Violence in the heart

Not quite death in Ipswich

2007-11-13T17:34:00.000Z

I began the autobiographical element last time: this is something that happened to me in my mid-20s, and I want to slot it into the book after starting the discussion about the vocabulary of violence. In this case, it's really about part of the visual vocabulary of violence, and the trivialising nature of TV and film portrayals of threat.

Ipswich ..

I can honestly say, if you’re going to be arrested at gunpoint, Ipswich is as good a place as any, but the aftercare is crap.

I was coming towards the end of my time with UCCF, and my PhD was finished. I’d got a job interview with the local authority in Ipswich, and it was an all day affair with committee exercises, drafting exercises and a lot of beach volleyball.

Ipswich is quite a journey. It took a good part of the day to travel down from Scotland. I’d never been there before, so when I’d checked into the bed and breakfast I went out into the town to explore.

I spent a couple of hours finding my way around and trying to get a feel for the place. I looked in to estate agents to see what sort of place we could think of buying if I got the job. I found the local authority HQ. By the time I’d done all that it was early evening, and I went for something to eat.

There are two main streets in Ipswich that run parallel to each other, one higher than the other; between them is a warren of lanes with shops and cafes. I went into an Italian place on one of these narrow lanes and ate an uneventful meal. It was early evening and the place was quiet. I ate the meal, paid for it .. I still remember the cash desk clearly, and the bland, yellowish light in the restaurant. I stepped out of the doorway into the lane and turned to my right, up the slope towards the higher of the two main streets.

I was just out of the doorway when someone shouted ‘Stop!’. I remember I’d been looking down at the ground by the doorway. I looked up and saw a large man in black, three metres from me, pointing a handgun at me. A little behind him and slightly to one side was another man in black, pointing a rifle at me. I remember the rifle was elderly, with the stock made of mid-brown wood, like an old Lee Enfield. There was a man with two large alsatian dogs. I can still see them rearing up on their hind legs, but I don’t remember them making any noise.

My first thought was that I’d stumbled into some kind of hostage situation, and they were telling me to take cover. There was a narrow gap between the building I’d just left and the next building, so I darted into it.

‘Come out!’, they shouted.

‘Who, me?’, I asked, baffled. I don’t think, by that point, that I was afraid, so much as confused.

‘Yes, you, come out now!’ I remember the anger in their voices, as well as what I now realise must have been fear.

I edged out of the gap, back into the lane, and they seemed to have moved closer.

‘Lie down’.

I lay down.

‘Spread your arms and legs’. Well, you do. By now I was frightened.

At that point, I remember craning my neck upwards to look at the first policeman, the one with the handgun. As I looked up, he seemed to be about three feet away. I was looking straight into the barrel of the gun, and it seemed like a cannon. The gun was black, but in the lights it shone, except for the circle of the muzzle, which was a huge disk of matt black.

‘If you make one move, I’ll shoot you’, he said. It was loud and clear. It wasn’t a shout. It focused the jumble of thoughts and feelings into one acute sensation of fear.

Then came the thought that I wasn’t frightened of dying. I remember thinking that this was what the gospel was about, taking away the fear of death. Now, at 51, terrified of dying, but almost as frightened of living, it’s hard to imagine being that person again.

I was convinced I was about to die. I can still experience the sensation, an imagined thing, of bullets burrowing through me. I imagined three shots, and visualised them as they entered around my back and shoulders and burrowed down through my torso like whirling lead drills.

Some years later I visited the firearms unit in Tayside police’s headquarters in Dundee. I met their armourer and he gave me Handguns 101. He dismantled a revolver for me, a Smith and Wesson .38, probably the same model that the officer used who arrested me. He took a Glock semi-automatic apart for me too. I fired both on the range. He de-headed a round for me, showed me the powder, the bullet … and explained about ‘over-penetration’. I thank God I hadn’t known about over-penetration when I was arrested, but of course, I learned, and it doesn’t help with the memories.

‘Over-penetration’ is when the round passes through the person it hits, and then endangers the lives of others nearby, who might be innocent bystanders, or other police officers. Military weapons are still supposed to use a jacketed round, with a thin layer of hard metal on the outside to stop the bullet deforming. That keeps the bullet to its original relatively narrow diameter, and also keeps it tending to pass straight on through tissue. This is one of the great ironies which arises from ideas like ‘the just war’, or the belief that states will honour international conventions. You’re supposed to not harm your enemy more than necessary.

In policing situations, an unjacketed round is usual, often a hollowpoint round. As the armourer explained to me, it begins to deform before it even hits the body, simply as it passes through the clothing. When it hits the body, the lead flattens and spreads, so that very rapidly what is passing through the tissue is a randomly tumbling splatted blob of metal. It directly impacts more tissue, and its passage is more turbulent. The bullet typically stays inside the person it hits which means that all of the energy of the shot has been absorbed by that person’s body.

It’s hard to explain how that cold, drenching wash of fear could co-exist with calm, but somehow it did. I remember that, but when I revisit the event, I remember that I was calm, I remember the internal dialogue telling me that I would be OK if I died … I remember that I felt calm. But what I re-experience is the fear.

Moments after I froze on those words ‘I will shoot you’, I heard someone running up the slope, felt my legs kicked wider apart and my hands pulled back behind my back. I was cuffed, with my hands pointing up to the back of my head and my wrists close together. The pain in my wrists, elbows and shoulders was considerable, a feeling that all the joints were being dislocated, and the cuffs were biting hard into my wrists. I remember complaining about it as I was being driven to the police station and being given a fairly rough answer. It was the one element of gratuitous, sadistic cruelty that night. I remember expecting to have the shit kicked out of me, but it never happened.

I’d had a document case with me, and that had been kicked away from me by the guy who cuffed me. Then they’d marched me down the lane into the lower of the two main streets. A couple of hundred yards of the road were cordoned off, with barriers made up of police vehicles. There were blue flashing lights everywhere and there were crowds behind the barriers. I was being displayed. I was marched for some distance across the brightly lit arena that had been created, and pushed into a police car for the ride back to the station. Sirens all the way. Even at the time it was obvious that this display was unnecessary. Once I was cuffed and immobilised there’s no reason why a vehicle couldn’t have been brought right to the end of the lane. I could have been in the car and away with no parade. I remember being held forward of the two officers who marched me to the car; held firmly, but pushed forward like a trophy.

