Buffy Blog: "Enemies"

“Enemies” written by Doug Petrie and directed by David Grossman, really kicks a number of season three arcs into gear. And it continues to explore several of the arcs that have been at play in Buffy since season one and season two.

At the heart of “Enemies” are the Faith, Faith/Mayor, Faith/Buffy, Faith/Angel, and Angel and Buffy arcs. Faith continues to play the Scooby but also continues to covertly work for the mayor. When a demon who doesn’t, says Buffy, fall into “deadly threat to humanity category” (note how Buffy continues to add moral complexity to the category of “demon” here) offers to sell the Slayers the “Books of Ascension” while they are on patrol in the teaser together Faith later informs the mayor of the threat, kills the demon at Wilkins’s insistence, and gives the “Books of Ascension” to the Mayor. Both Faith and the mayor put a plan to turn Angel into Angelus and bring him over to their dark side (shades of season two) in action in act two. Wilkins’ seems interested in his services, particularly his potential for killing Buffy. Faith seems interested in his body: she appears interested in “get in, get out” sex with Angel. In act three it appears that they have succeeded as Angel after trying to kill the now “impervious” mayor agrees to “torture, maim, and kill” our Buffy.

The second coming of Angelus, however, turns out to be a ruse. The shaman who the mayor hires to turn Angel into Angelus once again turns out to owe Giles a favour, “I introduced him to his wife”, Giles tells the Scoobies, and informs Giles off camera of the mayors plans. So the Scoobies decide to use this bit of information to their advantage. Angel, playing the role of Angelus, plays along with Faith and the mayor chaining Buffy to the wall of the mansion where both Angel and Faith threaten to torture and maim the Buffster in order to gain information from Faith about the mayor, the mayor’s plans, and the “Ascension”. Through their ruse they discover that Faith is not working for the mayor and that the Ascension is set to occur on “graduation day”. The Scoobies and we viewers now know, at least in general terms, where season three is heading.

But Buffy’s and Angel’s ruse has an unintended consequence (Buffy tragedy). Angel playing Angelus reminds Buff of the psychological torture he submitted her to and the violence he perpetrated in season two. As a result Buffy tells Angel she needs a “bit of a break” from him in act four of “Enemies”. So an episode that began with yet another Buffy and Angel kiss and high hopes that their relationship might be revised (though without the sex) ends with yet another roadblock placed in the way of a Buffy/Angel romance and raises questions for Buffy and us viewers about where the Buffy and Angel romance is going.

As I mentioned earlier, a number of things are going on with character arcs in “Enemies”, particularly as they relate to the mayor as big bad arc of season three. Faith and Buffy, of course, are the “Enemies” of the title as Faith’s ties to Wilkins become clear to the Scoobies in the episode. Cordelia asks Wesley for help with her English paper, he’s English, she notes, so the Cordy/Wes fascination continues. The mayor’s fatherly concern for Faith continues to grow. He gives her a glass of milk for healthy teeth and bones and tells Angelus to have her “home by eleven”. The mayor, we learn, in “Enemies”, thanks to Oz and the archives at the Sunnydale Hall of Records, is over a hundred years old and founded Sunnydale so that demons can feed on humans. He will be among the demons feeding off humans after his ascension. Faith, we learn, is jealous of Buffy, jealous that Buffy has a mom, jealous that Buffy has Scooby friends, jealous that Buffy has the Watcher, and jealous that everyone talks about Buffy and not her.

So dear unreaders we are off on our journey to season three’s end…

Notes:
Angel tells Faith that he didn’t have a choice when he did the evil that Angelus did, but that she does.

Angel playing the role of Angelus, acting, he claims that is superior to Faith’s playing the good Scooby all the while working for the mayor, refers back to the scene in season two’s “Surprise”/”Innocence” when he compares his taste for the Slayer as similar to his taste for cigarettes. He likes them both. This reference to cigarettes, of course, refers back to Angelus’s expiration of cigarette smoke after he bites the “woman of ill if not professional” repute in “Innocence” exhaling, after he does, the cigarette smoke she has just inhaled.

