Tuesday 21 March 2017

Tell me, what is my daughter's name?

I put this story of mine here as part of a conversation about the subjugation of women by, and in,  the Bible. I think the Biblical tale is shocking at so many levels.

And Jephthah swore and oath to God (Judges Chapter 11. verse 30)

Jephthah, Scion of Gideon, Mighty Deliverer, Judge of Israel, my comrade in arms, my dearest friend, my Brother Bastard; farewell.
Jephthah.   How well I remember those days when you brought us together.  Each of us kicked out of our homes, out of our family homes, as the children of concubines, despised by our ‘legitimate’ brothers, tolerated until the day our fathers died, when we took to the hills, running for our lives.

Alone and desperate we crossed the Jabbok, roamed the barren hills, until you found us, united us, and named us. “If are called bastards led us be A Band of Bastards.”   And so we were.   Banished from the fertile valley, scratching a living from the thin hillside soil, we were swords for hire when that was needed.   We were oft times brigand raiders too.   But we only took our swords east, to hit the idol worshippers, the Amalekites and Midianites, ancient enemies of God and of the People of God, of Isra-El.  We only took what was needed, when it was needed.  And of course we needed women, so we took them.   Never the wives; only the concubines or daughters of concubines.   We are bastard bandits, yes, but we were honourable bastard bandits.  And some of us, like you, found love with the women we took.   Some of them loved us simply for making them wives.   No concubinage for them now.   We knew what it was like to be second class.  So we were with wives, and then with children.    Legitimate children.  We might have been born bastards, but our children were not.

I remember, Jephthah, when your beloved wife died, in first child-birth.   And how you turned the fierce energy of your grief into tender love for your girl-child.   My wife wet-nursed her, yes, but you were her real mother as well as father.     You, a man of iron with hands shaped by your plough and sword, found gentleness within you as you held her, as you raised her. And as she grew she shone, as only a beloved child can shine.   She never missed the mother she had never known. She was full of joy.   And we loved her too. She was our princess.     How we delighted in her smile, and in her voice as light as the wind that stirs the barley or the sound of the bubbling brook.    We named her after it.

We knew you had noble blood in your veins, the blood of Gideon.   Gideon who put the Amalekites down, but would not be King in Israel.   I may be your Judge he said, but only YAHWEH is our King.    And when the call came for us fight, not for money or for plunder, but to defend his tribe against the invading Amalekites again, you claimed your heritage.  When we win I am your Chieftain you declared, and they gladly assented. There were no leaders among them.

What were the rest of our band fighting for?   For our reputations? For recognition?   To be legitemised?   To be Bastards no more? For a way back home?   For all of these. And surely victory would bring us rich farms in the plain for our reward, away from the unforgiving rocks and parched hills.   No more banditry for us. So none fought harder than we that day.    And none of us fought harder than you, our Commander, our warrior in chief.   Your blade shone red.

But when the battle turned against us you called to the Lord, and swore to him a mighty oath. “Give me victory this day, O Lord, and I will sacrifice……I will sacrifice to you the first living creature that greets me from my homestead on my return”.
I heard that, and in the heat of battle a cold river swept down my spine.   But the Spirit of The Lord came upon you, mightily, and you waded back into the fray. None could stand against you then, and we followed, trampling their bodies before they broke and ran like cavies from a wolf.

We won.    We wiped our blades and headed home.

I was by your side, Jephthah, when your beloved girl, our beloved princess, ran to greet you.     You shuddered to a halt.   You fell to your knees.   For the first time in my life I saw you weep. For the first time in her life she heard you shout – at her.   “What have you done! What have you brought upon me!”    And you told her how you were bound by a solemn oath to the Lord, an oath that had brought us victory, had saved our lives, and would now cost her hers.

She did not argue. She did not dispute. She did not rebel.  “Just give me some time, my Father, to say farewell to my friends, to lament with them.  I am not yet a woman, I will never have a lover, a husband, or children of my own, so give me three months to mourn my virginity.”