The streets must have been blocked off from the moment I went into the diner. I was in there at least 40 minutes, probably longer. There was plenty of time for the press to be on the scene and there must have been photographers in the crowd. Presumably at that point the police were certain they’d got the right man, and they wanted the publicity.

I was never told I was under arrest, never cautioned. I was booked in, pockets emptied, shoelaces and belt taken, put in a cell.

When they started to interview me … small, dirty little room with a cheap formica table, a window in the wall behind the two officers – straight off TV … they asked me who I was, where I was from, and what I was doing in Ipswich. I told them about the job interview and they looked at the document case There was the letter inviting me for interview, the list of bed and breakfast places, the expenses form, the map of the town that I’d been using … I’m sure they knew already that they’d got the wrong guy. I told them about the town I lived in. ‘Who can we ring to check this out’ … I gave them the number of the local station, and the name of a friend who was a probationer in the police. ‘Do you know any more police officers we can ring?’. I said, ‘Yes, one. His name’s Alec Morrison. He’s the Queen’s Inspector of Constabulary for Scotland.’ He’d been Chief Constable of Grampian when I was in Aberdeen, and a member of the Free Church when I was its Assistant Missioner. He was the only other police officer I could think of by name at that point. I don’t think they rang him.

The atmosphere did lighten, however. They explained why they’d lifted me. A guy had been doing building societies in the area. He’d phone the branch manager and say, ‘I’m visiting your branch in a few days; if there’s any trouble, I know where you live’, and he’d give details of the manager’s family. When he did the branch he carried a sawn off shotgun, which he fired into the ceiling to show it was real. He carried it in a black leather document case. They showed me a photofit of the guy and he was my double.

Someone in one of the estate agents had recognised me from the photofit, and called it in. Estate agents and building societies are in the same part of town. The police had been following me for a couple of hours before they lifted me. They’d seen me consulting the street map, obviously checking out getaway options. They’d seen the document case with the gun in it. And I was the very spit.

It was about there that they gave me an insight into the Met. A lot of their crime, they said, came from London. It wasn’t too long a drive. They suspected that I, or my double, was from London. ‘But we can’t trust the Met’, they said. ‘Corrupt, through and through.’ The normal deal was, if someone needed arresting, and he lived outside their area, then get the local police to lift the lad and ship him up to Ipswich. Except, if it was in London, the Metropolitan police would mess it up. Evidence, such as drugs, would go missing. Procedures would not be followed. Cases were consistently being thrown out by the courts, and the understanding was that inducements had been offered to Met officers to ensure the aforementioned outcome. ‘If it was the Met’, they said, and laughed, ‘you’d be dead.’ I believe I smiled. It was around the time that the Met had shot Stephen Waldorf for the act of sitting in a car in traffic. Having been hit five times, Waldorf fell from the open door of his car. An armed officer pressed his gun to Waldorf’s face, between his eyes, and said ‘Okay, cocksucker’, before pulling the trigger. Fortunately for Waldorf, the gun was empty, so the officer had to be content with pistol whipping him.

They took me back to the bed and breakfast and searched the room to be on the safe side, but by then it was just for form. No cuffs, chatty, friendly. Jokes. How I laughed. Back to the station, and a brief apology for disrupting my evening. ‘Do you fancy a pint?’, and they took me into the station bar. I remember drinking Guinness.

They offered to phone the local authority the next morning and tell them what had happened. They kept their word. I was asked would I like to do the interview later and have a day to recover. I just wanted to get home. All three of the one-on-one interviews that took place during the day were dominated by ‘Wow! What happened? What was it like!!’ I hadn’t had a wink of sleep the night before; simply hadn’t come close to sleep … I remember the couple in the next room shagged twice during the night. Cheap bed and breakfast, thin walls. Good luck to them. By the end of the interview day I was close to collapse, but I did actually finish the exercises. It was a goner from the start.

As we stood in the police station bar exchanging small talk, I remember it all feeling a bit surreal. It must have been around midnight and the bar was quiet. I think there was a sense of oddness partly because, although the decor was different, the vibe in the bar was not unlike the vibe in the diner before they lifted me. I know now that part of the reason it was so quiet in the diner was because the area had been closed off and no genuine punters had been able to enter. I know that at least one of the people in the diner was a police officer, part of the team that had been following me.

The press were interested, they said. It was the first time the centre of Ipswich had been sealed off and armed officers visibly deployed, so there was a lot of interest in the town generally. Ipswich is a small town.

‘We’d prefer it if you didn’t talk to the press’, they said. I didn’t greatly wish to talk to anyone. The urge to get home, to get back to the warren, was immense. There was no explicit threat, but it was clear that they seriously didn’t want me to talk to the press, and I was quick to say OK.

I remember almost nothing of what was said, apart from the press bit, and this: ‘The guys who arrested you’, they said. ‘the armed guys. They were a fraction of a second away from firing. And they’re still in the showers.’

This was about four hours on from the arrest.

‘They’re still in there, trying to come down. When they come out from under the shower, they’re pouring sweat, still. They’re that wound up.’

When I say that I can sympathise, it’s not sarcasm. They believed me to be the villain. They thought I had a gun and believed I was ready to use it. They thought, when I dodged into that gap between the buildings, that I was gong to fire on them from cover. I talked later with a friend of a friend who was in the armed response unit in Tayside. ‘They should have shot you’, he said. They’d probably blown it when they let me take cover, and knew it. But the bottom line is, they were taking someone on who they believed was ready and able to kill them. For less take home pay than that is really worth. I’d love to know how they feel about it now; if they’ve forgotten the event, or if they remember it with anything like the feelings that I have. I wonder if they still have nightmares.

There was no suggestion of compensation, no suggestion that I might need counselling, still less any offer to arrange or pay for it. I think that once I was off the premises they wanted to forget about me as soon as possible. They’d kept their word about phoning the local authority, I believe the phrase, as it was relayed back to me, was something like ‘He’s had a difficult evening’.

I told a small handful of people when I got back home. For years I didn’t talk about it at all. Couldn’t. Early in my breakdown I had one very vivid nightmare that clearly replayed some of the arrest, only this time, the gun was pushed closer towards my face, and I woke on the hot, orange-white muzzle flash, and the bang, and massive, smashing shock. The state apologises. Go away.

