To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

The above is an extract from "POEM ON THE LISBON DISASTER; Or an Examination of the Axiom, “All is Well,” which Voltaire penned on the occasion of the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. In the wake of the Indian Ocean catastrophe, the French Enlightenment figure has been wheeled out as religious leaders and secularists have clashed over the "meaning" of this event. Richard Dawkins, the scourge of believers, was particularly vehement in the letters page of the Guardian:

"It is psychologically possible to derive comfort from sincere belief in a nonexistent illusion, but - silly me - I thought believers might be disillusioned with an omnipotent being who had just drowned 125,000 innocent people (or an omniscient one who failed to warn them). Of course, if you can derive comfort from such a monster, I would not wish to deprive you. "

However, regardless of the debates in secular (or Godless, as some might accuse) Europe, it seems that the devastation has done little to dent faith in areas that have actually suffered. The South Africa Star reports "across these battered shores, dozens of mosques still stand, their minarets glinting defiantly in the sun - a phenomenon survivors in the deeply Islamic region credit as much to divine intervention as robust architecture.

"God's invisible hands prevent the mosque's destruction," said Mukhlis Khaeran, who saw the sea sweep away his home village of Baet outside the north Sumatran city of Banda Aceh, but leave the neighbourhood mosque relatively intact.

"He punishes us for our greed and arrogance but He will protect his house," a dejected Khaeran said."

The Independent has devoted its front page to asking commentators "Could the tsunami disaster be a turning point for the world?" Most of those who reply automatically take a paternalistic attitude, envisioning the possibility of the wealthy North reaching out to an impoverished South. But wouldn't a real turning point occur if this tragedy were to engender at least one Islamic Voltaire, one who questioned whether 100,000 Indonesians were really so sinful as to merit being wiped out? Or one who wondered aloud why the mosques were the only buildings to have been built soundly?

Assuming those who raised such questions survived, such a development might be literally revolutionary. After all, two years after the fall of the Bastille, Voltaire was reburied amid fanfare in the Panthéon, a mausoleum dedicated to those who inspired the French Revolution.

Here are three things, tenuously connected, I'd like to mention today:

*Contrary to previously expressed hopes that the Indian Ocean disaster might encourage a new generation of sceptics, this Washington Post headline doesn't bode well: 'In Angry Waves, the Devout See an Angry God.'

*As the Economist pointed out, this is not the worst loss of humanity inflicted by our (or their) bipolar Deity in recent times. The earthquake that struck the Chinese city of Tangshan in 1976 is estimated to have claimed at least 600,000 lives.

*The end of a single life, and especially one that seemed to have been complete, might seem nearly meaningless in the context of kilodeaths but it's significant that even during tsunami coverage, pages were cleared to mark the passing of Susan Sontag*. I think Sontag was important for what she represented as much as for what she wrote. Unashamedly serious, occasionally sanctimonious, she nevertheless made the life of the mind seem like an alluring luxury. This suggestion, I hope, is not as shallow as it seems: Sontag herself argued, most famously in the essay "Against Interpretation", that the sensual appreciation or visceral reaction to art always triumphed over dry interpretation. So despite the much-repeated story of her apartment containing 15,000 books and no television, there didn't seem to be anything primly ascetic about Sontag. In fact, it seemed, she was doing exactly what she wanted.

And in passing she even made Christopher Hitchens stop shilling for the neocons momentarily and write an appreciation that borders on sanity.

*In contrast, you have to feel a bit sorry for the shade of Aldous Huxley, whose passing was slightly overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy.

American radio isn't all shockjocks and foaming-at-the-mouth evangelicals--National Public Radio (NPR) is sort of like an American version of BBC Radio 4, which makes it an object of fear-and-loathing among those who think Ann Coulter is a rational human being. (Her latest musings ooze under the rubric "Liberals Love America Like O.J. Loved Nicole".) But bolstered by a humongous bequest of $200 million from Joan Kroc, widow of the founder of McDonald's, the NPR franchise will probably manage to withstand any crimp on federal funds that will doubtlessly occur when the Bush Administration, like Wile E. Coyote caroming over a cliff, realises the ground has disappeared beneath its feet.

