Enslaved to the cult of the car?

Enslaved to the cult of the car?

BMW: a nice car, but only if you can drive it.

A columnist’s job confers some privileges, and obligations

Opinion: With the megaphone comes a duty to protect freedom of expression

Fintan O'Toole

Tue, Feb 11, 2014, 12:01
In December 2010, I acted as MC for an Irish Congress of Trade Unions rally against the bank bailout and the arrival of the troika. The following weekend, the Irish edition of theSunday Times carried a long, anonymous “profile” of me. It began with a description of me driving home from that rally in my series 5 BMW.

The implication was pretty clear: I was a hypocritical, champagne socialist, stirring up the masses from a position of wealth and privilege. The article continued as it began, painting me as a hypocrite, a liar and a lazy dilettante who was paid a massive salary in return for very little work.

I don’t drive a series 5 BMW. I don’t drive any other car either. I don’t own a car because, to my shame, I can’t drive. I went home that day, as I usually do, on the number 13 bus. The BMW story was pure invention and almost every “fact” that followed was wildly and demonstrably wrong.

The “profile” was, in other words, a gold mine. I had hit the libel jackpot. The Sunday Times couldn’t possibly go into court to defend an article that was so sloppily written and badly researched. Even the most aggressive lawyer would tell them to stuff my mouth with gold and make the whole thing go away fast.

I have to confess that for about five minutes I was intoxicated on the potent brew of greed and revenge that I imbibed to soothe my hurt feelings. I thought how lovely it would be to get Rupert Murdoch to buy me an actual series 5 BMW and pay for the driving lessons and a lifetime’s supply of petrol. I would call the car Rupert and every time I turned the key in the ignition I would give a mad cackle of glee.

Chapter in memoir
Any time I was feeling glum, I would just go out and stroke the soft leather seats or rest my throbbing forehead against the cool walnut finish on the dashboard. I even thought it would make a great chapter in my memoir, called How I Learned to Drive.

And then I remembered something. I am a national newspaper columnist. I occupy a position of enormous privilege. I’m allowed to take part in what we might call the semi-official national discourse. I’m allowed to be robustly critical of all sorts of people. I’m allowed to enrage some of those people and (though I don’t set out to do so) to upset others. I’m given those freedoms because there is a working assumption that free and open and robust debate is not just permissible in, but essential to, a democracy.

If you benefit from those freedoms in the extraordinary and highly privileged way that newspaper columnists do, you have to be very, very careful about the way you conduct yourself.

So instead of hiring a lawyer and suing the Sunday Times, I talked to the paper’s Irish editor. He agreed pretty quickly that the article was inaccurate and indefensible. It was taken off the paper’s website and a retraction was published the following week.

And that was the end of it. The record was put straight. No money changed hands. No lawyer’s children’s school fees were paid. I still don’t have a BMW.

Occupational hazard
Being defamed is an occupational hazard for opinion-makers who stir up emotions. It has happened to me about a dozen times. I’ve been accused of some pretty nasty things, from lying to lack of professional competence to outright criminality. Sometimes, if the thing was merely stupid, I’ve just let it go. At other times, when the defamation was serious, I’ve tried to sort things out without involving lawyers or looking for money.

It is true, certainly, that the threat of a possible libel action is implicit in these affairs, but it has always seemed to me that for a newspaper columnist it should be an absolute last resort. So I’ve never sent a solicitor’s letter and never sought damages.

I’m not suggesting, of course, that being a newspaper columnist means that you don’t have the same rights to protect your good name as every other citizen. People have to exercise their own judgement about how they react to public comment they believe to be inaccurate, unfair and damaging.

But there’s a price to be paid for the considerable privilege of being granted an especially loud voice in the national conversation. With the megaphone comes a duty to protect freedom of expression and a vested interest in keeping it as open as possible. If, for example, you want to be free to call the National Women’s Council “feminazis” or suggest that atheists are not fully human, you need a robust sense of where the limits of acceptable polemic lie.

If I was a fervent Catholic, I might be swayed by another consideration. A man in the New Testament instructs his followers: “Pray for those that calumniate you.” As a sub-human heathen, I wouldn’t go quite that far. But as a columnist I do feel obliged to try to avoid suing them.

Enslaved to the cult of the car?