Did she think that given time you might change your mind, or hear your Lord release you from your vow?   I do not think she did. She accepted her fate as unquestioningly as she had accepted your love.
Once, by some miraculous alchemy you had turned your grief for her mother into love for your child. But your grief for your daughter?  That turned to rage.   The sharp blade of your rage needed a target.   And eventually you found one.

The Ephraimites, our cousins from across the river, were ashamed and angry that it was us, not them, who had been called on to fight the Amalekites.   After all, they were legitimate. And so when they felt bold enough they came and challenged us. We were armed with anger too, anger at their presumption, at their assumed superiority.   

And they soon discovered who really were the better men when iron met iron.   They too scattered and ran, running westwards for their homes.  They had to cross the Jabbok, the Blue River, before they reached safety, but we knew the hill country better than they and with you in the lead we cut them off at the ford.

Of course we knew who was one of us and who was not, but still you questioned each man we grabbed when they reached the ford, as if you did not know. “Tell me’ you asked, so calmly, ‘tell me, what do they call my daughter?”

And did they know? And if they knew could they even pronounce her name? The name we had given her, naming her for her voice, a voice like the sound of the bubbling brook?

Jephthah, farewell.   I have fought with you for what we needed to survive. I have fought beside you for gold and for honour.   But I cannot fight for you again, nor be your friend.

At Jabbok the Blue River ran red with the blood of those Ephraimites as you cut their throats.  They died for your daughter’s sake, for the darling girl you slew with your own hand.   Those proud and foolish men paid the price for that desperate oath of yours, a promise your Lord never required of you, and one you never sought remission from.   Who did you hate most that day?   Those men, your God, or your self?

So farewell Jephthah, Scion of Gideon, Mighty Deliverer, Judge of Israel, once my comrade in arms, once my dearest friend, but now no more my Brother Bastard. No more. Farewell.

For at the ford of Jabbok you did not kill those men, Jephthah, you murdered them.   Just as you had murdered your daughter, your beloved, our beloved, the girl we called Shibboleth.

© Bob Vernon. 2015.

Loving.



The Irish actress Ruth Neggar has rightly attracted a lot of praise – and an Oscar nomination- for her role in Jeff Nichols’ film ‘Loving’.    I think this is a fine film, telling the true story of Richard Loving – a white man – and a Mildred –  a black woman-  who married in the late 1950’s in the State of Virginia – breaking that State’s ‘miscegenation’ law forbidding inter-racial marriage.
Richard and Mildred were ordered to leave the State under pain of imprisonment.   Their case was taken up by the American Civil Rights Union and after nine years, in 1967, the USA’s Supreme Court affirmed their right to marry.   This was a landmark decision that has since then positively affected many Americans.   It was also an important victory in the whole Civil Rights history.

But I want to draw attention to Joel Edgerton, the Australian actor who played Richard.     Edgerton was a convincing US SEAL in Zero Dark Thirty, and produced a nuanced portrait of Tom Buchanan in Baz Lurmann’s Great Gatsby.

I think that film was vastly superior in just about every way to Jack Clayton’s 1974 version, which had Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy and Bruce Dern, as Buchanan – who was a simply rich oaf.   We had no idea why Daisy would have married him – apart from his ‘old’ money.   With Edgerton we could see that Daisy could indeed love him, and that he loved Daisy – even as he was unfaithful.   He gave us the swagger and arrogance, but we also saw his insecurity, loneliness and fear.    Gatsby’s fortune might have been nefarious but he had made it himself, whereas Buchanan’s had been inherited.   And he was physically afraid of Gatsby.    So much of this happened behind his eyes where all the best film acting is done.

Tom Buchanan and Richard Loving could hardly be more different.   Here we see a working man, a builder and car mechanic, a modest man of few words.  He knows fear, but quietly does what needs to be done out of love for his wife.  Edgerton inhabits this man, with his slow physicality, his gentle voice, his watchful wary eyes.   Richard is not a campaigner. He simply wants to do what his wife wants – to live alongside her family back in Virginia.  It is an ambitious lawyer who takes up their case, and put’s the couple at risk by doing so.


