Fasting is a curious mixture of the public and private. Even mild deprivation makes you intensely inward-looking, registering each stage of the struggle to get through the day, and this is allied, or should be, to an intensity of reflection upon your behaviour in the light of the expectations set by the faith by which you subscribe to live. But there’s an awareness that this is not something you are attempting alone. Yours is a tiny, frankly insignificant part of a shared experience that sustains each of its fragments. It’s pretty silly moaning about how tough it is when the children next door are getting on with it uncomplainingly.
My wife is plugged into this aspect of fasting in a way I know well but which always manages to surprise me. She’ll be busily figuring out what food she’s going to pass to the neighbours, and then preparing it, whilst I’m busy wishing the hours away.
But today has been tough. I think I’m running a bit of a temperature and most of me from the head down aches. Fortunately, I’m good at feeling sorry for myself.
This was really not the right condition in which to be reading The Shock Doctrine but I finished the last couple of chapters earlier today, finding the book difficult to put down yet not exactly easy to pick up again. Difficult to put down because I found it full of revelations – stuff I thought I knew about but had never really grasped. A simple instance – a section on the growth of Israel’s economy since the breakdown of the talks in Oslo shed a new and yet obvious light on the motives of her various governments. Not easy to pick up because so much of Klein’s analysis, beyond the straightforward recounting of human misery, is deeply depressing. In the end I felt a sort of moral compulsion (allied to a desire to know what is going on around me, I suppose) to keep reading and I’m glad I did. (At least there’s some real hope in the final chapter.)
Of course, this is not to say that I think she’s got it right in every respect, though the sheer abundance of obviously well-researched material drawn from a wide range of sources makes its own point. She finds a narrative in an extraordinarily wide panorama of events that comes off as being a little too pat at times, especially to a reader who subscribes to the cock-up theory of history. But the narrative is useful as a starting point, I think. It took me beyond the ‘oh dear, don’t bad things happen to those who least deserve them?’ mode to an uncomfortable, but much more real place.
The problem is though: what to do?
2 comments:
Hello sir! How are the holidays coming around?
O and just out of curiosity, is 1429 the year of the Islamic calendar?
Hi, JP - holidays are, I suppose, self-evidently a bit of a good thing, except if you happen to be revising. Mine have been pretty good, all told, thanks. Hope you can say the same, or better.
Yes, it was almost 1430 years ago that the Prophet made the journey from Makkah to Yathrib (now known as Medina, literally the city) which is taken to mark the 'onset' of Islam as a sort of entity in the world (I suppose). Sometimes you see the letters AH following.
Post a Comment