What does Tony want?
Bergonzi, Bernard
to lie. The most skillful manipulators are those who, at the moment they utter falsehoods, can self-deceptively be convinced of their own story. Private sexual behavior may not always...
...Air pollution and moral smog are suffocating us...
...If pressed, I would say that I admire him, notwithstanding the intermittent daftness and emptiness in his pronouncements, and still give him the benefit of the doubt about his aims and ideals for the country, vague though these are...
...As you listen to their incantations locked in ice, risk walking any street in any town in the richest country in the world...
...A god you least expected at the High Gates of Good Angels...
...Reform of the welfare system, like entry into the EMU, is going to involve Blair and his government in harder and more potentially unpopular decisions than he has so far had to make...
...I don't think the country actually condones his behavior, but most people are willing to let him get away with it, if they can be spared prolonged entrapment in the shameful stink...
...Hattersley represents old Labour, still an active force despite the efforts of the Blairistas, which believes that a left-wing party should aim at the redistribution of wealth and be prepared to tax and spend in order to achieve it...
...He publishes letters in the press giving his reasons, some of which sound disconcertingly plausible...
...Blair, on the other hand, wants to include everyone in the New Labour project, such as middle-class home owners who usually vote Conservative and businessmen who always do, and is making his pitch accordingly...
...So what's to be done...
...This meditation is an ancient offering, a kiss of consecration pure as prayers of atonement and desire...
...not for any defects of personality, but because power corrupts and it doesn't do to trust politicians...
...Farther out are the pure old-time Socialists who believe that the market economy should not be regulated, as New Labour wants, but abolished in favor of a better and fairer system...
...I found Blair fascinating and puzzling before the election, and do even more so now that he is in office and so evidently enjoying the exercise of power...
...Bernard Bergonzi writes frequently for Commonweal from England...
...We're gasping for fresh air, but we're probably not going to get relief any time soon...
...Bernard Bergonzi WHAT DOES TONY WANT...
...Above all, there is the settlement in Northern Ireland, an extraordinary achievement, which I never expected to see (though its future is still precarious, hanging on the question of decommissioning weapons, which will involve the IRA in handing over a few guns, at least...
...All manuscripts should be submitted in QUADRUPLICATE to The Review of Politics, Box B, Notre Dame, IN 46556...
...Many of Blair's political aims remain obscure but one is already very clear: to win a second full four- or five-year term of office for Labour, something which has never happened in its occasional periods in government...
...Even Blair seemed to hint as much in his recent impressive speech to the party conference, which was charged with communitarian rhetoric about the need to say "we" rather than "me...
...Suffering and arrogance sleep uneasy as two thieves beside one fire...
...Eighteen months after coming into office, Blair remains extraordinarily popular in the country, as shown by opinion polls...
...And unlike a judge sentencing a drunken driver to attend AA's twelvestep program, the House and Senate cannot enforce therapy...
...Impeachment for high crimes doesn't seem to exactly fit the case...
...Something similar was true of Margaret Thatcher, whom Blair admires, when she was at the peak of her popularity...
...Blair's real opponents are all on the left, and some of them were recently voted into the party leadership, as a token warning that Blair cannot have everything his own way...
...Just ask those who have dealt with clerical pedophiles...
...I think it will be good for him...
...Scotland and Wales have voted for devolved government, and there is a firm commitment to reforming the House of Lords and removing the hereditary element, a notorious anomaly in a modern democracy...
...Questions may be addressed to the editor at ROP.Editor.l@nd.edu...
...And the difficulty will be all the greater if the tidal wave of global recession hits the economy...
...I do not, however, trust him...
...In totalitarian societies there are portraits of the leader in every home...
...A columnist has THE REVIEW OF POLITICS Christianity and Politics: Special Issues The Review of Politics will mark the passing of this millennium with two special issues given to essays and scholarly studies engaging in some way the relationship of Christianity and Politics...
...A god the color of Jordanian mud...
...even now, the god of sparrows is shifting shape...
...Though the government is maintaining the Tories' strict fiscal policy, more money has been found for health and education, though not nearly enough, according to critics on the left and professionals in the field...
...Blair is a good democrat, leader of a party which last year swept to power in one of the greatest electoral victories in British history...
...Private sexual behavior may not always affect public professional functioning, but when a person's behavior points to inner contradictions and a lack of selfcontrol, trouble lies ahead...
...B. A. St...
