Double Happiness

by Joe Bennett

  Pop songs are emotional ephemera, stressing the transitory inflamed emotions of youth, of which by far the most musically celebrated is the urge to disseminate genetic material, an urge that goes by the name of love. Put the lyrics down on paper without the shelter of a tune and most are starveling things, which shrivel to nothing under the faintest critical gaze.

  Run through the frequencies on the radio, however, and you will see that perhaps 90 per cent of commercial stations are devoted to them. They are there to bathe us in soft feelings, to cheer us up, to keep us going, to prolong our adolescence, and to present us, washed, pink and emotionally vulnerable, to the advertiser. For the purpose of a commercial radio station, as of any commercial enterprise, is to make money. And the station’s only source of money is advertising.

  A kid I once taught went on to become a DJ for a commercial station. He developed, as they all do, an upbeat style of delivery. However gloomy he might feel, at the microphone he was always Mr Happy from Happytown, and he became successful.

  He was on air when the planes flew into the World Trade Centre. He watched the events on a television in the studio and he could barely bring himself to broadcast. The music still played, the ads still ran, but he said that the whole edifice from which he made his living was exposed for what it was, a veneer of synthetic delusion. He’s not a DJ any more.

  16

  O sing of His grace

  I attended a state school, but it was modelled on the traditional private school. It was for boys only. We were divided into houses, even though we went home each night. Everyone studied Latin for the first couple of years at least, there was a boisterously sentimental school song, we faffed around in uniform on Friday afternoons doing paramilitary stuff, and though there was no chapel and no chaplain, there was token Anglicanism in the weekly school assembly, consisting of a prayer, a reading and a hymn. At the conclusion of which the Jews and Catholics were allowed in for the holy recitation of the sports results. (They had to stand.)

  I’ve forgotten the sports results, though they mattered at the time, but I can remember quite a few of the hymns, which didn’t. No one paid the least attention to the lyrics, of course, which was as well because they constituted an intellectual insult.

  ‘All things bright and beautiful’ was not the worst of them, but it will do to illustrate a few of the notions that the church tries to inveigle into young minds by putting words to music. ‘All things bright and beautiful’, we sang, or murmured, or simply stood through in silence.

  All creatures great and small,

  All things wise and wonderful,

  The Lord God made them all.

  We’re back at Disneyfication. Nature consists only of nice animals, the bright, the beautiful, the wonderful and the wise (owls, I presume). ‘Each little flower that opens’, but not deadly nightshade; ‘each little bird that sings’, but no mention of vultures. And god made them.

  A god who’s responsible for the good stuff but not the bad is a staple of religious propaganda, and a remarkably durable one. When Gaddafi was killed we saw film of Libyans firing bullets into the air and shouting, ‘Allahu Akbar’, god is great. Fine, but what was the great god up to in the preceding decades as Gaddafi’s thugs hauled dissidents into his torture houses where the walls were too thick for the screams to escape? Did god condone this? If so he’s not good. Or was he powerless to stop it? If so he’s not great.

  You can see the same thing on the rugby fields of New Zealand. Quite a few professional rugby players are Christian, many of them Polynesian. Some wear a wrist band with a cross on it. Often when a player scores a try he will kiss the wristband and raise his eyes to the heavens in thanks. God got him over the line. But not once have I seen a player knock the ball on or miss a tackle or concede a vital penalty and then kiss his wrist and look at the sky, whether in gratitude or puzzlement or anger. The player’s failures, it seems, are his own doing. His successes, god’s. God, to change the sporting image, is on a very good wicket.

  After the Christchurch earthquake of February 2011, a Canadian woman was interviewed on television. She had been touring the cathedral when the quake happened. Stone fell around her and she was lucky to get out alive. She was understandably upset. But what she deduced from her survival was that ‘someone was looking after me’. I can think of better ways of looking after people than visiting an earthquake on them. It’s as if someone were to set fire to your house and then expect to be thanked for rescuing you. I also wonder why god chose to look after this woman but let more than 180 others die.

  But let’s keep singing in the hall of Brighton Hove and Sussex Grammar School circa 1969.

  He gave us eyes to see them,

  And lips that we might tell,

  How great is God Almighty,

  Who hath made all things well.

  God has not made all things well. This week I learned by email that a former employer of mine whom I’ll call Peter, a wise, tolerant, gentle and generous man whom I admire beyond words and to whom I owe a great deal, has been diagnosed with cancer.

  According to this versified propaganda, the reason Peter was endowed with lips was not for him to speak kindly and wisely to people, which he does, nor yet to encourage people when they feel weak, which he does, nor yet to provoke thought in them, which he does, nor even to give voice to the thoughts that brew in his own curious inquisitive mind. It was to praise the lord ‘who hath made all things well’. All things, by definition, includes cancer.

  And if any apologist for the said lord wants to suggest to me right now that Peter’s premature illness is part of some mysterious divine plan that it is not for us to question, then I shall bite my own lip and walk swiftly away for fear that I might otherwise swing a fist.

