Virtual Hilltribes & Political Correctness

It is well worth visiting the Virtual Hilltribe Museum if only for the music video. However, the introduction to the latter is largely irritating politically correct nonsense and as I couldn't post my full response to it, I will add it here:

Frankly, I don’t think that a pop video such as this bears all the hostile analysis you are throwing at it. It is a sweet, sugary confection … possibly a bit cloying but that is the nature of many music videos. Moreover, unless there are subtle nuances that I am missing - and that you are not pointing out - it is not that offensive either.

The thematic movement is towards integration with an acceptance of cultural difference rather than homogenisation. The Thai children initially see the two ‘Hmong’ with some amusement, a little derision but largely with curiosity. As the clip moves on there is more & more acceptance. For example, the plump-faced girl who smiles with a degree of schadenfreude when it looks as though the small Hmong will be punished for not wearing a uniform is quickly won over when he offers her the carrot. When he goes up to the teacher, she looks on with concern. Later, the only real opposition is between the rebelliousness of all the children lead by the Hmong and the authority of the rather humourless teacher.

It is interesting that this carnivalesque rebellion is given the royal imprimatur. The small Hmong stands at the front of the class, briefly supplanting the teacher. Above him, on one side is the King’s portrait; on the other, the Thai flag. This, by the bye, is a lesson that should be taken to heart by the bureaucrats who try to deny citizenship to the hilltribes.

As for the unrealistic elements, the whole genre is unrealistic! It can hardly be criticised for lacking the production values of cinema verite. Kids didn’t really sing in the Victorian workhouse; they do in the musical Oliver. Nuns normally don't scale mountains singing their hearts out as they do in The Sound of Music.

There is doubtless an element of patronisation going on but this is not especially sinister and not strictly racist either. It is surely better to be presented as cute exotic others and as part of the Nation (vide supra) than as dirty vermin who should be removed from society (as the Jews were during the Nazi era). I would argue that is also probably better to be seen as cute exotic members of the same nation than to be ignored and to have your legitimate grievances swept under the carpet as has largely been the case up till now.

It is a rather charming silly song and a rather silly but nevertheless cute promotional video. The only conceivable influence the thing might have is for the good. After all, for all its insipid sentimentality and racial stereotyping, Uncle Tom’s Cabin did quite a lot for the anti-slavery cause.

Death by a Thousand Qualifications or Daddy, You Bastard

The game is well & truly up, Archbishop Rowan Williams. You found the recent horrors in the Far East a somewhat trying test of your faith … yet - incredibly nay miraculously - somehow your faith survived. How touching … how unspeakably nauseating! What was ultimately on test was your reason and humanity, and both failed abysmally.

A young girl dies in excruciating agony from cancer of the throat, yet God loves her as a father loves his child? Ah, but not quite that sort of love … something mysteriously divine. In Aberfan, 116 little children die, some holding hands for comfort, smothered by thousands of tonnes of slag. More mysterious love from on high?

The years pass with more horrors: Vietnam, the Munich Olympics, the Killing Fields, Tiananmen Square, more recently earthquakes in Turkey. Who can keep track of it all? And exactly how much is the sacred affection diluted by ‘not quite that kind of love’.

Now, tens of thousands of the poorest of the poor die in Asia … yet God still loved them as some sort of cosmic daddy? The poor woman driven utterly insane by the death of her three children and who now is wandering the devastated streets hoping that whoever is looking after her drowned baby is feeding him well … is she another recipient of this wonderful, holy love? Just how much more ineffable affection can we take?

Was this simply a test, Archbishop Rowan Williams, and all this just for you? All this anguish, death and bereavement simply to provide you and your diminishing congregation with a bit of a puzzle, something to think about while warming yourself on a Winter’s evening by a cosy hearth at the Palace? How much God must truly love you.

Perhaps you remember Anthony Flew’s parable about two explorers who chance upon a clearing in the jungle. There they saw many flowers and many weeds growing side by side, and one of the explorers said, 'Some gardener must tend this plot!' So they pitched their tents and set a watch.

"But though they waited several days no gardener was seen. 'Perhaps he is an invisible gardener!' they thought. So they set up a barbed-wire fence and connected it to electricity. They even patrolled the garden with bloodhounds….But they heard no sounds, and saw no movements of the barbed wire. The bloodhounds never alerted them to the presence of any other in the garden than themselves. Yet, still the believer was convinced that there was indeed a gardener: 'There must be a gardener, invisible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound…who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.'

But the skeptical explorer asked, "Just how does…an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"

Rend your purple robes in shame, Archbishop Rowan Williams. They are in tatters anyway. Go to the beaches of Phuket, to Banda Aceh or to Sri Lanka. Spurn a face mask & breathe deeply, really deeply; it is God’s breath. Then with your head cleared by the invigorating stench, recite after me:

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.