Gregory Rosenstock
Letters
Fri, Mar 7, 2014, 01:09

Sir, – Fintan O’Toole’s entertaining column (“A columnist’s job confers some privileges, and obligations”, Opinion, February 11th) refers to his “privileges and obligations” as a columnist, recalling his alleged ownership of a series 5 BMW; he successfully disabused the Sunday Times perpetrators of such vile notions and duly received a written apology the following Sunday. So far, so ecological.

But then, alas, he drops the ball: “I don’t own a car,” he states, “because, to my shame, I can’t drive.”

To his shame? He should be proud of the fact that throughout his life he has (unwittingly, as it happens) contributed positively to a sustainable future for his grandchildren.

Although unlike Mr O’Toole and his colleagues, I don’t occupy “a position of enormous privilege”, I hope I can be allowed this opportunity to remind your esteemed columnist of the virtually irreversible destruction of our planet caused by cars and their attendant industries.

An SUV can weigh up to three tonnes. It takes 99 per cent of all the energy used to propel the vehicle itself; just 1 per cent is used to move the person inside it.

A small leap of imagination conjuring up a world in which people use sophisticated public transport systems and routes that respect nature and the environment puts into perspective the recklessness of vast networks of ever-expanding roads swarmed with billions of angry, lethal vehicles, killing, maiming and destroying in the name of an illusory sense of freedom and independence.

The truth is that people are enslaved by their cars and a traffic code that enhances even more the mass hypnosis of their social conditioning.

Cars are not only lethal, causing countless deaths and injuries worldwide every day, they are alienating, anti-social and divisive; they have depleted our natural resources, destroyed our cities and our atmosphere and blighted our countryside.

Is there a columnist in the country who will finally have the courage to address this century-old horror story?

Does owning a car – or even being able to drive – preclude these columnists from daring to raise the subject? – Yours, etc,

GREGORY ROSENSTOCK,
Seapoint Road,
Bray,
Co Wicklow. 

Earlier blog posts on Greg's Blog at Blogspot 

e-books by Gregory Rosenstock

Sir, – Shane O’Doherty (Letters April 4th) belittles cyclists and people like me who commute by public transport on the basis that he, as a car driver, contributes more to the national economy than we do.

The tobacco industry could apply an equally plausible argument, or the arms industry, but that would be to ignore the common good, the health and welfare of our society and, indeed, our appalling legacy of a ruined planet in the name of a spurious concept Mr O’Doherty refers to as “the economy”.

As Colm Moore (Letters, April 7th) points out, typically 75-per-cent-empty cars make up 80 per cent of traffic but carry less than 40 per cent of passengers. Mr O’Doherty lists the plethora of expenses involved in owning a car. Here are some more thoughts he can ponder: as a typical car owner today, he will devote three to four of his 16 waking hours to his car. For his time, he will travel less than 10,000 miles a year and propel himself at an average speed of less than 8 miles an hour — about the same as a bicycle. And he will have to work up to a day and a half each week just to keep his means of transport on the road. Go figure. Yours, etc,

GREGORY ROSENSTOCK,

Seapoint Road,

Bray,

Co Wicklow

WHAT'S GOING ON....

                                    REFLECTIONS

Were you to appear, were I to approach you on a road,

Or in a field, or in a fog, on an empty beach, me and the dog,

Were you to return or, be returned, should I say,

Deep in amnesia, your past, your memories, erased,

Lost footage in life’s projection room, burnt or bleached,

The dangling sprockets spliced hastily to the reel,

Would you turn away, unsmilingly,  

                                    As Lazarus did, or so they say,

                                    Resentful, maybe, at being returned?

Were I to find you in a street, window shopping,

Checking your reflection in the glass,

The sudden image of a man at your shoulder,

Smiling at your smiling face in the window,

Would you turn around, respond, reveal, without a sound,

Unreal, my love, we’re all unreal, our memories are

Reflections of reflections; let them go…

                                    Reflections are all that we are,

                                    Reflections of all that we are?

from Be in Me

Gregory Rosenstock

e-books by Greg

WHAT GOES ON....

You are the openness. It is only in waiting without waiting that you become open to the openness. In the end, openness is what it is open to; waiting is what it is waiting for. That is all.

J.Krishnamurti

Greg's Blog: Second blog post with What's Going On (ephemeral s...