The Epistle to the Libertarians: Left (Anarchists) and Right (Randians, Conservative)

Chapter One
Historically speaking the bureaucracies that so many libertarians rail against are the product of population growth, the rise of cities, the rise of city-states, and the rise of territories (kingdoms, states, duchies, nations). As population and population density increased so have cities, "civilisations", city-states, states, and bureaucracies, bureaucracies of social control (the military, the police, education, and so on) and redistribution (religious bureaucracies, economic bureaucracies, political bureaucracies, and so on). Why? Because as Max Weber pointed out some hundred years ago, bureaucracies are most efficient and most effective at controlling increasing populations and collecting and redistributing the "goods" of large scale societies (pastoral, agricultural, trading, industrial) from the powerless to the powerful, from those opiated on religious ideology to those who engage in religious opiation (rulers as god's chosen and priests as his chosen helpmeets on earth), most efficiently and effectively.

Given these simple historical facts de-bureaucratisation is highly unlikely to occur in complex societies (nation-states) because de-bureaucratisation would require population decreases, the breaking up of mega economic entities like corporations into small locally based and locally operating entities, and the breaking up of nation-states with their mega-bureaucracies into much smaller units on the scale of Quaker meeting houses.

Speaking of the Religious Society of Friends, Quaker meetings are the only type of relatively successful libertarian organisation that has functioned relatively egalitarianly for hundreds of years that I know of. It must be asked, however, whether this religious group that came into the world in the 1600s just as modernity was emerging, functioned and functions because it exists within the modern economic, political, social, and cultural institutions that dominate the world and, in particular, dominate the Western world. It must also be noted, that Quakers constitute a very small percentage of the global and Western population and that their libertarianism itself may be a product of the wealth and culture that modern population growth and bureaucratisation has created.

So breaking up bureaucracies is rather a Sisyphean task, wouldn't you say? Given that we are, as Weber once remarked, trapped in the iron cage of bureaucracy the question we should ask is how to make bureaucracies function more effective and successfully to bring about greater justice and equality of opportunity.

Chapter Two
The social theoretical hallucination of many libertarians, left or right, that men were free before the imposition of the social contract or social compact is a myth. The earliest humans apparently lived in groups that hunted and gathered and goods were redistributed in these societies for the common good. And while there were and are inequalities in hunter-gatherer societies, mostly of gender and likely having to do with procreation, the cooperation and sharing in early human groups allowed humans to survive and procreate in a hostile environment.

Again the issue here should be about how to create greater cooperation and greater justice and equality of opportunity in large scale bureaucratic societies and between the powerful societies of the West and the societies they have exploited and continue to exploit for their benefit.

Buffy Blog: "Doppelgangland"

In my discussion of “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” I wrote about how the Slayers Buffy, Kendra, and Faith were doubles or doppelgangers of each other. In the Joss Whedon penned and directed “Doppelgangland”, a sort of sequel to “The Wish”, we learn that the alternative Scoobies we viewers met in “The Wish” are less alternative versions of Willow, Xander, Buffy, and Giles than doubles of Willow, Xander, Buffy, and Giles. So that Faith like loner cynicism of AltBuffy may be more than simply a product of the alternative universe of “The Wish”. She may be, as “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” seems to show, a part, a generally submerged part of Buffy, herself. Whither Buffy?

“Doppelgangland” is largely a Willow tale just as “The Zeppo” was primarily a Xander tale. In a sense both “Doppelgangland” and “The Zeppo” are continuations of season one’s“Nightmares”, season two’s “Halloween”, and season three’s “The Wish” where the inner fears of our Scoobies, be it Buffy’s fear of becoming a vampire, Giles’s fear that he will get his Slayer killed, Willow’s fear of what others think about her, her fear that she is boring, and Xander’s fear of clowns and fascists, and character traits and character development, be it Willow becoming more, though not fully, comfortable with herself, Xander becoming more heroic and less confused about his manhood, or Buffy becoming more comfortable with her Slayerness. The difference between “Nightmare”, “Halloween”, and “The Wish” and “The Zeppo” and “Doppelgangland” is that “The Zeppo” and “Doppelgangland” focus more on specific characters, Xander and Willow, and hence the character development of Xander and Willow.

The on the surface narrative of “Doppelgangland” centres around Anya’s attempt—yes Anya is back and her frustration with being a high school student without power is superbly played by Emma Caulfield and wittily written by Whedon—to get her power back first by appealing to D’Hoffryn (this is the first time we meet this master of vengeance demons), who refuses her pleas, then by getting Willow to help her cast a spell that will return her to the moment she lost her power. This being Buffy the spell Anya and Willow cast goes wrong, thanks, in part at least, to Willow putting an end to the spell because of the visions of the dark world, the world of “The Wish”, Anya wants to return to (an ironical act on Willow’s part as it turns out and we will see). What the spell ends up doing, once Anya breaks the plate with the representation of her necklace, her power source on it, on it is to bring the alternative Willow, Vampire Willow, VampWill from “The Wish” into the Sunnydale world most of us viewers know and love.

