More panic about global warming. This time, Malta is going to be submerged by high seas and those left on shore will run out of fresh water. Well, perhaps I would be more worried if I hadn’t discovered that 32 years ago, the world was tying itself up in knots about global cooling. An article published in Newsweek on 28 April 1975 was headlined The Cooling World. It told its readers breathlessly that “the evidence (for global cooling) has begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it”. World temperatures are falling fast, the article went on, and “a little ice age” might well be upon us. The meteorologists are “almost unanimous” that global cooling will produce a “drastic decline” in agricultural productivity. Already, England has lost two weeks of the growing season since 1950.
The proposed solutions put forward by Newsweek included “melting the Arctic ice-cap by covering it with black soot”, which the magazine concluded “might cause problems far greater than they solve”. It had words of warning for the world: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.” Ho-hum. In 1975, we were all about to die frozen solid. Now we are going to be desiccated, parched and blow-torched by a furious sun and rising temperatures.
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An American journalist called Tina Cassidy has written a book about the history of childbirth. It is fabulously gruesome, a must-read for the women who have been conned into thinking that they should have been able to breathe the pain away in labour, only to end up feeling like duds when they couldn’t (nobody can; it’s impossible).
A good dose of realism and plenty of pain relief is what women need to be prepared for giving birth, and not a bunch of mad-hippie fairy stories. But whenever I say that, the earth mothers pounce on me in unison. Ironically, I had three of the most trouble-free births known to woman, and was back on my feet and in my jeans within a few hours – but that’s because I sent the breathing exercises to hell, ignored everything the earth mothers said, and went in mentally armed to the teeth and ready for a fight with Nature red-in-tooth-and-claw. It worked wonders.
If you’re dithering about whether or not to have a child, I wouldn’t recommend reading this book, but for those who are fascinated by social history, it is a perversely entertaining read, dotted with curious facts. Apparently, we owe the professional endorsement of anaesthesia during labour to Queen Victoria. Chloroform was first experimented with in the 1820s and was found to provide effective pain relief during labour. The discovery was hailed by women who hadn’t yet been blessed, in those days, by the breathing exercises that are supposed to float you to nirvana as a small thug tries to fight its way out of your body. Christian churches rushed to condemn it, agreeing among themselves that chloroform was an agent of Satan and that, according to Genesis 3:16, women must suffer during childbirth.
When Queen Victoria, as head of the Church of England, inhaled an ounce of chloroform during the birth of her eighth child, which should have popped out unnoticed, she declared herself “greatly pleased with the effect”. The Church of England couldn’t make any further noises, and the Catholic Church eventually gave up too. Women on both sides of the Atlantic were finally allowed to embrace pain relief while in the throes of labour, and it became known among the fashionable as “chloroform a la reine”.
Some decades after the Christian churches let up about it, the new church of natural childbirth entered the breach. Pain relief became a nasty no-no once more, and breathing exercises took the place of anaesthetic. Once more, women were told that they had to suffer in childbirth in order to have the authentic experience. Women obliged to have their baby by Caesarian section felt cheated. They wanted that pain. Now it’s all swinging right back again. Women have realised that there are some authentic experiences that they really can do without.
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The blame-game continues in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech University massacre. All kinds of reasons are being found as to why the disaster could have been avoided. They’re all pointless, in the way that a miss is as good as a mile. Men running amok with weapons, killing others indiscriminately and then blowing themselves up are an avoidable fact of life. We have to expect this kind of thing happening from time to time and accept that it is not within our control. All we can do is hope that no man tanked up on frustrated testosterone or psychological implosion is ever going to break out or break down in our vicinity.
There have been plenty of similar cases in our living memory, even though we have to be reminded of them, and many of them predate violent video games and films. You can’t blame Lethal Weapon or Robert De Niro posing with two guns and a mad Mohawk hairdo in Taxi Driver.
Now the crime historian Eddie Attard has brought us knowledge of a case that predates even television and the wide availability of easy-shooter weapons, and with far worse results than the Virginia Tech massacre. In 1927, Andrew Kehoe, a member of the board of the Bath Consolidated School in Michigan, slipped badly into debt and blamed a property tax that had been levied for the construction of the school building. He secreted huge amounts of the explosive pyrotol and dynamite in the basements of the school’s north and south wings. On the morning of 18 May, Kehoe shot his wife (do you notice a pattern here?) then set fire to his farm, which was adjacent to the school. The north wing blew up, with 45 dead and 58 seriously injured, most of them schoolchildren. Fortunately, the explosives in the south wing failed to ignite.
As his farm burned and many children lay dead and dying in the school inferno, Kehoe summoned the school superintendent into his car. He fired his rifle into the back seat, under which there was more dynamite. The two men died in the ensuing blast, and others were injured as bits of the exploded vehicle cut through the air.
If we could predict when the next man is going to do his nut, life would be simpler. But we can no more do that, it seems, than decide whether the globe is cooling, warming or doing what it has always done since the beginning of time.
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Sticking with the same subject but closer to home, a 16-year-old boy has been given an 18-month prison sentence, suspended for four years, and ordered to pay damages, for setting fire to 800 bales of hay in a field, shooting at the family dog and beating it with a stick. That kind of misses the point. This isn’t a crime with a purpose, like stealing a handbag to get the contents, or hot-wiring a car for a joyride. It has no purpose whatsoever other than giving vent to simmering rage and anger. In other words, the psychological forces that drove that boy to set fire to the results of other people’s hard work, and to shoot and hurt the household dog, are a pared-down version of exactly the same forces that drove other boys of the same age, at Columbine High School in America, to shoot their fellow pupils. They are a “junior” version of the same mind-frame that led to the massacre at Virginia Tech and even to the 1927 incident in Michigan.
A suspended sentence, or even an immediate one, and being ordered to pay damages, will not solve the root cause of this boy’s behaviour: simmering rage at himself, directed outwards to those around him, whom he perceives as being the cause of his troubles. What this boy needs is the kind of help that reduces the chances of him growing up into somebody who runs even more dangerously amok, and with worse consequences. Unbridled rage and hatred in a boy of 16 is a common problem. It’s when the boy grows into adulthood with this problem still unaddressed that the serious trouble begins.