Repercussions

"Forest of Arden? £20 to you, Guv!"

2011-02-03T01:01:00.000-08:00

In the great tradition of Maggie Thatcher, the Tories are scrabbling about for national assets to sell. Now that the oil, gas, BT, British Rail, entire manufacturing base etc. are all gone, there's not much left but the furniture. I believe your average Capitalist sees the naural world as pretty much his/her furniture; things to be bought and sold, diverted, changed, mined, exploited - trees are soft furnishings, too, they grow back faster than mountains, why not sell them off?

So, the National Trust or whoever can't afford to maintain the "old" woodlands of England, of which there are precious few left. Basically, the Government, who are cutting their funding, can't afford/be bothered with the woods of England, through which their forebears have hunted fox and peasant (no, I meant peasant) with such gay abandon.There's some talk of selling them to charities (which charities?), which means we, the notional charitable people, will pay; if a charity could afford to take on the maintenance of a whole forest, it would have to make it a public attraction to pay for it. And yes, it's only fair that people should be able to visit if they're paying, but those forests need to be left alone. And we aren't talking the vast swathes of greenwood an American or Canadian might think of as a forest, either; England hasn't got a lot left. Less than a Twilight movie in total, I'd say.

Commercial interests are also being mentioned on Radio 4; philanthropists in the UK? I doubt it. No, the woods would have to pay their way as well, but possibly much quicker and much more - finally. You can never get old woodlands back. The New Forest near me, so-called because it was first established as a Royal Hunting Preserve after the Norman Conquest, so it dates from the early 13th century. No-one has 800 years to spare letting that unique ecosystem re-evolve. I wouldn't bet hard cash on the human race making 800 years, come to that.

Can we let the Tories endanger something as irreplaceable as our forests? We all know the abysmal short-termism inherent in such an idea, it's just screamingly obvious. No no no! I'm getting quite exercised; I protested against the Twyford Downs Bypass years ago and we lost that, and I still feel the wound when I go to St. Catherin's Hill. It's time we got angry. The people of the UK are suffering, true, but you could argue we all had a part in our society and we all have to pay a part of the price (and the equitable distribution of that moral debt burden is something I'll come back to, don't worry); the trees are innocent! And the legends that will go with the last of the wild woods, can we really afford to pave over the sould of our country?

I bloody hate the Tories, I always did, and Clegg sold the Lib Dems out. You can viscerally feel Vince Cable choking on his words. And for what?

Some Dire Venting

2011-01-30T06:41:00.000-08:00

I used to write ideas and opinions, poems and stories, all sorts of stuff in Word, then in OpenOffice, then I wrote a blog and got involved in political debates on other sites as the Web and my confidence grew in tandem. Writing, debating, sticking poems online under one name in one community and blogging as someone else, being excited about turning on my computer. Then from one day to the next I came so close to death, stayed there for so long, and after the immediate danger passed I just couldn't write, it was all gone; even now the posts on this blog (what a crap name that is!) from "before" MRSA seem to have been written by someone else. Looking back, I wonder if I just needed all my energy for the battle at hand, and couldn't afford to waste anything on words, clever or otherwise. But I'm still not "over it", not by a long long way; random misfortune can jolt me back into the pain.

Here's what happened the week before last. The tip of a cone incense fell onto my T-shirt, and burned through. Unfortunately a lot of my chest tissue and wall has been ravaged by high radiation and is full of scar tissue from the gaping wounds of MRSA; I have no feeling, no nerve connections at all in large areas, and the joss burned into me. The first I noticed was a blister about an inch acrosss. I just didn't understand what it was, it was like a perfect shiny hemisphere - believe me it's bizarre and wrong that so much damage had happened and I hadn't felt a thing. I still don't, never will. And it's deep at the centre! The cone tip was small and the heat was concentrated; it had to go down as well as across.

I'd be in agony if it were anywhere else on my body, but even though I've had dressings changed by nurses for over a week and it's healing well, just knowing that makes me feel somehow sickened, reminds me of how much damage was done. I have to keep an eye on the damn thing to make sure I don't knock it open without noticing it, and at first the smell of the dressings made me feel so raw - it took me back to those awful weeks of being stuck to the bed with open wounds, in the summer, when poor Lennie was so little! Smell can be so potent a stimulator; it's much sharper and swifter than a sight or a song. I wish I'd smelled roasting meat a bit quicker when it happened, on the other hand. Must have been the patchouli.

The trouble is, I don't know if I'm over-reacting or if I'm just so traumatised by being as ill as I was for as long as I was; is it normal to be so upset over something which really is pretty horrible in itself and also so closely evokes a dark, dark time? I've been having nightmares, waking up soaked in sweat and full of cold, bone-deep cold. A most oppressive feeling of dread seems to be present in most of my dreams, however bizarrely and even perversely expressed or comprehended by the sleep-self; some nights of pain I found myself Walking without intending to. I've had dreams in which I became completely lucid and yet couldn't wake myself up. I've had sleep paralysis that went on for long, slow, horribly perceptible heartbeats when I knew that if I saw something, anything, the cat jumping on the bed, a flash of light from the road, I'd go insane! For one split second my terrible eyesight and my paralysed terror would conspire to conjure up a demon, and in that moment before I heard the cat purr or the siren wail I'd just lose control of my mind and splinter off into screaming madness. I'm standing on the brink of an abyss, I sometimes think, but I don't know how to step back, or even what exactly might finally push me over.

I see I'm going to have to ease back into this writing business; at the moment I've no detachment, I'm just content to see words forming on the screen and it doesn't matter if it's a subjective rant full of purple prose about how appalling my life is and has been for so long. I'm just getting it out of my system, I'll be up to giving the Tories a verbal kicking in a few days. I feel for it, and I've got righteous anger to spare. As Ismael used to say, "il y a des gifles qui se perdent ici, t'en cherches?"

Onwards and upwards; someone might read this one day and think "Okay, so my life isn't that bad...." Maybe this is just a place I need to go. I didn't specifically ask you to read this, did I? I might be writing for Posterity for all you know. I told you I was venting!

Oh man, I get so sad sometimes!

Astounding!

2010-08-29T05:57:00.000-07:00

I was very surprised to find any replies at all to that last post - it's not as though I said anything interesting. But take a look at the first Anonymous Said; it was the only one I even tried to read, and for the life of I can't work out if it's trying to sell me drugs, if Anonymous is on drugs, if I've been mistaken for someone who knows what this gibberish is about.... The rest are just as bad, I can't work out if they're computer viruses or messages from God. On the off-chance it's God, btw, can I ask for the traditional Burning Bush or whatever? We humans have developed awfully short attention spans while you're been away.

Well, I've Valiumed my way through the first 100 days of Tory/LibDem Coalition Government, time to peek over the parapet and see how the country's going. No more being too depressed to read the newspapers, better to Know Thine Enemy. Since I listen to BBC Radio 4 (serious talk!) all day every day, I can't say I'm oblivious to the world, but some opinion would be helpful. I wasn't ambitious or interested enough to become an expert on Economics or Politics (I'm very well-informed on Alexander the Great, however), so like most people I depend on people who, presumably, were. Ambitious enough, at least - I don't take anything as Gospel, not even the Gospels as it happens.

But other people's opinions give you something to bounce off - sometimes the ramifications of a Government diktat aren't obvious to the layperson, however well-informed, and there are some sources that I often find helpful; anything owned by Newscorp, for instance, I know from the moment I start reading that I'll probably deeply disagree with the "opinion" and that "facts" will need to be checked. I wonder, incidentally, if Murdoch intended his business empire to sound like a Batman villain right from the start. Or Superman; I can imagine Lex Luthor owning Newscorp.

In any case, for the purposes of knowing what to disagree with, I usually buy The Sun. Terrifyingly, this alleged newspaper is the best-selling daily in England, so I have to assume that this is where many people in my society (yes, even Buddhist hippy leftie malcontents get a vote, suck it up!) get the "information" on which they form their views. And their votes (yes, even people with swastika tattoos who want to deport 3rd generation immigrants to places they've never been to get a vote, I've been sucking that up for years!).

The Big Issue at the moment, for me at least, is Trident. When every government department from Welfare to the NHS to the Police have to swallow 25% cuts in their budgets (25% as in one quarter, as if those departments weren't grossly underfunded as it is) how come we can afford a multi-billion upgrade to our much-vaunted Independent Nuclear Deterrent? Is it time that Post-Empire Britain gave up its seat at the Top Table (some of us do feel a bit silly anyway, this tiny little islnad off the coast of Europe having the same voting power as, say, China!, and admitted that the quirk of post-war history that got us here needs to be rebalanced in a new millennium.

My grandfather was a soldier of the Empire, he spent years in India before Independence until malaria exacted it's price as the White Man's Burden. That's how recent it is for us; I can forgive the people who find it difficult to let that go. Even I do, in a way - in my travels, I've seen how a British passport gets you an easier ride than, say, a passport from the Former Yugoslavian Republic. But feeling a slight nostalgia isn't enough to make me believe that slashing 25% off the budget for the most vulnerable people in our society to pay for nuclear arms is a price we should be willing to pay to hold on to the coat-tails of a long-gone dream of power. We don't have any moral right to be here, I'm not aware that our history covers us with glory as a peaceful, progressive, democratic country. In some senses, our time is as long past as the Roman Empire's. I'd give up the remnants, the sacred Independent bit of the nuclear deterrent, for a more balanced economy. I'd rather spend the money on real living people now than theoretical future aggressors; I'm sure if we just shut up and got on with being part of Europe we'd be okay.

I'm rambling, as usual. Time to go buy the Sunday paper of my choice, and some much-needed cigarettes.

Talking to the wind

2010-05-27T01:31:00.000-07:00

I've got a restless feeling that I need to write, but not really much idea of what to say. It's like tuning a radio and getting only carrier waves instead of the inspiration channels I used to find. Still, it's a long time since I even felt the carrier waves, so I can't help hoping. I know no-one will ever read this, but no matter - I'm trying desperately to come back!

Several Years Later

2010-03-20T16:35:00.000-07:00

It's a long time since I've been here; I forgot I had a place to write whatever I wanted to. I was surprised to find that my dashboard was in a language so alien that I didn't even recognise the alphabet, and I had to get to English via French.

So I hereby announce my return to the world of writing for nobody's satisfaction but my own! I'm still alive, therefore I must still have business in this (frankly rather depressing) incarnation; I doubt if that reason is to witter away on here, but I don't see why I shouldn't have some fun with absurdity while I'm getting on with the serious business of working out what the point of my existence is.

If I do, by the way, I'll pass it on.

Appealing Ideas #6: A Unified Theory of Everything part 1.

2006-09-19T14:14:00.000-07:00

I don't mean to try to unravel string theory here, or get to the bottom of wormholes. I have a cousin who, although he doesn't yet know it, is a philophysiosophist, and a daughter who bodes fair to be the first human on Mars (recently, at any rate). Not that I'm a mathematical idiot, I hope; I believe I'm the originator of Katie's Law, which states:

x-1 = y

when x = the number of appliances need to watch a film, DVD etc, and y = the number of remote controls available at that particular moment. Try it. There is always, but always, one less than necessary.

Of course, this piece of genius is equal if not superior to Pythagoras' theorem in it's day-to day applicability. Working out the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is all very well and good in it's way, and in the 5th century B.C., before the invention of the surfboard or music without dying cats, probably anything was a welcome distraction. However, I think Katie's Law is a tad more relevant in the early 21st century.

For instance, you (or indeed I) come in after a hard day or whatever, you/I/we flop down on the couch, glance at the table and instantly take in x-1=y. If we want to watch Highlander/play D&D or download some decent porn (each to his/her/its own) we will be forced to crawl around under sofa cushions and coffee tables until we find y+1. Or we can just crash out. Think about it my friends - the truth is out there!

Ooops!

2006-08-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

Oh dearie me, the AOL cock-up! The revelation of search-engine queries for some customers, albeit with cunning "numbers-instead-of-names" (which proved doubly distressing for Mrs. Marjory 1127908 of Orange County, CA), should be sending shivers down all our spines. I for one stray into some very dodgy territory in search of material for articles, essays, stories and poems. I'd always kidded myself that if I didn't inhale - I mean download, of course - then it didn't count. Goodness only know what my Google profile must be like.

For instance, in the last few weeks alone, I've done some research into Countess Elisabeth Bathory, Ed Gein and (no particular connection implied) the Ku Klux Klan. In the spirit of pure curiosity, I've sometimes checked out what the Satanists are up to, and in a more know-thine-enemy way, the Bush administration. The results were chastening; the Satanists ambitions seemed to be limitied to selling a few goat-headed T-shirts and black scented candles, whilst the Bush administration appear to want to destroy the world. Surely in a sane universe.......?

So anyway, what have you Googled in the last few months? I wrote a whole blog entry (the last one, if you're interested) under the influence, and didn't remember a word of it until I re-read it five minutes ago. I can certainly believe that I've typed a few curiosities into search engines whilst a bit squiffy. Mind you, having read a few examples of those released by AOL in The Guardian yesterday, I can at least be fairly certain that my spelling and punctuation will be well above average, even if the content is a tad weird.

Pick a side, any side, we all drink oil!

2006-08-07T14:42:00.000-07:00

"It beggars belief!", the man on the TV said, as he pulled a bag of half-drowned kittens from a drain, into which we presume a psychopath threw them - of course, it couldn't be one of us! Well yes, it is a sad thing; not as sad, though, as the man in Hertfordshire (or Bedfordshire, or Hampshire - I wouldn't like to malign a shire if I could help it) who shot greyhounds in the head when their racing lives were over. 10,000 in his field, apparently, and when he ran out of space he started again at the other end, where the bodies were decomposed; waste not, want not.

They - the half-drowned kittens, not the greyhounds - lived on in an animal sanctuary (all but one, who died) and were adopted by good kind people who gave them loving homes. Once or twice one kitten or other was ill, because we saw them on "Animal Hospital" with Rolf Harris, and every person (except the psychopaths of course) were happy when the kittens pulled through.

I also watched a programme about a woman in Lebanon who'd had to leave her two sons behind. In the dazzle and haze and panic of war, somehow she and her sons were seperated, and she had their papers; it's a sad thing, to be dragged away in a boat from the children of your breasts, to scream and to weep for them and to draw slowly away. No-one looked after them, and there was no follow-up ; it beggars belief.

On the same News Bulletin, I saw an Israeli woman weeping and scratching her face. She hadn't loat a son, or a grandson; she was weeping for Israel, for the good young Jewish boys who are forced to fight. She reminded me of every mother and grandmother; any woman who has lost a child too breakingly, achingly soon to the careless world.

It beggars belief, I say, that so many of us women (and here I raise my glass, drink a little) give up our most-beloved children to die in stupid, man-made wars; nothing, no creed, no principle, no border-girdled fantasy of fatherland, or motherland, no songs, no anthems, no priests and no churches, no hymns or dim qabbalistic mutterings, can ever persuade me to send my child to war!

So I said, and so I believed, and believe still. Like all proud women, though, be they queens or queans, I forgot one small proviso. I will never send my child to war; why should I trouble so, when war can come or send for her?

holojojo

In Memoriam: The Somme.

2006-06-30T14:36:00.000-07:00

Most British people alive today, including many from the former colonies, will be remembering the battle of the Somme this week. Almost all of us have lost family members. Two of my grandfather's elder brothers died in the Great War, as did my grandmother's father. I can walk half a kilometer to the War Memorial in our town centre and point out our family names to my daughter; further afield, there are memorials in Flanders and north-eastern France bearing those young men's names. "A generation died", I say glibly, not really knowing what that means.

When my daughter asks real questions, I let (and sometimes oblige) her to watch the BBC coverage, and I read the Great War poets to her. She likes Owen because I do, I know, because I read his poems differently than Brooke, for instance, or Sassoon. It doesn't matter, this is only retrospective aestheticism on my part. Often I think Brookes idealistic "If I should die, think only this of me" is as true to the spirit of those far off days as Owen and his Anthem.

Pace, though, tonight; peace to all those who died, those who had the misfortune of surviving, to the women who waited alone, and even to the leaders who led so disastrously. We should celebrate the sacrfices and forgive the stupidities; they're both equally human, and until we change what we are we should pay due tribute to those who've died for what we were, and still sadly seem to be.

Appealing Ideas #5: The Things We Tell Our Kids

2006-06-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

My daughter Gareth (names have been changed to protect the innocent) is now five, and recently started "big school". Nursery wasn't so bad in the parental fib department, because most pre-schoolers tend to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, not to mention whatever Disney's latest film might be. Not believing in these ancient and hallowed traditions is considered odd, in fact, and such questions as "What does the Tooth Fairy do with them then?" are generally ruthlessly quashed. But now that she's older, some other accidental fibs which seemed like a good idea at the time are coming to light and making her regard me with a jaundiced eye. Here are some of them.

Radiator Trolls. For those of you without combination boilers and nice warm appartments (so that's 4/5 of the world, then), radiators often make strange and unexpected gurgling noises. Well, mine do, anyway. A long time ago, when my girl was all wide-eyed and innocent, she asked me what made those noises and I invented the Radiator Trolls. These are (obviously) Trolls which live in Radiators. Please don't get confused, I don't mean cutesy Trollz which sit on office desks and have UberPunk hairstyles, I mean the hairy skinny shaggy bloodstained type who live under bridges and eat billygoats, gruff or not. Anyway, Radiator Trolls were all the rage for quite a while, a missing slipper or pencil or ironing board (I'm an untidy person) had been "taken by the Radiator Trolls, Mama!". Once my daughter arrived at school she discovered that the RT's were FIBS, and her opinion of me dropped accordingly. Interestingly, when I'm searching madly for my keys in the morning before leaving the house, she'll often say "Maybe the RT's have taken them, Mama!" in a voice positively dripping with irony.

