Kipling and Anzac Day

I have just got home from the dawn Anzac Day service at East Maitland. As always they leave me with mixed ideas. Perhaps Kipling said it rather well.

Recessional (A Victorian Ode) 1897

Rudyard Kipling

GOD of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle line,

Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;

The Captains and the Kings depart;

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire;

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

Or lesser breeds without the Law—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard—

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

And guarding calls not Thee to guard.

For frantic boast and foolish word,

Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

This poem set to music has been sung either in whole or more commonly in part at most Anzac Day Services for many years. It is usually seen as the poem of a militant triumphal british Empire and as the poem of the soldiers of that Empire. It isn’t.

Its context is partly given by the date: it was composed for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, in which year the title Queen of all Earthly Queens became a common attribution to her. For most of last century Empire (or later Commonwealth) Day was celebrated on her birthday 25^th May. So from the context it seems that the reputation may be justified.

First note the constant and repeated reference to God or Lord. This is a religious poem. (And so perhaps appropriate for a semi religious day like Anzac Day when at each Dawn Service there are prayers, hymns and an address from a clergyman. But what sort of religion and what sort of God does Kipling invoke?

Seems to be like Land of Hope and Glory (and you need to see the last night at the Proms see British people at their most imperialistic singing this even if Britain has lost an empire and has yet to find a role) where the writer after thanking God

"for making thee (Britain) mighty

prays that God will

"make thee mightier yet"

But each successive verse says the reverse

Verse Three

Our navies melt away

…

all our pomp of yesterday is one with Ninevah and Tyre

When Kipling wrote this the British navy was not merely the largest in the world it was larger than the next two biggest navies in the world and it was the policy to keep it that way. Yet this huge navy melts away.

All the imperial pomp of the late Victorian Empire will be ended like these cities.

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

Or lesser breeds without the Law—

But the British were all Gentiles (Kipling didn’t believe that strange myth that the British were the 10 lost tribes) And the point is clearer with the next reference :Lesser breeds without the Law" (we do not have the Law ie the Jewish Law the only law to be capitalised.

Yet Kipling is saying that we are boasting, we are drunk with power if in fact we forget God and we rely on our own strength. George Orwell believed Kipling to be referring to some German philosophers (Nietsche perhaps) who were without the law in the sense of being lawless and advocating that strong men (supermen in Nietsches words) were not bound by law. Both Orwell and Kipling grew up in an England which was –for all its faults- a country that subscribed to the belief that all men are equal under the law (eg the jury system). It had a law- and a good one- but not the Law but even the Law doesn’t give life.

The message is given in the last 2 lines of each verse. It is not a boasting of Imperial power of weapons of what G W Bush calls Awe and Shock" and of might but a call to repent that boast and to put your trust in God.

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

That gives life

Is this appropriate for Anzac Day?

Far more so then the stuff that people say about Australia being a great country or the Australian soldier being the worlds best. Even if true it defeats the purpose: one of which is to remember (as they say each year) the great tragedy of war. The fruit of war is like the wages of sin, death, God gives life.

Review: Deerhunting with Jesus

This book’s blurb describes it as hilarious and funny. It isn’t. It is very serious and at times very sad. Your.sydneyanglicans.net had this in its secular section for reviewers. It’s not exactly secular either.

It is a story – not exactly a description or a history – of the American rural poor.
Joe Bageant writes particularly about his own hometown of Winchester, Virginia, which by American standards is a small town of 23,500. However, his message is general. And it’s a message of gloom and sadness. It’s a story about a society where 20 per cent don’t finish high school, where almost none go on to university, and where most employees do not earn enough to pay for health insurance or buy a house.

Bageant lets people he grew up with tell their own stories So we read of Dottie, who at 59 is half blind (she walks with a cane), overweight, has high blood pressure and has a husband who earns $8 an hour for cleaning cars. After paying rent and other fixed costs they have $35 a week to pay for groceries and medicine. They survive by not filling some of Dottie’s scripts. So she just gets sicker.

Bageant and his son’s story tells the decline of American manufacturing. When he left the US Navy in 1969 he worked at Rubbermaid, then Winchester’s biggest employer. He got $1.65 an hour, free (or almost free) health cover for himself and his family and he made a decent income. Now his son works there and earns about $15 an hour and can barely afford health insurance ($250 per month per person with a deductible of $1200 and it only covers 80 per cent of the bills in any case).

Bageant writes of meeting Joe Cave who has had two discs in his back give up for which he received workers compensation and needs a hip replacement which the compensation insurer says is not work related. Of course, the injury is, and so Cave is bringing an action to prove it but in the meantime he lives on a $480 a month disability pension and pays $320 on his share of the rent for the house in which he and others live.

He tells many other stories about working people, about housing, about health care, about education. And he surprises us. Like most Australians I am smug about our gun control laws and look at America as being the shooters capital. But not so according to Bageant. Many people still hunt for food in America – it’s sometimes the only way some small town folk put meat on the table.

Guns for many Americans are everyday tools. And he shows us how anti-gun hysteria affects people by telling the story of Joshua Phelps, of Pine Bush, New York (population 1539), a high school student and a member of the school’s civil war club, who after appearing in a school re-enactment of the Battle of Chancellorville threw his blank firing replica musket and Union uniform into his car. Joshua was arrested, dragged from class and suspended from school. Gun ownership, Bageant says, is the biggest political divide between American liberals and the small-town people he writes about.

But the biggest divide of all is Christianity, or at least the version most Americans in small towns know. And here more then anywhere else Bageant stops being secular and starts sounding like Amos.

Bageant comes from a Christian family. His father’s last words to him were “Will you be saved? Will you be on Canaan’s shore?”. His brother is a minister in an independent Baptist church. But Bageant himself is not Christian. And it’s not hard to see why.