“Doppelgangland” is more than simply the Willow/VampWill tale, however. The Scoobies are still unaware that Faith is working with the mayor and is now playing the role of fifth columnist in the Scooby gang. While being rehabilitated and trained by Wesley Faith learns that Willow, on Giles’s orders, is trying to get past the firewalls the mayor has put in place to protect his electronic records to learn what the mayor is up to. Faith tells the mayor this little Scooby secret leading the mayor to arrange for the execution of Willow. Faith also gets a new apartment from the mayor suggesting that Mayor Wilkins, at least on some level, has some affection for his new Slayer. Cordelia is still angry at Willow for her role in the Xander/Willow fling and gets to express it to who she thinks is Willow accidentally locked in the cage in the Sunnydale High Library. Of course, the Willow she takes out her sense of betrayal out on (there’s that betrayal again) is not Willow but VampWillow. When Cordy lets VampWill out of her cage AltWillow tries to kill Cordy this time without Alt Xander and this time without success thanks to a semi-bumbling Wesley who comes to Cordy’s rescue with cross in one hand and holy water in the other. Whither Cordy? Whither Wesley? Is there a little Cordy/Wesley relationship in the offing?

While these other character tales are prominent in “Doppelgangland” the real focus of the episode, as I noted, is on Willow. Willow is once again feeling the sting of being “reliable” “Old Faithful”, as Buffy and Xander call her, and the sting of being the dormat of Principal Snyder who has not ordered ordered her to tutor star Sunnydale High School basketball player Percy West in history yet again (remember that similar tale in season two’s “Go Fish”?). Percy expects less tutoring from Willow and more of the you do my schoolwork.

It is just at this inopportune or opportune moment that VampWill, thanks to Anya’s and Willow’s mucked up spell, finds herself in the “normal” Sunndale universe. VampWill actually helps Willow out of several jams. She beats up the vampires sent to kill her by Mayor Wilkins making them her minions instead. She slams Percy down on a pool table at the Bronze resulting in, by the end of the episode, Percy actually doing his homework including papers on the two President Roosevelt’s since he did not know which President Roosevelt he was supposed to write on. Actually he didn’t even know there were two President Roosevelt’s. He even gives teacher Willow, in a comically touching moment, an apple.

Now back to the heart of the Willow arc in “Doppelgangland”. Willow and VampWillow despite Buffy’s claim that “… a vampire’s personality has nothing to do with the person it was”, are, as Angel almost admits, similar in personality. Both are “bored” by life. “The world’s no fun” both agree. Both have the teaching bug. VampWillow asks if anyone has any “questions” or “comments” in that teacherly way when she and her gang take over the Bronze. Willow is tutoring Percy. Both are dismissive (eye rolls and simultaneous pffts) of Anya’s claim that everyone, when she gets her power back, will “all grovel before me”. Both may be a little bit “gay”: VampWillow runs her tongue up Sandy’s (the human she kills and, as we will see turns) and Willow’s neck. And both are a little bit “skanky”: Just look at VampWill’s outfit; remember Willow’s come as you aren’t kit in “Halloween”? Whither Willow?

Mise-en-scene, as is almost always the case in Buffy, tells us something about the narrative of the episode and about the characters themselves. Clothing. “Doppelgangland” counterpoints the almost childish and largely asexual clothing, including that fluffy pink sweater, of nerdy “reliable” Willow with with the black leather in your face sexiness of Alt-Willow (“Gosh, look at those”, says Willow masquerading as Alt Willow, in reference to her now very noticeable breasts; Xander being Xander does try to look at “those”).

“Doppelgangland” with its playfulness, its comedy, its wit, its drama, its tragedy, its fascinating minor characters, its memory, its superb ensemble acting, its superb writing, its humanistic and existentialist heart represents in microcosm everything I love about Buffy. What a great episode. What a great television show.

Buffy Blog: "Bad Girls"/"Consequences"

Musings on “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”
Just as Buffy creator Joss Whedon treats “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”, written by Doug Petrie and Marti Noxon and directed by Michael Lange and Michael Gershman, as one episode in his interview on the season three Buffy DVD, so will I. “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”, in its narrative, in its mise-en-scene, even in its rhythm, is, like “Welcome to the Hellmouth”/”The Harvest”, “Surprise”/”Innocence”, and “Becoming, Parts One and Two”, best seen as a single episode.