...Welcome are manuscripts that consider topics (or some aspect or instance thereof) such as Christianity and Liberalism, Catholicism and American Democrac3~ Christianity in Post-Modern Analysis, and thinkers such as Thomas More, John Calvin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jacques Maritain, John Courtney Murray and Reinhold Niebuhr...
...In caves beneath the altarstone a winter wind is rising...
...A god least likely to assume the Throne of Thorns...
...Could Humpty Dumpty be put together again with prayer and good intentions...
...He wants to keep the support of Murdoch's newspapers, which he currently has in a tenuous way, but if Britain enters the European Monetary Union (EMU), which looks likely in the end, they will turn against him...
...he has warned Blair's intellectual guru, the sociologist Anthony Giddens, to beware the fate of Martin Heidegger, who once supported Hitler...
...but one can turn it off, which is a concrete sign of a better system...
...A puzzling prime minister n ~ have an ingenious acquaintance who is convinced that Tony Blair's New Labour regime provides sinister parallels with the Fascist dictatorships of prewar Europe...
...But power is the key word...
...For the next two years we are probably condemned to limp along with a leader who would be promptly fired if he were a school superintendant...
...in modern British politics a prime minister with a disciplined cabinet and a solid and docile majority in the House of Commons (docile because many of the members have hopes of preferment), backed by popular support, can get his/her way on practically anything...
...More worrying is his naive regard for prominent businessmen, and particularly the egregious Rupert Murdoch...
...Communications indicating an intention to submit a manuscript are encouraged...
...Sooner or later, Blair will encounter real difficulty, of the harsh, character-building kind that he has so far been fortunate enough to avoid...
...Commonweal | 0 November 6, 1998...
...A god with CP...
...But Thatcher believed in division and exclusion, openly regarding not only the left in the nation but much of the center right as her bitter enemies...
...he has turned the Labour party, once an engagingly ramshackle structure that sometimes managed to win an election, into a super-efficient machine manned by sharpsuited spin doctors and image burnishers...
...Manuscripts will be received until April 1, 1999...
...as a result, she provoked hatred as well as devotion...
...Count one by one the moss-people curled against stone warmed by a distant sun witness how they fortify their cardboard nests and answer truthfully: Would you worship a god huddled there invested in the have-nots...
...Welcome are studies in religion and politics in which Christianity is approached comparatively and/or in which systematic empirical research plays a role...
...He can then expect serious criticism, which dictators can suppress but democratic politicians have to endure...
...Welcome are studies that bring the resources of the Christian tradition to bear on some problem of national or international politics...
...Blair has made many things happen...
...Further information can be found on our World Wide Web Homepage at h t t p : / / www.nd.edu/-rop...
...He has made many changes, not all of them agreeable, even if they are claimed to be necessary...
...He will hardly be worried by the official Conservative opposition, a demoralized and divided rump after their electoral disaster, under a youthful, balding leader, William Hague, a stopgap figure whom no one expects to see as prime minister...
...They are utopians, but the party would be poorer without any trace of a utopian vision...
...It's nonsense, though...
...The sparrow god is stirring...
...Clinton's shamelessness has already ensnared us in months and months of embarrassed shame...
...I won't actually love Blair, but I will probably vote for him again...
...Andrews complained of the '~oroad streak of silliness" evident in Blair's liking for the presence of pop stars and media personalities on official occasions (though one has heard less of that lately...
...A broad interpretation of that theme is encouraged...
...Commonweal 9 November6,1998 The New Catechism Notice how sparrows cluster like dried raisins in the knife-edge of North wind...
...Ad hoc spiritual counsel for this kind of deep-seated habitual disordered behavior can hardly be effective...
...Then there is the senior, respected figure of Roy Hattersley, a sometime Labour minister who is now a prolific journalist and political commentator...
...Sometimes Blair seems always to be on the television screen...
...As Chesterton remarked, one must learn to love the world without trusting it...
...A queer god whose English is imperfect yet whose heart mirrors perfectly all hearts...
...He dominates the government, the Commons, and the Labour party, which has not yet officially changed its name to New Labour, though you might think it had if you listen to Blair and his ministers...
...He knows perfectly well that a prime minister, however dictatorial his impulses, can always be removed by the voters, as happened to John Major, and occasionally by his colleagues, as happened to Margaret Thatcher...
...Would you crown again a god like Jesus was before the priesthood reconfigured Him in its exclusionary image...
Vol. 125 • November 1998 • No. 19
