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A fairly huge gap this time, and for a good reason: I’ve been busy on, among other things, completing the upgrade of the rest of the site. As usual, the basic work was not too bad, but error checking took forever.

I also had to spend some time fixing another site, where an unpredictable problem arose; fixing that caused more problems and in the end… I had to redesign the site.

If I don’t get back before then, have a good Samhuinn, Hallowe’en, or whatever you call it.

Saturday 26th October

It has always seemed odd to me that the BBC should claim the police box as a trade mark. (Well, always since 1996, which was when the Patent Office accepted it as a BBC trade mark.) The police box was, of course, created by police forces as a way for beat policemen to maintain contact with the station in the days before the transistor made two-way radio contact possible for a copper on foot; the boxes also provided a means for the public to call for police help in the days when very few homes had a telephone. The BBC cannot claim to have created the police box, then, so the idea of them holding the copyright on police boxes seems bizarre.

However, for most people today the police box has no associations with the police at all. Anyone seeing a police box in a magazine or on television will immediately recognise it as a Tardis. It says something for the enduring popular appeal of Doctor Who that fifteen years after the series was last broadcast, and six years after the disappointing Paul McGann TV movie, the imagery of the series is still deeply embedded in the public consciousness. Recent years have seen the Tardis used in advertising cars, to emphasise the spaciousness of the interior, and Daleks used to advertise chocolate and modified to form the BBC 2 channel identifier; kids who weren’t born when the series was on TV are familiar with its imagery. The most familiar image is the police box exterior of the Tardis. (In fact, the Tardis — humming eerily — was one of the first images on screen in the series, in the first couple of minutes of the programme.)

The almost exclusive association of the police box with the television series is nothing new. I recall some years ago — I think it was 1983, it was certainly around that time — going through to the Edinburgh Filmhouse for screenings of at least one episode of the first Doctor Who story ever, “An Unearthly Child” (the first episode was originally broadcast on November 23rd, 1963) and five episodes of the second story, “The Daleks.” This was the first opportunity anyone in Scotland had had to see these serials since their original broadcast (both are now available on video).

In the first episode, two schoolteachers are puzzled by oddities in the behaviour of one of their pupils, so they follow her home — which turns out, apparently, to be a junk yard. Inside the junk yard is a police box. When the teachers discover it, they are naturally puzzled — “These things are usually on the street.” On first seeing it, one of them exclaims, “It’s a police box!“ Immediately, one of the audience in the Filmhouse, a boy who couldn’t have been more than six years old, yelled out, “No! It’s a Tardis!”

Naturally, the BBC has used the police box in merchandising of various sorts. Recently the Metropolitan Police have tried to claim the trade mark rights on the police box image, and the BBC have defended their claim. Odd as it has seemed to me that the BBC should claim as a trade mark something which was once a familiar part of city streetscapes, I am glad that the BBC have won the case (and the police been ordered to pay costs).

Apart from the universal identification of the police box with the Tardis, The Met weren’t the only police force to have police boxes. Glasgow had police boxes of a very similar design, and indeed there remain a few of these boxes on Glasgow’s streets, renovated and maintained with, I believe, some support from the Doctor Who Appreciation Society. (One of the boxes in the city centre, in Buchanan Street outside Borders Books, used to play the Doctor Who theme — the original, Radiophonic Workshop, version, which further shows the extent of the identification of the boxes with the series.)

The Met, though, is not averse to making claims of uniqueness which ignore the existence of other forces. For example, this passage from its web site would seem to imply there was no police force in Britain until the Met came into existence:

Until 1829, law enforcement had been lacking in organisation. As London expanded during the 18th and 19th centuries the whole question of maintaining law and order had become a matter of public concern. In 1812, 1818 and 1822, Parliamentary committees were appointed to investigate the subject of crime and policing. But it was not until 1828 when Sir Robert Peel set up his committee that the findings paved the way for his police Bill, which led to the setting up of an organised police service in London.

This is not the case: a police force was established in the West of Scotland, in an area now encompassed by Strathclyde Police, in 1820. If you ever get the opportunity to visit the Strathclyde Police Museum (often open on Doors Open Day), you can find out all about this.

Anyway, back to the trade mark dispute. The verdict in the appeal seems to have been very sensible:

[H]earing officer Mike Knight remarked that even if the police had built up any reputation, it would have only been in the area of policing and law enforcement and would not have extended into the goods and services which the BBC had applied to use it for.

Mr Knight said that the police telephone box had been used by other police forces outside London, so was not exclusive to the Metropolitan Police, and at best it would be described by the public as “street furniture”.

“I bear in mind that for most of the period since the police call box was taken out of service, the only sight the public at large would have had of this item of street furniture has been in the TV programme Dr Who, provided by the BBC where it is a Tardis, a fictional time travelling machine with the external appearance of a police box,” ruled Mr Knight.