England In The World Cup (Semi-Finals) Act, 1987, Section 2 Paragraph 9 I was mildly surprised that she went for this one, since the words "section 2 paragraph 9" are regulars in my conversation whenever I want to talk about some ditzy piece of beaurocracy, but there you go. She's only a bambina. According to the above-mentioned piece of fantasy legislation, then, if England reach the semi-finals of the World Cup (that's football, not soccer), one adult member of every household is obliged to sit in front of the telly with a beer in one hand swearing at the referee, whether they know anything about football or not. So I explained to her that, since my boyfriend (names have been changed to protect the embarrassed) Mitzy is at the moment working in Denmark, I have to do it for him. This is even better when it's conducted in a place of public entertainment, for instance my mum's pub, where fat wheezy smoky old blokes who would have a coronary just walking the length of the pitch shout at skilled, dedicated athletes playing their gnadgers off. If England are playing, I tell my daughter, then it's permissible to yell "Orright, go-orn'nen!!! My Grandmuvver could do be'er than that! In 'er coffin!", and that the less you actually know the better. My boyfriend Mitzy has taught her some useful phrases too; she's now inclined to pick up her lime-and-soda and stare thoughtfully at the icecubes whilst opining; "Beckham's free kick? It was unstoppable, mate, unstoppable!"

Ossils I'm particulary pleased with this one, because it was totally spur of the moment and justs get better and better. The root of all this is Mitzy, who's an engineer and thus owns things like oscilloscopes. An oscilloscope, at least, which he brought round to do obscure engineer-type things to my video (or DVD, or computer, or maybe hat), and which immediately fascinated Gareth. It (the oscilloscope) has a kind of probe attachement, and you can vary the frequencies (or whatever, I was reading a book during this bit) by twiddling knobs, and generally it's all very fascinating and scientific, which appears to be right up Gareth's street. Mitzy left it with us when he went away, and we've had endless fun since. The crack is, the existence of the Ossil. There are good and bad Ossils (or positive and negative, perchance) and an oscilloscope either rounds them all up (bad) and puts them in a bag or gives them a little extra electrical charge (good) and sends them on their way. Gareth trolled around the appartment for days testing different objects for Ossils. She tells me that there are loads in my computer, hardly any in cheese, and "funny Ossils" in magnets. Humans are also crawling with them, it transpires; I'm considering reporting it to the local Pest Control.

Compensation Culture

2006-06-07T01:42:00.000-07:00

This allegedly-American syndrome is much in the public arena at the moment (I say "allegedly" because I rather think that the human desire for compensation for real or imagined wrongs goes back to Gilgamesh), especially in the often very different treatment meted out to victims of crime and victims of "miscarriages of justice".

I'd like to state unequivocally that I believe that victims of judicial balls-ups who spend time in prison for crimes of which they are later found innocent do indeed deserve a great deal of "compensation" for their suffering. Whoever you take for an example, be it Angela Cannings, the Birmingham Six or the Guantanamo Three, what you have in essence is private individuals (often without the means to procure adequate representation - or in the case of Guantanamo any representation at all) who have been pitted against the Juggernaut might of the State Judicial apparatus and who have been chewed up and swallowed in the process. There was a great wave of public sympathy when Cannings was realeased, as indeed there should be; not only did this poor woman lose her children, but was then (unthinkably to her or her family, no doubt) was tried and convicted for their murder. I wonder how many of the sympathetic public really understood how prison life must have been for Cannings.

I have had experience of prison, unlike many people who've nonetheless written at length about this. In the women's prison (not in England) where I had the pleasure of passing two and a half months, there was a Fletch-like attitude that prison was an occupational hazard for the most part. The women who were there for providing false alibis or not testifying against friends or lovers were admired as much as anything, the thieves were fatalistic, the prostitutes and drug-users were accepted. The only loner in our small wing was a woman who (and I never was sure of the truth, so I won't go into too much depth) was accused of having turned a blind eye to the molestation of her daughter. None of us knew the truth, the woman hadn't yet been tried so no salacious details had been turned over to the press, yet this woman was so shunned that none of us theives, whores, murderesses etc., would so much as sit next to her at Mass. So I can reflect and sympathise more than most Angela Cannings' experience of prison life; I find it hard to imagine that that part of her ordeal will ever really fade.

The victim of crime, on the other hand (and I've been there a few times as well), have run up against the anti-social/criminal behaviour of an individual or individuals. We all accept (well, apart from fundamentalists of course, who are inclined to drag Satan into the equation) that humans are - well, human - and that the "human condition" includes cads, rotters, politicians and other stupid and immoral people. It's far easier to live with the idea that one's the victim of what is essentially a coincidence (if I hadn't decided to go to Clignancourt and get ratassed, for instance, I wouldn't have had my passport and money stolen by a drunk guy with a knife) than to come to terms with one's innocence being crushed in the gears of the Machine. Plus a wrongly-convicted individual has none of the resources, emotional and financial, available to the victims of ordinary crime.

Certainly this isn't true of all "victims" of crime, but the majority will have friends and family and even complete strangers, the media for example, prepared to offer support and sympathy. In the case of the media this can amount to large cheques for "exclusive" rights, which can in turn pay for a lot of therapy. All of us are "on their side", and rightly so. A wrongly-condemned "criminal", however, has no such support. Those few people who still believe in their innocence, if there is anyone at all, face long and costly appeals to present new evidence or obtain a retrial. I sometimes wonder at the devotion and tenacity of the campaigners for such unpopular causes as, for instance, Ms Canning must have appeared after Sir Roy Meadows gave his damning statistical testimony. A woman convicted of killing three of her babies is not someone most of us would feel naturally inclined to sympathise with; a mother who has lost three babies and then been handed the guilt and wrongfully imprisoned for their murder is a woman who has suffered far more than most of us could, or should (in a properly ordered world), be able to imagine.

So yes, I think we owe Ms Canning a bit more than an apology. Whether society "owes" compensation to victims of individual crimes is a slightly different question, I think. If we admit that the criminal actions of individuals are ultimately the result of the failings of our society as a whole, then yes, we do. We therefore also owe it to all citizens to tackle those problems of our society which give rise to social disenfranchisement and, ultimately, crime. But criminal law isn't based on that; we emphasise the choice of an individual to go commit a crime. We do accept extenuating circumstances to a certain extent, which is right I believe, but we should also bear in mind that a lot of us (if not most of us) have had less-than-perfect lives and we don't all go around stealing iPods at knifepoint or raping pensioners. None of us, being human, can possibly expect other humans to be perfect, but we can at least expect our state apparatus to make amends when it goes so disastrously wrong.

Are We Paranoid Enough?

2006-01-18T11:52:00.000-08:00

I got my monthly copy of Amnesty International (AI) today. I'm a subscriber and Urgent Action team member, which means basically I get a lot of personal anger-management therapy out of writing exquisitely polite letters to, for instance, the Minister For Prisons in Beijing. I read the mag, I get incensed - in fact, I fulminate - then I spend an hour writing earnest letters/emails/faxes to people who I know damn well will ingore me. But I feel I've done my bit, and I think overall there's a net anger-loss at the end of it. Everyone's a winner.

So there I was today, getting angrier and angrier as usual, when I stumbled on an article entitled "The global detention network". There's been quite a lot of this on the news recently in the UK; tales of the CIA spiriting "prisoners" through participating countries without any such minor inconveniences as warrants, extradition papers, or trials. I didn't find that too hard to believe. The BBC is hardly a hysterical left-wing mouthpiece after all (although I believe Mr. Rumsfeldt disagrees), and the CIA aren't exactly famed for their transparency and adherence to international law (ahem! poisoned bidets). I wasn't really prepared for the extent of it all, though. I didn't realise that, effectively, America rules the world - I used to think America just owned it.

The visual impact of the map is chastening, certainly for the average American. Countries marked in red are countries which "host 'war on terror' detention centres", and this roll of honour comprises Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and - the USA. It must be galling for Americans to find themselves in such company; Europeans, both Old and New, don't want to dirty their hands with it, at least not in public, and recently the UK ruled that evidence obtained by torture, even in another country, was inadmissable as evidence in a British Court. I don't often find myself agreeing with Law Lords (in the dictionary under "grotesque old anachronisms"), but I'm 100% behind this decision.

It was an interesting article and I urge anyone who wants to know more to go to www.amnesty.org.uk and read it. For me, the "War on Terror" as waged by Bush, Blair and Co. has been disappointing to the point of making me weep. Yes, it must be hard to strike a balance between the human rights we (as democratic countries) claim we're fighting for, and the need to prevent another 7/7 or 9/11, but to have so quickly sank to the level of the "enemy" and so flagrantly broken our own laws is a tragedy. I believe the first half of the 21st century will be defined by the failure of "The West" to respond in a civilised manner to acts of terror. Then we can all get down to eco-doom and water-wars as climatologists and the Seventh Day Adventists keep warning us.

But it certainly gives you food for thought; the CIA, it appears, can scoop a person up and deposit them, via a torturer's cell in Afghanistan, in Gunatanamo Bay. And by the way, if you hear of my sudden disappearance then please write C/O Mr. Rumsfeldt...... But enough of this sedition; what worries me is, if the CIA can, then who else can? Certainly the CIA is very powerful and has a lot of money, but they're hardly known for - well - efficiency, are they? What about Mossad, for example; they're supposed to be pretty skilful, aren't they? And no-one's going to tell me the KGB have all retired to daschas on the Black Sea and taken up philateley..... well, you could try, but I wouldn't believe it.

Also, when you look into some of the actual cases of people "abducted" by the CIA; it seems to be enough to have an Arabic name and be a bit critical of the US. Or just being in the wrong place at the right time can do it. As I mentioned in earlier posts, 9/11 is my birthday, so I always feel a bit snooped-upon; Urban Legend has it that 9/11 is one of those CIA internet "trips" which trigger a listener (hi Cecil!). According to AI, seven people were "tortured to death" in US custody. They cite their sources as AI itself, Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) and Human Rights Watch. I'd be intersted to know (and next time I visit "Alternet" I'll ask, because they seem to have a well-informed readership) what US Law has to say about evidence obtained under torture; they (the government, I mean) must surely be relying heavily on it if they ever intend to bring the Guantamo Bay detainees to trial.

Just an afterthought. Given the choice, I'd far rather be abducted by aliens than by the CIA. I believe that I could start some kind of dialogue with any life-form which could undertsand Pythagoras' Theorem, and I can draw that with a stick and some sand. I don't think I'd have that much in common with a CIA operative.

"I'm going to rip your head off and drink your fluids!"

2006-01-09T01:48:00.000-08:00

So said my four-year-old daughter the other day, much to my horror and dismay. Like any good (or at any rate peer-pressured) parent, I obsessed about where she could possibly have picked up such a repulsive and scary concept. Could it be the girl next door? Have I been talking in my sleep again? Maybe I'd misheard. "What sort of fluids?" I asked. "Blood! Brain juice!" She returned, with such obvious glee I felt like sending her to the nearest Catholic priest and asking for an exorcism. It turned out to be a line from "Shrek", of all things - apparently the single line in the whole first film she liked enough to memorise.

Since she learned to use the DVD player I've had to be very careful indeed. My collection of 80's hack-and-slay movies are hidden in the bedroom, but she still ocasionally gets one over on me. A month or so ago I got up at about 8.00 a.m. to find her lying on the couch with a bowl of mini-sausages and relish watching "Interview With The Vampire". The final credits were rolling, complete with "Sympathy for the Devil" - she pointed casually at the screen with a relishy sausage and commented "That man's a vampire, he's going to bite that other man. We've got this song on the computer, haven't we?"

Her latest exploit was with "Shaun and the Dead" - this is a very funny British zombie flick; if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it (but possibly not for the under-5s). Anyhow, I thought I was pretty safe with this one; for starters it was on a white read/write DVD with no markings whatever, for seconds it was about the fifth item on the index, and for thirds the DVD player belongs to my partner and all the onscreen instructions are in French. So it was a great surprise to me when, stumbling through the lounge en route to a cup of tea yesterday morning, I heard my little angel say (with fairly mild curiosity now I come to think of it) "Mama, why is that man eating that other man's stomach?". "Entrails!" I corrected her sternly, before realising what was going on and lunging for the remote control.

It doesn't help that my particular area of interest fiction-wise is horror, SF and fantasy. I have a lot of books, and a lot of them have very odd covers indeed. Occasionally my girl will come wandering in with a book and ask "Who's that, Mama?", I'll throw a casual glance and a sentence like "It's the Demon Asmodeus and it's mine, now put it back" will escape me before I realise what I'm saying, let alone who I'm saying it to. My partner tells me that she'll need years of therapy to get over a childhood like this, although I personally think that's a bit rich coming from a man who spent considerable time and effort convincing her he's a vampire. Although I must admit she's liked him a lot better since, though what that says about her (and him) is perhaps a bit worrying.

So I'm slowly coming round to the opinion that any fairly bright child will unerringly pick out the most embarrassing and/or inexplicable part of any material available to them and repeat it at the most embarrassing possible moment. If we had any maiden aunts, she'd talk about monkeys having sex on the Discovery Channel; if the Vicar ever came round for tea, it'd be Modern Satanism. There was a "Show and Tell" at her school last week, and I let her take in one of my many statuettes of Buddha. "And is your Mummy a Buddhist?" inquired her First Grade teacher innocently. "Oh no, my mum's a witch," replied my lovely little girl. There goes my nomination for School Governor then.

Insurance, or, Acts of the Godless

2005-12-09T02:38:00.000-08:00

I must admit to having certain reservations about the insurance industry as a whole, and my inability to access it in particular. There's certainly no denying that having had a Grade 3 cancer at 35 makes me a "bad risk", and probably Bill Gates himself couldn't afford my premiums, but wouldn't it be kind to humour me a little and assume the best? I'd be happy to invest in a relatively modest policy, just to pay for having my body shoveled up off the sidewalk or whatever; I don't think it's at all fair that my poor daughter, who's had to put up with me for her entire life after all, should then be expected to fork out to dispose of me. However, even the specialist Insurance-For-Oldies-and-the-Almost-Dead or whatever fall about laughing when I apply.

With genetic testing on the horizon, things can only get worse. Consider my daughter, for example; both her mother and grandmother have had breast cancer, what do you think her chances of paying less than a pound of flesh per month for life/health insurance will be in the 21st century? But is this either fair or sound economic sense? Hold on while I slap myself round the face with a frozen haddock for introducing the concept of "fairness" into Capitalism, will you? Right, that's better...... So, sound economic sense or not? I think not. We are, after all, mortal; each and every one of us is going to die at some time or another. Young healthy people are far more likely to indulge in stupid and gratuitous recklessness (jumping out of aeroplanes or drinking alcopops) than people like me who've had a brush with the Grim Reaper and take the whole thing a bit more seriously.

It seems to me, too, that there's a hidden, sinister side to life insurance. Consider daytime TV; according to such excellent mirrors of reality as "Murder She Wrote" and "Diagnosis Murder", taking out life insurance is the practical equivalent of hiring a hitman to top yourself. $250,000 dollars seems to be quite sufficient to transform the most seemingly affectionate wife/daughter/secretary/mailman and/or husband/chauffeur/significant other into a homicidal nutter. It seems to me that an observant person might notice such tendencies in a spouse or partner before the fact; I would certainly be enormously suspicious if my partner decided to buy me life insurance. "Can't I have a CD instead?" "No. Sign this. Now - can you spell 'suicide'?"

Another thing that (excuse me) pisses me right off is this "Act of God" business; what's that all about then? For starters, I think that the kind of disaster usually refferred to as an AoG is more likely to be an AoS (Act of Satan), since I doubt an ever-loving God gets his jollies by pushing mountains on top of people. What's the proposed scenario? There He is, say, lolling about on His cloud feeling a bit bored, and suddenly "Hey, I think I'll just zap this poor zero with a lightning bolt! Wehey, that's cheered me up!" No, I think the insurance industry is being not only preposterous but possibly blasphemous in suggesting that the Good Lord (note the "Good" bit, if you please) would behave so frivoulously. If I were God, I'd sue for Defamation of Character.

Plus, if you subscribe to this particular bit of mythology, anybody dying anytime is an AoG, isn't it? In fact, insuring against death at all is a kind of monstrous hubris on the part of the insurer and the insuree, not to mention pretty damn stupid. Effectively they're betting that we'll live long enough to make the monthly payments accrue to more than the payout, and we (poor saps!) are betting that we won't - i.e. that we'll die in time to make ourselves a profit. And maybe that is indeed a great consolation to some weird people; maybe, as they lie half-crushed by a bus and bleeding like a stuck pig, the thought "Oh well, at least I shafted the Alliance and Leicester!" really does flash through their minds.....

Are you who you think you are?

2005-09-16T13:07:00.000-07:00

This may sound nuts, but today I found out that I'm not, according to a credit-checking company called Equifax. I'd never heard of them personally, but when I tried to set up a direct debit for my new cellphone, I was rejected. Why? I asked naively. I have no unpaid debts, my bank account is in credit, I only want a ten-pound top-up every month. It turns out that my date of birth, the same one I've always had and which my mother (who was there at the time) assures me is correct, doesn't match that in the files of Equifax.

I wouldn't mind that so much in itself; the 11th September has become an inauspicious date in the last 4 years, I'd happily change it for the 9th of February, say, or sometime in July when the weather's nice and we could have a barbecue. However, the incovenience of this is that all my other forms of identification, birth certificates, bank accounts, passports etc., include the DOB 9/11/1966. They would; it was the day on which I was born, after all.