There’s no quick way to deal with this. Here I am, a quarter of a century later, still fucked up, still having nightmares. I wondered about suing the Ipswich police … for what? They were right to act on the phone call from the person who spotted me. The element of display was unnecessary, and that was clearly a senior officer’s decision. The sadism with the handcuffs was probably down to one or two individual officers, whom I wouldn’t have been able to identify, and arguably left no more injuries than handcuffing generally does … minor grazes on my wrists for a few days. Failure to provide proper care for someone subjected to shock and fear, that would have been the basis for any action. But although these legal actions have to be begun quite soon after the event, it’s really only in the last fifteen years that it’s become apparent how badly the event affected me. Everyone probably thought I’d be fine. Me included.

And I wasn’t.

Watching a drama on TV, you often see a scene were someone is compelled to act at gunpoint, or threatened with shooting. Never is it presented as traumatic. There’s fear in the moment, but as soon as that particular setup is over, the character is back to normal.

I’ve spoken to one or two other people who’ve had firearms pointed at them in earnest. In one case, the person concerned discovered subsequently that the gun hadn’t been loaded. So what … he didn’t know that at the time. Their reactions have been very much like mine. I told my story, they told theirs, and we recognised. It’s not remotely like it is on TV. It stays with you all your life.

But for the majority of people who legitimise the use of firearms, which is to say, the electorate, in the UK at least …to the majority of these people, the TV images are what inform them. For most politicians this is true too. It’s easier that way, living with what the TV and the movies say, and not asking what the truth is. And as our police become more routinely armed, what happened to me will happen more and more often. Not everyone will be as lucky as I was, to be confronted by an officer who fundamentally didn’t want to kill.

Portrait of the artist as a Leeds fan

2007-11-07T17:58:00.000Z

The first post in the blog talks about a book that I want to write … a theology of violence. I talk there about wanting to find a way between the personal and the academic, and that means that there will be quite an autobiographical element in the text. This is a first draft of the foreword.

Foreword

As I write this book I want to move back and forth between an analytical mode, and a more personal, anecdotal mode. In analytical mode, I’ll look at the biblical text, and I’ll look at what earlier writers have said about violence. In a more personal mode, I’ll try to explain why some of these issues are important to me by talking about situations I’ve been in, where I’ve been asked questions by Christians or non-Christians, where I’ve been around violent situations, or even, in small ways, where I’ve been part of violent situations. In the background, both to the analytical writing and the more personal writing, I’ll be looking at historical situations where violence has broken out. Some of those, like the holocaust, will be situations that have generated huge volumes of analysis and reflection. Others will be smaller-scale, or more private.

But the personal will be mixed up with it, and I’ll speak about my feelings. So I want to begin the book with a few words about how I came to write it. The simplest way to do that seems to give a breakdown of my own progression through the Christian faith, a progression that has quite possibly deposited me outside of that faith, since I find myself, in my early 50s, after conversion at 15, simply unable to tolerate the contradictions and dishonesties which now seem to me to be inextricably bound up with evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. Some of that will begin to suggest an answer to the question which hangs over this book. ‘Why the hell should you have anything to say about violence?’

I grew up in a middle class home, both parents teachers, just outside Leeds. Leeds is a big industrial city in the north of England. It has a famous football club, Leeds United, and their ground (Elland Road) was just a few miles away from the house I grew up in. In those days the land between was mostly open fields. Before I was old enough to go to a game, I remember sitting on the doorstep, looking towards Elland Road. I couldn’t see it, but I knew where it was. When Leeds scored, the roar reached over those miles of fields and I heard it like the roar of a wild animal. I’ve been a Leeds fan all my life, though there were years when I tried to pretend it wasn’t so.

In my early years, despite attending a Methodist Sunday School for a while, I worshipped at Elland Road. On match days I’d take the scarf down from the wall, where it hung round the team photograph, part of a small shrine. I was devoted. Elland Road was where I belonged, and the fans, if they weren’t trying to beat me up or nick my scarf, were my family.

I would have been 12 or 13, when Leeds played Standard Liege. I remember getting up well before dawn. The street was not brightly lit, with long gaps between the street lamps, which were only on one side of the road. I remember dressing quietly, and making tea … drinking it beside the red formica-topped table in the kitchen, and then slipping out of the side door. It was barely light, but there was snow on the ground. It wasn’t new snow, and had softened during the previous day, but then frozen again during the night to give it that crusty, crunchy quality. There was a light mist, so that the street lights seemed like diffuse white globes.

I remember walking up the middle of the road, for the relative smoothness of the white surface, snow packed down hard, and streaked with coffee-brown mud. The road was called Rooms Lane, and it was believed to follow the line of a Roman road, though that may have been myth. By the bottom of the road it really was a country lane, with an old farm built, farmhouse and outhouses, from the iron-brown sandstone, soft and easily eroded, that had been blackened by the industrial revolution but was being steadily, if unevenly, scoured back to a tawny colour. Some of the houses I passed were of brick, but many were of stone, and some were almost a solid black.

I reached the Prospect … a road junction named after the Prospect Hotel that sat in the Y of a forked road. St Peter’s Church of England at the corner, where Rooms Lane hit right on the junction of the Y. And the bus stop where I waited for a 53, down Churwell … ‘churryl’ as we said .. and past the huge estate of prefab houses intended as temporary accommodation for people bombed out of their homes during the war … a white asbestos terrace-work that stretched back further than I’d ever dare venture. Down across the ringroad, and onto Elland Road.

I bought a programme at every game, I remember it costing a shilling, and being almost as expensive as entrance to the ground. I was always a Lowfields Road lad, the East Stand as it’s often called now, or the John Charles stand, facing the West Stand where the posh people sat. We stood. One shilling and sixpence to get in. Sixpence for a can of coke. Sometimes a hot dog on the way home, for another shilling, and thruppence each way on the bus. It seems odd now to think that for less than five shillings I was able to travel to the game, get entrance, food and drink, all for under five shillings … 25p. And this was for a first division team, certainly one of the best clubs in England, and just beginning to establish themselves as one of the top sides in Europe. For another 10p I could have gone over the road after the game and hired a room in the Old Peacock, and had the attentions of a lady of the night.

Well, not really.

In the programme they printed a token each week, and occasionally there was a leaflet with spaces to stick the tokens in. If you had sufficient tokens, you were eligible to buy tickets, for the few games in those days that were ticketed. I remember the West Stand car park where we queued for the ticket office to open, mostly lads around my own age, very amiable. The ground was covered in packed snow there too, and it was perishing. We found a pile of cardboard boxes and set fire to them to try and keep warm but it did nothing but melt a patch of snow. We stamped in the half-burned cardboard and black debris, trying to warm our feet. I can still feel the aching soreness of them, and the banging sensation in my ankles.