Greg's Blog: Second blog post with What's Going On (ephemeral s...: Second blog post with What's Going On (ephemeral stuff) and What Goes On (the real thing). Comments really welcome! WHAT&#3...

Second blog post with What's Going On (ephemeral stuff) and What Goes On (the real thing).
Comments really welcome!

WHAT'S GOING ON

THE SHUTTLECOCK

Remembering our vigil at Newgrange that solstice,

Awaiting the sunrise like children,

I phoned on the year’s longest night.

News had it that a satellite

Was crash-landing on Venus at the time,

And you told me you’d just fallen asleep.

You said the roads out there were impassable for ice.

Here it was changeable, windy, mainly,

And of course wet, though not as cold as last week,

But I said nothing about all that, 

And so you thought I was fading:

You’re fading, you said, can you hear me?

Can you hear me? I lied, like a tongue-tied fool,

Your voice is breaking up, it’s the line.

                       

I might have told you that a shuttlecock

Blew down last week in a wintry wind onto the lawn,

But I thought it was unimportant.

The caring leaves which housed it

And hid it from the smacks and wallops

Are all blown away, but it’s still there now, unfazed,

Red-nosed in the cold, probed by a washed blackbird,

Hopping about it on the dazzling lawn.

Cropped from a sepia photograph,

Slapped right out of the snap,

It is a windfall from the past,

From a game without winners and losers,

A relic from the world we abandoned

For the world and its relics that we found.

                                              

Gregory Rosenstock

WHAT GOES ON

http://shar.es/Qpcp0

The above link is a memorable interview with the inimitable Wayne Dyer about forgiveness, that much misunderstood word. He refers to the beautiful analogy of forgiveness being like the scent of a violet crushed under heel.
The video is forty minutes long but if you can only see the first half, it's DEFINITELY time well spent!

A few personal thoughts on forgiveness:

Why forgive? Because forgiveness, like truth, sets you free.
OK, that makes sense.
But what if the offender has no remorse or is a repeated or even pathological offender?
To understand forgiveness, we see the offender of the offense as unconscious. Not unconscious of the offense, of course, but unconscious of his or her true self while here on earth. (...they know not what they do.)
Where meaning breaks down, however, is that many people equate forgiveness with acceptance.
Quite the contrary: the offense is always unacceptable. You can't forgive an offense, even if that were possible; the damage is done.
You forgive the offender, not the offense.
In the interview above, Wayne's father is dead and at the age of thirty-four, he goes to his grave to piss on it. Is it possible, then, to forgive someone who is dead?
Contrary to what people may think, it is even more difficult to forgive someone who is alive; at least the person who is dead can do no more harm. People equate forgiveness with reconciliation; why would anyone be so foolish as to expose oneself to the potential of a repeated offense after reconciliation? If there's a loose cannon on deck, keep out of the way - if you can!  Forgive and forget?  Certainly not. Always forgive. Always. But forget at your peril.
One final thought: esoteric as it may seem to some, the reason why forgiveness sets you free is that we are, in the final analysis, really forgiving ourselves. Like the one hundred trillion cells in your body, we are all uniquely individual, conscious cells, comprising the single great organism of consciousness. That we think we are separate from one another and from anything and everything else - in the universe!- is just an illusion. When you forgive me, you are forgiving you, almost as if you had done the deed yourself.
Nah, you say, I'm not buying into that. Revenge is sweet, it's a dish best served cold; none of these new age cliches about being one with the universe. Forgiveness doesn't solve anything, you say.
You're right. Forgiveness doesn't solve; it dissolves. Solving has to do with working things out in your head.
Unconscious though the offender may be, the amazing thing about it all is that even the densest, most unconscious offender will recognize the power of forgiveness to dissolve the false self's (or ego's) attachment to the offense and to dissolve the hatred and poisonous feelings of retribution in the one who forgives.

Whaddya think?

Greg  (eBooks)

Greetings!

For the next while, I'd like to divide the blog into two parts:
a) What's going on, and b) What goes on. What's going on has to do with the ever-changing illusion we call life; what goes on has to do with that which does not change.
For the next few blogs, allow me to indulge myself by contributing a short poem to the first part and - thanks to all the great teachers and scientists of our times - an illuminating thought to the second part!

Here goes!

WHAT'S GOING ON

                      THE HAWK

Was it the weeds that grew out of the graves?