I think I can reasonably discount an enormous organised conspiracy by my mother, father, grandparents etc., to have a good laugh at my expense 39 years later; I admit to paranoid tendencies but even I can see that's loony. No, I'm afraid Equifax have got their facts (or fax) wrong. So tonight I visited their website with the intention of correcting this, even prepared to scan in a copy of my birth certificate if necessary. Stymied. The only way to contact them was to sign up, and the only way to sign up was to pay £9.95 for a full credit report, and when I typed in my details (frustrated and foaming at the ears) I was continually rejected for an error in the DOB field. I have no way of knowing what incorrect DOB they're holding for me, and even if I did, typing it in would only confirm it; I'm trapped in an electronic Catch 22. Okay, for the moment I don't care, I'll pay for a top-up card for my cellphone like everyone else, but what if I want a mortgage, or a loan for a yacht (unlikely, but I can dream, can't I?).

So who are Equifax, how come they have an file on me anyway? Here in the UK we have a thing called the Data Protection Act, which (allegedly) allows any citizen to access any data stored about them anywhere, by anyone. This is all very well and good, but I didn't know of the existence of Equifax until today, let alone that they knew about me, and they're almost certainly one of many. Every time we use our plastic fantastic, our tastes, shopping-habits, musical preferences, preferred contraceptives and petfoods are stored on a database somewhere. How on earth are any of us supposed to go about finding out who is storing what and why, and more importantly, if they're getting it right?

And some of it is partly our own fault. For instance, I have a store loyalty card which belonged to my deceased grandmother. It's mostly through laziness that I haven't changed this to my own name, but also partly because I don't use that store much and also because last time I tried it (in another store) I somehow "lost" all the accumulated points. So on some databases, my Gran is still alive and well and spending her pension on stuffed artichokes and Cabernet Sauvignon. I routinely get junk-mail for her, since I now live at her address; I've formulated a letter along the lines of "Dear X, Thank you for your offer of life insurance/cruise holidays/adoption of a Spanish donkey; I regret to inform you that Mrs. X (Gran) has been deceased for over 4 years, and our local authority have strict criteria about the exhumation of human bodies. Tempting though your offer is, I feel that it does not meet these criteria etc., etc." I like to print these form letters off and stick them in any pre-paid envelope that arrives; hopefully someone in an office somewhere will be marginally amused by this. It's nice to think I can contribute to the sum of human happiness, even in so miniscule and macabre a fashion.

Identity theft has been big news recently, as has the introduction of biometric ID. These gizmos, fingerprinted ID cards and iris-recognition passports and security cards are (so we're told here in the UK at least) going to make this kind of fraud almost impossible. Oh yeah? If you look at the history of crime, you'll find that criminals are almost always one step ahead; that's why hacking and ID theft have been so successful, after all. I read an article in the "New Scientist" this week, and according to the NS people are already being divided into sheep, lambs, wolves and goats. Sheep (so I read) will be easy to classify; lambs will be most vulnerable to fraud; wolves will be good mimics; goats will be people like manual workers (erased fingerprints) or people with facial deformities (not susceptible to iris scans) who just won't get into the system in the first place. If you're interested, the last two editions of New Scientist - www.newscientist.com - deal with biometric identity systems and their drawbacks; in the light of my experience with Equifax, I've found these articles both enlightening and more than a little frightening.

So if anyone has any ideas how I can convince Equifax that they've got it wrong, I'd be interested to know. I have a feeling it will be the first of many dilemmas for me with electronic identity; I've never knowingly passed myself off as anyone else, and as far as I know, people aren't queueing up to be me. But how can you know, until you check? I didn't - I've got a passport, a home, all the usual trappings of civilisation except a credit card (I'm an old hippy), but apparently I'm not who I think I am. But hey, I wouldn't mind losing a decade, maybe even 10lbs or so, come to think of it.........

2005-09-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

Dr Mo Mowlam by Rob Beckett 2005

The March of Unreason

2005-09-14T10:07:00.000-07:00

Every year in Northern Ireland, something called "The Marching Season" occurs. That's a rather interesting name, as though this particularly human phenomenon were something as unstoppable and inevitable as El Nino or the Mistral. Most of these marches are organised by people who call themselves variously Unionists, Loyalists, Orangemen and Protestants; the Marches are predominantly anti-Catholic, sectarian and (frankly) rankly provocative.

This is the year that the IRA finally gave up the "armed struggle", the murderous inter-faith Intifada that has ripped apart Northern Ireland and (often) the British mainland since before I was born. Here, if you like, is the Dark Heart of Christianity; if there really is a Satan, I reckon he lives somewhere between the Garvachy Road and the Church of Dumcree. So there was a lot of hope at the beginning of this "Marching Season", because the Loyalists had, effectively, got what they were supposed to be wanting. But it wasn't enough. These "Loyalists" (I use these quotation marks because I'm a subject in the Kingdom they purport to be loyal too, and I'd really rather they weren't) have traditionally insisted on marching through Catholic areas of Belfast. In the past, the Royal Ulster Contabulary, which is over 90% Protestant, have allowed this; it's hard to say whether they (the RUC) were secretly sympathetic to the Orangemen, or were simply intimidated by the force of numbers.

However, this year, with the IRA cease-fire and decommissioning of weapons in progress, the traditional marches were routed away from Catholic areas (or ghettos, as we'd all be calling them if black people or Jews lived there) and a different story unfolded. In the last 3 nights, we've seen the worst violence in Northern Ireland for years; this time it was the Loyalists v. the Police, apparently in an attempt to get into Catholic areas of Belfast.

A bit of background might be in order here, for those normal member of the human race who don't know what's going on or why. The Orange Order was formed in Loughall in 1795 (wait, it gets better) amongst other things to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne in 1609, in which the Protestant King William of Orange (Dutch and tedious) defeated his Catholic father-in-law King James II (English and mad). This was known as the Glorious Revolution to those who (I presume) won, and wrote the history books. 396 years later, we could all be forgiven for thinking "Get over it!", especially since they won, but apparently that's not going to happen. "King Billy" is still a presence on the Northern Irish stage. So the Orangemen are "loyal" not only to a king who's been dead for 3 and a half centuries or so, but whose dynasty vanished from the British throne shortly after.

The RUC have today declared the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to be no longer "on ceasefire". They've been officially on ceasefire for 11 years now, but in Northern Ireland, with the Ulster Defence Force, the Real IRA, and the Devil only knows how many other splinter groups abounding, it's hard to backtrack any specific bullet to any specific gun. You find good politicians, by which I mean people of good faith like David Trimble, a Unionist who was prepared to deal politically with the Catholic Sinn Fein, forced out of office, and disingenuous fanatics like the self-proclaimed "Reverend" Ian Paisley playing on the inherited fears and mistrusts of ordinary people to further their own careers.

Anyone who's ever heard the "Rev." Paisley speak (actually I should say "rant", and it's an education, believe me) will immediately recognise someone not prepared to relent or compromise on any level; the gestures, the rhetoric and the deliberately-heightened tension are reminiscent of Hitler in the Nuremberg Rally days. It's my belief that as long as the "Rev." remains a "power" in Northern Irish politics, long-term peace and stability will be an impossibility. The wounds are far too fresh, only just scabbing over, for someone as abrasive as him to be at loose. Unfortunately, although the "Rev" is pretty ancient, he has a son (also called Ian - what is it about megalomaniacs which makes them call their offspring after them - ahem, Mr. Bush?) who seems prepared to take over where his father - well, he won't leave off, but at some point he will inevitably shuffle off this mortal coil.

We in the UK lost a great stateswoman this year. You probably haven't heard of Mo Mowlam, but she was the principal architect of the Good Friday Agreement, which was the first real signed and sealed step on the arduous road to peace in Northern Ireland. Like a lot of people, I genuinely mourned her; she fell out with Tony Blair and got herself demoted out of the Cabinet, but most ordinary Labour supporters and (certainly) the people of Northern Ireland recognised her acheivements in that deeply riven province. Being made Secretary for Northern Ireland, in itself, is a political "punishment" for a Cabinet minister; it's traditionally been a no-win job where every bombing and political murder washes up at your door. Mo Mowlam turned that around, and was instrumental in making the Stormont Parliament a workable idea - and even though it's been closed down for now, the idea has been planted, there's something for the new generation of politicians to aspire to, and I believe the seed will grow.

I'm glad Mo didn't live to see the Marching Season this year. It would have been very hard, I think, for her to have witnessed the violence and brutality committed not by "terrorists" who hate the UK and want to break away, but by so-called "Loyalist freedom-fighters", people who call themselves UK citizens and claim to want to live as part of the UK and abide by our laws. Which is odd in itself, because the police take a pretty dim view of Molotov cocktails whoever throws them.

2005-09-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

Magic Cat (for Olympiada)

2005-09-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

Sad But True

How to Get Rid of a President

2005-09-05T01:31:00.000-07:00

Twice in this blog I've mentioned that I'm not very "savvy" on the American Constitution, which means by my own standards that I shouldn't be writing about it. So I spent this morning reading it, and making notes (thanks, Word, for cut'n'paste). Of course there's the bit everyone knows about High Crimes and Misdemeanours, which is a bit weasel-worded and judging by the late Mr. Nixon they have to be pretty high (in the old sense of "high meat", i.e. stinking and rotten), and more importantly, you have to get well and truly caught. I don't for a moment suspect GWB of being as intelligent - oops, I mean corrupt - as Richard Milhouse, and besides, the Democrats are perfectly capable (and seemingly happy) to shoot their own selves in the foot nowadays. I'm certainly not suggesting that any honest politician should be making capital out of a disaster like Katrina, but if ever there was a moment to savage the President in the name of the people, this is it.

So, reading on through the Constitution, I came across a definition of "Treason" which might be applicable in this case; it's in Article 3, Section 3, Clause 1, and it goes like this: "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort (my italics)". It goes on to say that two witnesses are required to each or any treasonous action, which is okay because a few million of us at the very least have been watching GWB giving aid, comfort and probably (such is the unpleasantness of human nature) much hilarity to the enemies of the US by his total incompetence.

In the last week I've seen things on the BBC and CNN that will stay with me until I die. I've seen extraordinary human courage and endurance, great dignity in the face of misery and loss, acts of kindness and generosity - none of which amounted to the proverbial hill of beans, because there was nothing to eat, and more deadly still, nothing to drink. Thirst is a terrible way to die; I haven't experienced it myself, since I'm clearly alive and typing, but during chemotherapy a couple of years ago I suffered from massive dehydration almost all the time, and I can tell you that there were times when I couldn't get water for myself and I wanted to die. There must have been hundreds, thousands maybe, of people who died from thirst in that searing heat; we'll never know, of course, and maybe it's better that we don't. If you have the empathy to imagine what it must be like to have nothing to drink but your own urine, then you probably don't want to know how many people died that way.

I feel that the clincher for Bush will be the number of people who lost their lives btween the end of Katrina herself and the arrival of the emergency services - the Federal Emergency Mismanagement Agency, something like that? According to a very hacked off truck-driver, his lorry had been loaded up with water bottles in Texas on Monday, but he didn't get permission to go into New Orleans until Thursday. Watching from across the Atlantic, on the BBC's rolling news converage and through the blogosphere, it seemed that the first people to go in were SWAT teams with orders to "shoot to kill" looters - and by day 3 or 4 anyone who wanted to eat or drink was forced to become a looter. Certainly, property rights are important, but not more so than human life - any human life. And yes, I do include the young black guy with the armful of designer jeans in that; I think that clip must have been played a thousand times, every time the word "looting" was mentioned in fact.

So all in all, this President has been providing quite some aid and comfort to America's enemies, as far as I can see. It must be a huge morale-booster to any anti-American organisations, to know that the Administration is so incapable. What better incentive to mount another terrorist attack than the conviction, fostered by the FEMA debacle and the cavalier attitude of Bush and Congress (still golfing, guys?), that the US is run by incompetents for the elite? Surely all Al Qaeda need to do is wait until the next Recess, and they'll have at least a 3-day head start?

There's another article in the Constitution (Section 3), namely that "(the President) may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both (the Houses) or either of them", something which GWB signally failed to do. He didn't even convene himself! If the destruction of New Orleans was an "extraordinary occasion", I'd like to know what he's waiting for - the War of the Worlds?

Maybe, just maybe, all American citizens good and true should take another look at your Constitution, and re-read it in the light of an outsider. Maybe, because you learn it at school the way we British learn Shakespeare (we don't have a Constitution), you don't pay enough attention to what it means. Has your President been grossly negligent, and has this given "aid and comfort" to America's enemies? I think so. I think a lot of lunatic fringes all over the world will be seeing this as God's punishment for this, that or the other, and Bush's incompetence will be seen as a further chastisement, even an encouragement. It's time to get rid; how many more years can you afford to babysit a lame-duck administration? Wake up and smell the rotting bodies, America; most of us are crying with you, but a lot of people will be laughing.

Georgie Through The Looking Glass

2005-09-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

I must admit that "North American refugees" is a phrase I never expected to read or hear in my lifetime; in fact, it's taken a week for commentators to get there, graduating through "survivors" to "victims", or "victims" to "survivors", depending on who you listen to - at this very moment the Mayor of New Orleans is speaking to a BBC reporter, ramming home the point that these "refugees" are in fact US citizens, not Boat People or Displaced Persons in Chad or Darfur. From over here, on the other side of the water, the race issue is not being overly emphasised because it doesn't need to be: we can all see for ourselves that 9/10 of the people there inside and outside the Superbowl, or paddling though the LaFitte Projects, or in three cases bobbing face-down in the filthy water, are black. The dead lady rotting in the wheelchair had a black (and bloodstained) foot. The seven-week-old baby with dysentery lying naked in his father's arms was black. Mary Landry cried on air (after, let's not forget, endorsing the "shoot to kill" policy for "looters", even those "looting" food or water) for help from GWB, as though a US Governor needs to beg for help from her President.

As I said in my last post, it's been a bad year for humanity. My daughter (4 and a half) and I have watched most of it on TV, the Asian Tsunami, the misery of Darfur and Niger, and now Katrina. We send money; I talk to her about it, explaining as well as I can, and we decide what we'll give up; maybe it's Teletubbies magazines for her and cigarettes for me, maybe chocolate for her and no hash for me. I've given up almost all my vices this year, except maybe weltschmertz. This is the first time, however, that she's asked me to write to someone; "You should write to them, Mama, you should tell them about us." She said, with big earnest eyes. I said "I will, if you like, but who to, sweetheart?" And she hesitated - "The black people, the dead people - and the bad people!"

I can't write to the dead, and I imagine that the living, the survivors, the refugees have better things to do than to read my blog. As for the bad people - Lennie, my daughter, seems convinced that there must be some bad people, or this couldn't possibly happen, right? The world is very simple when you're 4. Then again, the BBC news correspondants who are covering Katrina are openly incredulous at the length of time it took for aid to get through. At the moment I'm listening to BBC News 24, and GWB is making an appeal for money, asking us to give to the Red Cross. We already did, as it happens, but it does seem bizarre that the world's richest nation should be so slow off the mark, so niggardly in its response, so slipshod. The UK Government is donating half a million military ration-packs - why? We're a small country, you know; less indeed than the total area destroyed by Katrina. We don't even have half a million in the military!

Donald Rumsfeldt (long may he live and line his pockets) is now pontificating that this is a "natural disaster of unprecedented proportions in US History (sic)". Well, there was the Great Fire of Chigaco and the California Earthquake, and maybe the only reason they didn't claim as many lives (or maybe they did, and I just don't know it) is because they weren't so well-documented or the populations were smaller and less dense. Who am I to dispute with Mr. Rumsfeldt? The point still is, I feel, that a great deal more could have been done to prevent the loss of life (I've read, for instance, that the Army Engineers reports on the condition of the Levees were 40 years out of date), and surely what we here in the UK call Rapid Response Units could have been on hand (not six days away, or in Iraq) to move in as soon as Katrina moved out?

I saw a photo of GWB on day 2 of Katrina playing the Gee-tar at some kind of barbecue fundraising event. You have to wonder what he's paying his aids for:

"Er - Mr. Bush, Sir - "
"Whaddya want, son, I'm on a riff here!"(KerTwaaaang)
"Er - Hurricane Katrina has hit the Gulf Coast, Sir!"
"Well whaddya wait'n' for? Get aholt of the Ambassador to Kyooowait!"

Like I said, I'm not that savvy on how to get rid of an incompetent President; Impeachment (on the grounds of fiddling while New Orleans downs?) might be one, and of course there's always the tried and true Lincoln Remedy. But I feel that making a martyr of an idiot would be too much; he doesn't deserve it. Is there any mechanism by which an election can be called early? Is there no such thing (or equivalent) of the British "vote of no confidence", in which Parliament does what it says on the can, and votes that it has no confidence in the PM?

If not, maybe the American constitution needs updating. All constitutions do from time to time (women vote now, don't they?), and in this "unprecedented natural disaster" the US is burdened, crippled even, with an unnaturally incomptetent president. Get rid, get real, and get on with rebuilding the country.

2005-09-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

Midnight Webcam

Katrina, four days in.

2005-09-02T02:32:00.000-07:00

From Banda Aceh to Biloxi, it's been a hard old year for the human race. I had to stop writing for a while after the London bombings; the UK is a small place, and almost all of us down here in the South East where I live have family and friends in the capital. My closest friend passed through King's Cross on his way to work about 45 minutes before the bomb went off there; it took a while for the shock of that one to settle, for both of us.