KCRW, "National Public Radio's Southern California flagship station," broadcasts an outstanding show called "Bookworm," hosted by Michael Silverblatt. Previous interviewees number Seamus Heany, John Banville, Marin Amis, Orhan Pahmuk, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan and dozens of other heavyweights. David Mitchell and Alan Hollinghurst are upcoming guests.

As you would expect by now, it's all freely available here.

Sometime the Web actually does life up to the hype.

When the smoking ban in enclosed places was introduced in Ireland, many remarked that such a prohibition would never even be mooted in Southern Europe, with its bars and cafes perpetually wreathed in tobacco fumes. Well it's happened in Italy and my fellow Three Monkey's blogger "The View from Bologna" reports on how the new law is going down. It seems that without the stick of hefty fines, the prohibition may remain more de jure than de facto.

Perhaps Prime Minister Burlusconi should ask Ireland's Minister of Justice Michael McDowell about how to enforce the law with a vigour Il Duce himself would have been proud of!

The Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch once said something along the lines of the Second World War cannot really be said to be over until parents could innocently name their child "Adolf." That day seems to be retreating further into the future, in part due to excellent programs such as the BBC's Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution'. Such series remain important, partly because of the pernicious endurance of Holocaust deniers, partly because the process of genocide--improvised at first, but proceeding by grisly trial and error to assembly-line slaughter--needs to be delineated to bring home the concrete reality of what happened.

Yet I wonder whether such programs--or rather the myriad of lesser documentaries about the events of World War II--underpin some dark stereotypes as well as illuminate the past. For many people in the "Anglophone" world, continental Europe still remains the arena for World War II. A documentary on hooliganism during the Euro 2000 football tournament showed, I recall, an English "supporter" shouting at one of the riot police who was kneeling on his back while attaching handcuffs: "You'd be speaking German if it wasn't for us." This was coming from some yob whose father probably wasn't even born until after World War Two.

In such people's eyes (and in those of many several rungs up the intellectual ladder), contemporary Germany's (slightly faded) reputation for efficiency and Ordnung is merely a (temporarily) tamed version of the goosestepping ranks of 60 years ago. The cliché that remembering the past is always important holds true but, nevertheless, there are aspects of history many people can't even recall.

To plug the gaps there needs to be more high-profile programs about other eras in Germany's and Europe's past. In terms of "sexy" television, it's of course difficult to beat the telegenic spectacle of the Nazis. (For example, watching the BBC documentary last night, I became momentarily distracted by the skull-and-crossbones insignia on the caps of Waffen SS officers. How did people wearing such symbols of death possibly think they were on the "right" side? George Lucas couldn't have devised a better villain’s uniform.)

However, I think many people my age (especially those with a reasonable background in history) would like the focus to shift slightly from that black decade at the bull's-eye of the 20th century. We are drenched in the imagery, mythology, and the actual events of that conflict. In contrast, too little is known, for example, about how Germany achieved its Wirtschaftswunder--the economic and political "miracle" that transformed a ruined totalitarian state into a prosperous democratic nation in less than 20 years. In a broader context, the story of the European Union is equally miraculous: a continent riven by centuries of conflict coming together to create a new superpower that exerts its influence through "soft power" rather than through the military force flexed by its transatlantic competitor. (Think, for example, of how the EU demanded and achieved improved human rights in the candidate country Turkey. Then compare this success with the conditions in any of the United States' quasi-client regimes in the Middle East.)

At the heart of all these extraordinary achievements, alongside its prouder and perhaps less altruistic partner, France, stood the Federal Republic of Germany.

