History

Bread and Circuses – Metonymic, Akashic Records and Materialism

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A morning adventure…

Lying in bed this Saturday morning, I started checking my emails on the phone. There was an alert to a post by Deborah Weber over at Garden of Delights for the letter Y (part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge) – Yeppsen – the amount that can be held in two hands – an obsolete word as many of Deborah’s words have been, unusual, interesting words.

Then it was over to an email chain from my school friends of 47 years ago and one of them mentioned panem et circenses (yes we were posh enough to study Latin) or in English – bread and circuses. Just to check I had translated it right and to see what it originally meant, I checked it out on Wikipedia which as well as attributing it to Juvenal’s “Satire X”, told me that the phrase is an example of a metonym. Well despite the posh-ish education, I had never heard of this so it was another link on Wikipedia to find out what that means! To explain, Wikipedia (last updated on 30th April 2020 so hot stuff!) had to examine and contrast Metonyms and Metaphors as well as touching on Synecdoches and Toponyms and even Metalepsis. You see how this internet surfing goes…
Back to the meaning of Bread and Circuses – Juvenal was expressing disappointment that the mass of Roman citizens had ditched their republican ideals of taking their politics seriously and electing their, politicians, generals and officials – instead they fell for cheap bribes of grain (for bread) and circuses (entertainment). How little things have changed, we in the UK have a Prime Minister who made up the story about the European Union bureaucrats requiring straight bananas in future. He was working as journalist in Brussels and was too lazy to research real stories about the EU and later took us out of the EU – whilst in the US – well let me go no further down the critique of the political technique of distraction – you all know who I am talking about…

A depiction of Juvenal in the Nuremberg Chronicle, late 1400s. Wiki Commons


So what is a Metonym? Well, an example would be talking about The White House meaning, not the building itself, but the President and all his men and women in the West Wing who constitute that part of the US government. Now that is only part of this in-depth article in Wikipedia and if you are interested in linguistics and philosophy, then head over there pronto! I did read it all, and it was interesting to me even though I realized that I use metonymic phrases all the time without realizing it, but what I thought about it was a) you can use things without needing to understand the deep philosophical/linguistic issues and b) that this is the sort of stuff I bet Deborah Weber would love!

So I decided to go and read Deborah’s About page where I learned that Deborah is a Spiritual Guide and Alternative Health practitioner. I find myself very torn by this because – as my stepdaughter has told me – I am a materialist. I prefer rationalist, but that does not mean I do not have a spiritual view of life either. My first blog, Ripple, from which I quoted on bread, yesterday, was named for my belief that we all emanate energy and effect into the world, and even after we die, that energy and effect carries on spreading out into the world. What you do in life, for better or worse, goes on and on so that even though I don’t believe in an afterlife, I do think that how you live your life is very important not just in a karmic sense within your lifetime, but in terms of what you leave behind, how you change the world. So I really like to describe myself as a Spiritual Humanist. I think I will do a whole post on this but for now I just want to say that there is much about Deborah as a blogger and health practitioner that I love and much that I find difficult such as Akashic Records. But hey! That’s okay, things don’t have to be binary, we can handle grey areas rather than mere black and white…

So all this happened before I even got out of bed…

F is for Fighting…

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Fighting a war, fist fighting, fighting for your rights, fighting off an attacker, fighting the good fight, fighting for peace, fighting off an infection, fighting boredom, fighting flab, fighting sleep, fighting insomnia, depression, a sense of failure, fighting old age, fighting for recognition, justice, fighting to be heard, fighting an election, fighting the war on drugs, fighting terrorism, fighting for the environment, fighting for survival, the uses of the word fighting are legion but in this list, and I am sure you can think of more examples, only the first four are literal fights – the rest are metaphorical. When one activity carries such a plethora of metaphors, it must surely say something about our humanity.


It’s not exclusively a human trait to fight, animals do it to win a mate or in defense of territory and in many cases it may not even come to blows – elaborate posturing, special apparatus designed to impress may do the trick although in other cases real and sometimes mortal damage is inflicted. These are legitimate causes for fighting – reproduction and territory are about survival – short and long term but as a species, humans have raised fighting to a planet-wide, all-life-threatening status. For a species that prides itself, defines itself even, on the size of its brain, this activity does not make sense.

The United States of America, of it’s 242 years history, has been at peace with no wars ongoing, external or internal, for just 16 years. Former President Jimmy Carter allegedly pointed this out to Donald Trump in 2019 and added ” We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion [on] military spending. China has not wasted a single penny on war and that’s why they’re ahead of us in almost every way.” One imagines it made little impression on a man whose stance in life is, more often than not, belligerent. I said that animals fight in defense of territory and like the metaphor above, fighting for peace, this sounds a contradiction in terms. Just as the military wing of the government is usually called the Department of Defense or similar – rarely the Department of War as this would imply that waging war was an aim of government – not a response to potential outside aggression.

In George Orwell’s classic novel of a political and dystopian future “Nineteen Eighty-Four” we see how the use of the right terms is vital for the control of the masses by the few. “Great” Britain has become Airstrip One and is a mere province of the superstate Oceania which tells its citizens that is in (perpetual) war and exhorts them to greater effort, greater tightening of the belt (remind you of austerity?). Published just after the Second World War when the Tehran Conference had divided the world up into zones of influence, the book has as many warnings today as ever about the scrutiny we need to place on those who govern…

The other day I heard someone saying on the radio (in the plethora of discussion about Covid 19 I am afraid I didn’t clock the speaker) that we keep referring to the National Health Service workers as the frontline workers in this fight against the virus but that it would be better if the people at large regarded themselves as the front line since it will be the degree of their adherence to not going out that will determine the reduction of deaths at the final reckoning. So we should be the “Home Front” a term that came about during the Second World War to give unity and focus to a population only some of whom were experiencing the direct effects of bombing whilst for those out in the country, there was little immediate evidence of the war raging across the world. Rationing, inventive cooking, improvisation and substitution – all the things we are experiencing under lockdown.