But lately I've been back out in the blogosphere, especially since Katrina blew away the Gulf Coast of the US; firstly I simply wanted to get news and views, although the BBC coverage has been excellent as usual. Reactions to events like this are often as informative as factual reporting, and so I found it in this case.

Of course, the blogosphere itself is still very slanted towards America, simply because more Americans have pcs and blogs than us poor old Europeans, and because English (Amercian?) has established itself as the lingua franca of the Web. The first thing I noticed when visiting my usual sites (which I must admit are in general liberal, left-wing orgs like Alternet, though I try to balance it out with sites like The Washington Post) was how many people seemed to be using this natural disaster as a stick to beat each other with. Not only the usual suspects on the political left, but the right seemed to be thrown into an orgy of mudslinging too; some bunch of pseudo-Christian nutters insisting that Katrina (from a satellite view) was a representation of a six-week-old foetus and therefore was God's way of saying etc., etc. (I expect you can guess the rest - it would be funny if it weren't so scary and so sad), other self-procalimed rationalists somehow managing to use a hurricane as a direct political message from - well, who cares? - to - well, everyone else, I suppose - to overthrow the US Government. Such as it is.

What is both stupefying and terrifying is the lack of preparation and directed response to this wholly predictable (and widely predicted) disaster. What's going on? Or rather, what isn't? We all knew last week - at least, I did; I read it in the newspaper and I saw it on the telly - that Katrina was going to hit New Orleans. The "worst case scenario" (which turned out to be accurate) was thoroughly discussed, there were a clear three days or so to get things moving before the hurricane hit - so how come people are still stranded amongst the rotting dead, without food or water, in the most highly-developed nation in the world? I hear that Bush is going to visit (or fly over, or whatever) the Gulf Coast today; why? Does he need to see it with his own eyes for some reason? Wouldn't a payload of, say, water purification tablets be of more use to the people on the ground?

It's like a farce, like a grotesque morality play on greed and incompetency; where are one third of the National Guard? In Iraq. The Army? Likewise. And if GWB was sincere in his protestation that what he's doing in Iraq is for the good of the Iraqi people, and not for oil, then surely it's his duty to his own people, the people who elected him to govern them and to protect them, to bring the National Guard and the Army home? Certainly, by his own rhetoric the "job" in Iraq isn't finished, but surely a President's first duty is to his own people? As a UK citizen, I'd expect Tony Blair to do just that in similar circumstances, and to give him his due, Blair probably would. Contrast Tony's reaction to the London bombings with Bush's incompetence in the face of Katrina. I'm not often proud of Tony, in fact it rather sticks in my throat to admit it, but there was no doubt that he was both sincere and efficient. It seems to me the GWB is neither; in the final analysis, his sincerity doesn't matter a damn; his efficiency does. For lack of it, people are dying in their hundreds. Soon they will be dying in their thousands.

There's a lot of speculation now as to how, when and even if New Orleans will recover/be rebuilt. It seems unthinkable to write off a city like that, but what's really unthinkable is that this should have happened at all. This was a predictable and predicted disaster, eminently preventable if the will had been there. Money which could and should have been spent on reinforcing the flood defences of this highly vulnerable city has gone elsewhere - in tax cuts to the rich, on an indefensible war in Iraq - and the poor of New Orleans are paying the price in human misery. There's not a thing GWB or anyone else could have done to stop Katrina, but a great deal could have been done to reinforce and protect the towns and cities in its path. Certainly more could and should have been done to prepare for this disaster, to evacuate beforehand - and I mean help people to evacuate, not advise people; of course everyone who can afford to will get out of the way, but the most vulnerable people are those who can't afford it. And on that subject, I think that "looting" needs to be redefined in this situation; anyone stealing food or water to survive isn't a looter, they're just doing what any one of us would do to stay alive. How can you expect soldiers or police to "shoot to kill" their own fellow citizens, and how do you suppose these wounds will ever heal if they do?

I'm not savvy enough about the American Constitution to know how Impeachment works, or if there's any other way available to get rid of a dangerously incompetent president, but I think it's time to do so if possible. I also think that the left should stop bickering (and even in some cases gloating - Bush's incomptetence here is measured in human life and death, it's in very poor taste to trumpet "We told you so!") and use this example of gross negligence to get rid of the man. Anyone for a revolution?

The Cold Light Of The Day After

2005-07-08T14:02:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, London's Underground is the deepest in the world. As I write, at 22.00 p.m. GMT, that's 36-ish hours after the bombs went off, and there are still dead bodies left under King's Cross, because rescue workers can't reach the carriages. The old tunnels aren't safe, so people are rotting down in the dark.

It sounds grotesque; it is grotesque on my part, to write that. But it's true. It's also true that for once I'm proud to be a passing part of this valiant little country; I think these terrorists will be caught, and I'm moved to see these stuffy English people who annoy me so much, who I avoid when abroad and make such a big point of not being entirely part of, living up to the myth of the stiff-upper-lip they made for themselves. I felt for Tony Blair, which is no light matter for me; I don't like some of his policies, but I could see the genuine love of his country in his pain yesterday. I think any country whose leader genuinely feels that kind of patriotism is pretty fortunate. I think if we reran the election tomorrow he'd romp home.

Generally, it feels like people are as much angry as they are scared; how dare you (hideous racial expletive deleted) come to our Dowager Queen of a city with your foreign quarrels and expect to scare us? Whoever did plan this could probably have chosen a better year than this, the 60th Anniversary of the end of WWII and the 200th Anniversary of Trafalgar; we've been treated to more than our fair share of jingoism recently, it'd take an invasion fleet to make people put their umbrellas down.

Watching our 9/11

2005-07-07T02:37:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning this post at 10.35 a.m., watching the events in London unfold on the BBC. According to the Beeb, bombs are going off all over the place, in tubes, in buses, in litter bins. First of all, to the surprise of no-one, the Govt lied: it was a "power surge", they announced, which had shut down the Underground at 8.50 a.m., the end of the morning rush hour. Oh yeah? Somebody plugged in a hairdryer and popped the fuse, did they? Power surge from where? To shut down the Tube, you'd need half of London. Govts never understand that lies are much scarier than an honest "I don't know". If there's still a south of England when I get up tomorrow, I'll give a little thought to why Govts first instinct in an emergency (ahem, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Sellafield, need I go in....?) is to lie.

When more and more bombs began to explode on buses, clearly the "power surge" fib had to be jettisoned, but "a Home Office Spokesman" came on to reassure us that "There is no proof yet that this is terrorist activity". Yes? So what the fuck is it then? Mass explosive spontaneous combustion, perhaps? God finally getting personally annoyed with people and smiting them with wroth, or wrath, or lightning? The last time I felt like this really was 9/11; it's my birthday, I was watching live on CNN in Belgium and there was the same bewilderment amongst the reporters and witnesses. People, journalists and the Govt alike, whose normal lives had suddenly been exposed to unimaginable chaos. People who don't believe what they're seeing.

And we're all secretly thinking "What if they're dirty bombs?". There's been a lot of chitchat in the press over recent months about how devastating that would be; small easily concealed bombs with a pinch of plutonium. Or anthrax, or whatever. Biological warfare, although none of us are supposed to have any and we all pretend it doesn't exist. There have been enough nightmare scenarios conjured up by our Govt to force through "anti-terrorist" laws which were really gross abrogations of civil rights, and which, clearly, haven't worked. The Govt and the press, to a certain extent, worked together to make us afraid enough to accept "anti-terror" laws which chipped away at basic civil rights; we're a scared nation, now it looks like we're a wounded nation. My phone's ringing off the hook, friends in London phoning, others (worryingly) not.

Somebody did this. That makes me so angry; human beings did this to other human beings in the name of - well, we don't know yet, but I suppose the usual suspects will eventually be fingered. I hope it wasn't the IRA. I don't know why that should be important, but I do hope it wasn't. By the sound of things, though, this was too well-co-ordinated to be the IRA. No offence (please don't shoot me and dump me in a ditch) but it's too big. News is just coming in that there have been some kind of problems in Brighton and Swindon, that the stations are closed. Now is when I realise how small Britain is! How easy it would be to wipe us out by accident just to, say, provide a diversion to get at Gleneagles?

In case you don't know, London's Underground is the deepest in the world. I can imagine, all too clearly, how terrifying it would be down there in those old, old tunnels; I'm used to the Paris Metro, and Brussels with it's trams. I get freaked out going down the seemingly endless stairs into the horrible hundred-times-breathed-in-and-out air; my very mild claustrophobia cranks up to a serious psychological problem on a crowded Tube. Those poor people.

Poor London. I wonder how could I have lived to see this; weren't New York and Madrid enough? Why didn't we learn the very simple lesson that this is a war which can never be won by military action; how can you fight someone who's set out to die in a suicide bombing? What can you threaten him with? Oh, here we go - "Arab sources who monitor Al-Qaeda etc." Who else? Well, we've always known it was "when" rather than "if". In Madrid Al-Qaeda directly affected the result of a democratic European election for the first time; a few nutters with semtex underwear and you influence Spanish foreign policy for years. I half-expected something around the time of our election, but evidently Al-Qaeda decided that the G8 was more important.

"Is the sacrifice worth it"? The only person who can answer that is the person who makes the sacrifice, surely?

2005-06-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

There is, was, and possibly always will be a very fine English war-poet called Wilfred Owen, who died, like a generation young Europeans, in WWI. There was a less fine, but sometimes equally powerful young poet alive at this time, named Rupert Brooke. Owen was a common man, the son of a miner; Brooke was haute-bourgeoisie, hanging on the fringes of nobility. Their two great poems, "Anthem For Doomed Youth" and "If I should die,/ Think only this of me", are opposing poetic poles of the perception of warfare. They even seem to mark some distinction, internal to the Great War in the British psyche, between "chivalry" and modern warfare. The bombing of Dresden, Coventry and Cologne, of Portsmouth and London, in WWII, these were acts which put an end forever to British (and German, for that matter) "Romanticism".

After that war, and those poets, we - British writers, not American writers - perhaps because the cream of our young people had been skimmed off in four bitter years - seemed to produce brittle, beautiful works by people like Nancy Mitford and Noel Coward, without daring to go deeper. Perhaps we didn't want to look too deeply below the surface, because there wasn't a great deal left. And the shadow is still upon us, even now; in a cupboard in my bedroom, I have an exquisite porcelaine cup-and saucer in a crumpled box. Inside is a faded note in copperplate handwriting, saying "To my darling Nelly", and dated 1914. Nelly was my grandmother, born in 1909, and the gift was from her father, my great-grandfather, who, 5 months later, died on the Ypres-Salient. According to the army records, he stepped on a mine and - well, there's no grave for Frances Cleall, although his name is on the Menheim Gate. His body was lost forever in the Flanders mud, not even a dog-tag recovered to send home to his wife. My grandmother, who brought me up and who died in 2002 at the age of 92, gave me this fragile memory of her father to pass on to my own daughter, another Ellen/Helene/Nelly/Lennie, to take into another century with her. She too will one day unfold the faded yellowing paper, and read the words meant for another little girl; I hope she'll treasure it as I do, and remember that Nana, her great-grandmother, never saw her father again. I try my best to teach her that war is wrong, is a waste, is never justified, or justifiable. That you can love your country without killing or dying in her name.

There's a great deal wrong with our country today; Britain faces a more insidious threat than we did when the Nazis bombed our cities 60 years ago. Some of it, I believe, we've fostered ourselves, in arrogance and ignorance; racism is rampant here, and British foreign and domestic policy leaves much to be desired in the application of justice. A casual glance at the statistics will tell you how much more likely a person of, say, Caribbean descent is to be given a custodial sentence than a white Briton for the same crime. I can certainly testify personally to the bias of the "stop and search" policy of the British police; having lived in London, I'd say I'm about three times as likely to be stopped if I'm walking with a black friend than with a white friend. I've been called a "traitor to my race" on the Tube with my ex-husband, who's Morrocan.

So, If I should die, think only this of me - there is some corner of a foreign field, that was never England. According to my father, I can trace my family back to the Domesday Book (the Bates of Shrewsbury - an old Saxon family, apparently); I myself am my own self, and with all the heritage, the porcelaine and legends, I'm only what I make of myself. I'll put this fragile, lovely piece of history in my daughter's hands, and I'll tell her where it comes from and what it means, and I'll let her know that I'll be proud of her for what she, Helene-Charifa, accomplishes. I can give her a sense of where she comes from, but where she goes to is up to her. If she's a poet, I'll be happy and proud, but if she's a physicist or an astronaut or a ballerina or a whore, I'll believe that I succeeded in encouraging the who and the what of her.

Death comes soon enough for all of us. We don't need to seek it out, as these poor deluded fools did two weeks ago, and we don't need to force it on others, as their masters clearly wished to do. Interesting that the people who planned all this were - out of the country! This should be telling us something, Moslems, Christians, Jews, Pagans and Atheists alike; anyone who claims to be doing God's work, but is too important to risk his (or her) own life, is probably a stinking manipulative coward, don't you think?

I'd like to extend my respect and sympathy to Ms. Maryam McCleod, whose son Jermaine died bombing the King's Cross Tube; I too would be hard put to grieve for a son who'd committed such an act, yet I understand she must and does; she's a mother. I honour her courage and honesty, and as a woman and a mother I offer her my respect and my support.

Guantanamo Bay - Shame of the West

2005-06-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

I've never really believed in information gathered by torture, for the simple reason that I personally am a total coward. You wouldn't have to shackle me up or force me to piss on myself, it'd be enough to show me a pair of pliers and mention the word "nipples" to get whatever you wanted out of me. Yes, I believe in a lot of things, passionately, but I doubt there's a single one that'd stand up to a bucket of water and some strategically-placed electrodes. Until recently, here in the UK, evidence/confessions/information obtained by torture were considered inadmissable in a court of law. Sadly that's changed recently, and I think we have Guantanamo Bay to thank for that. Once Mr. Bush decided to bin the Geneva Convention, it gave latitude to any regime, ranging from the allegedly democratic (UK) to the downright despotic (Nigeria), to do the same. I've read a lot about this being "The American Century": like most Brits, I'll have a private mutter about ex-colonials taking on airs and graces, but I'm realistic enough to agree that America will set the tone for the decades to come. So far (and we're only 5 years into this century) it's a pretty abysmal tone, where the powerful allow themselves unlimited latitude when dealing with the weak, and where scientific evidence of (for instance) climate change can be denied by the richest (and guiltiest) nation on Earth for politcal expediency.

When we deny human rights, we cease to be human, or humane. When our governments sanction treatment of foreign nationals which we all know we'd go to war to prevent our own citizens from undergoing, we're hypocrites. I don't know a single person in Guantanamo Bay, but they're all my brothers and sisters. The testimony of recently-released British prisoners as to the conditions there, and the guilty-until-proven-dead attitude of their captors, only strengthens my belief in this. The desecration of the Koran, for instance, should be intolerable to any thinking person (and I'm not including Mr. Bush in this category). I don't have a sacred book myself, I'm not a religious person, but I do have an ikon of the Virgin and Child which I love for it's beauty. Yes, I'd be disgusted and revolted if someone threw it to the floor and trod on it just to hurt me; yes, I'd think of them as barbarous and inhumane. God, or Allah, only know what it must feel like to see the Bible or the Koran treated in this way.

If America has the hubris to take on the political and spiritual leadership of the world, then it needs to clean up its act. Any country with the sheer gall to make such a powerful statement must first make itself irreproachable. The US needs to clean out its own Augean Stables; there have been two highly dubious elections (ahem - Florida), and now we're all subjected (by association) to the lingering shame and vileness of the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. There is no excuse for torture, no excuse for revenge on individuals for what others have done. Either try these people or free them; this is the accepted code of human rights in all civilised nations, and the US risks dropping out of this category. We have to contend with the US as a superpower, but opposition will continue to grow as democracy in America is cauterised and castrated. This could have been the American Century, we could all have made strides towards freedom and democracy, but not with the US as it is as a leader.

Coming up next: why Bush won't sign up to Kyoto, and why the US declines to help Africa - one voice in the blogoshpere.

Teaching Horses to Fly

2005-04-10T04:35:00.000-07:00

I won't go into the Sufi story of Nasruddine and the Caliph of Baghdad's horse, it's easily accessible to anyone with Google (although probably not spelt like that), since I only intend to pinch the title. It's worth reading, though. I decided to steal this particular title (no point in saying "borrow", I'm not giving it back) is that teaching horses to fly sounds to me, as the mother of a recently-four-year-old daughter, very similar in terms of near-impossiblity as producing a reasonable thinking member of human society from the savage little solipsists we give birth to.

It seems vaguely sad that, with 40 still just over the horizon, I should be complaining about "kids of today". Perhaps I'll join a knitting circle, or start collecting other people's cats. However, I look at my daughter and I realise that in almost every conceivable environmental way her upbringing, including nurture - my mother and I have very different ideas of what to do with children - is wildly different from mine. More different, I think, than any two consecutive generations of human beings has ever yet been. I remember black and white TV that stopped at 11.00 whether you wanted to go on watching or not; my daughter watches dedicated kids channels, uses the Net and will soon have her own computer (when I get round to scrounging a moinitor). I was born in (deep breath) 1966, my daughter in 2001; has there ever been such an intense period of change, I wonder? Not of those specific dates, but from mid/late-20th to early 21st century. And things are still changing, faster and faster; desperate people like me struggle to keep up, so that next week our own children won't be regarding us with the sad, pitying look they'd usually give someone who failed the exam for Village Idiot. But however computer-literate (or not) I may have struggled to make myself, I'll never keep up with my daughter once she really takes off. I'm one of the last of the Dodos, and I know it. My daughter lives in a world which was sci-fi when I was growing up; we're going to be very different people.

