Programme notes: axing knife poem, blog rumors and heroes
The items we covered in this week's iPM:
Examination body axe knife poem
Carol Ann Duffy's poem, Education for Leisure, has been removed from the English GCSE syllabus.
Politics and the blog rumor mill
News and rumour is travelling faster then ever across the net, forcing the main US presidential campaigns to respond to gossip they might previously have ignored. What are the political realities of this new environment?
We heard from Chuck DeFeo responsible for Bush-Cheney 2004 internet campaigns and Zephyr Teachout, who ran Howard Dean's internet campaign in 2004.
The banality of heroism
Professor Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who made his name in the Stanford Prison Experiment has turned his attention to heroism.
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Rumours surely, not rumors?
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AQA Axing Of Poem
AQA; would that be the Assinign Quango Autocracy?
What absolute nonsense. The poem has little to do with violence or knife crime.
Evidently, the only suffering within this poem is endured by the first person orator - it is they that are crushed and worthless in a world where they hold no esteem. Having suffered from depression for many years, I can wholly empathise with that viewpoint. However, I have never had an urge to go and take someone's life.
The fish is flushed down the toilet bowl - a similar end meets many pet fish - but there is nothing within the poem to indicate that its demise was at the hands of the orator - only the internment. This alone could have made the person feel more depressed.
The only third party casualty appears to be the fly. A similar grisely end is portrayed in William Blake's The Fly "Little fly, thy summers play, my thoughtless hand has brushed away". Are we to censure Blake.
How about The Charge of the Light Brigade, where countless young men are slaughtered? Is this too much for modern society to cope with?
Then there are huge sways within the Old and New Testaments were people are murdered, tortured or abused in the most barbaric of fashions. Yet the Bible is available to five-year olds at school.
AQA seem concerned that some knife carrying lowlife may deem the poem a precursor to commit crime. However, given that a great many of such perpetrators are illiterate, how likely is that? They're more likely to have a bottle of cider or spliff in their hand than an anthology of poetry.
The poem is an analysis of the human condition. What worries me more is that AQA and their supporters are censoring what we van read, beleive and feel.
After many Londoners were murdered on the Tube, we did not seek to limit free speach. Instead, brave Londoners went back on the tube as an example of the compassion, forgiveness and fortitude of their won beliefs and lifestyles.
I would much rather live in a society were there is a (albeit negligible) chance that I might be attacked by a knife weilding thug, than live in a society that has been sanitised and is devoid of freedom of expression, debate and emotion. It is AQA that have inflicted the deepest wound of all.
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This country went to quite a lot of trouble to get away from state censorship.
I suppose this may be one of the very few times on which censorship has been applied to violence rather than to sex, but apart from that how is this decision different from the censorship of a novel such as *Lady Chatterly's Lover*?
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"state censorship"
So Duffy is in prison and her poems are removed from all libraries. To own her poems means you disappear.
NO, actually we are talking about 14-16 year olds. These are children. As such they are looked after by society.
Since poetry is normally highly stimulating to the visual consciousness it is interesting to read the film classification for 15:
"Violence may be strong but may not dwell on the infliction of pain or injury."
"Imitable techniques:
Dangerous techniques (e.g. combat techniques, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on imitable detail. Easily accessible weapons should
not be glamorised."
Maybe then if it was just a knife it would have survived but as "our bread knife" it is doomed. Especially when the world glitters.
I also like the 12+ description:
"Dangerous techniques (eg combat techniques, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on imitable detail or appear pain or harm free."
So there has to be a down side.
Also since comparisons are made to other older poems:
"46% of the national sample agreed that “violence is more acceptable if it occurs in comic, historic or fantastic settings”."
Interestingly more than half of the population survey thought there was too much violence in 15 films. So half the population do not even agree with these rulings!
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The banality of egoism ...
I found it tremendously dishonest that Prof. Zimbardo declared himself to be a "hero-in-waiting." The very experiment that made him (in)famous, the Stanford Prison Experiment, provides substantial evidence to the contrary.
Zimbardo was not a passive witness to the actions of the volunteers in that experiment, he was an active participant. He proclaimed himself to be warden of the prison, and as such was the authority to which the guards reported. His involvement in the experiment cannot be discounted.
Zimbardo himself acknowledges that it wasn't until the woman he was trying to woo (they are now married) saw the experiment first-hand (he brought her to the "prison" as part of his wooing) and pointed out in less-than-subtle terms the wrongs he was committing that he realized the experiment should be stopped. She committed an act of heroism by stopping him.
To this day, Zimbardo heaps praise upon himself for the Stanford Prison Experiment and what it has supposedly taught the world. Yet the experiment has so many flaws (beginning with Zimbardo) that its contribution to human knowledge is mainly anecdotal.
I have no way of knowing what the professor may do in the future. Who knows, he may someday save a busload of orphans and nuns from a tragic demise. However, for the professor to have taken the role he did in the experiment and then to continue to promote it for what it isn't, I have serious reservations about his potential for heroism.
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