21st century child abuse

Well, profuse apologies but I’m still too bogged down with real life to get back to serious blogging.

But I couldn’t go without noting the kerfuffle this week when Tynwald approved the merger of the Isle of Man Adoption Society (still better known locally as the Manx Churches Adoption Welfare Society) with the Isle of Man Children’s Centre, thus also amalgamating the island’s fostering and adoption services (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/details/53740/bishop-s-concern-at-closure-of-iom-adoption-society and http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/bishop-doubts-over-charity-merger-1-5517942 ).

As reports say, it only squeaked through after the Bishop (who is honorary president of IOMAS/MCAWS) complained the Society’s directors had not consulted him and so the Tynwald vote was the first he’d heard of it. In turn, our Minister of Social Neglect was keen to point out that MCAWS management themselves had requested the handover of functions in order to close the society.

The immediate problem with this version of events is that, by law, the directors must formally announce the proposed closure meeting by public notice, and simultaneously give written notice to all concerned parties at least 21 days beforehand, so that the Bishop should have known of the meeting and resolution to close. Any ordinary member of the public who worries about such matters would have known, as it appeared in the local press in the public notices – where corporate crooks bury the other evidence of international scams being closed down if anyone can be bothered to look.

There is also the control of MCAWS by the Anglican Synod. In theory, any interested person of good character could offer their services as a director: in practice (and I have this from past attendees of such meetings) a private Synod meeting chooses suitable candidates. ‘Volunteers’ are ‘coincidentally’ proposed and seconded at the AGM and an election follows, conveniently never with more candidates for office than posts. How, then, could a MCAWS board exist unless very much under the thumb of the Bishop?

Another issue is the reasons for the closure.

Insiders suggest the government discreetly told MCAWS it would no longer fund separate adoption and fostering charities. This seems likely as the Minister for Social Neglect (another religious zealot, of course, though in his case a devotee of Rome’s new link to 1980’s Argentinean fascism) clearly demonstrates he believes there are ‘deserving’ and ‘feckless’ poor, and is gradually depriving all such sinners (be they old, disabled or simply too badly educated for employment) of the public support expected in a civilized society.

Then there is the matter of a Catholic adoption agency in Leeds, whose continued refusal to allow gay couples to adopt has been vetoed by the courts at every level of appeal. Following our Civil Partnership Act, MCAWS (one suspects with gritted teeth and rictus grins) have duly made it known that applications from straight or gay couples, divorcees or single people would all be considered without prejudice. Again, I’ve been discreetly told that gays and other such delinquents might have to have their applications considered by the island’s  moral guardians of religious rightness, but in practice would never be successful.

Sadly, though, this may not be quite the victory for common sense it appears.

Partly because from the 1980’s (when Manx government childcare was noticeably ‘dumbed down’ by cheap evangelical alternatives to trained professionals) through to recent years (with seminars being led by new age charismatics with no academic or professional pedigree) childcare on the island is itself something of a foster home for wacky ideas. 

Partly because the Children’s Centre is yet another ghetto for the ‘ladies who lunch’. You probably know the score here. Committees are formed by bored rich women whose husbands spend their days diverting foreign aid from the poor towards the offshore accounts of developing world dictators in return for control of natural resources by Western corporations. Funds get raised at glittering social soirees, and, inevitably, are spent with more regard for the latest fad than solid academic research.

Hardworking parents of lesser means find it ironic that while these legends in their own lunchtimes harangue the rest of us about raising children, their own offspring - deprived of parental attention - become the best customers of drug dealers or the first in line to hand their bank accounts to the venal leaders of dead-eyed cults. I say this having personally helped several Manx ’trustafarians’ (in the absence of parental support – or even interest) to escape such fates.

So, the failure to help troubled kids find loving families passes from religious flat-earthers to the kind of vacuous trophy wives who take horoscopes and new age twaddle seriously.

And this is progress?

Release your Inner Llama

By now I’ve got used to the Isle of Man College running ‘spiritual’adult education nightclasses with titles on the lines of ‘Release your Inner Llama’. It’s not as if Manx college tutors are actually capable of teaching adults anything these days anyway. In fact their current range of ‘vocational’ courses illustrates exactly how low government expectations of the current and future workforce are.

