Bare Bones

A couple of days ago my elder son got married. He celebrated the first gay marriage in my family. In that sense it was more special than any other marriage, which might explain what thoughts befell me in the run-up to the actual ceremony.

Friends and family were gathered at a back entrance of the famous 15th century, late gothic City Hall. Because it happened to be one of the coldest days in this, the warmest year on record in Belgium, waiting outside was not the most limb warming activity that one could imagine.

Someone wondered aloud how many (people) were getting married that morning. Another, apparently “in the know”, answered “four”. Looking around me, it struck me as too few and I asked “couples” or “people”? Couples, of course.

As we had nothing else to do but chit chat and talk small, my mind started wandering, as it often does – somewhat subconsciously I guess. Isn’t it strange that 4 couples get married, which account for 8 people … – which account for ONLY 8 people!!

Of course, 4 x 2 = 8.
But, why do we have ONLY COUPLES that get married? If we lift the restriction of man and woman, and expand it so same sex, why then can we not change the number of partakers in a marriage to three, four or more: a trio, a quartet… get married. It would change the math, wouldn’t it?

When you start playing with such thoughts, it feels somewhat strange, even eerie. But twenty years ago when some people started talking about gay marriage, two men or two women becoming partners in a marriage, that must have come across as a strange concept as well, mustn’t it?

Yet, given that so many marriages end in divorce these days (and often relatively quickly), could we, could society not entertain the thought of more than two people getting married together, if only, for instance, to better protect children against the frivolousness of their progenitors? After all, if one of a trio leaves the “bond”, the two remaining parents could still constitute a full family (in the classic sense of two parents). Indeed, even the single-parent poverty problem would be easier to solve…

I know it is not here nor there, but I am convinced that society should consider trios and quartets getting married because, purely philosophically speaking, you do not have to be a “couple” to get married, nor to make or rear kids. As a matter of fact, for the kiddiess that enjoy or undergo the prerogative of being part of twice or thrice reconstituted families, for all those semi-orphans-at-a-distance, one thing is clear: the bigger the marriage would be, the better their nesting opportunities.

Who knows, pretty soon we might see parties of twenty getting married. And then we call it a commune. [Or a company perhaps, all depending on the family goals.]

Grimburger,
30th of December, 2014

If we ever doubted how the rules of a state-of-law are being manipulated in our Western world, Mr. Obama obliged by his comments on “The Interview”.

Yesterday he declared, from the safety of his modern-day pulpit, the presidential press room in White House, assumedly the High Church of Democracy, that
1) North Korea was behind the attack on SONY, and
2) SONY was wrong to pull the movie from the world theater(s)

His first statement is interesting, at least for two reasons. One, who says that North Korea was responsible? Earlier in the week quite a few hacker groups claimed to be the attackers! And if indeed the Americans are convinced that Korean pundits were to blame, where is the proof, how do they know? (After all finding the source of attacks on the Internet is not a 1-2-3 logarithm). Interestingly, the Western media do not question the statement of the American president, they just swallow, digest and regurgitate. It seems as if, from the purported pulpit of democracy, only unshakeable truths flow!

His second statement was no less surprising. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, we may agree with the view that dictators cannot be allowed to dictate to the world which movies to show. But surely, it is a lot easier to preach that message from aside and up high, than it is to courageously act and run a real risk of being targeted by a mala fide state like North Korea. Indeed, what assistance does the USA propose to give SONY in this no-holds-barred cyber battle? And perhaps, as I will discuss hereunder, where does artistic freedom end?

To a neutral observer, Mr. Obama sounds arrogant and hollow, resonating in the splendid isolation of a gothic tower. In recent years many Libyans, Egyptians, Syrians and others have heard the self-righteous messaging emanating from the pulpit in Washington; unfortunately, it has not been to their ultimate benefit.

While one would certainly applaud efforts from the US cyber army to silence North Korean cyber soldiers, or any others for that matter, I am left with two final questions, obliquely linked to these events.

The first one is: why is it that Western media are accepting without question that North Korea is guilty? Is it solely on the word of the US President? If so, why then do we need proof in court for the, often well documented and heinous, misdeeds committed by dictators or war crime artists which, by the way, predominantly end in the The Hague court rooms in acquittal?

The second question is a bit more intriguing: if North Korea (or anyone else, really) would make a movie around a plot of killing, not just the President of the USA but of Barack Obama, would we then still applaud this picture as “freedom of expression”, wrapped in and protected by a banner called “ART”? Or, would we seriously ask ourselves whether creating a movie with a spun-out plot about killing one particular person is one bridge too far and, in fact, constitutes a crime?

Grimbergen,
December 20th 2014