Or the rabbit’s foot nailed to the gate?

Or the skull of the dog on the road?

Or the sun-parched pump on the path?

Or the abandoned nest in the pump?

Or the bones of the abandoned bird in the nest?

Or all of that, or what? What was it at all

That caused all the tear-fall in the field?

Ah, had I but known why,

Sudden as the silence in the meadowlark’s song,

Raising your eyes to the sky you would print

On the silkscreen of your heart

The black silhouette of a hawk, spreadeagled against the blue,

Stock-still in expectation of some small animal

To bolt and tumble for all time through hot confusion

Into the bone-coloured meadows behind the eyes!

WHAT GOES ON

“All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.”

Kabir   (This quotation is also attributed to great mystic poet, Rumi - but no doubt both would agree that it comes from the same Source in any case!...)

Books published

This piece of flash-fiction is just under five hundred words - two minutes of your time, if you have it! 

And if you have another minute to spare, I'd love to know if you thought it was worth the first two minutes!    

                                                                                           

                                                BETWEEN STATIONS         

The announcement on the train apologized for the delay. Power cut. Obstruction on the line. Obstruction?   Months earlier, in Monkstown, I’d seen men in reflective jackets, with bin-bags, combing the tracks. Body parts, muttered someone, gravely.

Feeling servile in the tight-fitting suit I wore only for interviews and funerals, I went over what I’d say about the gap in my employment, what I had to offer, why they should hire me. There’d be a panel, I was told. Deep breath. Time enough. At least there was a view of Killiney Bay. Maybe I’d spot the dolphins. Oh, to be a dolphin.

Porpoises, Cornelius, not dolphins. Only Charles called me Cornelius. On the way into Dublin last year, he sat regaling me with prophesies of doom. Ignorance is slavery, he lisped, stuffing a bunch of photocopies into my reluctant hand. Warnings of an imminent nuclear war were highlighted in yellow, validated by incomprehensible astrological events to which obscure notes and numbers were added in neat, meticulous handwriting. Keep it under your hat, he advised, solicitously.  People aren’t ready for it.  

Fellow-students from the seventies, it was the first time I’d seen him in years.  It surprised me that he’d even recognized me on the platform. All his life he’d remained a teetotaller and non-smoker. His shirt collar was frayed, albeit neat and spotless. He had no watch, no phone, no e-mail, no debts, no cards, no mortgage, no dependants, no responsibilities. At all.  I suppose it must have been his integrity that evoked in me a certain admiration for Charles, envy even, if truth be told.  Before he got off, he scribbled the address of his bedsitter on the margin of one of the dispatches. Greed will be our demise, were his parting words, uttered with a chuckle.

Would he have actually welcomed a war?  A nuclear winter? A windswept planet of insects and grasses?  And if so, why?  Sour grapes?  The vindication of his predictions?  The utter destruction of his loneliness?

I decided to visit him months later, November, I think it was. I wanted to tell him, I wanted to reassure him, that despite everything, despite all the terrible harm we have done and are currently doing to ourselves and to the planet, this life, this astonishing, ephemeral life of ours was just bursting with potential and joy.  

A woman with a baby answered the doorbell. She pointed to a door in the hallway. The tenant, in his vest, also from abroad, drawing heavily on a cigarette, had known Charles only to see. He remembered a skip, a mattress, old clothes, old books.

A pair of fins surfaced and dipped in the bay. Dolphins!  I almost shouted it out. The near-empty train shuddered once, then glided smoothly along the tracks. I wiped the tears from my face, loosened my collar, stretched out my legs and broke into laughter.  It was true, I conceded, laughing.  Life was just bursting with potential and joy.

Gregory Rosenstock

Novels:  WhoCares (2008); Lazarus (2012).

Non-fiction: Be In Me (2013)

Prequel to Be In Me (Be In Me, Q & A) just e-published and pending review. I think it's currently free to download nevertheless - although it might take a few days to reach iTunes, etc.

What is it? It's an extended interview (c.20 pps) about Be In Me, a book on life, death and the afterlife.
(Just kidding. There is no death.)
P.S. And no, it's got nothing to do with religion!...

Enjoy the free download: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/394791
(Feedback of any kind would be cool - you can write a review if you like!)
Published at Smashwords.com