Mr. Bates v. the Post Office

For the last four Sundays, we’ve been watching Mr. Bates v. the Post Office on PBS, starring British actor Toby Jones as Alan Bates. It’s a four-part dramatization by ITV of the true story of what happened when the British Post Office adopted a computerized accounting system called Horizon. Developed by Fujitsu, Horizon was supposed to be a significant cost savings and huge increase in efficiency. 

That’s not what happened. Horizon was also full of bugs and glitches. The way the bugs worked, it looked like the subpostmasters – the people operating the postal stores on all the High Streets in Britain – were stealing money. The system kept identifying shortfalls.

 

Frustrated subpostmasters would call the Help Line, to be told they were the only ones reporting a problem. The Post Office sided completely with Fujitsu. And the subpostmasters were expected to reimburse the post office for the shortfalls. Because the Post Office, a government monopoly, had the legal authority to conduct its own criminal investigations and court proceedings, it took people to court. More than 900 people were convicted, in fact. More than 2,750 others paid from their own savings. 

 

Some went to prison. Some killed themselves. People’s lives and reputations were ruined. And it was all because Fujitsu wouldn’t acknowledge the program’s errors, and post office executives supported Fujitsu. Even when they all knew better.

One man, Alan Bates, a subpostmaster in Wales, took the system on – and wouldn’t let go. It took 20 years, but eventually the courts recognized “the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.” The saga continues; court judgments against former defendants are being appealed and vacated. Parliament is holding hearings. And the British Government has to answer the uncomfortable question of what responsibility it has. 

 

The Post Office’s CEO from 2012 to 2019, Paula Vennels, stoutly maintained that the Horizon system s robust.” Her husband advised against using “emotive” words like “bugs.” She knew that Horizon had problems, and ignored her own management who urged that the prosecutions stop. She was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) when she retired in 2019. 

 

The ITV program, which aired in January in Britain, created a huge wave of outrage. Within days, a million people had signed an online petition that she be stripped of her CBE honor. King Charles didn’t wait. He ordered it returned for “bringing the honours system into disrepute.”

 

Paula Vennels also happens to be a priest in the Church of England.

 

PBS is airing a one-hour documentary on the scandal. There will be no second series of the dramatization; the producers said it’s time for the documentaries to take over.

 

Fujitsu has a statement posted from the home page of its web site.

 

The dramatization may be one of the most horrifying things I’ve watched on PBS. Each episode starts with the words “This is a true story.” It shows what happens when a government agency – a government monopoly – is give too much power and becomes too arrogant to acknowledge it’s made a mistake. Instead, it keeps compounding the mistakes. 

 

And lives were destroyed. 

 

Top photograph by Johnny Briggs via Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Life and Land in Anglo-Saxon England – Eleanor Parker at History Today.

 

Bird in hand – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” poem by John Crowe Ransom – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Among the missing, among the dead: black poetry in America – William Logan at New Criterion. 

Poets and Poems: Paul Willis and "Losing Streak"

Free verse has reigned supreme in poetry for more than a century. It’s difficult for my contemporary mind to experience a formal, more traditional poem (the kind written for at least 3,000 years) as either “that’s how they used to write poems” or “this is going to be a humorous poem.” Rhyming poems seem to lend themselves to humor (think limericks), irony, or even popular songs. 

Yet I know full well that contemporary formalist poetry lives and flourishes; it’s even considered something of a movement. Simply read Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, Brad Leithauser, or Mary Jo Salter, to mention only a few formalist poets. And Losing Streak, the new poetry collection by Paul Willis, falls comfortably into that category of formalism.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Emily Dickinson was no recluse – Claire Lowdon at The Spectator.

 

Robert Frost’s accidental late start – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Watching My Children Play in a Graveyard – poem by Shaun Duncan at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Rain on Us (A Sunday Psalm) – Jerry Barret at Gerald the Writer.

 

Three Poets Painting with Agnes Martin’s Brush – Heidi Seaborn at The Adroit Journal.