The main reason, though, I am pleased is that I don’t think the police should be in the business of trademarking things and attempting to make money from merchandise, nor should they be spending public money on attempting to win trade mark rights. The business of the police is law enforcement, and they should stick to it.

While putting together the other day’s entry about Mother Teresa, I also came across a piece by Christopher Hitchens called The Stupidest Religion. He is responding to the legal action being taken against Michel Houellebecq in France following his comment that Islam is “the most stupid of all religions.” Hitchens is unhappy that everyone except extremists pussyfoots around religions, never daring to criticise them. He is, of course, writing from the point of view of a secular humanist, which is fair enough. He has a point when he says

I would not want the job of deciding which monotheism, let alone which faith, was “the stupidest.” For one thing, one becomes lost in an Aladdin’s cave of multiple choice. I do not think that Islam is dumber than, for example, the output of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

All religions, of course, are stupid to those who do not share their beliefs. Pointing out the apparently stupid tenets or customs, though, will upset the believers. There are suggestions from time to time that the law should protect their sensibilities; Hitchens notes that there are proposals to extend the British blasphemy laws to cover religions other than Christianity.

I am in two minds about this. On the one hand, I don’t see why mere abuse on religious grounds should be tolerated any more than abuse on racial grounds. On the other, though, any legislation which made it impossible to criticise the behaviour of religious groups would be an iniquitous limitation of freedom of speech.

It has to be remembered that religious groups — whether as tightly organised and self-protective as the Roman Catholic Church, or as loosely organised as Islam — wield an enormous amount of power, power which may be abused. Freedom of speech is the lynchpin of all freedoms, and (although I know the oleaginous occupant of Number Ten seems not to grasp this) it should rarely be limited.

If any religion has protection in law, all should; but I think it would be better if none did.

Wednesday 23rd October

Let me say this right away: I am no admirer of Mother Teresa, nor have I ever been. I have long been bemused that this woman, who denied those in pain any relief because she believed that the suffering of the poor was a beautiful thing, was held to be a living saint. Following her death in 1997, the Catholic Church has rushed to start canonising her. Bizarrely, she was voted the greatest Indian since independence (although she was born Albanian). All this adulation, and for a woman whose every effort made life worse for the poor of Calcutta. I have long thought she was a particularly evil specimen of humankind.

I knew that some time ago Christopher Hitchens had made a television programme (which I never saw) detailing the facts about Mother Teresa, and that he had followed this up with a book. I tried several times to find out what the book was called, with a view to ordering it, but had no success until recently — Amazon is a good enough way to buy books, but the search facility is not always superb.

Recently, though, I found an interview with Hitchens on the subject of Mother Teresa and the details of the book: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. The interview was published in Free Inquiry (vol. 16, no. 4 — 1996, I think). The interview is something everyone should read. Here’s Hitchens’ response to the question most people who know nothing of what she actually did must be asking (my hyperlinks):

Free Inquiry: According to polls, Mother Teresa is the most respected woman in the world. Her name is a by-word for selfless dedication in the service of humanity. So why are you picking on this sainted old woman?

Christopher Hitchens: Partly because that impression is so widespread. But also because the sheer fact that this is considered unquestionable is a sign of what we are up against, namely the problem of credulity. One of the most salient examples of people’s willingness to believe anything if it is garbed in the appearance of holiness is the uncritical acceptance of the idea of Mother Teresa as a saint by people who would normally be thinking — however lazily — in a secular or rational manner. In other words, in every sense it is an unexamined claim.

It’s unexamined journalistically — no one really takes a look at what she does. And it is unexamined as to why it should be she who is spotlighted as opposed to many very selfless people who devote their lives to the relief of suffering in what we used to call the “Third World.” Why is it never mentioned that her stated motive for the work is that of proselytization for religious fundamentalism, for the most extreme interpretation of Catholic doctrine? If you ask most people if they agree with the pope’s views on population, for example, they say they think they are rather extreme. Well here’s someone whose life’s work is the propagation of the most extreme version of that.

That’s the first motive. The second was a sort of journalistic curiosity as to why it was that no one had asked any serious questions about Mother Teresa’s theory or practice. Regarding her practice, I couldn’t help but notice that she had rallied to the side of the Duvalier family in Haiti, for instance, that she had taken money — over a million dollars — from Charles Keating, the Lincoln Savings and Loans swindler, even though it had been shown to her that the money was stolen; that she has been an ally of the most reactionary forces in India and in many other countries; that she has campaigned recently to prevent Ireland from ceasing to be the only country in Europe with a constitutional ban on divorce, that her interventions are always timed to assist the most conservative and obscurantist forces.