But mostly the walk up Rooms Lane, and the snowy white of the streetlights hanging, only fifteen feet or so above the ground, like big soft baubles, and the ground white, the strange sense of light coming upwards, of walking on something lit from below.

Naively, I bought only one ticket. I’d have been entitled to two. Within days, at school (and this was a school in Batley … a few lads supported Leeds, but most supported Huddersfield Town … what did they want with a Leeds ticket?) I could have sold the ticket for several times it’s face value. It never occurred to me for a moment to sell it, but I did regret not having bought a second one. I wasn’t in the slightest tempted, but I do remember the feeling of satisfaction at owning something that was very much in demand.

It was a couple of years later that I became a Christian, and my allegiance to Leeds seemed to wither overnight. It happened during the summer break, and I remember realising with a shock, part way through the following season, that I’d missed half a dozen home games without giving Elland Road a moment’s thought. An idolatry, as it seemed to me at the time, had been taken away.

I was converted through the witness of members of a Christian youth organisation, not widely known even in the UK, called the National Young Life Campaign … YL for short. Most members were from nonconformist backgrounds, wary of mainstream denominations and even more wary of biblical scholarship. ‘Always bear in mind, the bible sheds a lot of light on some commentaries’, I remember being told. They weren’t entirely joking. The theology was prevailingly Arminian, and the preaching was very anecdotal, hardly expository in any sense. It was almost all by lay preachers. Socially, it was a fairly bad environment for gossip. It was inclined towards legalism. But out of the non-conformist roots and the distrust of academic theology had grown some exceptional principles. You really were encouraged to think for yourself. It remains the only Christian group I’ve been linked with in any way of which I truly could say that. In fact, you were expected to; they were argumentative buggers. You couldn’t say anything without it being challenged. And you were expected to back up your ideas with scripture. That’s where another great principle came in; we were expected to read the whole bible, once a year, Old and New Testaments, cover to cover, the lot. ‘Three chapters a day, and five on Sundays, that’ll get you through it, lad’. And it’s still one of the most practical guidelines I know. Wherever we ended up, we knew our bibles. But we were expected to know about the world too, and the other guideline was ‘the bible in one hand, the newspaper in the other’.

In my late teens I moved to Aberdeen, for the University. I became involved with a student Christian Union, affiliated to what is now UCCF, the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship … an evangelical body, and the UK’s equivalent of the North American Inter-Varsity. I’d come out of YL as a fairly hard core little soldier, used to open air preaching, beach missions, and with a capacity for theological dialectic that went through most Christians my own age like a hot knife through butter. I didn’t stutter and the warts weren’t too bad so I was a shoe-in for the committee. After four years doing a first degree, and three years doing a PhD, I was headhunted for UCCF’s Scottish Staff.

But it was in Aberdeen that I encountered Reformed Theology and Presbyterianism. I encountered the Free Church of Scotland, well before its more recent disintegration, and I encountered Gilcomston, and Mr Still. Mr Still was the leading figure among the evangelicals in the Church of Scotland, Scotland’s mainstream, established, presbyterian denomination.

In some senses the theology and the preaching tradition could not have been more different to YL. Yet there were essentials in common. Mr Still did actually preach the whole bible. His ministry is responsible for establishing expository preaching in Scotland, if not far wider, working through the bible a book at a time, working through each book thoroughly, sometimes steadily chapter by chapter, week on week, sometimes roaming more widely over the structure of the narrative to clarify its architecture. And he thought for himself, and encouraged others to do the same. I vividly remember one evening, listening as he read through great chunks of Romans (his bible readings were heavily glossed and gave more food for thought than most people’s sermons) … saying ‘Ask questions! You must! You absolutely must learn to ask questions of the text!’.

He also had an instinctive grasp of the nature of story. I remember, for instance, one evening as he read us, for the sermon, large chunks of Othello. We must have had half of Shakespeare’s text in the course of the sermon. He was preaching on the devil, and wanted to show how insinuations work, with Iago whispering in Othello’s ear ‘Of course she is faithful, there could be no suspicion …’ It was a masterly demonstration of what dramatists would call ‘subtext’, and it was exciting to see not only such an adventurous method of preaching, but also to see the biblical text opened up. Only in Judaism, where an appreciation of subtext goes back thousands of years, have I met a similarly astute reading of the biblical text. Sadly even his own congregation often groaned under this kind of preaching, preferring to be given the text ‘on the nose’, and, like evangelicals everywhere, craving the ‘simple’ and the ‘practical’.

Somewhere along the way, violence had become an interest. I remember, before my conversion, discovering a series of books from an English publisher, full of horror stories. True accounts alternated with fictional accounts. There were stories of executions, as well as of murder, the natural and the supernatural. When I was slightly older I remember listening, under the covers in bed, to a radio broadcast of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Ivan Denisovich’. I went out and bought a copy on the strength of that broadcast, and by the time I was at University had read much of Solzhenitsyn’s output on the Gulag. I studied Geography, and when we had to select a regional specialism, I happened to choose the polar regions. For my dissertation on polar geography I somehow ended up looking at the use of Siberia for prison camps from Tsarist times up to the modern day. I ferreted out travellers’ accounts from the early nineteenth century onward, and looked at Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag alongside non-fiction accounts such as Robert Conquest’s ‘Kolyma’. I can’t say where it came from, but I know that at that point I was consciously considering the Holocaust, and I remember being struck at that early stage by the way that, in both the Holocaust and the Gulag, remoteness had become a resource, something that enabled the horrific to be done. I know too that Ivan Denisovich Shukov has never been far from my mind since, the lonely individual in the huge, uncountable mass. D.M Thomas, whose ‘White Hotel’ I read at the same kind of time, likewise excavated an individual life and gave her a face, even neuroses, before laying her back in the ravine at Baba Yar, horrifically abused, then killed.

I didn’t really understand, in those days, why these things drew me, unless it was simply a sort of ghoulishness to which many people are drawn. It was only years later that I began to discover, or rediscover, some of the things in my own life that might make sense of my own compulsion to investigate violent events.

What was unavoidable, however, was a recognition that my own arousal was connected with violent scenarios, historical, fictional, or enacted personally. Some of what I did in those years would probably be regarded now as ‘self harm’, some of it would be seen as masochistic. There was certainly a sense of self-punishment in what I did, but there was undeniably also arousal.