But instead the masses are drip-fed stories of Eurocrats on the make and barmy rules from Brussels. Of towels on sunbeds and neo-Nazi riots. Yet to expect some wider recognition of these events in the English-speaking media is probably a pipe dream. It's difficult to imagine the History Channel (AKA the Hitler Channel) weaning itself off fascinating fascism to present, say, the growth of the Greens in Germany, a development future generations might identify either as a false dawn or a pivotal step in saving the Earth. Peace doesn't sit well in the schedules.

But if we can't balance the crimes of the past with an awareness of the contemporary, we may end up sharing the same the bleak characterisation expressed by a friend of Charlie Citrine in Saul Bellow's novel, "Humboldt's Gift." Examining his vandalised Mercedes parked at a Chicago kerbside, Citrine recalls the adage: "Murder Jews and make machines--that's what those Germans really know how to do."

*I'm aware that many people would contest that the scale and the perverse ambition of the "Final Solution" places it on a different plane that other events during the Second World War. It doesn't just deserve a chapter like D-Day or the siege of Stalingrad--its sui generis nature means that it has to be pondered separately. I think, however, that the spectre of the Holocaust is integral to the way succeeding generations understand the war.

Although the Allied governments did next to nothing to inform their populace of what was happening in the death camps at the time, people in the countries that "won" the war (in a way, Germany and Japan, too, won) now see the struggle as unfolding against the backcloth of mass extermination--reinforcing the nobility of the Allies and the almost demonic nature of the Nazi regime. To many today the point of World War II was to bring the Holocaust to an end--a way of thinking that probably would have been alien to the societies of Britain, France, and the USA in the 1930s and 1940s, when casual anti-Semitism was rife.

You write a post about the lingering fascination of Nazism and what happens? The nice-but-dim third-in-line to the British throne is snapped wearing a swastika armband. Considering the Windsors are about as British as bratwurst, such antics were likely to prod the broadsheets into dredging up the Royal Family's (and particularly King Edward VIII's) rather dodgy relationship with Hitler's gang. Meanwhile in Italy, as The View from Bologna reported, Lazio striker Paolo di Canio found himself in hot (or perhaps only lukewarm) water after allegedly delivering a fascist salute after scoring against bitter rivals Roma. As our Bologna correspondent notes, admitting to Fascist sympathies is, alas, no big deal in contemporary Italy.

This queasy mixture of Afrika Korps aristos and Mussolini-supporting footballers made me come up with the following non sequitur: Is Ireland the only country in Europe that is both a republic and is free of an ugly fascist past? Whenever I fumble for reasons to be proud of this country, this is a fact that I return to. I think any country that retains a monarchy, regardless of whether they're immured in wedding-cake palaces or bicycling among the populace, is suffering from a democratic deficit. Moreover, I'd go as far to say that Fascism and Monarchism are grounded in the same weakness, rooted as they are in the need for some paternalistic figure who is "above politics". (In cases such as Spain this relationship was made explicit in the 1970s when the dictator Franco essentially designated King Juan Carlos as his successor. The fall of Benito Mussolini's regime, which was quickly followed by the end of the Italian monarchy, is also instructive.)

Some of Ireland's previous leaders may provoke little in the way of admiration but at least they avoided the totalitarian option*. And today we are free from the parasitic royals unlike, say, Scotland. In fact, you could argue that the Republic of Ireland has a history of being the most democratic nation in Europe. Which is, I think, a lot more commendable that the sort of hype that appears almost daily about how rich we're meant to be. (See here for today's specimen.)

*De Valera saw the potential threat of Eoin O'Duffy's somewhat ludicrous Blueshirts and prevented a potential coup d'etat. So his overlong tenure did, actually, have some positive aspects.

From Seymour M. Hersh's article in this week's New Yorker:

"The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse”—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said."

After reading the above, the simple question is: Do these guys ever learn?