But as the college brochure was chucked through the door today I had a quick glimpse to see and giggle at what wacko delights were on offer. And as ever, tucked amongst flower arranging and ‘how to turn-a-computer-on’ type offerings was the now usual quasi-Buddhist emptyheadedness for bored rich thickos, plus a sprinkling of other new age psychobabble such as Reiki. A new departure was giving over to numerous, equally ill advised (not to say imbecilic), explorations of ‘Celtic Christianity’ the chapel that came with the premises for the now disgraced ‘business school’.Um… yes…. quite!

So far, so stupid. Far more serious is the involvement of Care for the Family, puppet of infamous christocentric UK hate group CARE, in a course on ‘Alcohol Awareness’ run by a governmental advisor on that very topic. I have little doubt they will also poke their homophobic noses into another course, theoretically on drug awareness. I also doubt if either course, even without CftF’s ‘help’, would stand up to critical analysis. After all, nothing else produced by the Chief Minister’s Task Farce on Alcohol and Drugs has.
That might be because the Christian fundamentalist careerists who first proposed the project to a previous Chief Minister would never allow anyone who might have an academic or professional background in such topics to get involved in the first place. Apart from anything else, an informed person with even a modicum of social responsibility would be obliged to tell politicians what a dumb idea it is to give public money intended to prevent drug and alcohol dependency to those who deal in nastier alternatives.  Alternatives which screw up families and make weak people socially and financially dependent on free-loaders for far more years than bargain basement vodka or heroin.

Too lazy to even poke fun properly

Excuse my recent apathy. I wish I had a good excuse – but the truth is that (a) I decided that I cannot be bothered with ‘serious’ topics any more and (b) nothing much in the Manx news or even accounts of international religious idiocy has tickled my ribs recently.
The thing is, I once believed the local newspaper (and possibly even regional radio) could hold up a mirror to the community, chronicling its ups and downs, shining a vital light on dark doings and so on.
I now accept that this is no longer possible - at least in the Isle of Man. The local media is nothing but a nonsense box, reduced to reproducing the inanities of those who feed it most. So from now on I intend to leave ‘real’ journalism to those who live in delusions of a real world, and concentrate instead on surreally reporting the odd, the hilarious and the genuinely interesting.
However, the first details of one of the most cringeworthy weekends in the annual Manx leisure calendar have just been released (see http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=44436) and I cannot resist a quick smirk.
Oh dear!
Pardon my hilarity, but there is just something about the upper middle classes trying (and failing) so desperately to be hip that brings out the old Class War punk in me. I must have worked with more than my fair share of Tarquins and Gemimas in the Finance Sector over the last decade or so, and the funniest thing about them is their deluded leisure hour dabblings in everything from alternative therapy to world music.
Ahhh! Bless their cotton-wool brains. Where would the Manx New Age be without so many over privileged halfwits to keep it rolling around like an (upper) crusty full of bargain bin scrumpy?
I would poke fun – relentlessly – but by the oddest coincidence the Daily Mash has been taking aim at a similar target (see http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/new-festival-aimed-directly-at-twats-201203285064/ ), so I can just go and do something else instead.

Worried? Me?