Here is Hitchens, from another interview (in LiP), describing his meeting with Mother Teresa, which he approached at the time with a fairly open mind:

I was even sort of thinking, hmmm… maybe I should fumble for some money. And with a gesture of the arm that took in the whole scene of the orphanage, she said: you see this is how we fight abortion and contraception in Calcutta. And I thought: Oh I see—so you actually say that do you? Because it had crossed my mind that part of her work was to bear witness for the Catholic creed regarding the population question, to propagandize for the Church’s line. But I hadn’t realized it was so unmediated. I mean, that she would want to draw my attention to the fact that this was the point.

I don’t know Calcutta terrifically well, but I know it quite well. And I would say that low on the list of the things that it needs is a Christian campaign against population control… People who campaign vigorously against contraception, I think, are in a very weak position to lay down the moral law on abortion.

Quite. Working to prevent the uptake of contraception in Calcutta is working to keep vast numbers of people in poverty. Not that that ever bothered Mother Teresa, of course. If she didn’t think suffering worth alleviating, why should she be concerned about poverty?

Ah, yes, suffering. Her reputation depended upon the work she did among the sick and dying. This is Hitchen’s description of what that work was actually like (my emphasis):

The care facilities are grotesquely simple: rudimentary, unscientific, miles behind any modern conception of what medical science is supposed to do. There have been a number of articles … about the failure and primitivism of her treatment of lepers and the dying, of her attitude towards medication and prophylaxis. Very rightly is it said that she tends to the dying, because if you were doing anything but dying she hasn’t really got much to offer.

This is interesting because, first, she only proclaims to be providing people with a Catholic death, and, second, because of the enormous amounts of money mainly donated to rather than raised by her Order. We’ve been unable to audit this — no one has ever demanded an accounting of how much money has flowed in her direction. With that money she could have built at least one absolutely spanking new, modern teaching hospital in Calcutta without noticing the cost.

The facilities she runs are as primitive now as when she first became a celebrity. So that’s obviously not where the money goes.

… I have the testimony of a former very active member of her Order who worked for her for many years… She estimates that there must be $50 million in that bank account alone. She said that one of the things that began to raise doubts in her mind was that the Sisters always had to go around pretending that they were very poor and they couldn’t use the money for anything in the neighborhood that required alleviation.

Hitchens notes that she never actually claimed to provide medical care; nor, though, did she make any effort to combat this widespread misconception. I shudder to think of the suffering of those who fell into her clutches:

HITCHENS: I hesitated to cover this in my book, but I decided I had to publish that she has said that the suffering of the poor is something very beautiful and the world is being very much helped by the nobility of this example of misery and suffering.

FI: A horrible thing to say.

HITCHENS: Yes, evil in fact. To say it was unChristian unfortunately would not be true, although many people don’t realize that is what Christians believe. It is a positively immoral remark in my opinion, and it should be more widely known than it is.

She is old, she has had various episodes with her own health, and she checks into some of the costliest and finest clinics in the West herself…

FI: But if people go to her clinics for the dying and they need medical care, does she send them on to the proper places?

HITCHENS: Not according to the testimony of a number of witnesses… All of them were very shocked to find when they got there that they had missed some very crucial point and that very often people who come under the false impression that they would receive medical care are either neglected or given no advice. In other words, anyone going in the hope of alleviation of a serious medical condition has made a huge mistake.

Following on from that, another quotation from the LiP interview really is necessary:

When Mr. Keating was finally brought to justice after the embezzlement of that titanic sum of money … he was sentenced to the maximum that California law allows, which he’s still serving…

Mother Teresa wrote to the court and said, look, Charles Keating is a great friend of the poor and a lovely man and you should go easy on him. I reprinted her letter, in which she says if he’s done anything wrong she can’t believe it and she doesn’t know what it is. [Paul Turley, deputy DA of LA County] wrote her back a letter, explaining the process by which Keating had separated really large numbers of poor people from their life savings without any scruple at all or remorse, and then pointed out that in their audits they discovered that quite a lot of the money he had stolen he’d given to Mother Teresa. He said, now that you know this when are you going to give it back? At this point she broke off the correspondence and made no move to return the money.

Let’s say she really didn’t know. Let’s make the assumption of innocence and imagine that when she wrote the letter to the court she really had no idea what Keating had been doing. Well, she knew subsequently because the letter is extremely careful and highly persuasive and very well-sourced. She knew she was in receipt of stolen money. She did nothing to redeem that.

Read the Free Inquiry interview, read the LiP interview, and think about reading Hitchens’ book, and marvel at the widespread perception of this woman who increased the suffering of so many and said that their suffering was good, who praised brutal dictators, who took money from fraudsters, and who used all the money she was given not to help those in need but to establish convents, as saintly.