The church he writes about is the Creation Science church, the church that supports Bush because he is “pro-life “ (ignoring the fact – reported a year or so ago in Southern Cross – that while Clinton was President US abortion rates fell and under Bush they have risen to become the highest in the world) and more than that, the church – or at least a large part of it – wants to return to the Old Testament penal code – complete with stonings. This is an heretical church, a church preaching Law not Grace, a church rather like that in Galacia to which Paul wrote “what makes a man righteous is not obedience to the Law but faith in Jesus Christ”.

Deer hunting with Jesus challenges us directly. It contains a preface addressed to the Australian reader that asks us to avoid the low wage service economy that now afflicts the USA and to foster education. But it should also encourage us to preach the true gospel and in so doing stand with the poor and needy and deliver the oppressed.

America, Bageant writes, despite its outward Christianity has failed to do this. It is a call from a man who I think has lost his faith because the gospel was not properly preached to him. Every minister who is in a parish west of Homebush, south of Port Hacking or north of the Hawkesbury should read this book.

(published in March 2008 edition of Southern Cross)

Intention in the law

One of the things many people find most difficult to understand when they hear their lawyer talk is what the lawyer means by intention. To most of us intention is a mental thing, "I intend to go swimming at lunchtime" is a statement about me and what I plan to do.

But the law talks about this funny thing called objective intention and that can turn out to be the opposite of what the person intended in his or her own mind or what the person says he or she intended. To see why the law talks about objective intention let’s take the swimming example a bit further. I might say to you ", "I intend to go swimming at lunchtime" but I might be lying- perhaps its an excuse to avoid doing something I don’t want to do. If in fact I have not brought my swimming gear to work and if I go to the library then you might say "Kirsop never intended to go swimming."

It gets much more difficult when the lawyer is trying to look at what a number of people intended. The most common example is in a contract. Lets take the example of the sale of a commercial building. The vendor might say "I intended the margin scheme to apply" because in doing so it saves him GST and so he gets more money in his hand. The purchaser might not like that because if he is in business he can claim the GST back and so he ends up with more money in his hand. So its not very useful to listen to what the parties say they intended. Rather what the lawyers do is to look at what the parties did. Did the contract say the margin scheme was going to apply? Normally if it did say that the margin scheme will apply then that’s the end of it. But sometimes there are arguments. Say (to take a real example) the owner of a building leased a shop and in the lease gave the tenant an option to purchase the building. Say further the lease said that the terms would be those of the standard contract (which is drafted by the Law Society with input from the State government and the Real Estate Institute). That contract says that "normally" the margin scheme doesn’t apply. But when the tenant exercised his option the contract as prepared by the owner’s solicitors states the scheme does apply. The tenant and the lessor are arguing about what was intended. The owner says I always intended the margin scheme should apply and in his own mind he might be right but the lawyer needs to see what is the "objective" intention which is the intention that an outsider would say the people intended.

A very nice example of this is in a recent court case involving a house at Lithgow. More then 90 years ago miners had built houses on land known as the "Pottery Estate" owned by the mining company for which they worked. They paid a very low rental to the mining company,. They then sold their houses and the purchasers bought the house and continued to pay a low rental to the mining company. In 1969 Mr May purchased a 2 bedroom brick house within the Pottery Estate from a Mrs McIntyre. He paid her $1,000 and paid the mining company $85.80 rent in advance for 1969. Over the years the ground rent had increased to $18 a week (Mr May usually paid it monthly in advance but he –and the other people in the Pottery Estate – understood that it was a weekly rent). Mr May carried out various repairs and improvements. Around 1985 Mr May he arranged construction of a new roof at a cost of $5,500. In 1987 he arranged for electrical rewiring at a cost of $2,500.. In May 1995 Mr May arranged for the construction of a new septic system at a cost of $3,200 All these are things home owners not tenants do.

All this changed when a new owner –Ceedive Pty Ltd – purchased the land in 2000. It suddenly increased the rent dramatically, to about the same rent that was being charged for houses in other parts of Lithgow. Mr May and the other people living in the Pottery estate complained and refused to pay the rent. Ceedive tried to evict them.

Mr May and the other residents then claimed they were "Protected Tenants." That term probably needs an explanation to my younger readers. In World War 2 rents were pegged so that landlords could not take advantage of the war time shortage of houses and charge huge rents. After the war houses were in short supply (this was the start of the baby boom and of the big immigration programmes) and in 1948 the state government passed laws continuing the war time regulation of rents. Tenants in such houses were "Protected Tenants". This was meant to be a temporary scheme but it has continued in some places and some circumstances to today.
But Mr May could only be a protected tenant (and so have his rent pegged) if his house was a part of the land –a fixture. And Mr May had in the past acted as if he owned the house. And he certainly thought he did, after all he had bought it.

But the Court of Appeal said that what was important was what the original builder intended. If he intended the house to a fixture then it would remain so (once something is a fixture it always remains a fixture). Here the original owner is dead so the court could only look at what he intended from the circumstances at the time. And the court concluded that anyone looking at what was built (A 2 bedroom brick house on full foundations) would have said the owner intended the house to be a part of the land, and not something that could be taken away. As the court said

A house which is constructed in such a way so as to be removable, whether as a unit, or in sections, may well remain a chattel, even though it is connected temporarily to mains services such as water and electricity. But a house which is constructed in such a way that it cannot be removed at all, save by destruction, cannot have been intended to remain as a chattel."
And so Mr May and the other tenants were protected tenants and so they were only liable to pay a rent fixed at 1948 levels (subject to some adjustments).
And the way the court got to this result was by looking at the ‘objective’ intention of the person who built the house in 1910.

(syndicated law column in local papers for fortnight beginning 21/4/08)