I wasn’t going to blog this week, mainly because I was told to get out of the way and read a book while Management and Junior Management did something important.
Problem was, a joke about busybodies in the book connected with some things I read this week, one story about a completely bonkers fundraising initiative involving a charity known to my friends and relatives as ‘Hangman’s Rope’ (because every time the public give them further licence to act, something else innocent dies), and another an ‘advisory’ evening on a health matter where, on the face of it, yet another bunch of rich, superstitious new-agers want parents to disregard good medical advice because of something they heard from a friend of a friend who read it on the back of a Tofu wrapper. Both the head-scratchingly inane ‘fundraiser’ and the new age unhealth warning demonstrate the continued persistence of that irritating phenomena, the Manx busybody of independent means.
Funnily enough, many such press releases enter cyberspace due to a once very strait-laced hack whose idea of ‘edgy’ used to be wearing a pink Argyle pattern sweater to play golf. Then, some years back, he got it into his head to try hallucinogenic mushrooms, which led to such a bout of soul-searching that he signed up for life with an evangelical cult. This, I humbly submit, may explain a lot of things.
But this is the problem now that Britain no longer has an empire. Once upon a time village idiots (especially interfering, pathological do-gooders who engage in charity work), could, after adolescence, be dispatched to the colonies to boss around natives until they either got killed by beri-beri or lead poisoning (courtesy of a bullet or two from an exasperated native employee or spouse).
True, those who miraculously survived sometimes retired here and could even bring the empire’s problems home by going into politics.
I can think of one who was so dull-witted he was unemployable here, even by the church which gave steady employment to his relatives, and was dispatched in utter desperation by his family to Kenya. There he failed dismally to make his mark or even get into white mischief, then came home once there were no older relatives to stop him and eventually drifted into a career as a political deformer from which he was only recently and forcibly retired, and where his weekly questions were so pointless and his blustering speeches so grey they made even his father’s sermons seem inspiring.
Another, similarly dispatched in his youth further East, rose to the top of what Interpol used to consider the most corrupt police force in the former British Empire – apparently not just without a stain on his character but without even noticing that his real employers were the Triads. No surprise, then, that he also went into Manx politics upon retirement, where he was highly respected for his work on issues of morality, law and order.
But that was in another era, when there were still far-off countries where a pompous (if semi-literate) buffoon could be safely absorbed into some minor regional bureaucracy. These days the only market for such chumps is Eastern Europe, because a century or more of colonial mistakes have made Africa, India and the Far East immune to even the most virulent forms of British idiocy, and as US tele-evangelists pump far more dirty money into such countries than puny Brit godbotherers, even ‘charity work’ with demented evangelical outfits is drying up.
But always remember the Romanians saw off Ceacescu. In fact, from my relatives I know of a long history going all the way back to Vlad The Impaler of unwanted interlopers being disposed of in colourful ways, and greedy illiterates with political ambitions ending up in unmarked graves then being quickly forgotten by their former near neighbours and collaborators. So even siphoning off EU aid to build substandard cow shacks passed off as ‘sheltered housing’ and ‘schools’ in the hope the roof stays on long enough for the tourist trade to pick up and the site to be sold on for ‘redevelopment’ no longer seems like a safe career option.
The real difficulty will be when the latest generation of demented ‘social reformers’ come home for good.
Their colonial era predecessors left in times of Manx economic hardship and retired to an island of full employment where the economy was bolstered by a growing offshore finance industry. The new generation were unemployable here even in such good times, which was precisely why they were packed off in the first place.
If they return to an island where employment and the economy are both far less certain, then even their superstitious relatives and chums in the public sector will never find paid employment for all of them. And as they are demonstrably dumber than any ‘at risk’ subculture they might be let loose ‘advising’ to, one struggles to think of any career choice other than living off the state at an even lower level of subsistence than, say, an evangelical minister with a franchise from a US parent church.
I might worry a lot if I could stop laughing long enough.
You are welcome to try both, possibly even at once.

Broomsticks on the lawn?

As well as turf wars with a rival Batshit protection racket and worries that government departments looking for cuts could check if several ‘rehabilitation schemes’ (all running at the same time in the same room) might, perhaps, also be serving the same few (often fictitious) ‘clients’, Douglas’s biggest faith-based drain on public funds may have a new threat on the doorstep – literally!
Something I spotted outside the Broadway Baptist Church has me both amused and intrigued. Smack bang outside the front door this week was a car with a bumper sticker reading “My other car is a broomstick”.
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if the kind of fundie headbangers who solemnly teach the dimmest parents and social workers that teenagers in black T-shirts are trainee Satanists were under some sort of psychic attack from real local witches? Though the local witch and warlock community are almost as batty as the Baptists, and equally wrapped up in ‘timeless’ folk myths of recent – often urban – origin.
Take their grandaddy Gerald Gardner, who ran the old witchcraft museum at Castletown.
Gardner arguably kickstarted the whole modern witchcraft phenomena with a 1950’s potboiler, Witchcraft Today, opportunistically published just after the repeal of the old witchcraft laws (repealed on the grounds that nobody in the mid-20th century believed such old wives tales). Gardnerians are like the High Anglican version of witches, and funnily enough Gardner had also been both a church warden and a high ranking freemason – so not exactly an anti-establishment figure.
The other hilarious clunker for those who’d like to see him as re-introducing ‘timeless’ Manx tradition is that his book was based on his personal experiences in a New Forest coven and (now discredited) theories of Margaret Murray about ‘the Old Religion’, sexed up with some supplementary material from Alistair Crowley. It’s even alleged Gardner bought his impressive sounding rank within OTO (Crowley’s cult) at a time when that other shady shaman was little more than a penniless dipso about to pop his clogs in another run-down seaside resort, Brighton.
There is a well documented tradition of Manx faith-healers (known as "fairy doctors"), for example in various local Edwardian publications, though they were always at pains to stress they weren’t ‘proper’ witches, just folk with enough plant knowledge to concoct something for your lame horse or hens who weren’t laying.
Funnily enough, the nearest to a ‘witch craze’ we’ve had over here was when the local fundies started offering ‘help’ in case kids were dabbling with ouija boards or might get tempted to sell their souls to Satan while going door-to-door singing Hop Tu naa (Manx version of Halloween dressing up, well before Trick or Treat was invented).
This was a bit of a bad joke when the only known cases of the problem were sessions which had happened on the premises of evangelical churches in the 1980’s, and involved some of the same ‘youth workers’ who a few years later were offering ‘help’. Few other teenagers could have been bothered to waste their time on such twaddle, which might explain why most went on to decent jobs while the superstitious minority still beg public funds or flog woo-woo to the impressionable rich and thick.