  ‘All things bright and beautiful’ consists entirely of assertions, assertions that don’t so much lack supporting evidence as contradict every scrap of evidence that exists. But the sentiments expressed are more than wilful, Pollyannaish, self-delusion. They constitute an adult attempt to brainwash children, though admittedly a feeble one that failed.

  The hymn was written in the nineteenth century at the height of the Empire, when Britain was growing rich on the exploitation of subjugated peoples in distant lands. If the natives ever got uppity, in went the navy, invariably with god’s reps on board to urge them on. The English upper-middle classes had never had it so good. And they were keen to keep it that way. Here’s the sixth verse.

  The rich man in his castle,

  The poor man at his gate,

  God made them, high or lowly,

  And ordered their estate.

  It’s simply a gung-ho plug for the class structure, for the social status quo. If god had made people rich or poor it was clearly sinful to try to change things.

  Had we been given these lyrics to read in English, ideally with Jack Smithies, the best of all teachers, we’d have shredded them in seconds. Just as we would have had fun in a meteorology class with this verse from ‘O Worship the King’ (which has a cracking tune).

  O tell of His might,

  O sing of His grace!

  Whose robe is the light,

  Whose canopy space.

  His chariots of wrath

  The deep thunderclouds form,

  And dark is His path

  On the wings of the storm.

  I got an excellent education. It was founded on the exercise of human reason, the faculty that has lifted us out of the swamp, doubled our life span, brought us countless boons, discovered what actually causes thunderclouds, and may even, one hopes, cure Peter’s cancer. The weekly hymn was an attempt to numb that faculty through music. While the education we received was implicitly based on the idea that independent thought made things better, the aim of the hymn was to draw us into a flock, unthinking, uncritical, dependent, meek, obedient and cringing.

  I have just discovered that the author of ‘O Worship the King’ was Robert Grant, a devout Scottish lawyer and politician who became
Governor of Bombay in the early nineteenth century. I bet Bombay was thrilled. Grant’s father, similarly devout, had been prominent in the British East India Company when, as now, there was a problem with China. The British were buying vast quantities of tea, silk and porcelain from China, but were selling the Chinese nothing. The imbalance of trade was ruinous.

  The British East India Company’s solution to this problem was to establish a monopoly on Indian opium and then to smuggle the stuff into China. They did so in defiance of Chinese wishes, Chinese law and any sense of fair play. The company, which maintained its own private army and which was led by the devout, knew exactly what it was doing. It sought to balance its books by making drug addicts of vast numbers of Chinese people. When the Chinese objected, in went the gunboats.

  The lust for power and money is a commonplace of human life. Any study of the history of our species cannot avoid the conclusion that religious faith has made little, if any, difference. Indeed the distinction between religious authority and political authority and military authority has been effectively nil. All forms of authority want a populace that is both cowed and servile. The commonest way of going about getting it is to establish an authority figure so potent that he is venerated and that the thought of challenging his authority is effectively unthinkable.

  The simultaneous political and religious uses of music to placate and indoctrinate the mob come together most obviously in national anthems. The dirge that is the New Zealand anthem, for example, begins by invoking the ‘God of nations’. I have never heard anyone question the image. Here’s a god, and presumably a Christian one, concerned with the petty groupings that his wayward children establish. The song then entreats this god to ‘hear our voices’. Well now, if he can’t hear our voices, then there is no point in using our voices to ask him to. And if he can hear our voices, there is also no point in asking him to.

  The song then urges him to take sides and defend our free land. How is not made clear. He is specifically instructed to ‘guard Pacific’s triple star’, though I have yet to meet anyone who can tell me what this is. (And just in case he can’t hear us, or prefers, after weighing things up, to defend someone else’s triple star, we maintain an army, navy and air force. We thus demonstrate the same distrust in divine power as the far more faithful United States, who are constantly urging god to ‘bless America’ but who maintain a colossal military arsenal in case he forgets.)

  In short the official anthem of our modern, multi-ethnic, democratic state is an incoherent anachronism, illustrating once again that the use of music permits an astonishing quantity of bullshit to pass unchallenged by the etherized intellect.

  17

  We won

  If no one told you your nationality you’d take a while to find you had one. Observation tells us we’re part of a family and that we live in a village or town. But the idea of being part of a nation seems remote and artificial. And rightly so. Most national boundaries are arbitrary things established by war. Indeed it is only in war that most countries have ever expressed themselves as entities, the only time that they have come together as a one. Until, that is, we got international sport.

  In 2006 England played Portugal in the quarter-final of the Football World Cup. I was on holiday in England and watched the game in a Birmingham living room. The game was decided by penalties. Mark, my host, a successful businessman, father of four and a friend of forty years’ standing, couldn’t watch. He laughed at himself for it, but he couldn’t watch.

  England maintained a fine tradition and lost. After the game I went out into the street to smoke. Birmingham had gone quiet. There was little traffic. No kids were playing in the park across the road. There was, it seemed, a national hush, as the people of England absorbed the catastrophe. Then the silence was broken by a thunderous boom. Just round the corner from Mark’s house stood a bus shelter, one end of which was a frame for advertising, eight foot tall and made of shatter-proof glass. Someone had shattered it. That force required to shatter it bespoke an extraordinary depth of feeling. And extraordinary depth of feeling acts on the bullshitter as the smell of possum acts on my dog.

