Halo Halo, Tiny Tips
Halo Halo
When singer/songwriter John Lennon was penning the 1971 song that envisaged a world with no states, but common ownership of the means and instruments for distributing wealth and no religious societal power, can he have imagined the furore that it would generate in some future quarters? If he had been familiar with the Socialist Party he might have included a nod to a moneyless, leaderless society too but given the strong nod within the song to a rational sane society different to the one we have then we might easily surmise that the necessary elements of a socialist society were contained therein.
Reasonable to say that Lennon was an advocate of Make Love, Not War, and Jaw Jaw is better than War War. As youngsters we were aware that it was far better to engage in a ‘verbal’ punch up rather than a physical altercation.
‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words cannot hurt me’ was the riposte in the school playground when insults or spite were being hurled at one’s person. Slightly provocative perhaps if one’s adversary was still determined to show that sufficient might does overcome right. As we now know, hurty words can result in hurty feelings. Which may result in a van load of the ‘you’ve hurt their feelings thought police’ arriving on your doorstep, or, if you’ve really shaken someone’s beliefs to the core, the arrival of the riot squad or equivalent.
Back in 2006 children at a church-run primary school must have been a little miffed and confused when their headteacher pulled the plug on a particular song they had been rehearsing because some of its lines were, ‘not appropriate words to be sung at the Church of England school for four to eleven-year-olds. Was it ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’ by Ian Dury?
The local curate fully backed the decision; ‘The song was not suitable for the occasion. It has an appealing sentiment of love but its vision is of a world in which people do not need religion.’ A school governor said, ‘The song expresses longing for a different world and for eternal happiness. But it says you can have this without religion.’
The headteacher said, ‘We have not banned the song. We chose not to perform it at our public concert but to perform another song we had practised which better reflected the theme of Songs for A Green Earth. We are a Church school and we believe God is the foundation of all we do. As such we did not feel that was an appropriate song to perform at a public concert’.
Sophistry! It wasn’t censorship, but it was. What lesson did the pupils of the school draw from the whole happening? God’s a music bigot? A life lived without the constraints that religion implants in it is a much happier one.
‘Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try, No hell below us, above us, only sky.’ ‘No religion too.’
DC
Tiny Tips
If you make $60,000 a year after taxes, in order to make $700 billion, you’d need to work for nearly 12 million years. ‘The richest 1% own half the stock market (49.9%), while the bottom half of the U.S. owns just 1.1% of the stock market’. ‘The richest 0.0001% control a greater share of wealth than in the Gilded Age, an era of U.S. history defined by extreme inequality’ (Consortium News, tinyurl.com/fzef8n6e).
The toilet, by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — went up for auction Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s in New York. The starting bid for the 223-pound, 18-karat-gold work was about $10 million. Cattelan has said the piece, titled ‘America’ satirizes superwealth. ‘Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise’, he once said (Yahoo, tinyurl.com/mww89bwt).
Mother Teresa is still praised around the world for her charity work, but her legacy is deeply controversial. Reports from former volunteers and medical professionals claimed that many of her care homes were unsanitary and neglectful, with patients denied pain relief because she believed suffering brought people closer to God. Despite receiving millions in donations, her organization frequently failed to provide proper medical treatment or transparency regarding the use of the funds. She also accepted money and praise from dictators and was firmly against abortion, contraception, and divorce, even in extreme cases (Yahoo, tinyurl.com/426m38kn).
There are still people who say that Marx is outdated because Russian socialism collapsed … In Russia, capitalism was interpreted as being about private property and private ownership of the means of production, and the Soviets’ proposal was, ‘What if we nationalize everything?’ Then they found that state control ended up being absolute. If you look at the situation of the workers, it didn’t change that much from one system to another. In capitalism, it’s the employers who exploit the workers. During Soviet socialism, the workers were exploited by the Communist Party or by the bureaucrats (ara, tinyurl.com/46we5aab).
The Russian communist party has awarded North Korean leader Kim Jong Un the “Lenin Prize” for his outstanding contributions to ‘socialist construction’, praising him for standing up against ‘imperialist aggression’ by supporting the invasion of Ukraine (NK News, tinyurl.com/ybezewfa).
The cobbled streets of Newport in Middlesbrough survive from the Victorian era. The staggering levels of child poverty here also feel like they belong in a different time. Six out of every seven children in Newport are classified as living in poverty (Sky News, tinyurl.com/438yhx94).
It’s time to stop settling. ‘The working class is going to have to look at itself as a whole and say, “Our divisions in race, politics, religion, sectors of the workforce — all that will have to be laid aside,” he says. “It’s a ‘workers of the world, unite’ situation. We’re all in it together against the billionaire class, and it’s going to take that in the fight to win”’ (In These Times, tinyurl.com/3b87rjdw).
(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)