Edgerton’s performance mirrors the qualities of the movie. Understated, honest, careful, loving.  I applaud them. 

Does being a zombie make me a bad person? The Girl With All The Gifts


I am not a fan of zombie movies.   In fact I generally avoid them.  Then 28 Days Later came along with a bit of a fresh take on the genre.   And then Warm.     And 2016 offered us the The Girl With All The Gifts.  So that’s three British movies that to various degrees subvert the conventions.   Zombies don’t have to lurch.   Zombies can be lovable. And Zombies might be the only way forward.   At least after a plague.

I have already had to revise my similarly disdainful opinion of vampire movies after Let The Right One In,  Thirst, Only Lovers Left Alive and Byzantium, four movies that asked ‘what might it actually be like to be a vampire?’   To be a 12 year old for 300 hundred years, slowly but inexorably out-living everyone who is close to you?   What if you hate being a vampire?   What would it be like to be married for 400 years to the same person?  What would it be like to be the mother of a teenage girl for centuries – and what would it be like to be a teenage girl – forever?    

Margot Adler once asked “what it would mean to live a truly long life. How would that change one’s view of everything in society? …What does one value more and what does one value less with a long human life? Would we become bored? Would we become less compassionate? …Would it increase of decrease our reverence for the planet?”

So it seems that some genre movie makers are asking new questions, changing the p.o.v, turning the objects into subjects and extending the boundaries of our empathy.   Of course James Whale did that long ago when he made Frankenstein,  whose Creature was the very model of a modern male teenager, suddenly finding himself inhabiting an unfamiliar and seemingly grotesque body, spurting out in all directions, subject to powerful and unsociable urges and wondering if he can possibly be lovable, be loved by his own creator.   We even saw the Creature learning to smoke a cigarette.   Frankenstein’s creation was only a monster because he felt unloved.

And what about zombies?   We have had Sean of the Dead and Cockneys and Zombies of course, and they gave us some laughs as they fed on (or off) the conventions rather than recasting them in any radical way.  I think there are some other zombie movies that look from a fresh angle - but I haven't seen them.   Maybe I should hit them down. 

But what about  The Girl With All The Gifts?    A fungoid plague has devastated the human population turning them into ‘hungries’ – flesh eating zombies. We see children being taught by Miss Justineau,   (Gemma Arterton) in highly secure (but it seems not secure enough) camp.   She is slowly developing a bond with one of the children, Melanie (played by Sennis Nanua).  The children are treated like Hannibal Lecter, restrained with thick leather straps and muzzled because they are also infected and the smell of uninfected humankind drives them into a frenzy of hunger for flesh.   They are studied by  Dr Caldwell (Glen Close) who is looking for a cure, but making sure she does not get too close, physically or emotionally – to the deadly children.     They are being taught by Miss Justineau, (Gemma Arterton – who also illuminated Neil Jordan’s Byzantium) in an Army base.    When the camp is stormed and overrun by the adult zombies Caldwell and Justineau  have to flee, under the armed guard of Sgt. Parks (Paddy Considine) along with the child Melanie, who is it seems, The Girl With All The Gifts.
As their situation changes, so do their relationships.   Caldwell had believed that Melanie  was not really human, an attitude that allowed her to be objective and ruthless as she experimented on her cadre.   But that objectivity begins to soften on closer encounter.   Sgt. Parks’ brusque suspicious attitudes also moderate as he recognizes and rather admires the girl’s gifts and Justineau,  who has always treated these young zombies as children, begins to mother Melanie.   This may or may not be a good idea.   Melanie may be brighter than the adults think, and have different priorities.   The young actress Nanua does a wonderful job here, showing the child’s charm and vulnerability – and her coolly violent capacities.