There is, as is always the case in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a lot going on in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”. On the narrative level “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” moves several season three arcs along and is, as a result, the season three counterpart to season two’s “Surprise”/”Innocence”. Like “Surprise”/”Innocence”, which was one of the most important if not the most important episode in season two, “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”, is one of the most important if not the most important episode, in season three.

Both “Surprise”/”Innocence” and “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” are, in many ways, very similar structurally. Both episodes have their monsters of the week: in “Surprise”/”Innocence” it is the Judge in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” it is the been in the sewers so long that his skin is going all white and sickingly obese Balthazar and his virtous and honourable sword wielding knight like vampire warriors the El Eliminati. In both episodes the big bads are front and centre: in season two’s “Surprise”/”Innocence” the big bads Dru and Spike, revive the Judge in order to destroy the world (though how serious Spike is in destroying the world can be debated), in season three’s “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” the big bad, the Mayor, prepares for and undergoes a transformative rite of passage, the “Dedication”, a ritual, as we find out, which makes him impervious to harm. And in both episodes we viewers are in for a surprise: in “Surprise”/”Innocence” the surprise is that Angel is transformed into the evil Angelus who will become, along with Dru and Spike, the big bads of season two while in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” the surprise is that Faith, who has been hovering near the dark side since she arrived in Sunnydale, takes a job as the mayors right hand muscle after she kills his former right hand muscle man, Mr. Trick and become a big bad in season three. In each case these surprises played and will play important roles in how season two and season three spin out.

The transformation of Faith from sometime Scooby into the mayors muscle underlines the centrality of character developments or character arcs in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”, a title itself that has great resonance with what is happening to several characters in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” and season three of Buffy in general. The bad girls of “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” are, of course, primarily Buffy and Faith. Faith has, since she arrived in Sunnydale, been characterized by a kind of hedonism of the moment, a “get in, get it, get out” sort of mentality that underlines not only her view of sex but also her conception of slaying itself.

Buffy and Faith (not to mention Kendra) are, as Whedon and Doug Petrie say in the interview on“Bad Girls”/”Consequences” on the season three Buffy DVD set, doubles or doppelgangers of each other, doubles being a literary and filmic tradition that has engaged the interest of literary and film analysts, folklorists and even psychologists and psychotherapists including Rank and Freud over the years. In “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” Buffy becomes enticed by the same hedonism of the moment that is at the heart of Faith’s view of life and slaying. Buffy starts cutting class, acting as though she is Watcher free—she isn’t since young, arrogant, self-satistied, self-righteous, and bookish Wesley Wyndham-Pryce the new Watcher arrives at the beginning of the episode—and returns again to the rashness that sometimes characterized her actions in season one and season two and which dominates almost all that Faith does, in order to experience the joys of slaying (“hungry and horny”) with Faith. This rash hedonism of the moment for both Faith and Buffy reaches its zenith when our Slayers break into a sporting goods store to “want, take, have” weapons in order to confront Balthazar and his minions without going to Giles first.

Buffy’s flirtation with the dark side is short lived. After Faith accidentally kills a human, Allan Finch, the deputy mayor who apparently has come to warn our Slayers about the dastardly deeds of the mayor as they are fighting the El Eliminiti outside Balthazar’s warehouse hideout.

The difference between Buffy and Faith, as Whedon says in an interview on “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” on the third season Buffy DVD’s, is that Buffy’s moral conscience will not allow her to bury what happened to the deputy mayor. Faith’s lack of moral conscience will. The resurfacing of Buffy’s moral conscience is reflected in Buffy’s nightmare after the accidental killing of the deputy mayor by Faith. In her nightmare Buffy dreams that she is underwater trying to escape the grasp of the deputy mayor who is trying to hold her underneath the surface of the water. But it is not only the deputy mayor who is trying to pull Buffy down in her nightmare. Once Buffy escapes from the deputy mayor and surfaces it is Faith who pushes her back underneath the surface of the water. It is Faith, who wants to keep what happened between her and Buffy, and her rash hedonism that is killing who Buffy really is, a Slayer with a conscience.