The question of "What do I teach this clean-slate human mind" is something that, once a parent has asked him or herself, just gets harder to answer and less easy to ignore. I'm not part of any organised religion, so I don't have a convenient ready-made template of Good and Evil to apply to my daughter's growing mind. And the fact that I didn't want to be spoonfed "The Truth" or to apply one inflexible set of rules to every situtation I encountered in this strange, constantly-morphing world we now live in is the reason I'm not part of any organised religion. Nobody seems to want me for very long either - I think I ask too many questions. Still, being a parent means being presented with this strange-coloured (and no matter what their genetic or racial background, they're all a strange colour to begin with) screaming, demanding alimentary tract (because throughput is what it's all about in the early months) not even loosely attached to a thinking brain, and told to turn it into a human being. No-one tells you how; I got better instructions with my last digital camera than I did with my daughter. I envy the sincerely religious at this point; it must be wonderful to truly believe that an all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving being is going to enfold your child as soon as you've dipped it in some water or chopped off a small part of it's anatomy, according to your personal belief structures. From then on in, it's all down to God. I'm not capable of that kind of faith in anything which, however Divinely Inspired (I'm not even going to approach that one, a person's faith is their own business as long as they aren't trying to impose it on me) to begin with, is essentially man-made (and I do mean men, not just humans). It's been a long time in human terms, however it may appear to an Infinite Being, since any of the major religions got any updates. Not many of my neighbours have oxen to covet, but everyone round where I live seems to covet their neighbour's car stereos. And how about "Thou shalt not wear annoying tinny-sounding personal media players in any public place"?

There are parents who, if they ever read this, would say "what a load of old bollocks, kids are kids, we'll get along - we always have". Maybe I do take parenthood a bit uber-seriously, but I suspect that those are the same people who are pretending that nuclear fuel is safe and there's huge undiscovered oil-reserves under Antactica and there's no such thing as oil or water wars, no sir, not on my planet. At least one of the things I'll have to teach my clean-slate proto-human daughter, at some point, is that my generation, and the two preceding, knowingly squandered the Earth's dwindling resources and er, well, sort of left it to the next few generations to sort out, oh yes, there's a Tree in the Natural History Museum..... I know it's presumptuous of me to go about assigning places in history to people and events as if I was Herodotus, but I have a feeling the 20th Century isn't going to go down in Mankind's Greatest Moments. If there's going to be any history, of course; our current behaviour as a species is making it highly improbable that anything evolved enough to hold a pen will be around in 200 years time.

But back to teaching horses to fly. Unlike those fortunate enough to have true faith (and I do think that's a rare and special thing, even if their faith is different from mine), or even just inherited faith, there are people like me who have to start from scratch. Lots of people in this situation either don't understand they have to do this, i.e. impose some kind of ethical structure on these little sociopaths we give birth to (because ethics very rarely evolve spontaneously in human young, in my experience), or expect schools, the Government, TV or whatever to do it for them. None of these things actually work; here on our poor rundown inner-city housing estates, the most dangerous people are the teenagers (and younger) who hang around drinking strong lager wherever they don't get moved on by the Police or hassled by Truant Officers. The younger brothers and sisters, sometimes even the children of these lawless, hopeless kids will be my daughter's peers when she starts school. If I want her to be different, then I'm responsible for making her different. If I don't want her to share the values (or lack of them) of the people around her, then I have to instill something else, something strong enough not to cave in under peer pressure, something which gives her self-worth and self-reliance.

So, I know it's important, and I know it's my job; that's a good start, but I still haven't got a clear idea of what (and basically, this is what we're taking) survival skills I should be teaching my daughter, in this alien world. I want what most parents want for their kids; I want her to be happy, I want her to succeed in whatever she decides to undertake in life (even if I don't like what she decides), and I want, at the moment, to teach her the basic skills she needs to acheive this. So far so straightforward; however, I'd also like my daughter to be a good person. This is another survival thing, by the way; I think people who have kindness and generosity are much happier within themselves, and get along better in the world. Not financially, of course, for that it helps to be ruthless and cunning and unscrupulous, but in terms of emotional and personal fulfilment. I've never yet heard of anyone, on their deathbed, asking for their nearest and dearest stocks and shares to be with them (although I'm not disputing that some people might).

This is where the religious have people like me over a barrel. I don't have a pattern-book for a "Good" person; there's nothing she should or shouldn't eat/wear/expose that I believe will spiritually benefit her, no particular time of the day I think she'd be a better person for meditating or praying at, no rules of conduct not already covered by common law or social conventions that I believe she might please a Deity by following. But anyone can live within the law, millions if not billions do, without being necessarily a "good" person. This is where the sincerity of religious belief becomes important, by the way; a true Christian, to my certain experiential knowledge, will actually give the trainers on his feet to a beggar who is barefoot. An "Easter-Christian" can be as big, if not bigger, a bastard than a Satanist. At least with the Satanist you'd have advance warning; Satanists, whatever their PR people might say, are self-dedicated to Evil Incarnate, and it probably says so on their card. People pretending to be kind, sincere, loving, generous and honest are far more dangerous.

I think, however, that age 4 and a bit, my horse is finally getting off the ground. She's intelligent, but that's a part of their development that you can, with supervision, trust to a decent school; I've been more concerned with her emotional life than her alphabet, and it seems to be paying off. She's a peaceable child; if I have to tell off one of her friends who visit, she always defends them; when argues she'll stomp in, fists on her hips and say "Be kind to each other!" She never gets involved in Nasty Incidents; as I mentioned, the average human child is (I honestly believe) a natural born sociopath, and they do the most horrendous things. When mine was about 18 months, a friend with a daughter about the same age came round; we were sitting drinking coffee, and the two small persons seemed to be getting on okay. Then, from my daughter's bedroom, came one of the most blood-curdling screams I've heard outside of a movie theatre. My friend's daughter had bitten mine in the face, to the point of drawing blood, for no apparent reason at all. All very embarrassing for my friend (she never came round again, in fact - she'd warned me her daughter could be "a bit violent sometimes" but I'd had hair-pulling in mind, not cannibalism), shocking for my girl who'd never been exposed to anything more violent than a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and highly unpleasant for me for about two weeks; one side of my daughter's face was swollen up exactly as if someone had punched her, and if looks could kill almost everyone I pushed the stroller past would have been guilty of murder.

Given the material we have to work with, and the complete lack of guidance most of us have, it's not so surprising that "They fuck you up/Your Mum and Dad,/They might not mean to/But they do" should ring such a chord. It doesn't matter if you read all the self-help manuals and nurture theories going, ultimately you're on your own because each child is different and each parent is different; in fact, trying to apply currently-trendy child-rearing techniques is probably the biggest mistake we could make. I read lots, when I was pregnant (the Whale-Song tapes didn't work; she used to kick me in the kidneys), but in the face of reality all the theory evaporated like campaign promises after an election. A for-instance; in spite of my previously-worked-out strategy, my daughter didn't like hand-prepared lavender and camomile aromatherapy massages; far from lulling her into a soothing sleep, they left her red-faced and bawling, not to mention slippery. And so on and so on, through virtually every preconceived idea I had; you can pick up a few tips on how to calm down tantrums, a couple of bits and bobs might work with your own kid, but mostly parents have to play it by ear. And nowhere, unless you've bought yourself a specifically-religious book on parenthood, do we approach the sticky subjects of moral or spiritual formation. Plenty about how to teach them to eat with a fork and develop hand-eye coordination, nothing on how to stop them from growing up to be Jeffrey Dahmer.

Unless I stumble over, say, a cure for leprosy growing on the old tomatoes in the back of my fridge, being a parent will be the single most important thing I do in my life. I'm fine with that; it's probably the most important thing the Mahatma Ghandi's mother did in her life (and Adolf Hitler's mum, too, lest we forget). How, given the world as it it and not as we'd all like it to be, am I going to guide my little proto-human safely through drugs (everywhere), underage sex (virtually unstoppable if they decide to do it), in short doing all the things I did? Hash has become as available and as socially acceptable (if not more so) than alcohol; I smoke myself, and I'd certainly rather she skinned up a doobie (with herbal tobacco, of course) than got stinking drunk. I accept that she'll experiment; I did, so it would be a bit hypocritical of me to cry woe too much. Maybe my experience will be useful, maybe not; I do try to avoid the "When I was your age...", especially since I was such a waste of space and a perfectly good education as a teenager. With a bit of luck, she'll rebel against me and all my works, in the traditionally-approved Teenage manner, and spontaneously reject my laissez-faire attitude to pot consumption - then I'll have nothing more to do than polish her hooves and wave goodbye as she heads for the stratosphere.

Acts of God

2005-04-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

I'm unfamiliar with both the etiquette and the mechanics of using links to other people's blogs (do I write and ask permission? And if so, why? Isn't getting to the widest audience possible the whole point? I think I've provided you (at the end of this instead of at the beginning - sorry about that, I expect I'll sort it out next time) with a link to a story I personally found so disturbing yet so worthy of consideration that I'd like to pass it on. Briefly, for those who don't want to or can't be bothered to scrolldown and use the link (or in case it doesn't work), it's a story of Young White Christian Boys and Gay Bashing. There were several ironies in this particular case, such as both assailants and victim, previously unknown to each other, being from the same ethnic and religious minorities; the linked article is excellent in its grasp of the moral stance of both agressors and victim, and how their similarities were more marked than their differences, the main (perhaps only) one being the sexuality of the victim.

Whatever one's personal religious or philosophical persuasions, the recent death of Jean-Paul II has provided us with an occasion, perhaps even an obligation, to consider the place of religion in politics and society, and as an influence on human behaviour. I knew there were a lot of Catholics; I didn't know that there were a billion of them, though. I didn't know that 1/6 of the world's population at least nominally subscribed to the idea that the Pope is Infallible. I think that history will certainly accord a special place for this man, whom I believe to have been honest and sincere in his devotion to his faith; he's certainly been more politically active on the world stage than most of his immediate predecessors, yet his legacy is mixed. I think it's probably true that because Jean-Paul II was Polish and had lived and preached under the Soviet-controlled regime in Cold War Poland, he had a deeper understanding of, sympathy for and (crucially) influence over the collapsing Soviet Bloc. At that point in history, his Papacy became part of the evolution of post-Communist politics, when a lesser Pontiff, or a less influential and committed Pontiff, might have allowed the Church to be come sidelined and irrelevant.

However, it's hard to deny that Jean-Paul II's adherence to the "condom" question has caused enormous loss of life and suffering in Africa, where many of the Church's most fervent and (crucially) conservative (both priests and lay persons) members can be found. More progressive thinkers are mostly to be found in the developed Western world, whose "flocks" are vastly more sophisticated and liable to pick which parts of their religion suit them and dispense with what's inconvenient. Sure, if the Pope is right, when it comes to the Pearly Gates the Africans will probably get free passes while the rich Easter-Christians who sometimes ate Dover Sole on Fridays will be sweating it out in Purgatory (and I'll be roasting, but that's another matter). It doesn't change the fact that millions of people, in some places whole generations, are dying miserably in poverty, squalor and pain because they sincerely believe that if they put a bit of rubber over their dick they'll go to Hell.

So back to the link and the story I mentioned above. These young men were all (apart from the victim, who's father was one and who had rejected his son because of his sexuality) Evangelical Christians, and their main defence, if you can dignify it with the name, was that homosexuality is an "abomination" according to the Bible and it was "against their religion". I believe the reference comes in one of Paul's Epistles in the New Testament, but it doesn't mention anything about slashing them so badly with smashed bottles they look like "sides of beef". Even in the Old Testament, where Sodom and Gomorrah were thoroughly chastised, it was God who actually did the work; in fact, "Vengeance is Mine", Sayeth the Lord. He seemed to make quite a point of that.

"God made me do it" has been the standard fallback of loonies, psychos and would-be Presidential assassins for as long as there's been a God/Gods. I don't mean to devalue the millions of people who do actually do conscious good because of their faith, whatever it may be, but when it comes to atrocities, real atrocities, then almost as many seem to be of religious as of good old common-and-garden greed (oil, water, raw materials, slaves - don't kid yourselves, they just call it "people trafficking" nowadays). It seems, if God really does deliver the odd personal message, the message is always something pretty nasty or - and maybe this should be looked at as a possibility - a message from the Almighty makes you insane. It's true, you do occasionally read about someone who donates all his/her wordly goods to a Church, but the actual money tends, sadly, to end up in the pockets of people like Jimmy Swaggart. Such misguided faith is more likely to produce feelings of pity rather than a desire to emulate.

But given the massive public grief at the death of Jean-Paul II, much of which I know to be real and deeply sincere, and the Bush administration's tactics in the US (and to a lesser extent the Conservative Party in the upcoming British General Election), which shamelessly evokes the "dark side" of Christianity (intolerance and religious hatred), maybe Western liberal thinkers should give a bit more cerebral time to religion. Because you live in an apartment in a city with water coming out of a tap and several direct connections to the rest of the world at your disposal, because you're politically well-informed and read the right books and watch the right films, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of organised religions as faintly medeival and not worth taking seriously. Anything that 1 billion people believe in, whether it's the Catholic Church or a Flat Earth, has to be taken seriously. And I'm not comparing the two in terms of relevance, I'm just making a point. Anything that leads three young men to launch an unprovoked (unless you have a real dislike of white trousers) attack on a complete stranger deserves examination.

I'm not going to get into rivalry or even downright hatred between different faiths; not because I don't have anything to say, because it's a constant interest (and horror) of mine, but because I'd rather take it as a seperate subject. The kind of hatred that motivates atrocities like Darfur, the India/Pakistan arms race, or the Twin Towers deserves to be treated as a thing apart. And I bet you never read such a list in that order before, either. For now, it's enough to look at the metaphorical beam in our own eye; what are "we", in the sense of our societies, teaching our young people by way of morals, that they end up slicing up people who don't share their beliefs? Or shooting their classmates? Or getting pregnant at 13?

Lots of different issues here, but ultimately they come down, I think, to the fact that a lot of us are living in a post-Christian era. Certainly, there are plenty of Christians, especially in America, but exactly what brand of Christianity are they pushing? The New Testament brand, with it's insistence on love and tolerance, or the Old Testament fire and brimstone variety? And if we aren't Christians and have children, what kind of moral framework are we laying down for our children instead? Because the fact that I, as an adult, have opted out of organised religion means, to me, that I have to replace this in my daughter's life with something, a code of ethics which I believe to be right and which involves her as a human being with all her faults and her gifts. It's a big job, being a parent, and I think we're beginning to get a sense now, as a society, of what happens when we abandon the "old" moral values and don't replace them with something approaching a sense of right and wrong (or acceptable/unacceptable) in our children.

I live on a large, poor housing estate, and the scariest thing I ever encounter round here is a bunch of early teens with a few cans of lager inside them. If you follow the link, you'll find something scarier, but it boils down to the same; something is very wrong with what we're teaching our kids, or not teaching our kids, and if we expect to have a society where you really can walk down the street carrying a whie stick and not get mugged, we ought to be addressing this problem. Whether Gods tells us to or not.

Link

Someone's telling the Truth on the TV - I've lived too long........

2005-03-31T12:47:00.000-08:00

I don't suppose that I'm alone in noticing that global warming (or shall we be PC and call it "climate change"?) has suddenly become all the rage again? Today, I was warned by a particularly smug geologist-type guy that we'd already used up "two thirds of the World's resources", and that we are "living beyong our means". I can remember (and I'm only 38, hardly Methusalah) when Global Warming was right up there with Close Encounters and Crop Circles on the "Crazy of the Week" chart; only beardie open-toe-sandalled Green Party activists and Fortean Times readers gave it a second thought. Now it comes just behind the Royal Wedding and Michael Jackson on the BBC, so I suppose the Governement (not the idiots we elected 4 years ago, but the civil-service heirocracy behind them that makes the real decisions in the UK) , have finally decided that, since even parts of England (Cornwall hasn't got long, I reckon) are falling into the sea, they'll have to come clean.

Hence the smug geologist or climatologist or whatever. They've been saying this as a profession (except those who get paid to contradict them of course) for years and years, and finally, finally someone listens! And of course they're going to say "I told you so!" Wouldn't you, if you'd been telling "society" the same thing for 20 years, and it suddenly collectively woke up and said "Wait a minute, what happened to my planet?" The temptation to pull out one's beard and scream "You Ate It!!!!" (because that's what it boils down to - humans eat, societies consume, and a heap of shit is the net result) must be almost unbearable - well done all you climatologists etc., who haven't ended up on the soft-wall-ward, and who currently aren't doing 20-30 for strangling a complete stranger in an elevator who just happened to say "Is it just me, or are we getting more hurric - aaargh!!" The temptation must be severe. Morituri te salutatem.

Here's a good one, too. "The Government yesterday downplayed warnings by climatologists that....". Oh yes? And that helps, does it? Pretending something isn't happening as a coping-strategy; let's just examine that one, shall we? I have a 4-year-old who tries it, but even she, faced with the undeniable evidence of an unauthorisedly-empty ice-cream tub, generally puts her paws up and gives in. In fact, she's just recently giving up entirely on that as a strategy; she's got "it wasn't me" in R&D at the moment. So we have Governments who are at about the stage of development, collectively, of a 4-year-old. A very bright 4 year-old, no denying that, but surely we should be expecting a bit more from our elected representatives? What happens when Bangladesh disappears below sea-level then? Will that be our global Empty Ice-cream Tub, the one we can't possibly explain away? And species-wise we're going to encounter the very same problem my daughter is having with "It wasn't Me!". Nobody except she and I live in this apartment; if it wasn't her, then it must have been......er, no, that's not going to work, it it? But just in case, let me be the first to take up the cry: "It wasn't the Dolphins!"