Manx myths - buy one, get one free

Barry over at the Freethinker blog has a hilarious story today (see http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/11/26/did-jesus-ever-visit-britain/).
A Dr Gordon Strachan, who lectures on the history of architecture at Edinburgh University, is reviving the old ‘Jesus came to Britain’ legends. In fact he’s not only recently written a book about it (which explains the publicity), but the book’s inspired a recently released film entitled And Did Those Feet? (which explains the other publicity). Oh, and when Dr Strachan isn’t lecturing he’s ministering for the Church of Scotland (which explains a lot of things).
I dread to think what’s going to happen if Manx Heritage or the Tourist Department get inspired by this twaddle.
You see, in the late 1980’s there was brief talk of jumping on the ‘research’ of another barmy academic with an even loopier theory. In that case the academic was American, and the ‘theory’ centred on the idea that the Isle of Man was the Avalon of Arthurian myth, and that King Arthur might be buried here.
Thankfully I’ve long forgotten the small detail, but what I do know is that the Tourist Board (as it then was) bought it lock, stock and barrel and even ran an exercise on how the legend could be flogged, with the help of the academic, to the more gullible of her countrymen.
Two things put a stop to that nonsense. One was agitated pleading to politicians behind closed doors by an honourable local historian to the effect that, rather than bring tourists rushing here, it would send a signal to the world that the Manx were either totally dishonest or certifiably mad. The other was the Lockerbie bombing, following which Americans and their money stayed home for a while.
The thing that worries me is that honourable Manx academics may now be extinct and neither honour nor common sense have been seen in the Tourist Department within living memory. In fact, judging from the spread of Freedom to Fester fever, telling fairy tales while going about with our eyes closed and singing ‘La La La’ to drown out the last voices of dissent is the new traditional (and government underwritten) Manx way of life.
We should not be surprised at this. As the Anglo-Indian academics Bhikhu Parekh and Homi K. Bhabha pointed out at the time of the Satanic Verses saga, the liberal mistake is to take fundamentalists at their word and believe fundamentalism is steeped in tradition, when in fact it is a current and pragmatic reaction to the modern world by folk no longer fit to run it. To be blunt, bullshit merchants who know there is a sucker born every minute, and that all such BS merchants need do for a regular income is embroider some myth, however ludicrous, the suckers would like to believe.

Beware rabbits in waistcoats

After reading some of the PR twaddle produced by Manx government departments and drifting into the local press I have to declare a state of national emergency. This island is now being run solely for the benefit of whimsical geriatrics who collect pictures of rabbits in waistcoats.
Take this (http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Tea-room-plan-for-Fairy.5263876.jp ) for example. Sentamu’s Apprentice has chuntered about fairies, the Tourist Department chunters about fairies, now some finance sector dropout wants to run a café where you can talk to them.
Or maybe the café is for the fairies too. Whatever! The owner is away with them anyway.
Then you have the godbothers getting Tourist Department help to try and get in touch with their Celtic roots (see http://www.gov.im/fsc/ViewNews.gov?page=lib/news/mnh/candlelitpilgrim.xml&menuid=11570).
For the benefit of the non-Manx, the keills were the chapels built by the first Christian monks in remote hilly areas. For the best part of a thousand years they were happily abandoned except by a few sheep or the odd hippie having a sly toke.
I blame Clannad myself. Until they did that spacey Robin Hood theme music Celtic traditionalists were content with folkdancing and incest: now new age mystic malarkey is an international industry. With all that money for old…….knotwork(!) on offer no wonder the churches are in there with a collecting bucket.
Oh well, if a bunch of superstitious crinklies want to wander the hills at night in rain and fog getting inspired but soaked I suppose that is their business. Maybe there’s a niche tourist market for ‘extreme praying’. Let’s just hope our emergency services won’t be too tied up rescuing bonkers biblebashers when saner folk need an ambulance.