  When the Moscow Dynamos toured Britain in 1945, George Orwell wrote, ‘Sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will … There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with larger power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.’

  It is only with reluctance that I quibble with Orwell, but nationalism isn’t modern. It may be lunatic but it’s merely tribalism on a grand scale and tribalism has been a stamp of our species, as of other primates, since we evolved. It’s primitive stuff, buried deep in an early and wordless bit of the brain. Which is why it appeals to the bullshitter. It is virtually immune to the assault of reason.

  The modern Olympics are supposed to promote the fraternity of nations through friendly competition. Whether they do or not is uncertain. There are still plenty of wars. What is certain is that they prompt the same tribal feelings as war does. Hitler famously used the 1936 Olympics both to promote Germany in the eyes of the watching world and to foster nationalism in the hearts of the watching Germans. Plenty of bullshitters have followed his lead. Their reasoning is simple. Medals make citizens proud of their country. Proud citizens are more likely to love their leaders and to fight on their behalf if needed. And they are far less likely to rebel. The only tricky bit is winning the medals.

  The totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union and East Germany solved the problem in two ways. Having identified potential champions when they were young, they pumped money into their training, and drugs into their bodies. Such drugs indeed that during the 1960s and 1970s the Olympics became a freak show. Two Russian sisters from that time remain seared on the retina of memory: Tamara and Irina Press. They put the shot and biffed the discus and ran the sprints and did the hurdles, did the hurdles so thoroughly indeed that peasants followed for the kindling. The Press sisters collected swags of medals and were paraded as national heroes. It was only when the international athletic authorities decided to introduce sex testing that the sisters simultaneously decided they’d had enough of running and throwing for their country and retired to the Ukraine to care for their ailing mother.

  (I remember that while the Press sisters were being lauded from Moscow to Vladivostok I was doing my best, as an eleven-year-old, to feel proud of a forty-two-year-old veterinarian who had won gold for Great Britain in the clay-pigeon shooting. I did not succeed.)

  What the Soviets were engaged in was flagrant state-sponsored cheating for the purposes of bolstering a corrupt regime. Everybody knew it. And the Western democracies were so appalled, so outraged, that they followed suit.

  When the Olympics became professional, private enterprise proved every bit as good as communist states at brewing drugs to make athletes bigger, stronger and faster, and Western athletes, being as eager as governments for glory, proved even keener to swallow them. Meanwhile governments use taxpayer money to create athletic scholarships and sports academies, as if these weren’t inherently oxymoronic. The pay-off for the taxpayer is in medals and national pride. There is no pretence that this is not so. In New Zealand the funding of various sports is explicitly tied to the medals they win. They more they get, the more they get.

  The result is a close correlation between the wealth of a nation and its success at the Olympics. And it just so happens that there is a similarly close correlation between the wealth of a nation and the obesity of its citizens. Thus we have the bizarre situation that the fattest nation on earth routinely wins the most prizes for athletic excellence.

  (I have long maintained that there should be two sets of Olympic Games. One would have no drug-testing. If athletes chose to do themselves long-term harm in exchange for short-term glory, so be it. I’d enjoy the spectacle. The other Olympics would involve citizens selected at random from each country’s electoral roll. Because they would
be selected at the last minute, they would have no time to train. You or I could suddenly find ourselves required to take part in the Olympic pole vault. It would be a true test of a country’s state of athletic health, and as Mrs Rasmussen of Taumarunui struggled round the track in the 5000 metres it would make compelling viewing. I’m not sure who’d win this competition (Kenya might be a good bet, though it would struggle in the pool) but I am confident that the States would come last. There might even be deaths on the track. (Think of the ratings.)

  At the most recent Olympics the women’s shot put was won by a New Zealander, Valerie Adams. When she won, the sports commentators and the newsreaders and the politicians reached for the first person plural. We had won gold, they said gleefully. No we hadn’t. Valerie Adams had. The we is ra-ra bullshit. The only thing that the newsreaders, the politicians, the commentators, Ms Adams and I have in common is that we inhabit the same bunch of windy rocks in the South Pacific. I am justified in taking credit for her triumph to precisely the same extent as I am in taking blame for the crimes of the local rapist.

  It is a commonplace to compare international sport with war and it is a legitimate one. The very language of sport, the weary clichés of the commentators, are drenched in militarism: the field of battle, defence and attack, assaulting the line, besieging the goal, throwing everything at them, cutting them down, a barrage of bouncers, potent weapon, shots on target.

  Whenever the Romans won a war they would stage a victory parade in Rome, with the returning heroes fêted and wagonloads of booty being wheeled through the streets to delight the citizens. We do the same with sports teams. Elevated high above the mob whose name they bear, they ride the open-topped bus, bruised from the fight, grinning from the victory, waving to the crowd and taking it in turns to hoist above their heads the silverware they’ve plucked from the grasp of the foreigner, the enemy. Prime ministers invite these heroes to dinner. The country, which has done nothing but sit on a sofa swigging the official beer, is united in self-adulation.