Here is the disconnect at the heart of our mass response to Covid 19 – for most people it is not serious and even if they do catch it it will not feel serious – we can’t see the crisis in the hospitals, only empty streets, shutdown shops and we experience a sense of unreality. Even when we watch the nightly news reports with the climbing death tolls, we do not connect with the reality, over 5000 people in the UK now, that’s a stadium full! If we could have taken it seriously, then we would have started preparing earlier when we heard the reports coming out of China. Logic dictates that if you can pass on an infection before you show symptoms, a pandemic is inevitable but human beings are not notably logical and so the fact that this virus is not evenly fatal fuels the disconnect.

We find ourselves living in the movie set of a post-apocalyptic event (such as a pandemic) but there are no rotting bodies in the streets and no feral gangs of survivors breaking into shut down shops. In this respect, barring some early hoarding of toilet rolls and flour (I blame the Great British Bake-off for making everybody believe they should bake their way through the crisis) the majority of people have responded with the best that humans can be to this strange challenge. Imagine though, how things would have been without the internet to inform and entertain us, to share tips and memes and love.

In the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, things were very different. Coming at the end of the First World War, starting out, it is thought, in a military base in Kansas, the troops heading out to Europe spread it and 20 to 50 million died – more than the 17 million who died in WW1 and this may not be accurate as there was no means of testing the many victims or recording data accurately and even with all of our advanced technology this current pandemic still presents some of the same problems. We do not fully understand why Spanish Flu was so lethal and we have much to learn about why Covid 19 is so lethal for some and not for others. Incidentally, the name Spanish Flu came about because most of the countries involved in WW1 had censorship in place for military purposes and the powers that be suppressed news of the pandemic, afraid of public panic except for Spain which was neutral, had no censorship and freely discussed the disease, including the Spanish King becoming ill. I say this on the day that Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister is reported to be receiving escalating treatment in Intensive Care…

Returning to the metaphorical use of the word fighting – in the world of religion, we have “onward Christian soldiers” and we have Jihad a term which modern Moslems struggle to re-interpret as a metaphorical personal battle for spiritual development and not in its apparent, original meaning of a battle to forcibly convert non-believers. It goes to show how careful we need to be with metaphor – especially those based on images of war and fighting and we need to be especially vigilant that we do not give the latitude to right-wing leaders to take excessive powers under the cover of crisis sending us back to the future of 1984…

I am going to give the last word to that great storyteller and observer of his times – Charles Dickens in his opening to A Tale of Two Cities – almost a perfect metaphor in itself –
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

A is for Alistair Cooke

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Part of childhood Sunday mornings back in the 1960s, was my father switching on the radio on the upstairs landing of our house whereby everybody in the house could listen whilst having a lie-in. After “Hymns from the little chapel in the valley” – a precursor of Songs of Praise and before the omnibus edition of “The Archers” there was “Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America”. I am starting the A to Z 2020 challenge with this seminal broadcasting giant because for me, this is where my love of the blog form begins.


There may be some among you who ask how a long-running radio series which began before blogs were conceived of, before PC’s were dreamt of and in fact before mainframe computers were invented, could be considered a Blog! Well in the beginning, Blogs were conceived as a simple sequence of dated posts – ideal for say, a diary. One of the hallmarks of a truly great piece of new technology is perhaps the degree and breadth of mission-creep which accrues to it as people explore it and blogs have moved from a diary to documentary, educational tool, club forum, therapeutic vent, political rant, and blogs cover every subject imaginable. But for me, the classic form is a missive from the individual to the world which reveals their thoughts, reflections and most enjoyably, their personality and it is in this respect that Alistair Cooke is the model for the form. In 2,869 episodes over 58 years, the longest running, spoken word broadcast ever, he spoke with a mellifluous, mid-Atlantic accent that gave his observations on America, explaining it if you will, not only to Britain but to the world via the BBC World Service, but as well, to Americans themselves. They were already used to Alistair’s voice because before he emigrated to America from Britain in 1937, he had delivered “London Letter” for NBS explaining British ways to America.

You can read the quite astonishing history of this prolific broadcaster and writer here and you can listen to the best of the broadcasts here but it’s the style and tone of Alistair Cooke which I love and aspire to channel in my own writing and although he read his broadcast aloud, – his material was, in the first instance, written. You can find the scripts here. He might begin with some observations about squirrels preparing for winter and then take you around the political action in Washington, the reaction of the people before returning effortlessly to the Fall, and the squirrels. The political content would be teased out and explained for the world in a way that was comfortable, reassuring without any hint of patronage. And when you needed to hear about the gravest moments in American history, such as the assassination of JF Kennedy, there was no safer pair of hands, no more moving commentator to describe the events and the reaction of Americans.

That radio on our landing, itself an object of Americana which my father adapted to UK voltage by mounting a light-bulb on top, took us to another country each week – to Alistair Cooke’s America as we lay in bed and listened.

2,869 letters – blog that!

Published as part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge