The Armchair Admiral

Thomas P.M. Barnett: A War-to-War Salesman....

...selling globalization on the appall-ment plan

One for the Doc: First posted March 12, 2003

When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point-the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.

Thomas P.M. Barnett [Rentboy Third Class, Naval War College, Newport, RI]


Admiral Thomas P.M. Barnett's new board game [safe for kids younger than three]. Cut out the dark areas and 'shrink the Gap'

Now that the latest scourge of all that is fine, decent, and upstanding has crawled out from under its rock to sell war to the masses, what is the American left going to do to rein in the sick and depraved bastards running the U.S. and the globe into a black hole the size of George W. Bush's hollow skull? Huh? Of all the low-down, cheap-jack, bottom-feeding scum suckers I've read touting wall-to-wall war for couch potatoes and the Bush administration, 'Professor' Thomas P.M. 'Pom-Pom' Barnett takes the cake.

This abysmal excuse for a military strategist and oil-baron apologist is not only of The Project for the New American Century crank-tank school of hosers and fucknozzles. He has taken to pornography as well. He now flaunts his weaponry and the U.S.' diabolical plans for world domination across several pages of the March issue of Esquire.

Being a good Catholic boy and happily married to boot, I do not buy Esquire. Nor do I feel any need to get my rocks off watching free-lance military hacks like Pom-Pom selling the world on their missiles or technique. Nor do I buy into anything put out on the disgusting Council on Foreign Relations site, another gutter-level propagator of propaganda for the Jesus Bunker heel heads.

My acquaintance with Pom-Pom [or Tom the Gong as he is now known in the gentlemen's clubs] is Dimitri's fault. He pointed me to the Esquire article and I thank him for doing so. Although it is always pleasing to have one's bizarre theories corroborated by those in the know, my satisfaction felt after reading Barnett's drivel, all neatly wrapped in a brown-paper headline, The Pentagon's New Map, derives from having spent the evening laughing at Professor Barnacle's paucity of gray matter.

His thesis has to be one of the most flawed policy documents to come out of The War Room. All it tells us, with the subtlety of Las Vegas and despite Captain Courageous's assertion that Saddam is a 'cutthroat Stalinist' running a historical dictatorship at the 'crossroads of civilizations', is that the United States has become the Soviet Union [circa 1950]. This tawdry piece of fourth-grade prose posing as a policy briefing full of contradictions is nothing more than an ultimatum to 'homogenize or atomize'.

Barnett synthesizes the lot in one sentence. A country's potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity. Nice, eh? As far as the boys in the Jesus Bunker are concerned, it's 'globalize or bust'. And by 'bust', they're not referring to models posing for Esquire. They're talking KABOOM!

Listen to this:

Instead, this new world must be defined by where globalization has truly taken root and where it has not. Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and-most important-the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

Globalization's "ozone hole" may have been out of sight and out of mind prior to September 11, 2001, but it has been hard to miss ever since. And measuring the reach of globalization is not an academic exercise to an eighteen-year-old marine sinking tent poles on its far side. So where do we schedule the U.S. military's next round of away games? The pattern that has emerged since the end of the cold war suggests a simple answer: in the Gap.

Deciphering the type of bullshit that mutates 'mass slaughter of innocents' to 'away games', we can ascertain that Captain Barfly posits an aggressive, military 'shrinking' of the Gap he so vividly sees and, indeed, maps for us [see beta of store game above]. For what is a military strategist without his maps?

What scares me is Barnett's assumptions about Africa:

Africa, for example, will need far more aid than the Core has offered in the past, and the integration of the Gap will ultimately depend more on private investment than anything the Core's public sector can offer. But it all has to begin with security, because free markets and democracy cannot flourish amid chronic conflict.

Why is it that the U.S.' idea of 'security' generally leaves non-U.S. citizens sweating profusely, feeling nauseous, gnawing at their clothes, and exhibiting most of the symptoms of advanced malaria?

Until we begin the systematic, long-term export of security to the Gap, it will increasingly export its pain to the Core in the form of terrorism and other instabilities.

Nothing but catch-phrases and soundbites, I tell you. How's this for one. Barnett defines the realization post 9-11 that the United States' military can be brought to its knees by anyone with a good idea, a 'system perturbation'. I like it. He's inventive if nothing else. And for this, The Pentagon's New Map must be commended.

Just who is this Thomas P.M. Barnett punk anyway? Here's the lowdown. I took PorridgeBoy out of the cupboard, shook the mothballs from his skeleton, fed him some porridge, handed him his kilt, and sent him out to dig the dirt on the ersatz Admiral. He duly delivered on the new boy from the Jesus Bunker.

When not fulfilling his daytime duties as a failed semen and general jerk, Tom Barnett hangs around the halls of the Naval War College, smiling at undergraduates, ogling officers, and offering sexual favors for free. Being a free thinker, I do not in any way decry Thomas P.M. his behavior. His bedroom prowess and little black book have secured him a place in the anals of U.S. military history as the one policy adviser to have found himself in the right place at the right time.

"Okay, cut it now, Tom," moaned George, rolling over onto his back. "If you breathe one word of this to Big Dick, I'll have your balls roasted on a Crawford barbecue."

"Don't worry about me, Dubs, I won't say a word," said Tom, easing himself out of bed before padding off to the bathroom. "I'm very fond of the Veep and, like you, I'd hate to hurt his feelings. Besides, I owe him. He gave us the go ahead to start fucking with people's heads."

Yes, unfortunately [and disgusting as it is], the above is true. PorridgeBoy says so and I have independent confirmation direct from Tom's pimp, the editor of Esquire, David Granger.

I placed a call to Granger and told him to leg it to my office. Offering me a glimpse into Tom's knowledge of the carnal arts, Dave spoke openly of Barnett's insanity: "This is an entirely unprecedented look inside the thinking that will guide our defense strategy over the next five to ten years. It's a fantastic and challenging story. In November, Barnett came and presented his philosophy of global conflict to our staff. It was amazing and kind of breathtaking. It made each of us feel as though we had a slightly better grip on some of the most frightening issues ever to face our country and the world. I hope it has the same effect on you, making your life a little better."

"You disgusting little squirt," I screamed at him, jabbing him in the face with a straight left that bloodied his nose. "I don't need to grip anything. Don't you see what this is? Those sick fucks in the Jesus Bunker are carving up the globe as though it's the Thanksgiving turkey. They're taking over. Millions will die and billions will be affected. They're power crazy, hopped up on drugs, and totally deranged. They have to be stopped. Perle, Wolfowitz, Rummey, Woolsey, Gaffney, McCain, Snowcroft, Feith, the lot... We should be pounding the streets of DC right now, recruiting suicide bombers and vestal virgins."

"Don't they get the vestal virgins after they've blown themselves up?" mumbled Granger through his bloodied kerchief.

"Not for them, you snide little purveyor of filth," I roared. "For us. Recruiting suicides is dangerous and tiring work. Get your coat. We have work to do."

A thought struck me. "By the way, Granger, who came up with the headline, The Pentagon's New Map?"

"Eh, I dunno." He shrugged. "The Professor, I s'pose. He was very particular about it."

I doubted it. I could tell the mark of a professional. Just as The Emperor's New Clothes have been shown to be even less than those he usually wears ["Fuckit, Laura, get out! I'm nekkid."], the Pentagon's New Map shows the hallmark of a bubble brain. But the skin-pic editor was blind to that which stared him in the face. I could see right away Granger had been suckered by the toy boy from the War College. He shifted his feet and looked at the floor. "He's not that bad, you know. As he says, '...military engagement with Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad is not only necessary and inevitable, but good.'"

I was losing my temper. Lowering my voice, I set the thermostat to freezing. "David, this guy would see 21,000-pound MOABs dropped on Baghdad. He quotes an anonymous Roman at the foot of his home page. A slave who has more than one master is a free man. Believe that and you'll believe anything. He wrote a paper with a couple of out-of-work strategy whores for the U.S. Naval Institute entitled The American Way of War. Among many other sick and abusive things, when speaking of 'the inevitability of American warfare', he emphasizes the need to 'maintain a capacity to reverse significant acts of aggression within a security system we seek to administer like an empire.' Now if that language doesn't strike you as weird or twisted in any way, I'd say staring at all these women without doing anything about it has turned your brain to semen."

"Have one on me," offered Granger, trying to slide out from under his civic duty. Looking at the menu, I was tempted but had to turn the sly toad down, reiterating my marital status and Catholicity. Granger mistakenly saw my willingness to uncover my staunch conservatism as a gap. He took it. "Look Mike, Barnett has annotated the world. More specifically, the world's hot spots and the likelihood of war in each of those places. For the first time, someone with a position in the government explains what we're really undertaking when we go to war in Iraq. It's not just about disarmament. Rather, the United States is redrawing the map of the region, we are shrinking the Gap [to use Barnett's term], we are changing the course of history by adopting a good-offense-is-the-best-defense strategy."

"David," I replied, trying not to give him a short, sharp smack across his balding pate, "I don't give a fuck. Literally and figuratively. It's dangerous and it's wrong. And, given his behavior, I doubt Barnett's shrinking any gaps. If anything, he's turning them into Grand Canyons. The President and Veep can hardly walk. Look, this diseased little rentboy is no good for you or your magazine. He'll tear you apart like a space shuttle. Don't trust him."

Dave's chromed dome flushed red with anger, his spectacles fogged and he demanded, "Why not? He's quite attractive - for a strategist."

"Read my blog, you putrescent little porn freak. His so-called NewRuleSets.Project is nothing of the sort. I've known what Big Dick's been up to for years and I've blogged the lot. He's not only every admiral's last resort as a bumboy, he's a plagiarist to boot."

"My God, you can't be serious?" Dave Granger is, if anything, a publisher and a professional. I knew he'd be surprised.

"Nah, fuck it, read my stuff. I know all about the Ring of Steel and George's instructions to wipe Asia and Africa. Look at my blog entry below. It's nothing new. Read Wayne Madsen's January article Big Oil and James Baker Target Western Sahara. Read Larry Chin's articles on the Philippines and the NSC-68 school's plans for Iraq. Haven't you heard of Blogger? Cluetrain? RageBoy, Doc, Doctor Weimeraner and the boys? They'd market this thing very differently."


Cut along dotted line and burn Africa for a clear idea of the Project for the New American Century's interim vision of the Eastern World with shrunken Gap

Granger's face was as blank as Dubya's brain and about as white as his KKK sheet.

"David, listen to me. Do not take this man seriously. Thomas P.M. Barnett has a couple of Web sites. Jeez, are you dumb or what? Going by what they have in there already, anybody could fill the Cabinet's minds with absolute crap. Even I have a couple of Web sites. Mine is hosted by Blogger and his is on GeoCities for Chrissakes. He calls himself an adviser to the Secretary of Defense, he's the Director of this dumb NewRuleSets.Project, he sleeps his way into the Decision Strategies Department at the Naval War College, and you take him seriously?"

I smacked his head.

"Ouch! Don't do that."

"Shut up, you fool." I was becoming impatient. "Look at the write up you gave the little nonce in your December Best and Brightest issue. A military strategist? The boy plays with himself in the bath. You call that military strategy?" I smacked him again. And again for good measure. And once for luck. "He's a flunky, you fool. He was head of the Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project. Good grief, man, he was a cheap spook. He spied on FEMA. That's all there is to it. Today, he's still a spook and an errand boy. You write him up as the brains behind every think tank pushing this vile national agenda of yours. What's this crap? 'Shortly after we wrote about military strategist Thomas Barnett in last December's Best and Brightest issue, he gave the Esquire staff a presentation on his theory of war and globalization, just as he regularly does for government leaders as an adviser to the Department of Defense. We'll never read the news the same way again.' Good God, Granger, he's a nobody. He's Big Dick's runabout."

David was cowering on the floor. "What do you want me to do?" he whined.

"Pull the lot," I said abruptly. "Pull the lot, publish a retraction, and credit me with the plan. Keep the maps though."

"Why?"

"We want the world and America to know what the GOP has in store for them. Tell them I blogged it first. Screw Iraq. This is much bigger than Saddam and some Kurds being massacred by Turks while everybody fights over the northern oilfields. These buggers want to go to war with the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. Rentboy says as much. What's worse, and this is where he strings himself from a streetlight, he assures us that Israel is a fully functioning model of globalization adrift in a sea of insanity."

"Well, aren't they?" asked Granger timidly.

I seldom lose my temper but I came close to it. "You blithering, blathering twit. You ignorant fucking pipsqueak. Have you not heard of the DSM-IV? Sharon and his jackboots are sicker than a pack of rabid hyenas on steroids. Fuck me every which way but upside down." I gave Granger a vicious shove as he advanced. "I meant that metaphorically, you twisted little pervert," I snarled. "You know the whole Carlyle Group, Carlucci, James Baker, John Major, Bin Laden and Bush saga, eh?" I asked him.

"Yep, I've been following you," answered Granger. "The plans for nuking Afghanistan being laid out for Clinton by Wolfowitz and Perle and sat on by Bush, the whole Project for the New American Century thing, the whores of the Caspian Basin recruited from the MIC, Zbigniew Brzezinski's Clash of Civilisations Theory, and the orgies under the Lincoln Memorial. The Russian takeover, the BP oil deal, and the nobbling of Argentina. I've been reading you, I swear."


Cut along dotted line and burn Africa and South America for a clear idea of the Project for the New American Century's vision of the Western World with shrunken Gap and the United States and Europe secured for eternity. Surrounded by water and isolated forever

It appeared Granger had been keeping up to date. Nobody else writes such rubbish. But I enjoy it. "Barnett's the PR boy for the meat sheets. Listen to this":

Show me a part of the world that is secure in its peace and I will show you a strong or growing ties between local militaries and the U.S. military. Show me regions where major war is inconceivable and I will show you permanent U.S. military bases and long-term security alliances. Show me the strongest investment relationships in the global economy and I will show you two postwar military occupations that remade Europe and Japan following World War II.

"This is the stuff of empire and nothing less, David," I said giving him a hearty smack for the hell of it. "The bozos in the Bunker have been starved of oxygen. They think this shit is new. Every Roman with a wreath around his head said the same thing for centuries. And we all know what happened to them. Sure, succeeding emperors had their differences but their agenda was the same. And this stuff goes back a long way in the States. D'ya really think all that shit around 9-11 is conspiracy?"

"Well..."

SMACK. It sounded like a rifle shot. Granger fell to the floor and I kicked him in his ribs. "Get up, you little sot," I spat at him. "You know all about the FEMA transfers and their visit to the towers the day before. You know... I phoned you as soon as it happened."

"Yeah, I remember..." Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth and he breathed with difficulty. "The fact that they knew..."

"Of course they knew." I felt like kicking him while he was down but hesitated. I'd need him later. "Listen David, Barnett knew FEMA inside out. He knew what was going down 9-11 because he'd worked with them on the Y2K issue."

"Whaddaya mean...?" I was losing him.

"Check out his NewRuleSets.Project Web site at the War College. It says here 'The NewRuleSets.Project began in the spring of 2000 as a multi-year, five workshop effort designed to explore how the spread of globalization alters the basic "rules of the road" in the international security environment, with special reference to how these changes redefine the U.S. Military's historic role as "security enabler" of America's commercial network ties with the world."

