The Virtual Stoa

Have you ever wondered how the giraffe is a hieroglyph of truth? Let Charles Fourier explain:

“I shall not say much about the peacock here, since this hieroglyph is difficult to interpret without knowing the laws of Social Movement. Let us turn instead to a figure which is easier to understand, that of truth and its effects in Civilisation. Let us examine whether God has faithfully depicted the sad fate of truth in our social state.

“The hieroglyph of truth in the animal kingdom is the giraffe. Since the characteristic of truth is to surmount error, the animal that represents it must be able to raise his head higher than all the others: this the giraffe can do, as it browses on branches 18 feet above the ground. It is, in the words of one ancient author, “a most fine animal, gentle and agreeable to the eye”. Truth is also most fine, but as it is incapable of harmonising with our customs, its hieroglyph, the giraffe, must be incapable of helping humans in their work; thus God has reduced it to insignificance by giving it an irregular gait which shakes up and damages any burden it might be called upon to bear. As a result we prefer to leave it to inaction, just as nobody will employ a truthful man, whose character runs counter to all accepted customs and desires. Truth is only beautiful in our society when it is inactive, and the giraffe, by analogy, is only admirable when it is at rest: when it walks or runs it provokes jeers, as truth provokes jeers when it takes a practical form. If a man were to go to a party in high society and speak out openly and truthfully about the escapades of the fine ladies there, or about the shady dealings of the businessmen or other men in the salon, there would be an outburst of indignation, and all present would agree in remaining silent about it and reviling the speaker. Matters are much worse in politics, where truth has even less play: thus to represent the way truth is repressed, God has cut the giraffe�s horns down to their roots, so that they are no more than sprouts, permanently unable to branch up into antlers; God�s chisel has cut them off at their base, in the same way as, in our society, the chisel of authority and public opinion has cut down truth to its mere emergence, forbidding it to develop further. Yet even the most deceitful among us still want to seem truthful, and although we are enemies of truth, we want to deck ourselves out in its dress: by analogy, the only thing we want from the giraffe is its dress, its skin, which is extremely beautiful; so when we catch one we treat it rather as we treat truth. We say to it, “Poor beast, you are good for nothing but to remain in the desert, far form the society of man; we may admire you for a little while, but in the end we must kill you and keep only your skin, just as we stifle truth and keep only its outward appearance.”

“From this explanation we can see that God has created nothing without a purpose, even the giraffe which is supremely useless, but as God was obliged to represent all aspects of our passions, he had to use this animal to depict the complete uselessness of truth in Civilisation. If you wish to know what purposes truth will serve in societies other than Civilisation, study this problem in the counter-giraffe, which we call the reindeer, an animal which provides us with every service imaginable: you will see that God has excluded it from these social climates, from which truth will also be excluded for as long as Civilisation lasts.

“And when the societary order has enabled us to become adept at the use of truth and the virtues which are excluded from our lives at present, a new creation will provide us, in the anti-giraffe, with a great and magnificent servant whose qualities will far surpass the good qualities of the reindeer, which so excites our envy and arouses our anger at nature for having deprived us of it.”

From Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, edited by Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson, Cambridge University Press 1996, pp.283-4.

For an inspired - and twisted - speech by the President of the United States of America, which may have something to do with Chris Morris of Brass Eye fame, visit Warp Records and click on “Bushwacked”.

John wrote [7.11.01]: The Bush speech edit was good but a bit crude (both technically and in terms of humour) with the 4th-grader, and Bush-on-Bush bits. But very good nonetheless. Apart from those bits, in the same league as the Chris Morris “Alternative Queen’s Speech”. (Which had it’s crude bits: “where my father used to […] service men and women” and “used to put food behind us” etc, but the edits were cleaner and it was a bit less forced.)

Nick wrote [8.11.01]: Agree with feedback re: cod Bush speech: since the clumsiest edit was getting him to say “fuck”, the quality of the whole could have been raised by omitting the unnecessary profanity.

A snippet from today’s Guardian:

Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair’s chief of staff, reportedly said in private last year that he wanted to create a “Bonapartist” system in which Downing Street controlled every element of government. This runs against the constitutional convention that cabinet ministers are accountable to parliament for their departments.

