The e-mail from Catherine, my former wife, said just one word this morning: "Smile!" Not that I don't, a very great deal, but this particular missive was addressed to others too and were this a good joke collector's blog, I'd post the attachments.
Jonathan Sachs, who appears to be a controversial chief rabbi in Britain from the little I've read about him, preferred to see in Ash Wednesday in shades of grey, in his "thought for the day". Grey has always been my least favourite colour, especially the cloudy kind nearing on white-out. But Sachs had a word or two for people who think in black and white on the eve of conflict. He even informed us that in the Book of Genesis, the line after what God said is a bit odd:
01:03 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 01:04 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 01:05 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
I'd never lingered on that part of the legend before, but Sachs told us that the substance of those words "evening" and "morning" gets lost in translation from Hebrew. Such was his exposition of a transition through grey and of a bursting out of light that for a moment I could have been listening to a Chinese explaining some of the principles of Yin and Yang.
Sachs's point was what you might do when confronted with a choice between two moral wrongs, the wrongness of war on Iraq and the wrongness of the actions of Saddam Hussein's regime. But that was his point, not mine. I'll move on to somebody else who made a case for shades of grey.
Japanese film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, born in 1941 and little known in the west until 'Princess Mononoke' stunned many of us, kept his cards close to his chest in the first years of his own Ghibli (a Sahara wind) studio, rather than see his work savaged by others. But now he has no problem with being distributed by Disney, who hesitated over 'Princess Mononoke', perhaps for fear of seeing some greyer work eclipsed. When they released 'Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi' (Spirited Away), Miyazaki tells us in a recent interview for Les Inrockuptibles: "For them, it's like this: 'Will Chihiro beat the evil witch?' They can't see that the story isn't as simple as that. It's like when the President of the United States declares 'Either you're for us or you're against us'. If they have to simplify everything to understand, that's their problem."
Lawyers are very good at studies in grey, but my father, who is one as well as a keen amateur painter, asked me at the weekend: "When did morality ever come into war anyway?" Well, maybe it doesn't, not very often, for all the propaganda that would have it otherwise.
The politicians, however, remain very keen on morality and on justice, when it suits. Which brings me back to this morning's topic, the ICC in The Hague, an institution not to be confused, as some still understandably do, with the International Court of Justice. The Bush administration is far less keen on the ICC:
US-ICC-Rwanda
US signs 24th ICC immunity deal with Rwanda
WASHINGTON, March 3 (AFP) - The United States on Tuesday signed a deal with Rwanda this week that gives US citizens immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The pact, the 24th so-called 'Article 98 agreement' the United States has entered into, was signed by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Murigande during a visit here by Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
Washington refuses to support the ICC, arguing that it could become a forum for politically motivated prosecutions against US citizens, including civilian military contractors and former officials, and has been on a worldwide campaign to sign such immunity deals.
Since last July, when the treaty creating the ICC came into effect, the United States has signed immunity deals with 23 other countries.
The others are: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Djibouti, the Dominican Republic, East Timor, El Salvador, Gambia, Georgia, Honduras, India, Israel, the Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Micronesia, Nauru, Nepal, Palau, Romania, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Tuvalu and Uzbekistan.
There you have it, in black and white, but I call this shady behaviour. Shades of Kyoto and an abandoned protocol. Shades of Durban and the US and Israeli walkout on a colourful UN conference on racism.
Sure, I'll listen to the arguments on both sides, seek to recognise validity when I see it. I'm a Libra, after all, so if anybody's stuck sometimes between the white and the black, it ought to be me. But my favourite colours are saffron yellow and blue, particularly this one:
It may be in need of repair, but it's still the best we've got. Let's not break it. I don't have a television and I've never seen Bush without that fearsomely earnest frown on his face, as if even he's not quite sure where the next word is coming from.
Poet Adrian Mitchell had a line for what he's contemplating asking pilots to do. He likened it to unleashing "Jack the Ripper on a surgical strike". And that puts the fear of God into me. Try it, George. "Smile!"
8:40:30 PM link 
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