify as rape in a court of law, they give us an insight into the mind of the rapist, turned on by fear and power rather than tenderness and companionship.

So, another month, another sexual scandal. I felt that Mark Sampson, who I wrote about last month, had been harshly dealt with.  He was a successful coach with a taste for tasteless ‘jokes’ who had the genuine support of many of his players but fell out with one of them.  He may be able to rebuild his career, whereas Weinstein’s reputation is surely too toxic for a comeback now.  In fact, I would rather be almost anyone on the planet than Harvey Weinstein right now. Still, this has to be said despite his good work as a producer, it serves him right.

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Today - 31st October 2017 - is the 500th anniversary of Luther's famous proclamation which started the Reformation.  No more sex scandals - I will write about this next month.

Edwin Lerner