Friday, October 07, 2005
Its not something I suddenly thought up. In fact, its so obvious one might forget or omit to say it. This is that the best western values and culture are worth mentioning and praising in the face od an onslaught of criticism of the West. By that I do not back-against-the-wall negative defensiveness, but defend as in proud.
The obvious false (i.e. unfair) opposition is the heavenly music of Bach, say, as set against the desert silence of the Taliban: silence except for the gentle wafting of the trails of magnetic tape from broken cassettes. We have all seen that on some documentary or short piece of news footage. But it is an image we all might hold in our minds when we are selecting what we think is good about our life and history.
In other words: instead of whining and muling "What have we done wrong for them to hate us?", we must proactively show that we have something worth keeping. I for one love music and feel this is one of the greatest messages we can send to anyone hell bent on a New Caliphate, which is a ridiculous and quite unnecessary change in an increasingly inter-connected world. But asking what our best features is something we should do more of as we puzzle over crises such as the quagmire in Iraq, or the never ending conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Today on BBC Radio 4, Frank Gardiner { 2 }was the guest on Desert Island Discs. There doesn't seem to be a link to the programme yet, probably because it was only aired for the first time this morning, 9 a.m., GMT. As we listen to his Bach selection (he did choose some Arabic singing too, which I will find the name of later, which was beautiful) we must ask ourselves whether this is what it amounts to: Bach or no Bach. Certainly western music won't be played under the rule of the New Caliph. Presumably, since the west is going to blown up to create this new world, the science and technology, art and literature is going too?
Strange that the boys who were brain-washed into murdering innocent people in London on 7/7 were not Arabs, who have legitimate grievances which the West can do a lot to solve, but Asians or West Indians who took to fundamentalist Islam. They would have probably grown up with radios blaring out the pop music of the day, and heard a wide variety of the best of classical music, even if by accident rather than design, through watching TV dramas and films with much good music in the sountrack.
Apart from music there are other good things about our societies which they too could have concentrated on rather than the worst features. It is said ( So what do you have to do to find happiness) that we have evolved a rather negative mind which searched out the worse and gets all miserable in the process.
¶ Friday, October 07, 2005