Apologies to all my countless readers in the blogosphere for being remiss in offering recent posts. (I bet at least 25% of all blog postings consist of similar apologies.) It's just that as I approached the end of my employment with "A Once-Leading Irish Software Company, Erstwhile Great White Hope of the Dotcom Bubble", I found myself in a slight mental funk.

Faced with the prospect of updating my CV and smiling during interviews with the desperation of a jobbing actor looking for a walk-on part in Holby City, I have succumbed (when not engaged in haphazard house husbanding, of course) to a DVD binge. (In passing: My recommendation from the hours of watching would be Pedro Almodovar's overheated noir 'Bad Education'--think of it as Alfred Hitchcock meets Robert Mapplethorpe. And although Michael Mann's 'Collateral' is an enjoyable ride, the script's sub-Nietzschean musing can't hide the fact that the characters are about as complex as Indiana Jones.)

Anyway, in the last two weeks, I think I've read about as much as a dyslexic Premiership footballer, but I think I'm slowly emerging from intellectual lethargy. Unfortunately, I put the blame for the recent bout partly on Colm Tóibín. A friend lent me his highly praised "The Master" just before Christmas and I've been averaging around 4 pages a day ever since. The ragged bookmark currently lies hanging out from the hardback like a mocking tongue.

It's not that the book is in any way not beautifully written; indeed part of my problem with the book is that it's almost too sensitively executed. It's a book that basically revolves around Henry James' ruthless determination to avoid getting entangled in the messy emotional lives of others, chiefly intelligent, highly strung women whose inability to accept conventional marriage mirrors James' own ambiguous position. Tóibín makes the cliché of living for one's art come vividly alive--and it's not an edifying sight. With still another sixty pages to go, the near-blasphemous thought struck me about Tóibín's James--how would anyone possibly tolerate this rather boring emotional vampire, a man whose sense of decorum is in fact closer to the cagey blandness of a spy gathering info. Nowhere in the book is James presented as saying anything particularly interesting or even offering the throwaway bon mot. We are told that James detested the facile wit of Oscar Wilde, but after a few hundred pages of wandering in the fustian gloom of James' intellect, a few glib aphorisms wouldn't go amiss. It's not that I expect characters in novels to be good or even likeable, but I do like them to make an effort.

(There's is a very good tragicomedy sequence, however, in which James ineptly tries to deal with his increasingly truculent and drunken servants). I feel vaguely embarrassed by this trenchant attack on the book (as so often is the case, soon after I started typing my condemnation became stronger than I initially envisioned). Perhaps I'm missing something everybody else is swooning over. But, I ask you, can't you find something incredibly well-made and pretty boring at the same time?

...as the character in the sketch used to say, I'll get my coat.

No doubt as I type this some guru is preparing a book for O'Reilly or some other press on the 'ethics of blogging'. (For example, is it permissible to correct errors "invisibly" after posting or should you always highlight changes after the initial publish?) And of course the idiosyncratic nature of blogging is being slowly eroded as major corporations sanction the activities of 'house bloggers' who chart the zany (but always productive) antics in cubicleland.

In an attempt to preserve any integrity this blogger may have, I will preface the description of the following product by admitting that most of my family is involved in its development. Now, having got the declaration of interest out of the way, I will say that in an era when the Apple iPod has been hailed as the greatest breakthrough since the splitting of the atom, I can't see why a gadget like the StikAx shouldn't sell by the shedload.

The website (www.stikax.com) will do a better job than I can in explaining the device's appeal, but what struck me is that it now allows people to turn sample mixing (which seems to have become the backbone of modern music production) into a performance art. The StikAx itself is a sleek-looking gadget with buttons that you can 'wire up' to various loops and effects. Once you've "prepped" the buttons with their associated sounds, you can leave the keyboard and let loose. (This should appeal to teenagers and their balding fathers equally.) The resulting mix is automatically recorded--you can then use this recording as the basis for a new "performance" thereby creating ever-more complex soundscapes with a minimum of hassle.

Anyway, that's enough of my spiel; go to the site and see for yourself.