While Buffy grieves over the death of the deputy mayor Faith seems, at least from Buffy’s point of view, to be “laughing and scratching and zipidee doo dah[ing]” again as though nothing happened. It is in the confrontation scene between Buffy and Faith on the streets of Sunnydale in act two of “Consequences” that the differences between the two Slayers become clear and Buffy’s moral conscience finally fully resurfaces. Faith argues that accidents happen and that while she is sorry for what happened to the deputy mayor what she and Buffy have done and continue to do, every night, killing the evil that goes bump in the night, evens the scales. Buffy does not let it end there, however. Pushing Faith to go to Giles and tell him what happened the Nietzschean Social Darwinism that is at the heart of Faith’s conception of the Slayer finally fully surfaces: “You're still not looking at the big picture, B”, says Faith, “Something made us different. We're warriors. We were built to kill…We are better. That's right. Better. People need us to survive.”

The Faith and Buffy character arcs aren’t the only ones playing themselves out in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”. The theme of betrayal hovers over almost every major character in the Buffyverse in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”. The mayor is betraying Sunnydale. The deputy mayor is betraying the mayor by keeping records of what is going on with him and by going to see the Slayers to tell them about the mayors demonic plans. Giles betrays the new Watcher Wesley by talking to Buffy about Slayer stuff. Willow learns about Xander’s “unhh” with Faith in “The Zeppo” and feels betrayed by the Xandman giving us viewers yet another one of those emotionally wrenching scenes where Willow cries this time in the Sunnydale High School bathroom. Faith betrays Buffy by telling Giles it was the Buffster not her who accidentally killed Allan Finch. Faith betrays Xander by choking him during almost sex without a safety word. Buffy betrays her moral conscience, her Slayerness, and her best friend Willow for a relationship with Faith ("hey girlfriend") that is not only slayerific but almost sexual in nature. Faith betrays Buffy and the Scoobies. The by the Watcher book Wesley betrays Faith to the Watcher’s Council after overhearing Giles and Buffy talking about Faith’s killing of the deputy mayor all the while feeling that he is doing his duty. Faith’s “arrest” by the Watcher’s Council does nothing except push her further to the dark side as Faith betrays Slayerness.

So what will the consequences for all these bad betraying girls and boys be? I guess we will see.

Making Historical Sense of Redistribution and the Just Society...

As you dear unreaders have probably noticed by now I am amused and bemused by a lot of the discourse, particularly the right wing discourse, surrounding politics in the Western world and particularly in the United States these days. Why? Because it is so ahistorical and so lacking in sociological understanding. Take the issue of redistribution.

Any time you have large scale societies with significant chasms between rich and poor and growing chasms between rich and poor and between the powerful and powerless you are going to have redistribution. Look at Ancient Sumer, at Ancient Egypt, at Ancient China, at Mediaeval Europe, at the Byzantine Empire, at the Soviet Union, and at the US, all societies where power, money, and wealth (including property) were redistributed generally in very similar ways. I apologise to all of you out there who prefer to have your US and USSR history in binary and manichean form but hey, history is history.

Generally redistribution takes money from the less powerful and less wealthy and redistributes it to the more powerful (political, economic, religious) and more wealthy (politicians, business leaders, religious leaders). It is almost impossible to escape redistribution because of these imbalances of power and wealth. Why? Because as history shows there are generally imbalances of power whenever you have complex societies, complex societies with kings, princes, priests, party chairmen, politburos, corporate robber barons, congressmen and women and so on. Even communes in Western complex societies, that form that has most tried to do something about the inequalities that characterise the modern world of economic and political bureaucracies and inequalities of power and wealth, have generally been unable to turn back the inequality clock. The only time in human history, in fact, that we have had significant equality was in the human past before the rise of cities and "civilisations" and in those hunter-gathering societies that survived the rise of the modern world.

Now don't get me wrong. There are things complex societies and states can do about inequalities. Some nation-states have used the apparatus of the state to try to create a juster society. The problem here, of course, is that not everyone agrees on what constitutes the just in the just or juster society. For those on the puritanical and religious right just often means using the federal or state apparatus to censor television, censor radio, censor films, inhibit gay and lesbian practises, inhibit abortion, inhibit the imbibing of alcohol or other drugs, build up a strong military defence (where defence, ironically, usually means just the opposite, military offence). Laissez-faire Liberals have tended to use the state to provide economic leaders with the means to the end of ever greater profits via its legal and police apparatus including the use of the state militia to put down attempts by workers to unionise. Social Liberals have tended to use the state to ameliorate the more negative Scrooge-like aspects of "unfettered capitalism" but only to a limited extent. Leftists have long had dreams about bringing about a just society through cooperation or via eliminating the factors that the believe drives extreme inequality.