 

At Six Months – poem by Pia Purpura at Every Day Poems.

“T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy” by James Matthew Wilson

From the beginning of his poetry and writing career, T.S. Eliot was considered of a similar mind as the poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). One of Arnold’s best-known works was Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he presented culture (and poetry) as the replacement for religion as the bulwark against anarchy.  

However associated they may have been, Eliot spent a great deal of time and effort correcting what he saw as Arnold’s misunderstandings, especially about religion and the idea of culture substituting for it. The poet wasn’t so much in the business of substitution as he or she was in recovering the idea that it wasn’t only the natural that composed the world; it was also the supernatural, and it was the supernatural that had been lost.

 

In the 46-page essay (with 16 pages of notes) T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy, poet and professor James Matthew Wilson explores the similarities and differences between Arnold and Eliot, explains where Eliot sought to correct what he saw as Arnold’s errors, and in the process provides an excellent introduction to Eliot, his poetry, and the thought that lies behind it. Wilson focuses on Eliot’s major poems – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the poem that made Eliot famous; The Waste Land, which solidified his poetic reputation; The Hollow Men; and Four Quartets, which likely played a major role in Eliot being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

 

James Matthew Wilson

Wilson, the Cullen Foundation chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program at University of St. Thomas in Houston, is both a poet and a poetry critic. His poems and articles are published in such magazines and journals as The New Criterion, Front Porch Republic, Hudson Review, Raintown Review, The Weekly Standard, Dappled Things, and other literary and political publications. Her serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute, scholar-in-residence of Aquinas College, editor of Colosseum Books, and poetry editor of Modern Age Magazine. 

He’s published 14 books, including his first full-length poetry collection, Some Permanent Things; The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (2014); The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (2015); and The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017). The Hanging God: Poems was published in 2018. 

The publisher of Wilson’s monograph, Wiseblood Books, has published several of these essays in affordable editions. The essays cover a variety of authors and topics under the general heading of faith, culture, and literature.

Related:

James Matthew Wilson and The Hanging God.

 

James Matthew Wilson and Some Permanent Things.

 

James Matthew Wilson and The Strangeness of the Good.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

It Didn’t End with Lee’s Surrender at Appomattox, Part 1 and Part II – Tonya McQuade at Emerging Civil War.

 

George Ticknor: The autocrat of Park Street – Michael Connolly at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Bookish Diversions: The Puzzle of Publishing – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Things Worth Remembering: Allan Bloom on the “Charmed Years of College” – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

The London Data Store – A London Inheritance.

The kind of Salem

After Hebrews 7:11-28 

A few, fleeting references:

a blessing, a tithe, a king.

He was a king, not

a priest, and yet a priest,

who gave his name

to an order, an order

of one king, one priest,

one man, one man who

lived and died, one man

who gave his name

to one king, one priest,

one man who lived and

died and lived and lives

forever. It is the order

we are called to, the order

of Melchizedek.

 

Photograph by Pro Church Media via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Expectation – poem by Sarah Spradlin at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Song of the Week: “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” – C. Christopher Smith at The Conversational Life.

 

The Prophets: René Girard – Cynthia Haven at The Free Press.

 

In Memoriam: Janet Reid. Literary Agent. 

Saturday Good Reads - April 27, 2024

In 1874, a group of friends, fellow painters all, decided to hold an exhibition for their work, which wasn’t exactly accepted by the art world’s mandarins at the time. They didn’t know what to call themselves; a writer, Emile Zola, associated with them, suggested the name “the Actualists.” It didn’t stick. A critic, intending an insult, called them another name. This time it stuck, or the painters embraced it. Michael Prodger at The Critic Magazine considers the first exhibition of the Impressionists held 150 years ago on April 15, 1874. 