There is something profoundly wasteful, I think, about a race capable of building Mont St. Michel, or composing vast and beautiful music for gods or for pleasure, dreaming all the dreams the human race has conjured up in poetry and song, drowning in it's own shit, but there you go. The water that covers Bangladesh ("Who ate the ice-cream? George? Tony? Did you eat the ice-cream?") will be full of condoms and raw sewage, mutant fish like we find in the "Hospital Zones" of the North Sea nowadays, old fridges and car tyres, plastic which will continue to exist as the framework of a six-pack of beer forever. Scary that, really; long after I'm dead, the plastic that held together every six-pack or four-pack I've ever drunk will still be existing somewhere, flopping listlessly in the heart of a conglomeration of algae and scum that have used it's handy cellular shape to carve out an ecological niche in the suffocating seas. And somewhere, clinging on to the heights of some Andean or Himalayan non-toxic zone, or deep in a bunker somewhere, a Government will be "downplaying" reports of roving gangs of mutant cannibal lobster-men..........

I'm writing this a week before the General Election in the UK. We've had the deeply unedifying spectacle of our politicians competing to hump the country dry - I mean, form a Government for the next 4 years. Like most people of my age, I've given up actually voting for people, I just vote against the real Loony Toons (BNP, UKIP, The Conservatives). Scum will always float to the top, and that's what we get in British politics too, one shouldn't kid oneself otherwise. But for the first time, Labour, the actual party in Government and Party most likely to form the next Govt, according to the polls, have included "Climate Change" in their manifesto (or at least speeches), referring to it as the single most important issue confronting mankind. Wehey for the Earth! then, you might think. At last someone (someone political, I mean, not us sad old hippies who've been banging on about it for decades) is taking things seriously!

However, this doesn't change the fact that the ice-cream has been eaten. Maybe I should change this metaphor; maybe the ice-cream was in fact devoured by a man-made virus originally designed to - yeah, ride it, jojo, this is a good one - break down fat molecules on the insides of your fridge and make cleaning that much easier (for your Phillipino maid), which unexpectedly, I mean literally a 1 in 5 billion chance, has spread to the ice-cream and is now threatening the entire dairy-product section of the refrigerator. "The Government is downplaying scientists' fears that the virus has jumped or will jump the "species barrier" to the Parma ham......", whilst "Christian leaders are reminding the faithful that a "kosher kitchen" comes from the Old Testament in the first place". Meanwhile, "The manufacturers of "FatBuster(TM)" were unavailable for comment, but a source close to the DA's office has hinted that the company has filed for bankruptcy and the directors are now in hiding on or near Mount Annapurna." The metaphor may change, the script never.

Back in the '80s, I was very involved with the Green Party. This wasn't because I was utterly stupid; even then, I didn't actually expect all the Evil Plutocrats to listen to what I had to say and acheive Ecological Enlightenment overnight. I was just more prepared to put my scrawny back to the Immovable Object and shove. I think I imagined, just because we were right, and the earth really was going down the drain (in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where do you think?), pointing this out to people would be enough to change attitudes and behaviour. I didn't understand then, as I do now, that the "World", as we call it, is actually owned by about 1000 or so really rich people, who are mostly very old, and who don't give a shit about the rest of us because they're going to be dead soon anyway. Incidentally, I bet Bill Gates pisses them all off a treat. These really rich people live in the shadows normally; Bill Gates openly being rich (and philanthropical to boot) all over the place has probably cost them a couple of heart-transplants each. It must be a bit like the Lord High Mandrake or whatever they call the boss Mason "coming out" on TV, apron, trouser-leg and all.

So, as an end-time phenomenon, someone telling the truth on the TV beats any number of 2-headed goats for me. What were those Horsemen again? War, Famine, Pestilence and Death, right? And they're supposed to "ride forth", I believe, at the end of the world. Maybe someone should let them know the party has started without them, that it's turned out to be a secular do after all. Or should that be ecumenical?

Appealing Ideas #3 - possibly

2005-03-28T01:14:00.000-08:00

This is only a possibility, appealing though it is, because I'm not sure if it's an Idea or a Corporate Marketing Strategy for California(TM). This is how it goes.

Somewhere far across the Western Ocean, Beyond the Setting Sun as the bards used to say, lie (variously) Avalon, the Blessed Isles, Lyonnesse, The Isles of the Young, Valinor for my hobbit friends, or, to cut a long saga short, some form of Heaven-on-Earth often involving scantily-clad maidens (some of whom would eat you). I personally think that the persistence of this Idea of lands beyond the sunset is due to the folk memory of the rare, long interspersed but definite pre-Columbian visits to the Americas. We know the Vikings went there, the Polynesisans, the Pheonicians almost certainly, the Irish in the Dark Ages; as civilisations rose and fell (along with levels of technical development) here in Europe and Africa, so these expeditions of trade or colonisation were mounted.

There are enough "unexplained" human remains (peoples or races which shouldn't have been there at that specific time but inexplicably are, to the annoyance of antroplogists and the glee of Erich von Daniken supporters) to make it a fair working hypothesis (for me, at any rate); the problems would have been, I suppose, that it's is such a very very long way to the Americas, and once you got there, in your reed-boat with your Pheonician equivalent of metal key-rings of the Eiffel Tower and I-went-to-Athens-and-saw the-Acropolis T-Shirts, there wasn't anyone on a similar civilisational or technological level to trade with. The journey was too long and dangerous to make settlement a real possibility, until technology combined with population pressure and land-hunger here in Europe made it economical. So people came, had a look, thought "Nice people, nice country, but what can you get here you can't get cheaper in Massilia?" and forgot about the Americas again. But not quite; the memory of the Lands beyond the Setting Sun, the Blessed Realms, persisted in folk tales and folk memory.

So we're psychologically and culturally set up to believe in some kind of Paradise over the Western Ocean. This is why, I reckon, against all sense of reason and logic, we actually accept and even watch shows like "The O.C." I'm not singling this show out for any particular ingnominity, it's just a bloody good example of the genre and provides a handy title for this imaginary land - The Orange County. County, because this is obviously a small and exclusive Land, reserved for the Blessed; what kind of Paradise would it be if the hoi polloi were allowed to trample around throwing gum-wrappers and wearing Wal-Mart shoes? Orange because oranges need warm, lush, fertile land to ripen and grow, and that's what days are like in Paradise; lush and warm, with only the gentlest, softest sprinkling of summer rain (rainbow included) at convenient moments. And in this Blessed Land, The Orange County, live beautiful people, transcendent versions of ourselves, transfigured; yes, they have their moments of pain and confusion, but there's generally nothing that can't be worked out by "honesty" and "communication". We watch these beautiful avatars of ourselves grope through some moral dilemma or other, often hampered by their own touching naievety and inner shyness, until at last, in a blaze of glorious enlightenment the likes of which we can only dream of in our miserable lives, the simple Truth hangs limpid and transparent for all to see. There's always a moral, there has to be, for this is The Orange County, and even through suffering we gain access to our inner selves and our true emotions. There are "bad" people (although they're still beautiful, or at least very rich), but ultimately they only exist to point out the truth of the Moral and to set up the Dilemma in the first place.

I like this Idea because it gives me some kind of esoteric rationale for why so many people watch this kind of crap. I know why I do; I lost the remote for my bedroom TV, and if I'm Zenning mellowly on a Sunday morning I tend to just glide through those shows on autopilot until something I like comes on. Ultimately, I watch them because I'm too lazy to get out of bed and change channels manually, which says a lot about how sad my life has become of late. But the idea that millions (yes, that's millions) of otherwise normal intelligent people actually watch this godawful deadhead rubbish every week, that's quite scary. I just watched a brief snippet this morning of some show or other, and there was a woman at work wearing a bikini!! Please, introduce me to any woman on the face of this planet with the confidence to spend a day walking, sitting, standing, eating and going to the bathroom, in front of her colleagues, dressed in less fabric than it takes to make a decent napkin! If she exists, I want to meet her so that I can gawk. Who can she be, this Goddess who can sit on an office-chair without unattractively flattened thighs? Has she so throrougly waxed and depilated and coiffed that she's not worried about one single bodily or cranial hair? Is she, in short, made of plastic?

I've never been to California, which seems to be packaging itself as the New Improved Blessed Land, but I'm sure it's much like any other part of the Western world with, okay, better weather. Not everyone who lives in The Orange County is beautiful and inexplicably rich and has perfect teeth. What we're being granted is a brief glimpse into the supposed lifestyles of the planet's richest and most fortunate beings, the Princes of America, with the gentle subtext that they too suffer the slings and arrows etc., only with better haircuts. Here am I, lying in my bed with a joint and a coffee, having the only real downtime I get all week as a single mum; Sunday morning, when it's an understood convention for my daughter and I that Mama is going to be lazy and go back to bed after breakfast. Daughter watches a DVD in the living room of our tiny flat, I watch Friends and Hollyoaks on Channel 4 in the bedroom; we don't have a lot of money, my daughter and I, but already the electricity, the implied running water, the computer and the DVD put us in the top billion of this planets 6 billion inhabitants. I'm actually pretty grateful to be who I am, when I am and where I am, which is good, because otherwise when Friends morphed into Tales of The Orange County in whichever format it was being transmitted in (ugly strange oddbals are allowed in New York and Boston, but not in any of The Blessed Land incarnations I've seen yet), I'd probably get very depressed about not having a swimming pool or a therapist or (gods help me) and orthodontis.

I liked the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' "Californication" a lot; that's an Appealing Idea all in itself and Californication is a concept-encapsulating word I'd really like to have come up with myself. Oh well, we can't all be Oscar Wilde all the time. Still, it describes so well the brand image of the New Improved Blessed Land which is being packaged so successfully to us other citizens of the planet. It's pretty insidious really, when you put it together with the current Bush administration's Mission to democratise people back into the Stone Age. It would be so lovely, wouldn't it, to live in a house that outshone a Sultan's palace, drive a sleek car which only needed gas when you had a scene in a gas station, to be so beautiful and self-confident that even clothes are just gilding the lily. And we too could have that; The Orange County gives us something to aspire to, as all good Paradises should. I hate to think of how many women (and men) across the world are starving themselves and mutilating their faces and bodies in a doomed attempt to enter The Orange County; how many people are selling their souls and their bodies every hour of every day to live in that impossible, unsustainable Land. We all know, deep down, that it's a fantasy that has as much chance of actual existence as Fairyland, that in any case we'll never be rich enough or beautiful enough; a lot of us spend our lives (and lose them) trying, though. We even go to war for it.

I think the problem with The Orange County as a Paradise is simply this: money. It's a Capitalist Paradise; you can't get in just by being good or having faith or resculpting your face and your body, you have to be rich too. Obviously being white helps, if you don't want to spend your time in Paradise as the Butler, but even that isn't as important as being rich and having a swimming pool. A decent Paradise, the one which most religions get by on in one form or another, is open to all, providing you follow a certain ethical code - many of which, interestingly enough, actively encourage poverty in some form or other. Most of the really popular Paradises have no such thing as money, and are essentially pretty solipsistic; you, your soul, go to Paradise (who really believes they're going to the Other Place, after all?), and then good things happen to you according to your particular belief-system for all eternity. What you don't have to do, ever again, is wonder where your daily bread is coming from. In The Orange County, unfortunately, money (the lack of it and the love of it) is often both the plot and the moral; even when you've reached Transcendence, the ultimate expression of Incarnate Man, some shyster will still be trying to take it all away from you.

And then there's the above mentioned Other Place. Where do all the other 6.999 billion souls who never even make it to Central Casting go? It's the unfortunate flipside of having a Paradise; it has to be exclusive, if everyone went there anyway whatever they did, what would be the point of sticking to the rules? What would a Captialist Hell be like, I wonder? An eternity of working at Starbucks, paying off the interest on the interest of a loan you took out 6 years ago on a car that got stolen two weeks later because you left the keys in the ignition. So quite a bit like life then, but without the rare and precious good bits; except on Sunday mornings, maybe, when we could all watch The O.C.

Appealing Ideas #2, The Sequel: Is It Just Me?

2005-03-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

I'm in two minds whether this is a perceptual or an actual phenomenon, and maybe I'll find that out as I write this. As I said in Appealing Ideas #2, over a period of some months I've received three of these scam-mails, and just to make the point, another plopped into my Junk-Mail Inbox today. This is coincidence of course, but it reminds me of when someone close to me died of cancer. Whenever I turned on the TV, it seemed, or opened a newspaper, there it was; cancer. At the time it almost most felt like some vast conspiracy; in retrospect, it was obviously perceptual. Cancer was and is and probably will be for a while always in the news, some breakthrough or setback or miracle cure. During the months I was grieving, I just noticed it more. But I'm just an observer of the phenomenon of e-bribery, I was commenting on its evolution because I received three, and the appearance of another so soon can hardly be perceptual. I've been "noticing" them, deliberately, for months now; the appearance of two in three days does suggest the scam is getting wider, or more popular.

I think I can discount targeting; after all, I've pointedly ignored two, and once offered to pass the details of the Innocent Widow's predicament to Amnesty International, or any one of a number of legitimate legal organisations who'd help her with an honest claim. Strangely enough, the Widow didn't reply; clearly she wasn't looking for legal advice. Since then, as previously described, they're growing more and more blantant.

Today's example is from a Mr. Taylor Smith, a PA to the Head of African Banking in the World Bank. That ought to be fairly easy to verify, surely, which suggests that Mr. Smith doesn't exist. However, he goes on to say that "Through the sale of World Bank allocated oil quota from OPEC and other activities which I cannot reveal for now (my italics), I have been able to make US $10.2 million, which is currently deposited in a Finanace and Security company". He goes on to explain that the deposit wasn't made by himself, and that he can't claim it personally because it's (and who would have guessed it?) against the "code of conduct" for civil servants in his country (not specified) to "acquire such an amount of money".

My stake in this virtuous enterprise has now increased to 30%, Mr. Smith colunteering to have deposit records altered to "reflect" that I was the "depositor and beneficiary", and all necessary paperwork supplied. Mr. Smith even goes on to mention the laws we'll be breaking, and the new post 9/11 International Monitoring of large international transactions. Nobody could possibly take up this offer and claim they weren't aware that it was illegal, and maybe that's the scam in itself. In the three months or so that I've been "observing" this Idea, it's changed from the Widow in Distress (which might fool some people, but not many) to a simple open invitation to break international law. An International Law which was, incidentally, specifically instituted post 9/11 to combat international terrorism.

I have to admit here that I'm a shameful conspiracy buff; I'm not saying, for incident, that Princess Di really was bopped by MI5 (although I do think that if she hadn't played Twister with the Pont D'Alma they'd have done it eventually), but it would certainly be more interesting if they had......Ahem. I'm just as interested in the "folklore" that's growing up about it. Each to his own, as the old maid said when she kissed the cow; recently, a few of my fellow conspirophiliacs have been getting twitchy and muttering into their metaphorical beer that you get "pinged" by the CIA if you visit certain sites, of which Al Jazeera is one. Also that there are certain "trigger words" that activate "internet surveillance", whatever that might mean; 9/11 is allegedly one of them, which is a damn shame for me because that happens to be my birthday.

This may be linked to my reading too many books by Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz, coupled with a more than average interest in and knowledge of subjects like the Iran/Contra fiasco and Watergate, but for some reason the CIA and the FBI have always seemed to me to be two-dimensional entities with one-dimensional ethics and null-dimensional intelligence. As I said in Appealing Ideas #2, I can't believe this is an serious attempt at international money-laundering, it's too random and stupid. Maybe I'm grossly maligning the creative departments of both these excellent, God-fearing agencies, but given their unparallelled innovation in the art of bidet-poisoning, it's fairly easy to imagine this Idea as a particularly stupid (even insultingly stupid) honey trap for anyone "guilty" of having Al Jazeera on their favourites list.

I'm not quite far gone enough to believe that this is directed at me personally; sadly my blog has a readership of 1 (me), so I'm not getting any feedback as to how diverse or wide-reaching this particular scam is. I could trawl the blogoshpere and come up with some info, I expect, but at the moment this is 1) my pet project and 2) a Clue, if I happen to be accidentally shot in the head (memo to self: keep away from libraries) and if Jessica Fletcher happens to be staying in the same hotel.

I'd very much like to have some kind of overall picture of who's been getting these particular scams; I'd really like to compare browser notes with them. There definitely seems to be a "progression" here, the Idea is evolving (though not in the direction of extra links, as I at first naively speculated) but towards an open invitation to commit a crime. That does seem a bit odd if the scam is really to get hold of your bank details; I think, on balance, I'd be less rather than more inclined to trust an avowed thief, at least not without some recognisable security. I can conceive of circumstances, maybe, perhaps, where I'd break the law for a stranger; I've broken it for a fox before, what the hell, a really good sob story might just possibly work on me if I was in a philosophical mood. I certainly wouldn't trust some crooked public servant; for US$300,000, I'd be more likely to get a discreet and succesful "suicide".

I wonder if I can get any information on this? What if, for instance, I typed in Taylor Smith, African Bank, Personal Assistant" - I think there'd be a fair chance of a "Did you mean....?" followed by a lot of legitimate organisations which sound vaguely similar but in fact have no connection with the alleged Mr. Smith. I'm half-tempted to go to stage one with this one, just to see what happens; at the moment I'm being asked to submit my "private telephone and fax numbers for easier communication" to smith1@coolkiwi.com, and I'd so like to follow this along and find out the real heart of the scam. The first thing they're asking for is a phone number, and you can get a lot of info from area codes etc. Then again, you can't tell where scammers (or others) are buying their information, or how extensive that is; asking my phone number may just be confirming they've got the right person/address.

