It being Sunday, this story is particularly resonant - and also demanding of forgiveness. But the news that a junior British civil servant in the Foreign Office prepared an official memo planning for the Pope's autumn visit - a memo distributed widely to politicians and officials, and called a serious brainstorming document - which recommended the Pope variously open an abortion clinic, and start a new brand of condoms - seems willfully disrespectful, even sacrilegious. People who wish to suggest I take a chill pill, and see the humour of the document may miss the point: visiting world leaders shouldn't ever be treated to such official government mockery, no matter how ludicrous their beliefs may be. When their beliefs are a religion practiced by more than 20% of the world, and by a significant minority of one's own nation, even less reason is given for such a Monty Python treatment. Of course, in pubs and private, let the Protestant (and secular) people of Britain mock the Catholic leader. But to have derision generated at the higher levels of government reveals an inconvenient truth: Britain's elite ruling class is now, more or less, godless. Godless, irreverent, and even, it might be said, cynical to the point of boring nihilism.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
Comments
People forget that Civil Servants are, first and foremost, people - and quite as capable of doing stupid stuff behind closed doors as the next person. Even in such 'august institutions' as the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
Anyway I would rather live in a society where everything can be mocked in safety than where nothing can be. We have comedy vicars, comedy priests, comedy rabbis - now if only we had comedy ayatollahs, rather than people who take them in dead earnest, maybe the world would be a safer place.