Slaying dragons, or perhaps dinosaurs

It took a message from Catalan friends to remind that today is the Feast of St George, the pretext for a huge party out there. And it’s the day of our patron saint, too, back here in England (not Britain – England).

Barcelona's going to be having fun tonight

At first sight, it’s a curious coincidence that Catalonia and England share a patron saint, but a lot other places share him too, including Greece (and they really need a patron saint right now) and, naturally, Georgia.

St George has become a bit of a thing in England over the last couple of decades. The flag, red cross on a white ground, has begun to rival the Union Jack, that mish-mash that’s supposed to represent the whole of the United Kingdom: it’s made up of bits from the flags of England, Scotland, which is in the throes of an independence campaign, Ireland, most of which has long since gone, but not poor old loyal Wales. 

More about Wales later.

You see the flag of St George flown quite a bit these days, above all from church steeples. Church of England steeples, I suppose.

Flag of England on a Church steeple

The flag’s growth in popularity seems to be a reaction to the increasing nationalism of the Welsh and the Scots, which is a bit of a cheek, when you think that Welsh and Scots nationalism has grown in reaction to English nationalists lording it over them for centuries.

In any case, the most attractive aspect of St George is nothing to do with nationalism, but with his legendary exploits in slaying dragons. Now that’s something that we badly need again today. Or if not dragons, at least a few dinosaurs.

• The dinosaurs that inhabit the clubs of London, including the big one that meets in Parliament, and runs the Tory Party on the basis that the measure of a man is his wealth, and the greater his wealth, the better qualified he is to run the show.

• The dinosaurs in the US senate who’ve decided to react to the killing of twenty kids in Newtown by doing precisely nothing, even blocking the most limited control on guns, though they’ll doubtless react to the three deaths in Boston by clamouring for a war somewhere.

• The dinosaurs on both sides of the Atlantic who feel that the rights of an embryonic collection of cells in a uterus trump those of the grown, sentient, suffering woman to whom it belongs.

• The dinosaurs everywhere who think there’s a lot too much love in the world, so that any that occurs in couples of the same sex really ought to be locked away in the dark somewhere or, better still, banned.

• The dinosaurs who think that the best thing the poor can do is suffer a bit more to make sure that the fine people who run the place, can add a bit to their wealth. Maybe that’s just restating the first entry in this list but, hey, sometimes I feel it can’t be said loud enough or often enough.

So, come on St George! Show us what you’re made of and slay a dinosaur or two.

Which brings me back to Wales. That’s the country that’s not even significant enough to warrant inclusion on the Union Jack, but just when England, proud bearers of the flag of St George, were about to clinch the triumph of a Grand Slam in the Six Nations rugby championship – victory over every one of the other nations – who stepped up to deprive them? Wales, of course.

In the words of an Irish friend of mine, who adds insult to injury by living in Wales, they didn’t just beat England, they trashed England. I phoned to check whether he’d perhaps misspelled ‘thrashed’, but no, ‘trash’ was what he meant. And a trashing was what it was.

So, St George. If you don’t fancy taking on a dinosaur for us, let me point you towards Cardiff. There’s a dragon there on whom you might like to wreak revenge.

Welsh Dragon.
A target for St George if dinosaurs aren't his cup of tea

And, in the meantime, have a great party, my friends in Catalonia. And you Georgians too. As for the Greeks – see if you can at least drown your sorrows for one night.

And everyone else – happy St George’s, even if you don’t celebrate it.

Newtown and free speech

Much of the debate since the Newtown shootings, as after every other such tragic incident in the States, has focused on the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Nothing surprising about that, because this is the amendment guaranteeing the right to bear guns.
The fundamental problem may however lie not so much in this amendment as in the First, which guarantees freedom of speech, belief and assembly. It’s a powerful illustration of how something that on the face of it seems entirely good, can produce terrible effects in certain circumstances.

The ten amendments to the US Constitution form the Bill of Rights

Kierkegaard got it right when he said ‘people demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use’. All the same, most of us would probably agree that free speech is an important right. Certainly, I regard it as crucial whenever I want to exercise it, though I have to say I wish I could occasionally selectively suspend it for certain other people.


Desirable though it may be, however, the right to free speech can’t be open-ended. The classic counter-example is that there’s no right to shout ‘fire’ needlessly in a crowded theatre. Civilised societies also prohibit libel, incitement or conspiracy, thought these are also constraints on free speech.

There are other, more subtle aberrations in the application of this right. The First Amendment was the basis on which the US supreme court chose to allow the so-called super PACs to operate. These are organisations that can channel unlimited sums of money into political activity, allowing them to make or unmake politicians.

It is also the first amendment that guarantees that politicians can continue to back their campaigns with TV advertising. Funding the astronomic expenditure that involves makes them more than ever dependent on donors.