I think Appealing Ideas may already be spawning a spin-off, something along the lines of Loony Conspiracy Watch; I think I may actually go to first base with the next one, just for research purposes, and keep Appealing Ideas as an "ongoing project" (unless I come across a really good one). This could be my Pulitzer Prize, man; I've read "All The President's Men", I could be on the point of exposing either 1) the stupidest attempt at international money-laundering ever carried out or 2) one of those gloriously insane "plots" that the US Security Agencies (both internal and external) seem to enjoy so much. You have to admit it, they really do. Who poisoned who's bidet again? And who among us doesn't have a private snigger when a politico or a high-ranking "moral authority" comes a cropper? Bishops in the bedsheets, Princes in tampons, Chief-Super-Intendents caught in brothels wearing lizardskin thongs, that's what we (at least in the UK) have come to expect of our elected and non-elected leaders.

And remember, when you read about suspected CIA involvement in the dramatic suicide/ murder/alien abduction of an obscure European woman who scrawled the message "Oh bugger, I was wrong all along, it was......." in her own blood as she was spirited away, you'll know you could have read it here first, if you'd bothered.

holojojo

Appealing Ideas #2

2005-03-04T15:06:00.000-08:00

This Idea is appealing for totally different reasons than #1, and it has to do with an an altogether darker and dingier side of human nature. This Idea can be found lurking in many an Inbox or Junk-Mail folder, especially if you're like me and visit a lot of dodgy sites (all in the name of research, of course) - I've got Al Jazeera and the Ku Klux Klan on the same browser, I keep expecting my hard-drive to declare civil war. I get a lot of Junk, and because my main address is set to Contacts Only I have to trudge through it from time to time in case I've missed something personal. This morning, there were 118 (I'm lazy) and I came across yet another example of the Idea.

I think I've probably had three different versions of this, but the basic premise is always this: a person I've never heard of has been "searching the Net" for a discreet European and has settled on me for the obvious reasons - good vibes, nice aura, God told him/her to - to help them with a terrible financial catastrophe/opportunity which only a European bank account can avert/take advantage of. The amounts are usually in the mid $20 million U.S. For instance, my first was the widow of a recently disgraced (to death) Foreign Minister in an African country whose name I can't mention - because she didn't. Anyway, this honest and honourably-deceased Patriot just happened to have salted away as a large amount of readies in a Swiss Bank-Account (as you do) and his grieving widow, unjustly suspected by her husband's muderers of knowing where it is, can't get her hands on it personally. All I have to do is send my account details to (obviously-made-up Yahoo-address) and she'll cut me in for 10%.

Today's example was much the same in basic principles, but this time there was a verifiable plane-crash involved. Just in case I was cynical enough to doubt the existence of the horrifying disaster in which the Honest Patriot, his children, parents, grandchildren, spinster aunts and livestock perished, there was a handy link to a CNN News report. The Patriot was a Lebanese importer-exporter of Textiles and Automobiles (sic) in Benin, and his only surviving friend and lawyer, Humphrey Menssa (honest, I kid you not), International Barrister, needs a next-of-kin (with a bank account, obviously) to receive the US $27.4 million the Patriot handily deposited in a (you've guessed it) Swiss Bank Account. This is a good example of Ideas leading to other ideas; I'm now going to have to satisfy my curiosity about how likely it is that a Textile and Automobile entepreneur (?) in Benin could legitimately earn $27.4 million, which will mean finding out where Benin actually is. I'm digressing again, aren't I?

There's one distinguishing characteristic in all the e-mails I've received so far, as well as the Idea itself, and that's that they're all written in absolutely laughable English. I've seen DVD instruction manuals better than this. What I haven't decided yet is if that's a deliberate part of the scam - "you can trust me, I'm just a poor ignorant (fill in blank)" - designed to lull me into a false sense of superiority, or if they're genuinely as crap and disorganised as all that. If I wanted to pull off a scam in say, Estonian, I'd find myself someone with no scruples who could actually speak and write it properly for me - it surely can't be that hard to find unscrupulous people who can speak English, I know plenty myself. Or do they think that if I'm stupid enough to fall for such a lame scam then I won't notice the spelling?

Actually, they'd have a point there, and this is a bit of a flaw in the Idea for me; fair enough, I suppose, there probably is one born every minute but they tend not to have computers (or not for very long). If I was enough of a nutter to send my bank account details to bigfatcon.com I'd probably keep my savings in a biscuit barrel in the shed in any case. And a wicked little part of my mind, the little lawless chaotic part of me that lurks in the reptile-part of my brain, thinks "But I could do this so much better! You're targeting the wrong people! This is feeble!"

Because this Idea is a heat-seeking-missile set to greedy and stupid people, who really do believe you can get a free lunch; most of those people live on the peripherary of the rich and powerful, eating free lunches. People who are already rich or have power, political or otherwise, are generally a bit more intelligent (or cunning, or ruthless) than the hangers-on, that's why they're rich and powerful. This Idea should be touted around politicos, celebs and minor royalty, that's where you find the real bottom-feeders. If Humphrey Menssa put on a nice suit, hired someone with a title, and invited the right parasite for lunch at the Ritz, then the idea might be a goer.

The scam usually finishes with some reason why the money has to be claimed within a short period of time; in the case of my fictional Lebanese relation it was 14 days, or the money would revert to the State of Benin. As I said, I'll have to do a bit of research on Benin before I can swear to it, but I bet they're pretty poor. Or if not, then the people who live there are. I expect $27.4 million would come in very handy indeed; so, not only do you have to be greedy and stupid, you have to be pretty ruthless too. I can't bring myself to be sorry for anyone who's been taken in by this one, which is partly why I wanted to investigate the Idea further; this is not hassling fragile pensioners to change their gas company, or stealing charity boxes from shops to feed a habit. This is a sheer naked appeal to avarice and lack of scruples; Humphrey Menssa (Barrister and International Legal Practitioner) doesn't exactly say it's illegal in so many words, but he does ask me to "Please do not circumvent this information, handle it discretely " (sic again). So tough luck, suckers.

I can't bring myself to believe this is a serious attempt at international money-laundering, it's just too stupid and random. It certainly does speak volumes about our opinion of each other as a species, though. You get so much more access to cons and scams like this on the Net, and so many of them seem to rely on precisely the same Idea as this one; that enough people are going to be stupid and greedy enough that, no matter how poor they may be individually, it's at least worth trying in the aggregate. Any fool can set up an e-mail address and buy himself a list of addresses, as proved by the fact that so many do; write a sad letter (or rather, in this case, pay someone else to do it) and press Send. However, if I discount all forms of advertsising, which are legalised scams with better graphics, I'm definitely getting more obvious scams based on greed than on compassion at the moment.

Fake charity appeals had a brief moment of glory and, because I do contribute to a charity and unwisely got my name on everyone's mailing list, I did get one of those. It must have been clocked pretty quickly, though, because I knew about it beforehand; a lot more effort was put into it than into Humphrey Menssa's, even with the informative plane-crash link, and it did fool some people I believe. But scammers who do that kind of thing get very unpopular very quickly, and they don't tend to last long. Not to mention having dog-crap through the letter-box every day for the rest of their lives if caught. If I'd been ripped off while donating £50 to a dodgy disaster relief fund, I'd make a big fuss and complain to absolutely anyone who'd listen; if I got cleaned out plotting to defraud the State of Benin, I think I'd be inclined to slink off with my tail between my legs and never tell a soul.

So maybe the Idea is cleverer than at first take; it might snare less people overall, but it'll probably last a lot longer and if I've received three different ones then it's clearly evolving. The link to a real-world event is a new touch, and surely they'll get the language sorted eventually unless it is a deliberate ploy; American/English will probably hobble on as the Net lingua franca for a bit longer. And this Idea, this stupid and transparent scam, is about as close as it gets to a victimless crime as far as I'm concerned. Costs won't be passed on to taxpayers or the shareholders of insurance companies, no-one gets hurt anywhere but the pocket, and the scammers make no pretence of legitimacy. In fact, they offer an outright bribe for doing something that must be illegal; I really can't believe anyone who knows how to turn on a computer and navigate to their inbox could possibly believe it's legal to pretend you're the next-of-kin of a complete stranger and skim $200,000 dollars from a foreign government. Surely not. So the only people to suffer will be stupid unscrupulous people who don't see anything wrong with defrauding third-world countries (ahem! Mark Thatcher), and even they won't dare to complain.

I wonder if I followed the link and offfered my services, they'd cut me in on this Idea? I could write a seriously tempting letter with the right motivation, and I've got a suit.........

Newsflash - Human Being "Still not interested" In Jacko's Sex Life

2005-03-01T01:44:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know, what kind of a freak does that make me? Since I'm not currently otherwise occupied (in the middle of a war, for instance, or starving to death, or fighting a losing battle against Aids) who the hell do I think I am not to have an opinion on this? Popes die (or don't die), cities fall, whole countries battle hopelessly against rising sea-levels, Bird Flu threatens to swoop out of Asia and decimate us all, but Michael Jackson's trial still gets number one slot on the evening news. He's on page 1 of the newspapers (even the big serious ones), psychiatrists and pundits sit on TV studio sofas and discuss the ifs and the buts, political organisations and even churches are taking sides. So why can't I bring myself to care?

Certainly, the charges against him are serious ones, and deserve to be taken seriously. If they turn out to be true, then who could argue against packing him off to jail with the rest of the paedophiles? Having been (or not been) a victim himself doesn't excuse victimising others (if he did). In most cases, we could all sit back and let the court decide - a person is innocent until proven guilty, right? However, as OJ Simpson proved to all of us who bothered to take notice, in the US, justice is a saleable commodity. No offence, OJ, but plenty of people have been hanged, fried or injected on far less evidence, and in fact continue to be offed in States like Texas every month. A casual flick through the pages of Amnesty International Magazine will provide you with the names of plenty of people on Death Row who were convicted on far more tenuous grounds; Ryan Matthews, for instance, who was sentenced to death at age 17 for a murder which, 5 long years later, DNA evidence proved he didn't commit. Ryan is, in fact, the third juvenile offender in Louisiana to be sentenced to death for a crime of which he was later proved innocent; these three were lucky enough to be retried before the sentence was carried out. Anyone care to make a guess how many innocent people weren't so lucky?

So back to Jacko. It seems to me that the man (?) has no possibility of a fair trial, and that part of the blame for this lies with his own publicity machine. I don't like him, and if you put a gun to my head and demanded an opinion, I'd probably have to say I think he's as guilty as sin, but with so much money and publicity being thrown around I doubt very much we'll ever know the truth. If the boy in question really was abused, then shame on his family for allowing it; would you let your child spend nights alone with a man with such a dubious reputation? After the Jordy Chandler case (and exactly who in this world pays $X,000,000 hush-money if they're innocent, anyway?) surely no parent, however dim or Jackson-obsessed, would knowingly put their child in such a potentially dangerous position - unless they intended to make money out of it, of course, which is yet another thing I expect we'll never know.

So on one side, we have a person who, by most people's standards, is a loony-tune. I'd weep tears of blood if my daughter were so deeply unhappy with herself that she had to have her face sliced and diced the way Jackson has, if she were so emotionally dysfunctional that she couldn't have a relationship with a human being, if she inflicted her own misery on the children she had to pay someone else to have. Sad as it is, though, there's no law against being a danger to yourself, apparently; what the jury is being asked to decide is, in fact, whether Jackson's obvious mental problems are now making him a danger to others. On the other side, we have a family so stupid (Oops! I mean "trusting" of course) or so avaricious that they put their son in the care of a man with such a soiled reputation. I'm of the opinion that, if Jackson is guilty, then so are they, and in all fairness they shouldn't get a cent.

This morning, on BBC News 24 (who should know better), I watched Jackson turn up for the first day of his trial dressed up (apparently) as Lee Van Cleef in a Spaghetti Western. It makes me wonder if, in his strange and dissociated world, this is just another role he's playing. I'd love to take a peek into his mind; like millions, maybe billions, of others, I watched the 1 minute video-clip he made to protest his innocence, and it made me feel somehow dirty, as though I were visitng Bedlam to laugh at the inmates. I don't doubt that he at least believes what he's saying, but when you look at that mad, ravaged face, you have to wonder if what he believes has any connection with "reality" at all.

Another source of wonder to me is that black civil rights organisations are so willing to support him, given that he's spent so much time and effort on being as un-black as possible. This is not a race issue, so why are so many legitimate campaigners for social justice ready to pick up the race card he had the nerve to play? Nothing about this trial, as far as I can see, is about Jackson's ethnic background; he's not being prosecuted because he's black(ish), but because he's accused of child abuse. He certainly isn't poor, oppressed or in need of funding. No-one has the right to pre-judge him, for or against. As it is, Jackson seems to be deliberately confusing support with proof; "Look how many people believe in me, I must be innocent". If that were true, then we'd all be apologising to the ghost of Adolf Hitler. As for the "fans" who travel across half the world to "support" him, what exactly do they think they can acheive? None of us have access to the facts, and whatever the outcome of the trial there'll still be people who believe he was either unjustly condemned or that he got off scot free.

Even though I'm not interested in Jackson as a person, I am interested in this trial; what's really on the stand here is the American justice system, and how far that system can be manipulated by money and fame. Jury selection must have been a bitch; even people who really aren't interested or prejudiced for or against would have to have lived in a cave for the last year in order to avoid the publicity. Child abuse is the bete noire of Western Society, something we all have strong opinions about. There's no middle ground here; on one side we have the people who do it, and on the other side - well, the rest of the world, I most sincerely hope. Virtually every other crime, up to and including murder, can have some mitigating factors; child abuse doesn't, can't, and should never have.

I'm also interested in what will happen to Jackson if he does go down. We all know what usually happens to "nonces" in prison, and I know that, personally, in my heart of hearts, I don't really care. I know I should, I know that the human rights of paedophiles ought to be as important to me as the human rights of any other section of society, but they just aren't. Far too often, in my opinion, abusers get off with ridiculously light sentences, so why should I care what happens to them on the inside? It won't be as bad as the physical and emotional damage suffered by their child-victims, after all. But somehow I don't see Jackson, however the trial goes, ever being subjected to the ordeals that paedophiles usually face when they're sentenced to jail. That, he will certainly be able to buy his way out of.

Freedom of Speech

2005-02-26T02:29:00.000-08:00

In theory, I've already got it. I live in Europe, so it's my Human Right to get up on my hind legs and say or write what I like. Publish and be damned. Except it doesn't quite work like that; if I were to express my deep and heartfelt conviction that, say, Rupert Murdoch is the Anti-Christ (I don't actually believe this - the Anti-Christ would have more charisma) or that Coca-Cola tastes like fizzy horse-piss with added sugar, I'd be sued off the face of the planet. The fact that I'm no-one and my opinion is hardly likely to sway millions of consumers is unimportant; I wouldn't be suffered to live any more than a witch under Torquemada. The same goes for religion; for instance, I've got nothing against the Pope personally, he seems like a nice enough old chap (though we've never met, of course) and is probably quite sincere in what he does. However, his stance on contraception, especially condoms, is condemning hundreds of thousands of Africans to a slow death from Aids; if we're going to have such a thing as a Pope at all (and that's up to the Catholics), then I think we'd be better off with one who understood the 21st century and was willing to admit his predecessors may have got things a bit wrong. I don't understand how come the Catholic Church is so firmly anti-contraception anyway; surely Jesus didn't have any opinion on the matter, condoms didn't exist in Roman Palestine in the 1st century A.D., as far as I'm aware.

Things get even trickier if you want to talk about Islam. I'd like to state quickly (before someone fatwas me) that my ex-husband, the father of my daughter, is a Moslem. The only religious differences we ever had were over Ramadan. Not the theory or practice of, that's entirely up to the individual in my book. Our problems began because my ex is deaf and dumb, so I was the one who had to wake him up at 4.00 a.m. to eat and pray. I wouldn't even have minded that, except that I had be at work by 8.00 and deaf people inevitably make a lot of noise in the kitchen. Or mine did, at any rate; to this day, I don't know if he was doing it on purpose. The worst for me was when Ramadan fell over the Xmas period. I don't "do" Xmas in a religious sense, but if you've got a child you get sucked in anyway. So there we were, my family and I, quaffing fit to bust while Momo sat there like the Egyptian Death's Head, unable to drink so much as a glass of water. Not a situation calculated to promote marital harmony, and indeed that was the last Ramadan I experienced, as we split up later that year.

I wouldn't have minded so much if he'd been a Moslem the rest of the year, but apart from not eating pork you wouldn't have noticed the difference. He'd happily swill beer, smoke and chase skirt the other 11 months; I don't know Allah's opinion on people like him, but it seems to me that any God worth his salt would rather not have someone like that on board. But where would I be able to say or write that without someone or other getting offended? There's been a lot of debate about whether to include Islam in the Blasphemy laws, which of course are Christian in this Christian-by-default society. Personally I'd go for scrapping Blasphemy as a "crime" altogether; Incitement to Racial Hatred, yes, we need that now more than ever, but in a secular society I can't see the need for even the concept of blasphemy.