This is a serious movie, adapted by Mike Carey from his own novel and filmed by Colm McCarthy.   It uses the genre to look at the contrasting needs of the individual and the group, and the abiding inquiry into ‘what does it really mean to be human?’   Science fiction movies have long explored this latter question, from Metropolis through Blade Runner to The Ghost in the Shell movies.
We may hear another question about the tension between teenagers and adults – teenagers who suspect the restraints adults insist on imposing on them, adults who fear the capacities of the younger generation. The future is another country; they do things differently there.   

During my years as a youth worker (and parent) I began to see that adults are rather like mature frogs, looking at tadpoles and refusing to recognise that we were ever once like that, a selective amnesia that allows us to distance ourselves from and criticise them.  I have read statements of adult condemnation of teenagers and anxiety about whatever future they might control.   These statements can be found all the way through our history.    In this post-apocalyptic movie there will be a new future, shaped and controlled by the children like Melanie, and the adults will have to adapt to it.


This is not a horror movies. It is properly thrilling at times, but never goes for schlock or gore.  The four main players work well together and the direction is pretty taut.     It does not end the way zombie movies have ended in the past, and may well leave you with moral questions to ponder.

Who really was the Spy on the Bridge?

I recently showed Spielbereg’s BFG to friends, and they loved Mark Rylance’s  motion and emotion characterisation of the Giant.     Most of them had not seen his previous performance in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies.   That film told  the story of the capture by the FBI of a Soviet spy, Colonel Rudolph Abel, in the late 1950’s, and how he was later swapped for the American U2 spy-plane pilot, F. Gary Powers.   Tom Hanks played Jim Donovan, a lawyer who had worked for the prosecution at the Nurenberg Trials, now appointed to defend the spy.   Mark Rylance, in his first major film role, played the spy.     The film is ‘based on a true story’.

However, in the second part of this review (which I reprint from revbobsblog.blogspot)  I  look more closely what seems to be a truth hidden by this film and ask ‘Who really was Rudolph Abel?’  That is a question the CIA still want not to answer.
The Spielberg film is not primarily about the Soviet spy. It is about the American lawyer, Donovan, chosen to defend him at what was always going to be a ‘show trial’, but who did so with remarkable integrity and courage, knowing the public would despise him for his role.   Although Able was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment he was spared execution.  Donovan made the argument to the presiding Judge that this Russian should be kept alive as one day he might be a useful pawn to swap if any American spy was caught by the Soviets.  This proved to be the case.   Four years later Donovan was asked by the U. S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, to work with the CIA and secretly negotiate the swap of Abel for Powers.

Donovan again conducted himself with courage and integrity, demanding that a young American student, Frederick Pryor, should also be included in the swap. The Berlin Wall was being constructed and Pryor had just been arrested by the East German Stasi on the wrong side of the Wall.   The film tells us that the CIA were not at all concerned about this young man’s fate, but Donovan insisted, and the Stasi eventually agreed. So an individual American’s humanity and courage triumphed once again despite the heartlessness of Governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain.   Just as in Private Ryan Pryor was saved by the American Hero personified by Tom Hanks.    And the Soviet spy’s life was also saved.

After the initial arrest of Abel Tom Hanks is centre stage.   We see a little of Powers, who is never portrayed as a hero.     Like the other U2 ‘drivers’ he was given explicit instructions on how to destroy the top-secret spy plane if it might fall into enemy hands, and given the means to self-destruct if he was likely to fall into enemy hands himself.   He failed to do so.   We are not told how much he revealed to his interrogators, but I suspect he did not have a lot to reveal.

Tom Hanks played Donovan with his customary skill, making an otherwise ordinary man quietly heroic, in the mould of a Jimmy Stewart character in a Capra movie or, more precisely, Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch.   Hanks has done this many times before – and so, of course, has Spielberg.   I rather like the fact that an actor who is hardly handsome, has never been described as sexy or been an action movie hero, is actually the biggest box office draw in Hollywood. They say his films have grossed 11 billion dollars.
And what about the casting of the Englishman Mark Rylance as Rudolph?

