We have learned the astonishing news of Roman Polanski’s arrest by the Swiss police on September 26th, upon arrival in Zurich (Switzerland) while on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award for his career in filmmaking. He's a great film maker.
His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978
an awfully long time ago. Don't you think we can just let bygones be bygones?
against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.
We don't judge other people by standards of bourgeois morality.
Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.
He's a great film maker. We all think so. You can't go around arresting great guys like that. Film festivals are sacrosanct. This is tantamount to arresting a priest in church.
By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.
We claim diplomatic immunity for our event. Otherwise, what next? They will be arresting people for showing films that someone doesn't like. This is like McCarthysism.
The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country,
Switzerland was neutral in WWII, and is not a member of NATO or the EU and it's um we think it's probably therefore neutral in the enforcement of cases of morals
where he assumed he could travel without hindrance,
He's been able to get away with it for so long he thought he could get away with it this time.
undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no one can know the effects.
What next? They will be arresting people for showing films that someone doesn't like. This is like McCarthysism.
Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renowned and international artist now facing extradition.
He should be immune from your bourgeois American moral judgements.
This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom.
And he should be free, because he's a great film maker.
Filmmakers, actors, producers and technicians—everyone involved in international filmmaking — want him to know that he has their support and friendship.
He is one of us. He is our friend.
On September 16th, 2009, Mr. Charles Rivkin, the US Ambassador to France, received French artists and intellectuals at the embassy. He presented to them the new Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the embassy, Ms Judith Baroody. In perfect French she lauded the Franco-American friendship and recommended the development of cultural relations between our two countries.
We appeal to all enlightened French-speaking people
If only in the name of this friendship between our two countries, we demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski.
* * *
If a friend of mine were threatened with jail I'd go to some lengths to help keep them out, and if they went to jail I'd go and visit. (Assuming they hadn't done something so gross I didn't want to stay friends.) I'm not going to boycott anyone for signing this petition. There are many people I like and admire who support it. I just think their arguments are woolly.
It's a long time ago. OK, so you want a statute of limitations for rape. Some jurisdictions have that. No doubt some elderly clergymen wish they had the benefit of a statute of limitations. But you will have to make a better argument than this. He's hardly Jean Valjean is he.
Hollywood, rock stars, the golden days - everyone was messing around with kids back then. There have been powerful people indulging their urges since time immoral, and society sometimes lets them get away with it. Then people start thinking you can get away with it if you're rich and influential enough. There is never a shortage of victims. There should have been a lot more prosecutions. Why should an auteur be treated differently from a priest, or someone who lives in a trailer?
Her mother knew all about it. The victim was thirteen. I don't know what her mother has to do with it. (It's a pity she didn't stay around during the shoot.) The sexuality of children isn't - in western society at least - the property of their parents. How many times did that kid say No? I've lost count, but it was a lot.
The victim wants it dropped. And some offences are so difficult or humiliating that the victim may not want to talk about them. But unless the offence is really trivial, the victim shouldn't have a say in the matter. Otherwise the perp would be able to intimidate the victim into dropping charges, or if they were rich enough, buy the victim off.
But he's Roman Polanski! He makes great films! What about Chaucer, Villon, Marlowe, Byron, Wilde, Eric Gill &c, &c? Let's separate the man from his work.
And why focus on him when there are all these other guys running around evading prosection? Because of the petition. People like me are sounding off because we don't think the petition should be unchallenged. We may speculate on why it's taken the US so long to catch him, and why now. They need to catch the other guys as well.
Feelings are running high. There's wild talk of witch hunts, of pitchforks and torches, of lynch mobs. This isn't Salem, it isn't McCarthyism, and it trivialises what the Ku Klux Klan did. It's not even as if Polanski can be claimed an innocent man. It's not totally unreasonable, is it, to call these celebs out on their assumption of entitlement to immunity?
As any fule no, a blog is a weblog, and it started out by being a list of sites visited. As an antidote to Blytonia, here are some of the more interesting items I've come across in the past few days.
Belle Waring has an impassioned post on Crooked Timber about sexual harassment in the academy, with a sideswipe at "look but don't touch" Kealey from Buckingham. Mary Beard isn't so bothered. Is Terence Kealey as misunderstood as Juvenal? (Or as contemporary? I'm inclined to add.) Yes, it may have been satire, but it's pretty lame satire.