And censorship pops up in the most unexpected of places. I write online on several sites, one of which is the BBC "Get Writing" site. I don't think I'm a particularly foul-mouthed person; sure, I let slip the occasion "fuck this for a game of soldiers!", but who can really honestly say they've never let their temper get the better of their tongue? In fact, if I lose my rag with my daughter, I usually let off a volley of gutter-German; one day she'll study German at school and realise what I've been saying all these years, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. However, when I'm writing dialogue, it's often appropriate to use what my Grandma used to call "language". I submitted a short story to the BBC site which was mainly a dialogue between two police officers and a taped interview with a "loony"; there wasn't a gratuitous "fuck" in the whole story, just an attempt at realism. Criminal psychopaths probably don't say "Oh my gosh!". To my surprise, I got a Stern Reply telling me my work had been edited because the language used was "unsuitable". Someone had laboriously gone through it and asterisked everything even slightly contentious, regardless of context. It wasn't the story I'd written any more, precisely because I'm so sparing with expletives and when I do use them they're for an immediate and calculated effect.

So really our freedom of speech is limited by a lot of factors, because we have to tiptoe through life not uspetting anyone at all. The trouble with this is, as soon as you have an opinion about anything at all, you've upset someone or other. And if you aren't part of something, a Church or a political movement, you've got no natural allies; worse, if you do put forward an opinion, you risk getting jumbled up with one side or other of an argument, even if the rest of your beliefs are totally opposed to what you've been lumped in with. I've never in my life found any religion, philosphy or political grouping which I could whole-heartedly believe in, so I don't appreciate being called any kind of "ist" at all, and I don't have an "ism" to fall back on when my opinions are questioned. I don't have a Holy Book to quote from, I'm not one of the Chosen (it's my opinion that they choose themselves anyway), and even to myself I tend to define myself by what I don't believe in; there's a lot more of that in my life than genuine convictions, and I think that's a pretty average Western European philosophical position.

Here in the blogosphere, for now at least, there is freedom of speech. Until they work out some way to censor us, which probably will happen some day, we can all say whatever we like, and not bother ourselves if we offend some people. Here's an example; I personally believe all religions are bullshit. I'm of the opinion that they exist for lazy people who can't be bothered to have a personal philosophy, and of course for the enrichment of "spiritual leaders" everywhere. They promote war and hatred, however much their founders might have preached peace, and they give a leg-up to hypocrites the world over. I'd be very happy indeed if all the committed Christians, Moslems, Jews, Hindus and all other denominations just decided to call it quits. By all means carry on loving thy neighbour, embrace the positive, humanistic side of any faith, but stop trying to "Evangelise", worry about your own conscience, not mine. If people could bring themselves to act like civilised beings for the sake of it, and not because a God told them to, then I believe we'd be making a big social and evolutionary step forwards. It seems ludicrous in the 21st century to be fighting, actually killing human beings, for the sake of something someone may or may not have said a couple of thousand years ago. Let go of the tit!

So there you go. In that one paragraph, I've insulted about two-thirds of the world, because my own sincerely-held belief is that their sincerely-held beliefs are ludicrous. Don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of anything which makes human beings behave better, but in my opinion religion doesn't accomplish that. Once you declare for one side, whether Christian, Moslem, Scientologist or Moonie, however sincere or well-intentioned you may be, every person of a different religious persuasion becomes the "enemy", the "infidel", the "heretic". Even wierder in my opinion are the divisions which exist within religions; Sunni and Shia, Catholic and Protestant, Orthodox and non-Orthodox - what's all that about then? I know the technical reasons why some religions have diverged over the centuries, but does it really matter any more? Apparently it does, enough to be still fighting and killing over it in a depressingly large number of countries. Last year in Northern Ireland the news was full of Catholic children having to walk though a Protestant area to get to school; children, children, running a gauntlet of abuse and even physical violence in the name of their parents' religion. And this is Europe, not some poor benighted third-world country we can discreetly ignore.

It seems to me that freedom of speech is, or should be, more important than "blasphemy", religious or political. When I was at University in the UK, the British National Party (a bunch of vile racist thugs) applied to speak at our Student Union. As I was on the Entertainment Committee, I had to vote on this. I have a lot of anathemas (I collect them) but racism and nationalism are probably top of my hate-list. However, just because I personally find these people repugnant, I don't feel this gives me the right to censor them. So I voted "Yes", then stood outside the Union Hall with a banner and a box of throwing-eggs to protest about it. Censorship implies that we, the people, are too stupid or easily led to make our own decisions. Blasphemy laws imply that the religion they're institued to protect can't stand a bit of criticism. Somebody, I can't remember who, said "I disagree with everything you say, but I'd fight to the death to defend your right to say it", and that's more or less my position. Yes, I think it still needs to be illegal to incite hatred on grounds of race or religion, because people seem to be too stupid to see for themselves that it's wrong, but I hope the day will come when these laws will become as obsolete as the Blasphemy laws are today.

Appealing Ideas #1 - an occasional series.

2005-02-24T02:08:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I come across an idea which really pleases me. I don't feel the desire to have thought of it myself (well, maybe sometimes), or even to rush out and rip it off; I just like to roll it around in my brain like an intellectual Mint Imperial, letting it zing! across my mental cavities. Sometimes I come across some really novel idea which means I have to read a book several times, then read another few books just to cross-check, then a couple of books with opposite ideas just in case. Ideas like that are rare (so anyone who's read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" might like to check again) and to be savoured; who says there's nothing new under the sun?

Excellent though the above-mentioned book is, my favoutrite idea recently comes from somewhere completely different, from some books by Robert Rankin in fact. In case you have the misfortune not to have read Rankin, the idea is this; inside the earth is a big clockwork motor which not only keeps us rolling around the sun in the approved planetary manner, but, when we approach Armageddon of one sort or another, gets set back by The Controller (Ooooh!) to a point just before that of no return, with the precipitating factor edited out. No-one remembers, the world just rolls on. So we are, all of us, always, living in the End Times. The point just before Armageddon.

Of course, the idea of a big clockwork motor inside the earth is clearly preposterous, as Rankin himself (through a character) points out. He doesn't go into details but they're fairly obvious surely. We'd long-ago have run out of oil, for instance, because The Controller would have been tapping it from underneath to keep the wheels spinning; imagine clockwork big enough to drive a planet; lots of lubricant, right? Also, someone sometime in human history would have discovered it (the Greeks, probably, they were pretty good at that kind of thing) and forever after guards would have to be posted over every manhole and storm-drain to stop disaffected loonies dropping spanners down them. Spelunking would never have evolved as a sport, thus robbing us of many rib-tickling jokes ("See Kevin over there? From Accounting? He's a spelunker, he is!") and the occasional opportunity to get rid of rich but dull husbands ("He loved spelunking, Chief Superintendent - it's how he would have wanted it. And who could have known that the spare batteries had been taken out and used for the remote control?"), incidentally saving a great deal of money on coffins.

No, it's a nice idea, it really is - try rolling it about a bit yourself, ramify, man! - but it's not true - sadly, perhaps. We might never have discovered warfare, for instance, because who could afford standing armies when there were holes in the earth to be vigilantly guarded day and night? Unemployment would never have existed; "If you can't find yourself a hole in the ground, go dig one!" Hole-watching (no doubt dignified in every language with some such title as Guardian of the Netherworld) would have been quickly assmilated into every human society, and would of course have become riddled with heirarchy, corruption and nepotism. There's an obvious and enormous social gulf between, say, Standing Guard at the Buckingham Palace Stop-Cock and sitting in a roadmender's tent in the rain by a rabbit-hole on Orkney. If they have rabbits in Orkney, I'm afraid I don't know that for sure. It's a metaphor, stop being so picky.

If the discovery had been made by, say, the Chaldeans (also very good at stuff like this, but a millennium or so earlier than the Greeks) it would have become an integral and ritualised part of human society, right from the start. Astronomers today proudly trace the history of their science back to the observations of the ancients; it isn't magic any more, but there's no denying the aura clings. "I'm an Astronomer" has so much more of a ring to it than "I'm a Dinner Lady", although few (parents, at least) would deny that the dinner-lady is probably more socially useful. Apologies to the Atronomical Fraternity, but getting pre-schoolers to eat cabbage is a lot more challenging than calculating redshift. But I digress. There would have to be a name for hole-watching, of course, something suitably Greek or Latin (give me a moment, I'm freewheeling here), and probably a High and Noble Order of. In the Middle Ages the good holes (Paris, the Vatican, Hull) would all have been snapped up and become hereditary, and of course a whole social order of Holewatchers-by-Proxy would have developed; nobody would really expect Lorenzo de Medici (a total Banker, if you're not familiar with the name) to sit next to the main drain in Florence all day, for example.

Burial customs would be completely different; they wouldn't involve burials, for starters. I wonder, if humans had never buried their remains, if there'd be a noticeable difference in soil composition here in Europe, say. Think of all the billions of us who've generously donated our physical selves (often long before we've actually finished with them) to the earth's fertile bosom; would it be noticeably less fertile if we collectively hadn't, do you think? If cremation had always been the norm, what would Europe be like now? Don't just rush off to the next blog with an exasperated expression, when you think about it it's quite boggling. An intelligent person (or a statistician) could probably work this out with a bit of effort; take the most accurate assessment currently available of how many people who've lived and died in Europe since we wandered north from Africa, assign the average bod a carbon content, nitrogen content, H2O content etc., then work out how much of all that is lost in heat or light energy when the bod is cremated. After all, we acquire all our constituent elements from the environment around us; what if, as a species, we'd just not put them back?

That's what I like about ideas like this. A good one will spark off a whole chain reaction of associated ideas, ricocheting off in directions the originator (Robert Rankin, in this case) probably never considered. Or at least didn't think were funny enough to put in a book if he did. A really decent idea can keep me happy for a week; I'm a great fan of daydreaming, for instance - as, I suspect, are many insomniacs. It stimulates me to read other books, either by the same author or (in the case of ideas political and philosophical) opponents of the author. I don't really mind if the idea's a joke like the one above, or a serious new take on consciousness like the one I found in Dog in the Night-Time; if it inspires creative thinking, or research, in fact any expansion of the mind at all, then it's worth it.

Another, more real train of thought which came from Robert Rankin's clockwork earth was the idea that we're all, permanently, living just on the brink of global destruction. This is slightly scarier, because we are. I'm not going to bang on about Global Warming or nuclear terrorism here (plenty of time for that), but it's a fact that, since the 50's, the "First World" as a society has been living out it's own particular End Time. What make this different from the End Times of, say, 999 A.D., is that we aren't (or at least I'm not, the Seventh Day Adventists may be) living in fear of a wrathful God putting an end to His creation. We're living in the very real fear of man-made destruction; we know it can happen, we've seen it on TV. I was born in 1966 so I don't remember the "height" of the Cold War, when people were encouraged to build nuclear fallout shelters and the 4-minute-warning sirens were regularly tested; I can only speculate as to what it must have been like growing up in such a fear-dominated society, only decades after the most destructive war the world had yet seen. Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have been a bucket of icewater over the collective psyche of the Western world, already staggering from the reality of conventional war; Dresden to the power of ten in seconds, could anyone really imagine that?

So, a good idea, can really lead you anywhere, if you let it. Personally, I'm a great "evangeliser" of ideas; if I read something that hits the right chord, and that's so far anything from Philip K. Dick to Baudelaire, I get on a mission and threaten, bribe or cajole my friends and relatives to read it as well. "But you don't understand, I've got no-one to talk to about it!" I would wail to my ex-partner as I spent hours online urging people to read whatever I was into at that particular moment. Ex-partner, who reads a couple of books a year (in fairness, he does have a life), really didn't understand; for me, ideas are for sharing and discussing, batting backwards and forwards over a bottle of wine, disseminating as widely as possible. Which is more or less what I'm doing here, I suppose. And why I love the Net so much; once an idea is out there, it persists, and with a bit of effort I can find it.

The Unspeakable in pursuit of the Uneatable (cheers, Oscar)

2005-02-22T02:50:00.000-08:00

Fox hunting is "all the rage" here in the UK at the moment. People who do it are raging about the recent "ban", people who don't are raging about the total lack of enforcement of said "ban". I'm using quotes for this word, because in the opinion of many (especially foxes, I imagine, but they can't vote), this recent piece of legislation does not actually stop fox-hunting per se. Not only is it a totally unenforceable fudge (for instance, you can't allow your hounds to rip the fox to pieces any more, but you can use 2 hounds to "flush" a fox from it's den - and then shoot it), but the police have been told to "go easy" on the hunting community. The difficulty here, I feel, is explaining to the 28 other hounds that they aren't allowed to join in. And, as the Master of one Hunt remarked on national TV yesterday, "accidents do happen".

Of course, I can see that; there you are, innocently riding cross-country with 20 0r 30 chums, accompanied by a pack of hounds bred and trained to hunt and kill foxes, and ooops! Perfectly natural, could happen to anyone. It isn't often that we're treated to a real display of "one law for the rich"; many people take objection to the position that fox hunting is a "rich man's sport", but it is an undeniable fact that horses are expensive to own and maintain, especially trained hunters, and that this "sport" is far beyond the reach of most ordinary people here in the UK. The "ban" came into effect last week, and the public at large were treated to the spectacle of hundreds of people, including the Great and the Good of this fair Kingdom, deliberately and openly flouting the law. "So arrest them all!", a naive person might say, looking puzzled and perhaps scratching their head. Sadly, this isn't going to happen; we'd end up arresting half the judiciary, most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, and all of the Royal Family still spritely enough to sit a horse. It isn't just a rich man's sport, it's the favourite passtime of most of our aristocrats, plutocrats and even some politicians.

The naive person mentioned above might point out that, morally speaking, fox hunting is no better than badger-baiting or dog-fighting, and both of those have been banned in the UK - they still happen, of course, but people really do get arrested for it nowadays. However, badger-baiting and dog-fighting have traditionally been sports for the poor. Nobody important was upset when they were banned, and nobody important gets arrested for it. I've always considered myself quite a cynical person, but I'm still amazed at the power of these Lords and Ladies in a so-called democracy. If I decided to go out and break the law, consciously and deliberately, then I'd do it in the knowledge that if I got caught, bad things would happen to me. That's part of living in a society; you might not like the laws, you might not always obey them, but you have to accept that they exist and that if you break them, you'll be punished. That's life, right?

Not here in the UK, or at least, not if you're rich or titled. Amazingly enough, anyone actually tried and convicted under the new hunting laws (if that ever happens) won't even get a criminal record. Yes, I find that hard to believe too; at first, I couldn't understand the rationale for it. However, it's no great mystery; no-one with a criminal record can become, for instance, a magistrate or a judge, and the people who engage in tearing small woodland mammals to pieces for fun are, in fact, our de facto ruling classes. A real conundrum for our so-called Labour (that used to mean Socialist, for those unused to British politics) Government; the "ban" has huge public support, it was part of the Manifesto which got them elected, but now they're in power, they can't afford to upset the "Establishment". Hence the craven, compromise-riddled piece of legislation that was batted about between the House of Lords and House of Commons, taking up (incredibly enough) some ten times more Parliamentary time than the Iraq War. Yes, that really is true. In spite of 2 million people marching through London to protest against "Tony's War", only 11 hours of Parliamentary debate was needed to ignore the hell out of us. The (pro-hunting) Countryside Alliance, however, was important enough to force the Governemnt to back down again and again, and is confident enough in it's own untouchability to blatantly declare that they'll carry on hunting regardless. And they are.

It's years since I've been an active saboteur, my days of sprinting through woodland with bottles of lemon juice to mask the fox's scent are long behind me. However, in spite of disability and motherhood, this incredible display of arrogance and Government cowardice have made me angry enough to dig my wellies out of the shed and contact the Hunt Saboteurs Association again. I'm not kidding myself that standing around with a banner having insults hurled at me is going to achieve much; I'm a veteran demonstrator, petition-signer and agitator, and it hasn't made a blind bit of difference so far. Nevertheless, I'll be there; I think I just want to see it with my own eyes.

And having seen this for myself, I intend to buy myself a black-and-white stripey sweater, a small black mask, and a large bag with "SWAG" written on it. If you can break the law just because you're properly dressed for it and it's "traditional", then I don't see why I shouldn't just politely knock on people's doors and announce my intention to burgle them. What could be more traditional than thieving? It certainly pre-dates fox hunting.

To Blog or not to Blog

2005-02-22T01:27:00.000-08:00

I'm a blogging virgin - and that's a statement I never thought I'd make in this incarnation. I'm not new to writing or even publishing, but I fell off the world 12 years ago, and now I've made it back I've found that everything has changed. No more laboriously double-spaced manuscripts sent off with trepidation to publishing houses, no more compliment slips with "Please never contact us again" by return of post. Nowadays, I write a poem or an essay, post it online and voila! At least 3 people read it. Sometimes even 4. And now there's blogging; any fool can do it, and many of us do. Some people have something to say, some people just seem to like seeing their opinions in print, others seem to want to change the world. I'll be honest - I'd like to change the world, too. I'd like to take it back and get a new one. However, since nobody elected me God (as far as I'm aware), I'll just have to put up with commenting on it like the rest of us.

What I like most about the wonderful new world of the Net, which evolved whilst I was "away", is the total freedom to read and write whatever you feel like, for no other reason than that you can. Imagine a world where everyone blogged (imagine a world where everyone had clean water!), imagine if every single one of us could add their voice and opinion to every debate, and those voices were heard. Imagine if there were so many of us that the media and governments couldn't drown us out. Imagine the blogosphere (available to everyone, not just us rich Westerners) becoming the informal international parliament, a techno-crucible of ideas and opinion and (most of all) information. I wonder what would happen if, instead of just accepting whatever information we're spoon-fed by the media and politicians of every ilk, people decided en masse to find out for themselves the facts behind the spin and propoganda. What would happen if nobody could lie to us any more, unless we wanted them to? If there were so many of us that repression was simply impossible? Shall we try?