I’m not sure that the essence of Bonapartism was that Downing Street got to control everything. This is, nevertheless, very exciting. Does Mr Powell understand, following Leon Trotsky, that “If two forks are stuck symmetrically into a cork, the latter can stand even on the head of a pin”, and that “That is precisely the schema of Bonapartism”? And with history weighing down like a nightmare on the brains of the living, as it does, do we think Mr Blair will turn out to be more like the Uncle, or the Nephew?

Suetonius, on the emperor Nero’s singing, in Robert Graves’s translation of The Twelve Caesars:

“No one was allowed to leave the theatre during his recitals, however pressing the reason, and the gates were kept barred. We read of women in the audience giving birth, and of men being so bored with the music and the applause that they furtively dropped down from the wall at the rear, or shammed dead and were carried away for burial.”

World leaders don’t often sing these days, though sometimes they play the drums.

From today’s Observer:

The Home Office is preparing to incarcerate entire families of asylum-seekers, including babies and small children, in the equivalent of category B prisons.

Architects’ plans of the new Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre in Bedfordshire which have been obtained by The Observer show a facility capable of holding 900 asylum-seekers - up to half of them families with small children - behind three lines of secure walls more than five metres high.

The centre, which cost £80 million to build and opens on 19 November, contains dozens of fixed and moving cameras as well as numerous microwave detection units of the sort favoured by the Prison Service to foil escapes.

‘If we were considering these plans in relation to the security classification of a prison they would equate with a category B facility,’ said David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of Central England in Birmingham and a former prison governor who has studied the papers for The Observer.

‘It is not the highest of security ratings, but it is a very secure establishment indeed. However, the microwave detection units and the pan-and-tilt dome cameras are the sort of equipment you would expect to find in the very highest-security prisons.’

Plans of the new centre make much of the landscaping and planting around it, to soften its appearance. In reality, Yarl’s Wood sits at the centre of an exposed tract of Ministry of Defence land notorious for its biting winds, near major industrial units used by the military for research.

The extensive compound is ringed by chain-link fence two and a half metres high topped by three lines of barbed wire, and is designated a ‘prohibited place’ under the Official Secrets Act. …

Professor Wilson, who is also policy and campaigns director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, agrees. ‘People being held there will be being managed at best as a nuisance and at worst as a threat,’ he said. ‘They will have no sense of being welcomed - let alone that they might have a legitimate claim to be here.’

Campaigners are particularly concerned about the decision to incarcerate children with their families. Under the terms of the 1998 White Paper on asylum, families could only be detained in the few days prior to removal from the UK, once all legal challenges had failed…

The policy may put the Government in breach of international law. Under article 2 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Britain ratified 10 years ago, children may not be punished for the activities of their parents, which would include seeking asylum.

‘On the face of it, this policy does seem in breach of article 2,’ said Allan Levy QC, an expert on children’s rights. ‘It is not an easy situation because the convention also demands that children should not be separated from their parents. However, if the period of incarceration were to become oppressively long then there would be a clear breach of article 2.’

There is little doubt that the Home Office is intending stays at the centre to be lengthy. It is currently negotiating contracts with educational consultants to provide teaching for children held there.

There are many groups fighting the Government’s vile policies on asylum seekers and refugees. Use these links to get to information and activist resources from Amnesty International, the Refugee Council, Oxfam, the Campaign to Close Campsfield here in Oxford, and Barbed Wire Britain.Nick wrote [8.11.2001]: When I skimmed: “The Home Office is preparing to incarcerate entire families of asylum-seekers, including babies and small children, in the equivalent of category B prisons,” I couldn’t help substituting “incinerate”. Any votes in that?

This, from the AP wire at Salon.com:

A judge ruled Thursday that a 15-year-old sophomore cannot form an anarchy club or wear T-shirts opposing the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan because it would disrupt school. Katie Sierra was suspended from Sissonville High School for three days for promoting the club. She was also told she could not wear T-shirts with messages such as: “When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God Bless America.” In a complaint filed with her mother, Sierra argued her right to free speech was being denied. Circuit Court Judge James Stucky agreed that free speech is “sacred” but he found that such rights are “tempered by the limitations that they … not disrupt the educational process.” Sierra said she’ll pursue the dispute.

Thanks to Naunihal for sending this my way.