In a post entitled Because Men are Stupid and Shallow, That's Why, Jeff Fecke demonstrates that some men are capable of seeing the person beyond the breasts. He challenges the Canadian Rethink Breast Cancer campaign (aimed at raising men's awareness by concentrating on breasts):
the thing about breasts that I generally like the most is that they’re usually attached to living, breathing women, and I like women, because, you know, they’re people. Many of them are people I like, and consider friends. All of them are worth far more than the breasts attached to them; that should go without saying.
Ben Goldacre considers the AIDS-denialist film House of Numbers, which was shown at Cambridge Film Festival and (temporarily) hoodwinked rationalist sceptic Caspar Melville. Goldacre starts a lively discussion about how to deal with moonbats - exposure, ridicule, debate? Or by ignoring them? (There's no widely accepted noun for that, but ignoral might suit.) This comment in particular struck me:
The best advice my late Dad ever gave me was; “Never argue with an idiot, because people watching lose track of which is which”. The older I get, the more I appreciate his words. Several times a week, I’m given cause to think of them.
no man ever forsook his father, mother, brother, sister, son or daughter and took up his cross in order to support the nuclear family, preserve the work ethic, reduce crime in the neighbourhood or foster charitable giving as an important ingredient in civil society.
For reasons we won't go into, this morning I found myself listening to William Shawcross being interviewed by Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour about his new biography of the late Queen Mother. What an extraordinary piece of radio. The Royal Family is an anachronism, useful as trade ambassadors and tourist attraction. And - in principle anyway - it is a good thing for the Prime Minister to have someone to defer to. (Imagine Blair as head of state. Or Cameron for that matter.) But, while Murray has no time for this gilded, profligate life and sense of entitlement, Shawcross adores his subject. I'm on Murray's side in this. Yet through Shawcross's passion one can also glimpse Murray from his point of view: shrewish, petty, practically philistine. But she keeps her cool.
After the abdication, the war, Diana, the alleged colostomy - the fun starts at around 11 minutes in:
JM: One of the other things she was criticised for was her profligate lifestyle, and she seems to have almost gaily announced that she might go bankrupt. Why did she live in such splendour? WS: Because she enjoyed it. Because she grew up to that. She was one of the last of generations of people, of aristocrats, who weren't ashamed of their birth and the concept of noblesse oblige, she wasn't ashamed of giving employment to lots of people and having a jolly good life. And she enjoyed it, she could afford it, and she certainly lived better than you and I do. And why not? JM: Could she afford it? WS: She gave a huge amount of pleasure - JM: She did have an overdraft WS: Of course. Have you never had an overdraft? JM: (Pause) I'm not the Queen Mum. WS: I've had overdrafts. I couldn't live without an overdraft. (laughs) Always begging the bank manager not to come down too heavy on me JM: But she had thirty three staff and she had - WS: (interrupting) Why do you go on about this? JM: - she had - Because it's fascinating - WS: It's so silly, Jenni, this is an incredibly important woman, who epitomised this country through the whole of the second world war. She held the country together after the abdication, she created - she enabled her husband who was a hesitant, but adorable man, whom she was devoted to, she enabled him to take over the throne in very difficult circumstances, when a lot of people thought the monarchy was finished in 1936. She personified and symbolised this country. Churchill won the war for us but she and the King sustained the British people through six years of terror and horror, and that's what matters, and you go on about her staff. It's pathetic actually, JM: - it - WS: that doesn't really matter, I'm really surprised at you. JM: - if she - WS: You're one of the, you're the Queen Mother of Broadcasting and all you can think about is her staff and her illnesses. (fiercely) It's very very funny - JM: I think people would be fascinated if they thought I had my menus hand-written in French every night, don't you? WS: No - I well, they might well be fascinated if you do but why shouldn't she? JM: You met her didn't you - WS: Yes JM: - on a couple of occasions and you clearly adored her. WS: Yes I do adore her! And everyone adored her! Her staff stayed with her for thirty years. Nobody wanted to leave her. One of her pages who'd been with her for twenty five, twenty six years, um, on her hundredth birthday, he was very very ill, he stayed with her till her hundredth birthday so he could take her her morning coffee but went into hospital and died two days later. He kept himself going for her, just to be there for her hundredth birthday. And I hope this is what this book puts over, that she was a woman who was much loved, not just by the millions of people who didn't know her, but even more importantly by the people who worked for her, who knew her well, and I think that's - well, I mean - that's a celebration, something to be celebrated, and I was jolly lucky to be able to have this treasure trove of all her letters of a hundred years.
(Etc.)
...an incredibly important woman... What? Do listen again before it disappears.
That story of the servant disturbs me. What was his name? Was his loyalty, sense of duty, misplaced? You'd think a sensitive employer would have had him off to the doctor sharpish, but people are not easily or kindly separated from their objects of veneration. He might have been cruelly disappointed if denied the opportunity to serve. Perhaps HMQM was working on that assumption.