So it was that, at around 25, I joined the staff of UCCF. I was recently married, had recently completed full time work on my PhD, and was very conscious of contradictions and complications. But when, on the induction course for new staff, I heard a senior member of staff start talking quite passionately about the importance of corporal punishment in bringing up children, I knew enough to recognise … a certain manner, certain characteristics of phrasing, something in the passion of the speech … that this was not simply about parenting. I was familiar by then with eroticised discourse dressed up as moral principle. I was, for all my own confusions, at least well enough to feel sick. There was something that I recognised from years before, when the air, as I used to say to myself, became thick.

Are you a sadist?

2007-10-16T13:03:00.000+01:00

Within BDSM and D/s circles, it’s quite common for people to refer to themselves and others as ‘sadists’. It’s done without any sense of condemnation. ‘Sadist’ is just one category of person within D/s … sadists are simply people who enjoy giving pain to other people. (I believe that to be, incidentally, much more accurate than ‘sadists are people who are sexually aroused by giving pain to other people’). It’s quite a broad category, and it doesn’t preclude the person belonging to other categories … a sadist might or might not be into age-play, schoolroom scenes, interrogation scenes. And there are lots of other categories, people for whom the Master / slave dynamic, or total power exchange, for instance, is the real core of their enthusiasm or their life. For many, to be frank, it's really just all about exhibitionism and shagging.

Anyway, if you express an inclination towards ‘discipline’ (coughs discreetly, purely as an example, of course) you might well find yourself asked from time to time, ‘Are you a sadist?’. And I usually say, no.

Within mainstream psychiatry, and influenced in particular by the American psychiatric diagnosis manual … (thank you, you insurance companies, for your role in all this) … the prevailing view of sadism is that it’s a personality disorder. Sadism in this view is the thing I mentioned above, being sexually aroused by inflicting pain. In this framework, of course, a sadist is, like his or her mirror, the masochist, an ill person. Typically, the sadist is a damaged person; sadism is the result of trauma.

(I pause here to reference another blog that I just found, with a strong theme of theory about SM and a healthy dose of personal reflection. It’s written by several different women, but it hangs together very well. Trinity offers two models of SM personality, one where SM tendencies are a response to trauma, and one where they’re just who you are. I’m not into the ‘where does it come from’ question here, but the blog outlines the two models with great lucidity and humanity. She also has her own discussion about the Sadist as a personality type.)

I find it interesting that the language of psychiatry, an almost completely corrupt profession, so closely mirrors the language of BDSM and D/s. The only real difference is that the two worlds (which, of course, if we’re in the business of talking about the real world, do overlap. There are professional psychiatrists in the world of BDSM) take different attitudes to the morality of SM. In one it just is, and any morality is simply the business of the practitioners. 'Safe, sane and consensual' makes a convenient public mantra. In the world of psychiatry, SM is a sickness to be cured, or at least, its practice is to be controlled or moderated. As Trinity has pointed out, however, tackling the underlying trauma doesn’t actually seem to deliver much cure. Which is perhaps why action by psychiatry’s paymaster, the coercive state, is inevitable, and so on to censorship, which is another thing I don’t want to discuss here. I should add though that all states are coercive: I subscribe to the Weberian view that a state qualifies as a state insofar as it exercises a monopoly on the use of force within its own territory. Weber wasn’t taking sides here, in any sort of left v. right way; he was simply describing what is.

To which we should add, perhaps, the media view, which is that SM is monstrous, and sick in a moral sense. In the sense in which murderers and rapists are inhuman and should, ideally, be destroyed. It’s a view that strengthens immensely the hand of pro-censorship politicians, and is to some extent the psychiatric model showing its true colours.

I look at all this, and I ask myself, have any of you actually read De Sade? I also look at all this and think, this is a very English-language discussion.

I have no way to put accurate numbers on this, though I suppose Grove Press may have print-run data they could share. Grove Press published De Sade in English decades before it became fashionable in certain chattering circles to have a copy of the 120 Days of Sodom on your bookshelves. Long before Pasolini’s film Salo made a hugely sanitised version of De Sade chic, with De Sade in a novel role as cultural critic for the 20th century. But, I suspect that reading De Sade as part of the mainstream of the literature of ideas is massively less common in Britain or in North America than it is in, say, France or Germany. There are reasons for this, of course: if you read De Sade and then read Hume, a giant in the Western, English-speaking canon, you cannot help but be struck by similarities, particularly when they argue against the broadly Christian establishment and conventional morality. But that, again, is another story.

In mainstream Europe, as opposed to the Anglophone fringe, De Sade is taken seriously as a thinker. Not necessarily that people think his ideas are intrinsically important, and not necessarily for his originality, but because he is seen as having massively influenced European ideas about individual liberty, or libertarianism, or even human identity. If you’re trying quite seriously to understand an event as massive and appalling as, say, the Holocaust, you simply can’t afford to ignore something like that. So a book like Pierrre Klossowski’s Sade my Neighbour (first published in Paris in 1947) sits in a mainstream of cultural theory which Anglophone reading has barely touched. The same is true for perhaps one of the most important books to be published in the last hundred years, Dialektik der Aufklaerung, by Theodor Adorno (of ‘no poetry after Auschwitz’ fame) and Max Horkheimer. This was written in exile in New York, first published in 1944 … and the critique of modernity they offer sees De Sade as one of modernity’s key builders. It’s before the Holocaust was widely recognised, but they write about the Enlightenment of which De Sade is a key figure as having built a world that ‘radiates disaster triumphant’. It was 1972 before Dialectic of Englightenment appeared in English translation.

You want to understand Sadism, you read De Sade or you’re wanking in a cold hard wind. And people don’t read him, by and large, for two key reasons, first, it’s boring. It’s repetitive ad nauseam, beyond nauseam, beyond even Arbroath, to a sort of brain-dulled, stunned place where … and I’m sure this is part of De Sade’s strategy … seeing yet another servant flogged to death just is tedious, has ceased to stimulate you, to arousal, or to disgust (and of course, those two are good friends) or to anger. Secondly, taken in smaller doses, it is truly horrible.