Those two effects create circumstances in which political lobbies flourish. And here we are back with the problem of guns and tragedies such as Newtown’s: no political lobby is as well organised, and few are as well funded, as the NRA, the main pro-gun lobby.

It is currently following its usual tactics, of saying very little in the immediate post-massacre period. It can see the writing on the wall, and the head of steam generated by Newtown is such that the writing is powerful: there seems a real chance of some significant steps towards tighter gun control this time.
So watch the NRA, once the dust has settled. It is going to give a master-class in the use of lobby muscle in a political system more prone to it than any other in the world.

At which points its opponents will need to ponder the effect of abuse of not only the Second Amendment to the Constitution, but the First as well.

Newtown: the long view

A people fighting for its freedom: what could be more inspiring? Even we know that even in victory, they are only swapping one set of problems for another, that what they conquer may be new liberties but it won’t be Liberty, that the process won’t be complete but simply reach a stage from which the next can be contemplated. 

Along the way, as the process extends, there are many diversions, as early principles are deformed and misapplied by those who follow behind. Still, the original leaders remain impressive and, to me, among the most striking are those craftsmen, lawyers and farmers who mounted the campaign to free the North American colonies of British domination back in the eighteenth century.

At the time there was only one standing army in the colonies, a foreign one, Britain’s. The insurgents could only call on the militias of the individual colonies, and arm them only with whatever weapons they had in their homes. Britain, of course, banned the colonists from holding arms, making acquiring and keeping weaponry a key issue.

In 1791, with the British expelled, the newly formed United States decided to add to their Constitution ten amendments that would form a Bill of Rights. There was nothing new about this demand. It had been raised by Englishmen since the reign of Charles I in the early seventeenth century, and we tend to forget that it was above all Englishmen who set up the United States.

Curiously, the English back in England had to wait for a written Bill of Rights until 2000, when the Human Rights Act came into force. Ironically, there’s now an intensifying campaign in Britain to repeal it as ‘too European’, i.e. foreign. The notion of guaranteed rights has never really fully taken root in Britain.

When the American founding fathers came to draw up their Bill of Rights, their views were naturally influenced by the circumstances in which they lived and the experiences of their political careers. And a matter that concerned them, though by then the United States had its own standing army, was the difficulty of forming an effective, well-armed militia.

So they included a second amendment among the ten adopted in 1791:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

It’s always difficult to try to work out exactly what was intended by men long since dead. But surely both the wording of the amendment and the personal histories of the men who drafted it, suggest it was designed to ensure that the people could defend the state against anyone attempting to use violence against it.

Possibly, as the US Supreme Court argued in 2008 and 2010, this could be extended to include defending one’s own home and family.

What it was clearly not designed to do was to create circumstances in which it is easy for deeply unfortunate, unhappy or ill individuals to walk into a high school, a college campus, a temple, a cinema or – for Pete’s sake – a primary school and deal out arbitrary death.

Surely the framers of the amendment would be the first to cry in horror at the idea that they intended to allow citizens to hold lethal weapons for any purpose they chose, independent of the defence of the state?

James Madison, father of the Constitution.
He would be shocked by the travesty made
of the Second Amendment

It’s my suspicion that if James Madison, the father of the Constitution and fourth President of the United States, were to return to Earth today and see what happened in Newtown, Connecticut, yesterday he might say, ‘what? And they turn our second amendment into a defence of a situation in which this can happen? It’s time to revise it.’

But we don’t need the resurrection of James Madison for Americans to understand the need for revision. An American friend, talking about what pushes anyone to acts of mindless violence, wrote yesterday ‘sometimes it is mental illness, sometimes it is being fired, sometimes it is heartbreak, sometimes it is hate...but the common denominator is always access to a gun, and without the gun there would be no killing.’

One of those attending the vigil in Washington pointed out a stark truth: ‘assault weapons are designed to kill as many people as possible as quickly as possible. They have no place in our society, they have no place in our communities.’

I’d love to think that the cumulative effect of the repeated massacres would lead to an unstoppable momentum for change. Perhaps it will at last. But the forces against are powerful and well-organised. 

Among the many statements of sorrow yesterday, there were also eloquent silences. John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, offered condolences but said nothing about gun control. And the great pro-gun lobby, the NRA, followed its usual tactic of saying little while the wounds are fresh, saving its powder for any proposals that emerge, which it will use its financial strength to derail.

There’s a long way to go to achieve gun control in the US. But the Founding Fathers didn’t give up because the forces against them were apparently overwhelming or the battle was likely to be long. And, as I said at the beginning, no revolution is ever complete, it’s always a work in progress.

What better tribute could there be to the drafters of the Constitution than to take that process forward, campaigning for as long as it takes, to modify one of the provisions they added to it? To review a second amendment perverted by misinterpretation and bring it back in line with the spirit that they embodied?

Then perhaps we can turn the Auroras, the Columbines, the Newtowns into what they should be: ghastly reminders of a past long buried.

Why not put a stop to this terror?