In Scandinavia, for instance social insurance liberals and leftists used government action to reduce quite significantly the chasm between rich and poor and reduce poverty particularly after World War II. In the process they have become some of the wealthiest nations on earth (when measured by GDP), quite an achivement given the poverty in the region in the 1930s. Even in that vaunted "holy land" of "free enterprise", the United States, the gap between rich and poor was reduced as were levels of poverty between 1945 and the 1970s. It was A.R., after Reagan, that in the US, that chasms between rich and poor and poverty levels rose once again thanks in large part to a renewed war on the left, on labour, and on the social insurance state itself, a "populist" revolt led by right wing "populist" demagogues in the service of the rich and powerful.

What is ironic here, of course, is that while many neo-liberals issue jeremiads against welfare and public utilities they are far too often silent if not supportive, of the wealthfare state (the mote in their own eyes?), the wealth that is redistributed from taxpayers to wealthy corporations. But then I suppose such inconsistency or hypocrisy is inevitable given that most people have imbibed the status quo ideologies of the wealthy and powerful which maintain that inequality is natural rather than as social and cultural.

BallyKissMe: Musings on Ballykissangel

I recently completed a return sojourn through the six series of Ballykissangel. BallyK, as its fans affectionately came to call it, was a BBC Northern Ireland programme, made with Irish government support, about a British Catholic priest, Father Peter Clifford (Stephen Tompkinson), who is sent from Great Britain to serve as priest for the small rural village of Ballykissangel in Ireland. Created by the Irish writer Kieran Prendiville Ballyk ran for 58 episodes on the Beeb from 1996 to 2001. I thoroughly enjoyed my return trip to and through Ballykissangel, my first since the show was first broadcast in the late 1990s and early 2000s and which I watched on local PBS affiliates.

While rewatching Ballyk a number of things kept running through my mind. I thought about how Ballykissangel reminded me of those other whimsical and eccentric dramadies that have become prominent since the 1980s such as the BBC adaptation of James Harriot's All Creatures Great and Small (BBC, 1978-1990), which like Ballykissangel, ran on the Beeb in the Sunday night family slot, like Carla Lane's sitcom dramady Butterflies (BBC, 1978-1983) about a housewife's midlife crisis, like Bill Fortsythe's films Gregory's Girl (1981) and Local Hero (1983), and like Monarch of the Glen (BBC, 200-2005), another BBC Sunday night show. I thought about how Ballykissangel's eccentric Irish were rather like All Creature's eccentric Yorkshire men and women, like Forsythe's eccentric rural and urban Scots, and like Monarch's eccentric rural landholding, tenant, and village Scots. I thought about how Ballykissangel like All Creatures, Butterflies, Gregory's Girl, and Local Hero before it and Monarch of the Glen after it mixed and matched comedy, drama, tragedy, nostalgia, parody (and sometimes even satire), and topicality, something that has become more and more common in film and particularly television since the 1970s and 1980s. I thought about how, as with the tales of All Creatures, Butterflies, and Monarch of the Glen, Ballykissangel's stories and character arcs continued across episodes and even across series. I thought about how All Creatures's Skeldale House and Yorkshire, Gregory's Girl's Cumbernauld, Local Hero's Aberdeenshire, Ballykissangel's Ballyk (played by the lovely Irish village of Avoca south of Dublin), and Monarch of the Glen's Glenbogle are all just as important characters in each of these shows as any of the human characters and how All Creatures, Gregory's Girl, Local Hero, Monarch of the Glen all have a strong sense of place. I thought about how many of these shows and films begin with the arrival of an outsider to their very specific places, the vet James Herriot (Timothy Christopher) in All Creatures's Yorkshire, "Mac" McIntyre (Peter Riegert) in Local Hero's Scotland, the English priest Father Peter Clifford (Stephen Tompkinson) in Ballyk, and Archie, the prodigal son more at home in London who returns home to become laird of Monarch's Glenbogle, and use these new arrivals to introduce viewers not only to Yorkshire, Scotland, Ballyk, and Glenbogle but also to the people, and something about those people, who we will get to know in each of those places, Ballykissangel in a particularly elegant way.