It seems that when Rylance was approached by Spielberg twenty years ago he chose the Shakespearian stage instead.   Hanks remarked at the time that Rylance ‘ has a great future.’   I wonder if he knows how great a past he has.   Rylance is a luminary on the Glove stage – and was of course the star of the BBC’s six part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, but this was his first major film role.     Rylance can play ‘big’ if he wants to, as when playing Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron in the award winning West End and Broadway hit, Jez Buttersworth’s Jerusalem.   But he can also play small, doing so little that every tiny thing inflection or facial shift catches our attention and tells us something significant.     He was perfectly cast here.

The Bridge’s script helped  Rylance’s minimalism. He says very little.   He says nothing that is unimportant.   His repeated response when asked by Donovan if he is worried is “Would it help?”   That is wonderful.   Someone knows that being a spy is like raising teenage children – in this at least, that when things look like going badly wrong it is far too late to start worrying.  You simply have to trust the work you did before, in the case of teenagers during those early years when you were bringing them up, in the case of a spy the trade-craft employed when setting up your legend and the routines and systems to protect it.   In both cases you also have to trust those who support you.   Your family or your employers.  Abel had done the best he could.     Although he had been betrayed by his deputy he would not sell out to his captors.   If this loyalty cost him his life, so be it.

The script is clear about the nature of Abel’s trial.   He was bound to be found guilty and nothing was going to stop that, including the carelessness of the FBI, who failed to get a warrant for the search that revealed his trove of spying equipment.    The judge chose to ignore this legal lapse.  This obviously has a contemporary relevance, and Spielberg is forthright is his criticism of extra-legal procedures in Camp X.

There is nothing gung ho here and there are no grandstanding acting performances.   Even Donovan’s performance when appealing the conviction in The Supreme Court is cut short (maybe a bad editing choice?).     All the actors simply get on with their jobs, from Amy Ryan as Donovan’s wife, Alan Alder as his boss, Dakin Matthews as the presiding judge, Sebastian Koch as the svelte East German official Donovan has to deal with in East Berlin – a lovely counterpoint to his role in The Lives of Others’ – and Mikhail Gorevoy as the head of the KGB in Berlin is properly oleaginous.   Scott Shepherd is the rat-faced CIA man.     Austin Stowel as Gary Powers is really a no more than a cypher, but the film is never about him.     He is a pawn in this game.   He is never the hero.   Donovan is.   Abel was also a hero however, as Donovan pointed out to the court.   A brave and true soldier in a Cold War.
Some critics have complained about the film’s length. I was surprised afterwards to learn that it is 141 minutes .   It did not feel like it.    It is a remarkable movie, and I strongly recommend it.

But who was Rudolph?   There is a truer and even more interesting story not told here.    It seems that the man caught by the FBI was not Colonel Rudolph Abel, but Colonel Willie Fisher.   A recent article by Simon Armstrong of the BBC (28/11/15) refers to Vin Arthey’s book Abel: The True Story of the Spy They Traded for Gary Powers, and David Saunders, a professor of Russian history at Newcastle University has also researched the full story of the spy’s childhood and career.

According to a book by the Soviet spy Kirill Khenkin Fisher was born on North Tyneside on the 11th July 1903.   Sanders has seen his birth certificate.   Fisher’s ethnically German parents were Russian Communist agitators, forced to flee Russia at the turn of the century.   His older brother Henry is believed to have organized running guns back to Russian for the communists, and Willie helped his father to distribute anti-German literature on North Tyneside.   After the Revolution the family returned to Russia and Fisher joined the Red Army.   He spoke English, Russian, German, French, Polish and Yiddish and was a gifted radio operator.    During the Battle of Stalingrad he played a crucial part in an important fuhlspiel, using false radio transmissions to convince the German High Command that one of their battle groups was cut off and operating behind Soviet lines and persuading them to send in Commandos reinforcements.     This was a deadly trap that cost the Germans dearly.     Arthey considers this to be the most significant event of his career.