When you read De Sade, the amount of overt philosophising in the books is a surprise. Abstract discussion about the nature of society, about the place of ethics, about freedom and individualism. There is passionate diatribe against the church … which is to say, given De Sade’s own historical position, largely against the Catholic church … and also against Christian theology in a wider sense. There are chapters of this with barely a backside or a vulva on view. And in the orgy scenes the same arguments are used to rouse co-abusers to greater feats. ‘Go on, Sir, kill your daughter, she is just so much stuff, nothing more than an animal. You sired her, you can do as you choose with her.’ Let's not discuss patriarchy.

The orgies do include most of the forms of humiliation and flagellation that are common in BDSM circles today. They do tend toward the extreme … women are fed special seeds and pulses to ensure that their stools are immense … people are flogged with great severity … there isn’t an awful lot of taking little Susie over Uncle’s knee and patting her bottom gently with a heart-shaped leather paddle. But they go far beyond the ‘Safe, Sane and Consensual’ of modern BDSM-speak.

Victims frequently do not consent, and victims frequently do not recover. Indeed, their killing is the chief end of many of the scenes. And in so far as they do survive, they are degraded and, psychologically at least, destroyed.

The orgies, I would argue, are not primarily about sexual gratification at all. They are about destruction. The central figures repeatedly revel in the death or absolute degradation of both their victims and their co-abusers. The use that is made of the victims is above all a demonstration of the abusers’ power … and typically that is a power that derives from wealth or title. Abusers are, effectively, above the law. The society that is being advocated is one based not on the rule of law, where all human beings have a value, but on what some moderns call ‘honour’, where a man (typically) stands on his own two feet, defends himself against any slight or attack, and takes what he wants from the world by the exercise of individual power. This is above all an individualist, libertarian society, but it is also, almost incidentally, a society in which the state is pathetically weak, a mere token. The state no longer enjoys a monopoly on the use of force; license is available for purchase, or is granted (rather as it was in the Roman empire) to the paterfamilias.

For the ordinary person, not wealthy, not titled, not with great armed force at his or her disposal, the society De Sade advocates is divided into predators and prey, and there is no referee.

I am holding out for the true definition of a sadist. A sadist is someone who takes delight in destroying another human being. They exist in BDSM, as they exist in the wider world. To categorise them differently is always possible .. ‘serial killer’ … ‘psychopath’ … ‘sociopath’. They crop up in the form of racists, homophobes, religious bigots, pimps, corrupt policemen and corrupt politicians. The destruction they practice is not always physical, but whenever there is corruption there is always someone low down the food chain who pays the price in flesh and blood.

I am not primarily concerned here to work out where it comes from, this sadism. For me it is intrinsically linked to my understanding of violence as basic to humanity. In some cases, it seems to me that individual trauma must have contributed to psychosis. But looking at events like the Holocaust, where a whole culture becomes infected with an ideology, it seem impossible to deny that ideas play a major role, whether they are political ideas, or philosophical, or religious. And a fundamentally benevolent ideology, as I believe Christianity to be, for instance, can be warped within generations, can be infected and carry with it the capacity to induce psychosis.

So Sadism is, it seems to me, fundamentally an ideology. It is intrinsically malevolent, although it hides that malevolence often under the language of liberty, individualism, honour and srength. A sadist is, I think, primarily someone who has chosen sadism, who has taken the devil’s shilling. Whether he gets a hard-on while destroys is frankly neither here nor there.

What is going on in most BDSM or D/s is simply different. Psychiatrists or members of the BDSM community who use the word sadism are doing themselves a disservice. That won’t stop, of course; the word has its own long tradition now in an SM context. They are also, sadly, trivialising historical facts of sadistic behaviour and the impact of the ideology of Sadism. They are kidding themselves about the nature of the world they live in. And, particularly sadly for this community, they are failing to face the problem of predatory sadistic behaviour hiding in the BDSM world. Faced with that behaviour, sadly, the typical response is, ‘I don’t want to think about that’, or even ‘I don’t want to know about that’. But that’s another story.

The God Issue - Having Two Heads

2007-08-16T10:24:00.000+01:00

One of my heads is a believer. It was converted to Christianity when it was about 15. It has read the bible from cover to cover, worked for church organisations both part time and full time. It was an elder in the Church of Scotland for years. It has led church services, bible studies, prayer meetings.

The other head just can't believe it any more. It's seen too much criminality, dishonesty, physical and sexual brutality among people who were supposed to be church leaders. Among evangelicals. 35 years of this kind of thing the length and breadth of Britain. Now, that doesn't prove there isn't a God, but it does radically undermine the claims that are made for this theology. It does undermine the claim that God changes lives for the better. It questions the whole 'born again' idea. The handful of evangelicals I would trust ... have trusted ... well, perhaps they're just decent people who would have been decent people if they weren't born again. The vicious ones, who take a clear pleasure in hurting people, who will, off the record, boast about how their finances are the most important thing ... their viciousness seems inextricably bound up with their ostentatious righteousness. The kick for some of them seems to be precisely in preaching the bible while knowingly living in defiance of it.

And if this theology falls then, for me at least, what falls with it is the whole evangelical apologia for God's toleration of evil in the world. Why does he allow so much violence? Why does he allow so much violence which is not an 'inevitable byproduct' of war - and of course we understand that war is sometimes necessary to ... err ... hmm ... oh, yes, to resist evil regimes. Who are evil because of the violence they inflict ...

Why so much torture? Why so much sheer sadism?

If it were simply a case of famine, I could start to understand, I think. I could understand that the planet is simply that way. Crops fail. Populations compete for available resources and there is no umpire to say what is 'a fair share'. But explain torture within an evolutionary framework. We'll consider torture properly in a little while, but by torture I mean the deliberate destruction of another human being by causing the maximum level of pain, fear and distress, and with an outcome either in death, or in the long term wreckage of the victim either physically or psychologically, and all of this directed as much at the victim's family and community as it is directed at the victim herself, or himself.

Torture, typically, goes beyond practicality or utility for the torturer or the torturing regime. It takes pleasure, typically sexual pleasure, in the process of destruction. This is a not a 'kill or be killed' shooting on a battlefield. It is, in the strict sense of the term, sadism. If anyone knows an explanation of this from within an evolutionary framework, please let me know.

In my days as an evangelical, I once helped out with a Christian mission in Strathclyde University, in Glasgow. At the residence that I worked in, the Christian group wanted to put on a discussion, and we talked about how to do it. We settled on 'Is God a Sadist?'. It was shortly after Christian militias in Lebanon had masscred Palestinians who lived in two long-term refugee camps, Sabra and Chatila. The room was well filled. I don't recall that we reached any conclusions, but they listened, and they talked, the Christians and their non-Christian friends. Mainly I remember the hush as I read from a detailed report in a newspaper.

It was an all-male residence, which helped, I think. Each evening in the common room there were soft-porn movies to watch. The night's titles were pinned up on the notice board, where we put up our 'Is God a Sadist?' posters. One evening we took a break from the mission while some of the lads went to watch a football game. (OK, OK, it was Partick Thistle. Somebody has to watch them.) Most of the time there was relatively little bullshit.

I'll write about Sabra and Chatila later. Some of it makes sense, within the framework of sheer utility. I mean things like muzzle velocity. The kinetic energy of small arms bullets has increased dramatically since the second world war. Bodies shatter more thoroughly, and a higher proportion of bullet wounds now cause death. Emergency medical technique has improved too, but it will never keep up. But much of what happened in Sabra and Chatila went beyond military utility.

The Israeli Defence Force fired star shells over the camps as night fell, so that the Christian militias could see to slaughter. And God fires his star shells too: the sun rises on the just and the unjust, and gives light to the gunsights of the merciless.

Thanks to some bad medication a couple of years ago, I wake each morning into a disturbed state; anxiety attacks, hallucinations, confusion, and often, the worst, moments of clarity. Sometimes I try to get through it by praying. Sometimes I pray the Jesus Prayer ('Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, a sinner') because it is how I feel and it's simple. But it's a very selfish prayer, isn't it. This morning I tried to pray the Lord's prayer, because the disciples came to Jesus and said they didn't know how to pray, and that's why he gave it to them. I like that. But I was trying for almost two hours and I couldn't finish it. Simply couldn't stay clear enough or calm enough long enough to get through it. Sometimes when I can manage to say the Lord's prayer, that's when I know my mind is clear enough to get up.

This morning I tried to say the Lord's prayer. I said to him, at one point, 'Father, this is me crawling towards you'. In my bed, in my house, where there are no militias and the death threats are infrequent. I didn't finish it today. Saved by a phone call.

There really are two heads. I'll write this blog as if my evangelical head were the real one. I don't know if it is, but it's the one that's spent longest working this stuff out, and in so far as it makes sense of the bible, even the unbelieving head kind of agrees with the picture. They argue with each other, of course, the two heads. What would be the point otherwise. If ever one of them finally wins, I'll try to remember to let you know.

Metanoia, and Polly Peachum's Violence in the Garden

2007-08-15T17:10:00.000+01:00

I've found myself on several occasions talking to women who are married, and who long for their husbands to discipline them, but feel they can't talk about it and are sure their husbands wouldn't want to take charge. 'He's a lamb', says one Christian lady in the southern US.

These are not women who pretend that there is no erotic dimension to their desire to submit, but they are very clear that they do want real discipline. It's natural for them to come online, often to IRC chatrooms, to try and find support for their feelings, and it's natural that they look for an online fantasy life to provide what they miss in real life.

I've been talking to two women in particular, both of whom really want to have this reality with their husbands, and we've been talking about two things that I think are related.

First, the more you fulfil these desires online, the less likely you are to do anything about it in a face to face way.

Polly Peachum is very good about this, and I want to link to a couple of her essays here:

Defining The BDSM Life Style Don't be fazed by the BDSM references. I think a lot of this holds true equally for people - like the two women I've mentioned above - who are looking for Domestic Discipline relationships.This is really about fantasy and how it undermines reality. Polly is also very harsh about online relationships, and particularly on the sort of domination and submission to be found in IRC chat rooms. I think she goes too far in her criticism of IRC ... it's only a medium, after all, and no more nor less 'real' than any other medium. Some people do choose to be honest with each other online, and they can do real thing. But, a lot of what she says does ring true.

Violence in the Garden This is more autobiographical, and the emphasis switches from identifying the fake, to living with the day to day realities of life, where the idealised relationship that you saw in your mind's eye before you moved in gives way to the awkward, painful process of learning real submission.

Second .. what you really think, and want, is going to show itself in the way you behave. I mean 'offline' behaviour. I mean 'vanilla' behaviour. Both of the women I've mentioned above feel that their husbands just don't have it in them to be dominant, still less to physically discipline them. If you think he's a lamb, you behave towards him as you behave towards a lamb. And in many, many small ways, unspoken, he is bound to see it. And the more he sees it, and the more he acquiesces in it, the less likely you are to waken up anything more than a lamb. Let's not pretend that getting to 'tiger' is going to be easy, but a feisty goat would be a step in the right direction. And from there to wolf.

We've been talking about small things that a woman can do, perhaps before she even begins to get ready to talk about what she needs. Like asking permission. To buy new clothes, to go out for coffee with friends, whatever seems right. Maybe even the word 'permission' is too much at the beginning, but if you say, 'Isi it OK if I buy myself a new ...' and he says, 'fine', you can say afterwards, 'Thank you for giving me permission ...' Anyway, once you're moving in this direction, if it gets him used to exercising authority, however minor, that's a good thing, it's a bonus. But the important change is in you. And that will gradually show.

There's an excellent article on Taken in Hand about this: He isn't interested in or capable of taking you in hand ... And it's well worth following the link at the foot of the article to a piece about Achieving positive change by acting as if ...

But change is the scary word here. And I'm reminded in this context, of all places, of the word 'repentance', in the Christian tradition. It's a terrible word. What it means in modern English is something like 'remorse', or 'sorrow', or 'regret', or even 'pain'. Hand-wringing ... the wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth. The word that 'repentance' translates in the New Testament is metanoia, and that simply means 'changing your mind'. Anguish is not part of the story.

I have friends and relations in the Scottish Reformed church tradition. They're big on repentance. The Church is supposed to be Reformata, sed semper reformanda ... Reformed, yet always needing to be reformed ... and they haven't changed their minds on a single significant idea, moral or religious, some of them, in sixty years. They believe in repentance, and their prayers are full of it, but they never change their minds.

A belief in Dominance and submission, despite the fairly evident indications of the bible, is pretty counter intuitive amongst modern believers. Even in those who don't profess any religion, the belief persists that this is all a bit naughty. And the idea of anyone voluntarily accepting physical discipline goes against several generations of public consensus about how families and relationships should work.

But what we really believe leaks out. And it should leak out. And we should be prepared to change it, and to declare the change. Not just online, but in real, vanilla settings. Metanoia. Great stuff.

