The Ritual Wringing of Hands

I know little of Amy Winehouse, beyond the facts that she was a singer, had problems with narcotics or alcohol, and is dead, God rest her soul.


Through my work I became familiar with the destructive effects of narcotics, and hope that those who loved her singing, and perhaps accepted her problems as a part of her character, will not emulate her manner of living to its destructive end.  Dostoievsky somewhere recounts the true story of a young Russian girl who drowned herself in order to imitate Ophelia.


Of the massacre and bombing in Oslo, I would suggest some considerations of the misery of the "marginalised", whoever the culprit and whatever his or her religious or political affiliations. People who are, or feel themselves to be, excluded from decisions which affect them, are dangerous to the political status quo, whether they are Irish Catholics remembering the terrible evils wreaked on them by the English and Scottish, proletarian Germans, seeing Hitler as their saviour, Muslims seeing the all-powerful West as the Great Satan, or homosexuals regarding themselves as discriminated against.


The Germans wrecked Europe; Jihadist Muslims seek to wreck the Christian and post-Christian world by imposing Islam; homosexualists, in seeking to affirm the rightness of their behaviour, and supported by governments, are succeeding in wrecking the family bonds which have sustained civilisation.


Would the world have wrung its hands if an "unstable" assassin had slaughtered Hitler and his barbaric followers in the 1930s? I'm sure it would.


I know nothing of Norwegian politics, or of what may be the agenda of the Norwegian Labour Party. But some Norwegians, like some people everywhere, who see their future as intolerable, may well become so enraged that they will embrace violence as their only possible path.


I do not rejoice in, endorse, or even fully understand what happened or may happen in Norway or elsewhere, but believe it to be a fact like gravity. Governments who destabilize the nations who elected them should tread carefully, unless the provocation of outrage is their method of achieving their ends.


Those who are capable of rational thought should take note.