Hilary Cass, a highly regarded British pediatrician, was asked by the National Health Service in England to review gender care, following a scandal involving the NHS’s medical hospital that performed such care (it’s been suspended). Her report, based on extensive review of studies, practices, and other data, was not favorable. As The Free Press reported, the UK mistreated kids with gender dysphoria for years. The reaction from gender care supporters was not unexpected. A few members of Parliament called the review inaccurate and “unforgivable.” Cass herself discovered she can no longer travel on public transport in London. Helen Saxby at The Critic Magazine asks where is so much gender confusion coming from? Rebecca McLaughlin at The Gospel Coalition gives a succinct summary of the Cass study. And Scotland has now also suspended treatments for children.

 

There’s a new term in town – reverse gaslighting. This is when authorities attempt to convince you that what you know is crazy is actual normal. Roger Kimball at The Spectator describes it.

 

More Good Reads

 

Israel

 

The Jews Who Didn’t Leave Egypt – Alana Newhouse at Table Magazine.

 

Camping Out at Columbia’s Communist Coachella – Olivia Reingold at The Free Press.

 

Behind the mask: Why the new US campus protestors cover their faces – David Weigel at Semafor.

 

British Stuff

 

And Did Those Feet? In search of the English Soul – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule. 

 

The enigma of Englishness – Luca Johnson at The Critic Magazine.

 

American Stuff

 

Webster’s Dictionary 1828: Annotated – Liz Tracey at JSTOR Daily.

 

The Last Witness to the Shot Heard Round the World – John Kaag at Time Magazine.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Writer, Treat Your Words as Offerings – Kathryn Butler at Story Warren.

 

Shakespeare’s Grief – David Bannon at Front Porch Republic.

 

A Pair of Moles: Robert Penn Warren & William Styron – Robert Cheeks at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Life and Culture

 

The Intifada Comes to America: Now What? – Frank Miele at Real Clear Politics.

 

Kids Are Giving Up on Elite Colleges – and Heading South – Eric Spitznagel at The Free Press. 

 

Toxic: How the search for the origins of COVID-19 turned politically poisonous – Dave Kang and Maria Cheng at Associated Press.

 

Faith

 

Climate Anxiety Paralyzes. Gospel Hope Propels – Andrew Spencer at The Gospel Coalition. 

 

Devotions and the professional life – Thomas Kidd at Thomas Kidd’s Substack.

 

“Why All the TVs? The Death of Attention and Our Loss of Ability to Listen” – Bryan Schneider at Gentle Reformation. 

 

News Media

 

The Rise of Independent Journalism – Alison Hill at Writer’s Digest.

 

Poetry

 

Love (III), poem by George Herbert – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

I Believe – Phil Wickham

Painting: Woman Reading, oil on canvas (1885) by Childe Hassam (1859-1935).

The oath

After Hebrews 6:13-20 

The promise was

accompanied by

an oath, to know

that it was true,

and real, and it

would happen.

 

The oath bridged 

the promise and

the moment, 

because we are

frail, inclined 

to impatience and

the demands 

of now.

 

The oath reminded

of what had been 

promised before

and delivered. 

The oath means

the promise will

not be forsaken. 

 

Photograph by Cytonn Photography via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Of Death and Resurrection – poem by William Strode at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

 

When I Don’t Love My Body – Lara D’Entremont at A Faithful Imagination. 

 

Slow Happiness – Seth Lewis.

 

Optimistic Denominationalism – Tim Challies.

 

Poems to Listen By: Buoyancies – 1: Casting Off – Laurie Klein at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Joseph and the Grace of Forgiveness

The entire spring issue of Cultivating Oaks is devoted to the theme of grace. Published are stories by Lancia Smith, Malcolm Guite, Annie Nardone, Junius Johnson, Adam Nettesheim, Amy Malskeit, Steven Garber, Corey Latta, Tom Darin Liskey, Nicole Howe, Amelia Freidline, Lara D’Entremont, and several others. 

For me, reading a very familiar Bible story – the account of Joseph in the Book of Genesis – led me in an unexpected direction of grace. You can read the story, “Joseph and the Grace of Forgiveness,” at Cultivating Oaks Press. 

 

Photograph by Michael Olsen via Unsplash. Used with permission.