Of all of these whimsical, eccentric, arc driven dramadies Ballykissangel, Bailie Coisc Angeal, the town which banished the angel--the Irish village becoming modern? Ireland becoming modern?--is perhaps the most tragic and emotionally intense of the lot of whimsical and eccentric British dramedies. Across its six series many characters I came to know and love departed for the supposedly greener fields of Dublin or London. Characters suffered from mistakes they had made in the past and present, drank too much, suffered from physical and mental pain, suffered from loves lost and loves wanted, among other things. Two major characters died during Ballyk's run. Assumpta Fitzgerald (Dervla Kirwin) and Garda Ambrose Egan (Peter Hanly) met dramatic and tragic deaths at the end of series three and the beginning of series five respectively, something you don't see very often on TV whether in the UK or the US. Assumpta's death at the end of series three before she and Father Peter Clifford were able to start the romantic relationship they had finally decided they would, a relationship most dedicated fans wanted to see consummated, was an important and shocking moment in Ballykissangel's broadcast life and lost the show a number of fans and viewers as the online posting sites and youtube comments about how Assumpta's death and Father Peter's decision to leave Ballk as a result continue to show.

Ballykissangel was also probably the most self reflective of the whimsical and eccentric dramadies of the 1980's and 1990's. Over its six series Ballyk parodied The Godfather (book 1969, film 1972), parodied Irish "traditions", satirised the Catholic Church, and even, on occasion, broke the fourth wall. In one episode of series four, for instance, the punters at Ballyk's gathering spot, the pub Fitzgerald's, watch a Spanish language telenovela on a new wide screen TV. The viewers, despite not understanding much Spanish, manage to make narrative sense of the telenovela they are watching in what has to be a shout out to those fans of the series who saw Ballyk itself as one big Irish soap opera. Over its six series Ballykissangel was the most religious and probably the least religious of the whimsical and eccentric dramadies which, I suppose, befits an Irish TV show made in the late 1990s and early 2000s, an era of increasing secularisation in Ireland. Musically, Ballyk did what is rare in a TV series, it used music to underline and counterpoint the narrative, to reveal something about character, and to foreshadow things to come. The theme tune of the show itself wonderfully captures the whimsy and eccentricity of the village and the village's "odd" residents. As I watched this wonderful programme I often caught myself wishing that I was one of these eccentric village inhabitants.

A word of warning about the Ballykissangel DVD's. The region one set includes the series three episode "Waiting Game" while the region two set does not. No idea why.

Socialism and the Idiocies of Human Life...

You have to love an article like this (http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/20/what-are-the-ndp-talking-about-when-they-talk-about-socialism/). Why? Because the first sentence in this article is historically and culturally inaccurate.

According to the National Post, one of Canada's self-proclaimed national newspapers along with the Globe and Mail, socialism was once a social movement defined by its belief that the state ownership of industry and the equitable distribution of wealth were moral, political, and economic goods. Can you say fairy tale? In reality socialism has always been a social movement made up of different visions and versions of socialism. Socialisms rather than socialism, in other words. Getting empirical and historical I give you communal socialism (Owen, Fourier), Christian socialism (Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr), Scientific socialism (Marxism), and Democratic socialism (Michael Harrington, Bernie Saunders). In historical fact, socialism has always been about as sectarian as Christianity with its multitude of churches, denominations, and sects, including its 40 plus versions of Anabaptism. I have always appreciated this last fact because there have always been so few Anabaptists in the world, 1.6 million at last count, but they have created 40 different Anabaptist groups all of who think they are the one true version of Anabaptism and Christianity..

While there are problems with this National Post article on the NDP, the Canadian social democratic party that arose out of the merger between the largely rural Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress, and socialism it is far superior in its historical understanding of socialism than many of the Facebook posts underneath a link to this article on Facebook. For ideologues and demagogues Leigh Patrick Sullivan and C.G. MacKay socialism "means" and "equals" failure". Not to be outdone poster Andrew Horton raises the linguistic stakes by claiming that socialism equals "epic failure". Unfortunately, but understandably Messers Sullivan, MacKay, and Horton have to ignore real history in order to make such statements. Quite clearly to anyone with historical eyes, ears, a sense of smell, and a sense of touch, Scandinavia, where socialism has dominated since the 1930s, has given us the social democratic success stories of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, all of which, simply to focus on economics, have some of the highest standards of living in the Western World.

One of the most unfortunate forms of historical amnesia on posting boards, all generated by ideology and demagoguery rather than empirical historical analysis, by the way, is this historically bizarre equation of socialism and bureaucratisation. Historically, of course, Paternalistic bureaucracies have existed at least since the 300s of the current era if not before. I give you the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, and the Chinese imperial apparatus, paternalistic bureaucracies all.

Modernity, as Max Weber pointed out over almost one hundred years ago, transformed bureaucracies as efficiency, effectiveness, professionalism, merit, modern military structure and strategy, and notions of progress came to dominate the modern world. Today bureaucracies, be these political (governmental apparatus like the federal and provincial governments of Canada), economic (GE, Apple, Microsoft, Caterpillar), educational (UofT, SUNY, the University of Notre Dame), intellectual (the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation), religious (the Baptist Church, the United Church, Coral Ridge, the Union of Reform Judaism), journalistic (the National Post, the NY Times), etc. are all bureaucracies rent through with the ideologies of modernity (in their "meritocratic" form) and are all products of the modern world. As anyone with eyes can see "modern" "meritocratic" bureaucracies have "triumphed" and rule the modern from Vancouver to New York to Copenhagen, to Moscow, to Melbourne, to Auckland. Meritocratic bureaucracies, in other words, are as modern as capitalism, socialism, and liberalism and more than compatible with all of them.

Finally a word on the equation of Hitler and socialism that one finds in a blog by John J. Ray linked to by another Facebook poster under the aforementioned National Post article named Graham Martin (http://matiane.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/hitler-was-a-socialist/). This linkage of Nazism and socialism, of course, is not new. Conservative ideologue and demagogue Thomas Sowell made it in a editorial I happened upon several years ago, for example. It is so used and abused, in fact, that it has become a cliche. It is a curious equation even if we admit, as we historically must, that socialism is and has always been multiple.

So what is Nazism? Nazism is a fascinating bird. Historically Nazism has been seen as a type of fascism, other forms being Mussolini's fascism and Franco's fascism (love that alliteration). On one level, fascism and hence Nazism is conservative. It looks back to a golden age in the past be this Rome in Mussolini's case or German racial purity in the Nazi case. On another level, however, fascism is a product of the modern world along with liberalism (of the laissez faire and social insurance varieties), socialism (of its many flavours), and, perhaps most importantly, nationalism. Nazism is a form or ultra nationalism. It is a form of ultra nationalism (Germans as the superior race) that explains any national problems by pointing to the pollution of the fit Aryan body politic by racial and political outsiders and inferiors such as Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and socialists. And it is a form of ultra nationalism that sees this struggle between Aryans and diseased others, particularly Jews, in apocalyptic terms (the cosmic struggle between good aryans and evil others, particularly Jews and Jewish-Bolsheviks) as a struggle for control of this world. The apocalypticism here should remind us that Christianity with its apocalypticism and its anti-Semitism, was an important cultural factor in the rise of Nazism and the creation of its culture. Christian primitivism, with its hope of returning to an original order, an original golden age, to the utopian garden of Eden, and Christian apocalypticism, with its prophetic vision of a battle between good and evil for control of the world, merged in nineteenth and twentieth century Christianity (a final apocalypse followed by a return to a paradise where the lion will lie down with the lamb) and twentieth century Nazism to produce, in each case, two kinds of conservative modernism.

Nazism is not alone in its utopianism. For laissez-fair liberals it was and is the free market and the belief that free markets will spread the wealth. For socialists utopia was, remember there were and are different socialisms, the commune, the industrial anarchic paradise where one could philosophise, fish, and work all on a given day, and the cooperative, democratic, and just society. Like other modern supposedly secular movements socialisms had their own vision of a golden age in the past to which it to some extent wanted to return, for marxian socialism it was the cooperative society of the hunter-gatherers with industry.

The moral of this tale? Nazism is very different from socialism socially, culturally, and intellectually despite the fact that Nazism, socialism and liberalism (of the laissez-faire and social insurance varieties) are all, to a great extent, products of the Enlightenment. They are products, at least in part, of the Enlightenment because they are all rent through with ideas and ideals of liberty, fraternity, equality, happiness, property, justice, citizenship, etc. The problem is that these Enlightenment ideas and ideals were never consistent and were always contradictory (even for the "great" John Locke). Liberty and equality and justice simply, particularly under the impact of industrialisation and capitalism, aren't harmonisable though the various ideologies that arose out of the Enlightenment try to harmonise them or at least some of them.

Anyway, wouldn't it be nice if people used real history rather than kneejerk and often fear based ideological demagoguery to analyse things like socialism and to understand the world? Well yes but it is not part of the nurtured "nature" of most humans. That said over the years I have observed that those who describe themselves as leftists (a very different animal, historically, from liberals, by the way) have a much better grasp of history than those on the right. I think this is because those on the right (like most religious folk) tend to ground their "analysis" in myth, nationalist myths and economic myths, in particular, and use these myths to make and remake history in their own image, while most people on the left start from the historical facts and, even when they twist and manipulate this history, still remain grounded in a kernel of historical truth.