After the war Fisher was trained in further spy-craft and rose in the ranks of the KGB.   He taught Konan Molodi  how to use codes an cyphers in radio signals.  Molodi later assumed the identity of Gordon Lonsdale and  ran the British Naval spy Harry Hougton at Portland, whose capture is recorded in ‘Spycatcher’ by MI5’s Peter  Wright.  In 1953 Fisher was sent to New York with a false identity to take over the Soviet spy network in the USA.

He was then the ‘control’ of the Rosenbergs and Krogers.   “The FBI was working hard to disrupt Soviet spy rings, but Fisher kept the show on the road” writes Arthey, “I don’t think his job was seeking out military secrets, but he was an important cog in the wheel that got information back to Russia.”  He may also have been regrouping the penetration of the nuclear research site at Los Alamos.   The arrest of the ‘Atom Spies’, the Rosenbergs, had thrown this mission into a spin.     Fisher’s chief operator at Los Alamos was Kitty Harris, another English born Communist spy previously trained by Willie.   But his deputy in New York, the Finnish Reino Hayhanen, was an incompetent drunk.   Under the threat of being sent back to Moscow (where he might have been ‘promoted’ by means of a Makarov pistol at the back of his head) Hayhanen defected and told the Americans everything he knew.   Because of the standard trade-craft practice of cut-outs and closed-cell structure Hayhanen did not even know his boss’s name,  only his general area of residence, cover occupation (painter and sign-writer) and rank (Colonel).   Eventually however that was enough and Fisher was arrested by the FBI and charged on three counts.

At this point Willie Fisher showed what a good spy he was.   He told the FBI/CIA that he was Colonel Rudolph Abel of the KGB.   Fisher and Abel had become friends many years earlier, so Fisher knew a lot about his friends biography.   The CIA knew such an officer existed, but they did not know that he had recently died in Moscow.     When the Americans announced the arrest of Colonel Abel the KGB knew that although their main man had been arrested the CIA did not know his real identity.   Willie Fisher maintained this pretense during the four years he spent in prison before he was swapped for Capt. Gary Powers, shot down over Russia in 1960.

So Fisher had cleverly signaled to his superiors that he had not revealed his true identity.   He had not betrayed his greatest secret.   The KGB bosses would decide if they believed him.   This would be a question of life or death if he was swapped, but there was nothing more he could do.   Worrying would not help.     The film leaves his fate unclear, and rather suggests that it would not be positive.   In fact, despite the fact that the Russians never totally trusted any spy who was not ethnically Russian, his loyalty was recognized.   He was reunited with his wife and daughter in Moscow.   He could never work abroad again and did not like being paraded round the new KGB recruits as a hero – what he called a ‘museum piece’ – he lived in Moscow until he died of lung cancer in his bed in 1971.

Steven Spielberg’s new movie tells of the arrest, trial and eventual release of this spy, but does not reveal this ultimate deception.     Nor do Spielberg and the script writers make it clear that Fisher was in jail for over four years before the swap.

All this must have been known by the film makers, as attested by the way Mark Rylance speaks his lines with a British accent.  Rylance used a Scottish, rather than Geordie, accent, because he found it easier to master, but “I’ve met everybody who knew him as an English speaker. “ says Dr Arthey.“They said he didn’t speak anything like [a Geordie]. The best we’ve got is that he spoke with a kind of Scots-Irish accent, which he told people was down to being brought up by a Scottish aunt in Boston. “

The film, along with official and unofficial sites refer to him as Rudolph Abel, perhaps deferring to the CIA who still don’t want to admit that they were fooled by their most important captive.  Professor Saunders says “We make a lot in this country about Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, but those British spies didn’t have any rank in the KGB.   Abel (sic) is the only British-born ranking officer in Soviet external security services that we know of.”


So it seems that Willie Fisher was much more remarkable in life than he is in this film.    During WW2 he would have been seen by the Americans and British as a hero, fighting on behalf of our valued – indeed essential – allies the Russians against the Germans.   Stalin and his betrayal of  Marxism was not Fisher’s  fault, and I feel rather proud of him.