An Exchange with the Contradictor-in-Chief, Bert
I thought this exchange between me and Bert, our resident Mr Contrary, on the 'Kevin' thread, deserved a wider audience. As always, Bert is free to respond at length, if he wishes:
Bert: Mr Hitchens,
Thank you for the clarification that Helen is not a real person. Good to know.
***PH writes: I thank Bert for his sarcastic rejoinder. Mine, however, was the original and authentic sarcasm, and Bert deserved it. I made this point because Bert was arguing as if 'Helen' in 'The Archers' was real. Her unreality (involving something close to multiple repeated character transplants, according to some listeners I know) makes 'her' (she doesn't exist!) case useless for any serious discussion of the matter. Such character transplants are common in soap opera plots and are a direct result of their propaganda purpose. Individual characters are cyphers, without the true enduring natures of real human beings. People are made to do things which are entirely incredible, for the sake of a morally or culturally loaded storyline.
Anti-marriage campaigners, who never sleep, and who continue to believe that marriage is a seething nest of rape and patriarchal oppression (though they have learned not to say this openly nowadays), have recently begun to invent new marital offences of verbal or psychological abuse, and new defences (against murder or manslaughter charges) of long-term indirect provocation. These are of course not capable of objective proof. That's why they are so potent in the continuing campaign to eradicate marriage and replace it with temporary state-licensed civil partnerships for both sexes. Anyone charged with them is going to have a very tough time defending himself, and the presumption of innocence will not properly function. In a direct choice between two subjective accounts of events, today's right-on police, CPS and courtroom culture will tend to believe the female accuser more than it believes the male defendant.
The invented character 'Rob' commits these offences in invented scenes at which the soap's listeners are privileged ear-witnesses of a kind which seldom if ever exist in such cases. The invented character 'Helen' feebly endures them for months as if she were a trapped 1930s housewife living in an Enid Blyton or Agatha Christie village, rather than a 21st-century woman, free to manage her own affairs, who knows perfectly well that her friends, family and neighbours, plus the authorities, the police, the media and the courts would take her side against such treatment. Having decided to leave, she then delays her invented departure until her invented notoriously menacing and evil-tempered husband is back at the fictional home to get in the way. when any sane person would have been well over the horizon, with her child, long before his return. What's more, the cruel, overbearing 'husband' is bizarrely incapable of defending himself against a fictional knife attack by a fictional woman who (unless 'Helen' has been doing weight-lifting and combat training) has half his upper-body strength and two thirds of his reach. The thing is quite unbelievable, and illustrates nothing except my point about soap opera propaganda. The 'private' moments which listeners to the 'Archers' have endured have made them complicit in this propaganda fiction. They think they 'know' what the police and courts cannot know. Actually, they just know what the scriptwriters have invented.***
Bert: You say that you think you could make an argument that severe violence, or conviction for a crime resulting in a long period of imprisonment, went beyond the limits of 'for better, for worse'. I interpret this as meaning that, for you, the sort of treatment meted out by her husband to Helen would not be a good enough reason for her to leave?
***PH: Then he misinterprets it. I said nothing of the kind, only that the circumstances I described might be justly seen as grounds for separation. I don't think the fictional treatment meted out by an invented person to another invented person in a propagandist soap opera is any basis for an argument at all. Hence my dismissal of 'Helen' as fictional, a point which Bert still seems to have some trouble grasping. No such person ever existed, exists now or ever will exist, and no such circumstances, either. ***
Bert: I would disagree.
***PH: well, of course he would. That's what he does. I state an opinion. Bert disagrees with it. We are all used to this (his determined and increasingly moving last stand on the EU Landfill Directive makes George Armstrong Custer look like a poltroon and a dilettante) and, as usual, it requires no reasoning or facts to explain it. It just is so. We could invent a soap opera in which a person like him behaved like this. People would laugh.****
Bert: As for the separation/divorce distinction, doesn’t this mean that someone who had chosen to leave a marriage because of severe violence would therefore never be in a position to benefit from the financial advantages that social conservatives want to attach to the marriage institution?
***PH: I am not sure which advantages he's referring to.The last significant financial privilege of marriage is the exemption from inheritance tax on property at death, which doesn't seem to be much of an issue in such a case. Social conservatives have no legislative power, so their ideas are of little interest. The other benefits were never up to much. It was the social, moral and cultural standing of marriage which gave it its strength, not tax breaks.****
Bert: You may say that such a person should have chosen a better spouse in the first place (through the rather Austen-like greater family liaison beforehand, perhaps), but it still seems harsh to me.
***PH: Well, divorce seems harsh to me, especially for the children involved. He must choose which harshness he prefers. In this Vale of Tears, total permanent ease and happiness are not available. Sometimes we just have to decide which of two difficult roads is the right one***.