"So?"

"Check out the logo, you fool. You're supposed to be the journalist. It depicts the Twin Towers. This is the interesting bit. 'The project was hosted by the Wall Street broker-dealer firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which participated in the design of the three workshops held atop World Trade Center 1 at the Windows on the World conference facility [May 2000, October 2000, June 2001]. That particular workshop series ended with the tragedy of 9/11, as did Cantor's participation in the research."

Granger looked dumbfounded.

"Jesus, Granger, if you don't get your head into gear, I'll set PorridgeBoy onto you. Bin Laden, cut out of the Carlyle deal, threatened with the Taliban by the administration on Unocal's behalf, effected a pre-emptive strike against the enemy. What was the best target and who was worst hit?"

"Cantor Fitzgerald? Lutnick, the guy who cancelled his employee's paychecks? The World Trade Center? Who?"

"Both. All of them, you idiot. Cantor Fitzgerald lost more employees than any other company in the World Trade Center attacks. Up on floors 101 and 103-105, they accounted for a quarter of the total. As for the people who served them their meals in the Windows on the World restaurant... hmm. And why? I'll tell you why. It's because our boys in the Jesus Bunker want to rule the world. Some payback, eh? What do you think the average Cantor Fitzgerald employee knew of what was going down? What did Lutnick know? It probably doesn't matter. The system's rotten to the core. What's more, with Barrow Boy Barnett on the loose, we can look forward to far worse."

"Are you sure?"

"Christ, Granger, you're supposed to be a journalist. He's behind this shit. He gave you the headline for the dumb article. We've been yabbering about this stuff on the blogs for well over a year now. Now that some microbe is set loose from the Jesus Bunker to infect us with their thought processes, which verify all our worst nightmares, you suddenly start doubting it?"

"No, no, I don't, I promise. What do you want me to write?"

Hell, if there's one thing I really appreciate, it's a free press. I scribbled some copy and let Granger go. It has to do with Pom-Pom Barnett's role in the bombing of the World Trade Center. It'll run in Esquire next month. We have to balance the books somewhat, eh? What irks me about the admiral is not that he believes his own propaganda. That's normal. What hacks me off is the way he loses himself in the density of his own rhetoric. Pointing out that state-on-state wars are passé, Barnett emphasizes the need for the U.S. military to scale itself to match its foe. He then tells us it will be business as usual.

It is America's continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that allows us to stick our noses into the far more difficult subnational conflicts and the dangerous transnational actors they spawn. I know most Americans do not want to hear this, but the real battlegrounds in the global war on terrorism are still over there. If gated communities and rent-a-cops were enough, September 11 never would have happened.

Yeah, Bubba. So does that mean Americans can reclaim their civil rights? Heh... Sure.

Scalability is well and good but, in The American Way of War, he tells us why half the United States is camped on Saddam's doorstep. Following a hollow attempt to circumscribe a new jargon, viz. "Network-centric warfare combines the four military branches into a seamless, joint warfighting force...", he describes the speed with which the U.S. armed forces respond to crises:

The decision to go to war must never be quick, but a defining characteristic of the American Way of War is the growing ability of U.S. forces to execute operations with unprecedented speed. This is not so much speed of response as speed within the response. In other words, we may choose our punches with great care [strategy], only to unleash them with blinding speed [operations, tactics]. Most of this speed comes from increased battlespace transparency, although the speed of platforms remains crucial to protecting our personnel.

U.S. operations increasingly resemble hockey superstar Wayne Gretsky's "speed" on the ice. Never the fastest skater, Gretsky concentrated less on skating to where the puck was and more on skating to where the puck would be. The goal of the common operational picture within network-centric warfare speaks to this sort of speed: not trying to be everywhere all the time, but to be exactly where you need to be exactly when you need to be there.