First posted in Yahoo 360, on Monday 16 July 2007 - 05:20PM

Violence and D/s ... and a journey by train ...

2007-08-15T15:28:00.000+01:00

I want to discuss violence in the blog; violence as it breaks out in public spaces, and as it occurs in secrecy. The secrecy might be the closed space within a suburban home, or it might be the basement of a police station. The public space might be a downtown street in a European or American city, or it might be the local football stadium in a Muslim town in South-East Europe or the Middle East. It might be a military operation carried out with the support of the UN Security Council, or it might be a civil war. All of this keeps me in line with those who have theorised about violence over the last hundred years or more. That I want to do this in the light of theology keeps me in line with people from Bonhoeffer or Moltmann, to Girard and Drewerman. But I want to talk about consensual violence too. I want to talk about violence as part of our sexuality and our erotic lives too. Some people talk about BDSM for this (bondage, domination, sado-masochism) but I prefer D/s (for domination and submission, which some people also see as incorporated into the term 'bdsm').

I'm going to tell a story, and it's part of the background for me, about why I don't think these two apparently separate blogs ('what I think about D/s', and 'what I think about violence') can really be kept apart.

Once upon a time my work involved me travelling most Saturdays, within Scotland, by train. It meant I was often in the company of football supporters.

One time, with a friend, I was travelling north from Glasgow in the early evening. The train was crowded with Huns (supporters of Glasgow Rangers, traditionally protestant) and it was not a comfortable ride. They crowded most of the coaches, chanted, drank, and generally terrorised the vanilla passengers. They were travelling to homes north of Dundee, having watched their side (thankfully) win at Ibrox.

We hit Dundee and it was serious trouble. The platform was packed with Fenians, since Celtic had been playing in Dundee that afternoon. The Celtic Supporters were waiting for the train down to Glasgow. When the two sides caught sight of each other, things became really quite emotional. There were forays into the train or onto the platform, scuffles, and the chanting and threats became extremely aggressive. We were on one of the old, heavy Inter-city coaches, and as the supporters surged along the train, it rocked and swayed.

The turning point came when a Celtic fan shouted, 'Hey, we got one of your bastards today!'

There was a collective scream from the Rangers fans like someone in pain. They knew immediately that the Celtic fan meant that a British soldier had been shot that day in Belfast by the Provos. The Celtic fans responded to the scream of pain, and there were renewed assaults on the doors. Thankfully, at that moment some British Rail employee had the wit to send the train out, never mind the timetable, never mind anyone who still wanted on or off. It prevented what would certainly have become a violent, bloody, possibly lethal fight.

But it left us on a train full of enraged Rangers fans.

Somehow the carriage my friend and I were in had cleared a little. There was a set of four seats just across from where we sat, round a small table. A single girl, in her late teens or early 20s, sat at that table and worked quietly on what looked like college study materials.

A group of Rangers fans spotted her, and fitted themselves into the remaining seats. They talked to her, and she was amazingly good at giving answers that were friendly and amiable, but not encouraging the conversation to go any further.

That lasted a couple of minutes. Then they began to stroke her hair, or her cheek, and one leaned round and put his arm round her. She shrank into herself and stopped answering their questions. They became more confident. She wore a duffel coat, and the collar was pulled open. It was compelling viewing. Everyone watched, the rest of the supporters, the vanilla travellers. It became quiet.

My friend took out his Bible. He opened it, and went over to the table where the girl sat. He slapped it down on the table, and said, 'Right, lads ... you'll all be Orange boys, won't you, or you'll know what I mean.' The Orange Order is a Loyalist organisation which marches in celebration of Protestant religious freedoms and the the accession of the House of Orange to the British throne.

The lads nodded.

'And you'll know then, that when the Orange Order marches, at the head is a Bible, carried on a cushion, and held in great honour. And often the rally is addressed by a preacher, like Ian Paisley ...'. More nods.

'Well I want you to look at this, then,', he said, and turned his bible to Genesis 4. He read them Lamech's Boast, as the passage is often called.

Lamech said to his wives,
"Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
wives of Lamech, hear my words.
I have killed a man for wounding me,
a young man for injuring me.

If Cain is avenged seven times,
then Lamech seventy-seven times."

There was a quiet moment after he'd read it.

'Do you understand?', he asked the lads. Every one nodded readily. Every one recognised the mix in Lamech's words of sexual bravado, and the enjoyment of violence. They had just been screwed by the Celtic fans and in turn they had planned to fuck the girl on the train.

My point is not the bible's capacity to defuse a bad situation, for clearly it is used just as often to enflame. And my point here is not to dig into Lamech's boast particularly deeply, but to say that what we find in it is universal, and speaks directly to uneducated idiots bent on rape and game for murder. My friend deployed no sophisticated theological analysis, he just read the passage.

It speaks to educated idiots too.

Now ask yourself what we all felt, we vanilla travellers, as we watched the lads move steadily towards rape.

Violent beginnings ...

2007-08-15T15:19:00.000+01:00

There's a book I want to write, about violence. To be accurate, I want to write a theology of violence.

I'm not happy with 'theology', though, because it was taken over by the academics many years ago.

And I'm not happy with 'academic', either, because that became something for professionals, years ago.

And I'm not happy with 'professionalism', becuase that is a corrupt idea.

There is no corruption without violence, that would be one of my first principles, writing about corruption. Corruption is driven by fear, not greed. People keep quiet because they are afraid of what they will lose if they speak out ... income, job, home ... and sooner or later you reach someone who has nothing to lose economically, and their health, or some blood, or a member of their family ... that's what has to be taken away to make the point.

I believe you can't have professionalism without corruption. The idea has a lie at its heart. A professional is supposed to be someone who does the job to the highest standards for the sake of the client. For the sake of the client, he puts aside personal feelings or beliefs, and does the most effective job, technically, that is possible. But the professional is always serving his own interests, maximising his chances of future earnings, defending his own professional status. Historically, the mediaeval guilds operated to restrict entry into a particular craft, to protect prices. The public rationale was always that they excluded practitioners of low quality to protect the standard of performance. It was always a lie.

So I want to wite about violence in a way that is rigorous, but also personal ... even anecdotal. I want to do things that theology has traditionally done, like look at texts in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, but I also want to consider historical material, from the ancient to the contemporary, and I want to include reflections on my own experience as both a victim and a practitioner of violence.

First posted in Yahoo 360, on Monday 25 June 2007 - 06:45PM (BST)