Rachel Rose’s Ramblings

It’s taken me until now to be able to write anything about Baby P.  Such was the impact of reading about this horrible case that I literally was unable to think coherently.  In fact, I shed tears daily for over 2 weeks thinking of his torture.  For me, the worst thing was the graphic detail of the reports.  From the too-late testimony of the 15-year old witness, runaway girlfriend of the “lodger” Jason Owen (who’s actually the brother of the prime torturer “the boyfriend”, named in various websites and forums, mostly now censored) to the various sightings by “friends” of this poor, malnourished, filthy child eating dirt and looking sad, to the heart-rending computer images of his injuries and finally the revelation of the face of the sweet, blonde baby reaching up to the camera…it all crowded my thoughts, crept up on me at night before sleep, made me cling too tight to my own daugher, barely older than P at the time of his death.

And then a few days ago, while looking for a recording of the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, I accidently listened to the hymn Jerusalem.  Written by the mystic and thinker William Blake, it is much-loved in Britain.  In it, the lines

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountain green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

You know, I can’t imagine anyone nowadays writing anything about how lovely England is. Pete Doherty might pen poetry about Arcadia, but there’s little in the modern compendium celebrating England’s glorious queen, or culture, or the beauty of the landscape. The only people who openly praise England are the BNP and we all know how rational they are. Now, I am not into patriotism, but I do think that pride is important. Pride in who you are, in doing right, in standing up for good against bad, in being the best possible person, in caring and not being afraid to show it. The overwhelming lack of pride, of shame, of caring, is what allows horrors like the torture of Baby P to persist in a so-called civilised society. His mother has no shame, the official machinery that failed him grinds along but cares little, the neighbours and friends who ’saw nothing’ had so little confidence in what they saw with their own eyes that they condemned, each and every one of them, that little boy to death. Something really went wrong here and it’s not only Haringey social services who failed. It’s the way the whole of society is breaking down: the mother surfs the Internet while her child screams in the background, everyone takes notes but sees nothing, violence is all around us but we carry on as usual.

What am I trying to say here? That we need to restore some sense of honour, and dignity and pride in ourselves and our children. There will always be reprobates and psychopaths and idiots, but normal, functioning people should not allow themselves to degenerate so. Is there any way to teach this? Is there any way to salvage pride in the ruins of our corrupt and self-serving culture? I read an interesting viewpoint today, dealing with the violence in the border region of Mexico-USA (Amexica) :

‘Consider how great civilisations fall, the marks of their last days.’ He cites ancient Rome and ‘the nature of public execution’. Torture and violent public execution also marked, he says, ‘the end of the Middle Ages and Inquisition as they gave way to Renaissance and science. There are these great moments of civilisation and science, but they try to be better than they are, and when they fall, they resort to public execution. And I think we are now in a moment of crisis, in the culture of global business.’

This deals specifically with the Mexican drug-related assasinations of the past 2 years, but I read in it the kernel of the theory of how we live among such violence with the semblance of normality. And why our children and young people are so unbalanced and unruly. When you take the sum total of rapes and killings in DR Congo, carbombs in Iraq, the Taleban in Afghanistan, rape and violence in South Africa, hostage-taking in Colombia and the worldwide assaults against womenhood, you realise that we are in fact a society in decline. Rapid decline. And England, as the Mother of it All – the first to industialise, the Empire builder, the leader in times of war and crisis – is naturally going to be the first to go down. And the English people are either drowning in the quagmire like the family of Baby P, or jumping ship and moving to Spain then complaining of how much they hate England while continuing to draw a British pension from the munificent British state that so spectacularly failed Baby P, no doubt in part due to lack of money.

I have often said that anxiety resides in the space between what you know to be right and what you are actually doing.  When you are doing what you know to be right, you feel absolute surety and calm. We are a society gripped by anxiety because we know that what we are doing is wrong but the gap between that knowledge and the everyday actuality keeps widening.  There are a lot of people tossing and turning about the Baby P case and the reason is this:  we have blinded ourselves to the daily violence that we inflict upon each other, our planet and our children but once in a while the spectre pops up and reminds us just how far we’ve drifted, we look into the anxiety gap and we see…a tiny child with blond hair and blue eyes  staring back at us not with anger but with innocence.  And we see that this is what we have lost, this is what we have sacrificed.