By the way, Shawcross and Pan MacMillan are getting a lot of mileage on the BBC today. Nice publicity if you can get it.
The header is a quote from The Observer. It should make headlines when a girl minding her own business going to school is snatched away to spend her life with a stranger, and forced to bear him children. But it's not the story everyone's talking about, and it's more common than you might think.
The problem is far wider than forced marriage - as if that weren't bad enough - and it's global.
Violence against women and girls is a human rights scandal; from the bedroom to the battlefield, from the schoolyard to the work place, women and girls are at risk from rape and other forms of sexual violence.
The response of governments to rape and other forms of sexual violence is still inadequate. Amnesty International
And a better than average CiF, from Victoria Brittain, here.
I was out walking beside a particularly long lake at the weekend [...] and I noticed a heck of a lot of people out fishing. Every few yards another chair, another rod and another sprawled-out display of angling paraphernalia. And I thought two things. Why do people fish? And why are they all male?
I can't speak generally for anyone, but here's one woman's take.
I used to muck about in rivers and streams when I was a pre-teen, back in the days when children were out unsupervised all day (and no doubt some of them drowned, though I never heard of any). I learned to catch fish with bare hands, which for child's play is an amazingly satisfying skill. First you have to find your fish - camouflaged, shy, alert - wait for it, your hands already underwater so there is no splash. To lose yourself knee-deep in a stream pitting your wits against a wild creature in its own element is worth all the aching hands, wet wellingtons, muddy coat and the scolding when you get home. You learn to watch the fish very carefully, and learn patience and disappointment. And you distinguish species, "which are easiest and valueless to catch." Some people go into Big Chief I-Spytwitcher mode, but I knew we didn't have all those fish in our streams, so I didn't.
When I started getting pocket money and an even greater sense of self-importance I could do some proper fishing - bought a second-hand rod and a rubbishy reel. That's where the trouble starts. If you are going to be serious about fishing, you need fishing tackle. It gets expensive, nerdy and competitive, and I couldn't be bothered with all that. And you do it in proper places like the Brick Pits, where you have to stand on the bank because it's far too deep to wade in. There are rules for grown-up fishing - things like pitches and licences, which spoil the Rousseauian fun. And there seemed something faintly cheating about bait, and cruel about hooks. I was never persuaded that fish don't feel pain.
Anyway, I needed money to raid the junk shop every Saturday for second hand books.
Much later I had a boyfriend who was a keen fly fisherman. So I tried my hand too, and seemed to have a beginner's knack for casting. We fished chalk streams in Hampshire and Wales, Highland rivers, wildernesses. There's a fair bit of skill to it, and you can eat some at least of what you catch. Hot-smoking a trout you've just caught by the side of the loch where you just caught it satisfies something pretty primitive. But fly fishing is expensive, and some of the people who do it can be snobbish. (I wouldn't have minded going fishing with Ted Hughes though.)
I married someone opposed to blood sports.
Incidentally, I picked up a book on freshwater fish the other day and was shocked to see how many fish I guddled thoughtlessly out of the Waring and the Bain are now rare or endangered.
But to go back to DG's question: Why do people fish?
O, Sir, doubt not but that Angling is an art; is it not an art to deceive a Trout with an artificial Fly ? a Trout ! that is more sharp-sighted than any Hawk you have named, and more watchful and timorous than your high-mettled Merlin is bold ? and yet, I doubt not to catch a brace or two to-morrow, for a friend's breakfast: doubt not therefore, Sir, but that angling is an art, and an worth your learning. The question is rather, whether you be capable of learning it? Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean, with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice: but he that hopes to be a good angler, must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself; but having once got and practiced it, then doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be, like virtue, a reward to itself. Izaak Walton
And why are they all male? I don't know. It sounds as if DG was witnessing a fishing match. That never appealed to me. The regimentation and competitiveness seems more about the technical side of things, rather as motor racing is more about the cars and driving them than about getting to a destination or even the journey. (You will find more women rally-driving than on the racing circuits.)
Angling may be said to be so like the Mathematicks, that it can never be fully learnt; at least not so fully, but that there will still be more new experiments left for the trial of other men that succeed us. Izaak Walton
What I liked about fishing was being out of doors, hunting, that sense of being wild.
But the men with all their state-of-the-art tackle and half-dozen rods side by side on their rod rests (and what is it about rod rests? and bite buzzers? How disconnected is that?) do care about fish, in their own way. Here is (or was) Benson.