What unmitigated crap. Have you ever seen anything as useless, unwieldy, and inefficient as the U.S. military? Me neither. But then perhaps we're not taking our Captain Without A Command seriously enough. Foreseeing the need to loosen up the military, he advises "Forward presence therefore will be valued more than strategic deployment from home, necessitating a major force posture shift from the current condition where 80%-plus of the force is U.S. based."

I'm telling you, that last statement scares me witless. Coming from a man without a conscience, soul, or shred of intelligence, it tells me the never-ending war is here.

Disconnectedness defines danger.

Yeah. The Admiral has a way of using succinct phrases liable to bounce back at him. Thomas P.M. Barnett has disconnected to such a degree we stand little chance of surviving him or his puppeteers. For a truly frightening contradiction of everything you've come to expect from the Bush administration, read Barnett and Gaffney's The Top 100 Rules of the New American Way of War, to be published in the next issue of British Army Review.

"GRANGER!"

"Eh?"

"Get in here. I need to smash something..."

"Screw you. Tear up the maps and conquer the world."

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. Edmund Burke

The Turning of the Key

Joe Conrad, TS Eliot, Bob Dylan and Me

Of dry bones, broken stones (shored) and hollow victory



They're selling postcards of the hanging | They're painting the passports brown | The beauty parlor is filled with sailors | The circus is in town | Here comes the blind commissioner | They've got him in a trance | One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker | The other is in his pants | And the riot squad they're restless | They need somewhere to go | As Lady and I look out tonight | From Desolation Row

Allan Moult gives me hope for the future. In a typically understated e-mail—you know the type; "Where the fuck are you"—he drops a URL to a site he's "having a lot of fun with — Leatherwood Online, Tasmania's Journal of Discovery." Yeah, well, I've always enjoyed understatement... Visit Leatherwood Online and get sucked into an amazing project reflecting the extraordinary lives of ordinary people in a forgotten country of great beauty. And sign up for updates.

Allan, as far as I remember, is an old-time South African who kicked the dust from shoes that had tramped old-time South Africa for too long. He once worked as a journo for The Star in Jo'burg but realized life had more to offer. So it has. Things are looking up for our Cobber from under Down Under. Leatherwood Online's preview issue is visually and textually stunning; and reminds me of much of that which we have here in South Africa. I'd have given my eye teeth to work on a similar metablog on Cape Town or the Western and Northern Capes but, so it goes.

Before we get down and dirty and start rambling (I've a two-month itch), I want to thank Allan for his typically South African / Tasmanian sense of PR. He's jolted me into realizing the need, after being offline for more than two months, to acknowledge the e-mails I've received. I also want to apologize to those to whom I've not responded, i.e. all of you, particularly those questioning my absence like good friends Tom, Frank and Tish, invitations to join the new monster of social software from equally good friends Michelle and Elaine, those offering the promise of stimulating and rewarding conversations through links and letters (Andie) and questions posed (the impossibly insightful and always delightful Yule Heibel).

Yep, I've been away... neither here, there, nor any place between. Sometimes we have go through these things in silence. Life has a way of working on many levels. I have heard the turning of the key. Right now, Wendy's just informed me that the ginger is growing. This has some bearing on what I have to say. Ginger is, after all, a tuber. One of the kids planted it in the garden (green and lush, shading a glaring sun) a while back and it's been lying dormant a while. We thought it was dead. It's not.

Life's like that. But, yes, on its own, it makes little sense, doesn't it? It ain't good to think of firing squads and bodies on the beach. And we are more than pubic hairs floating the piss streams of other people's lives (see Collected Phrases of Golby at 18). We are, in fact, the last twist of the knife.

Cinderella, she seems so easy | "It takes one to know one," she smiles | And puts her hands in her back pockets | Bette Davis style | And in comes Romeo, he's moaning | "You Belong to Me I Believe" | And someone says," You're in the wrong place, my friend | You better leave" | And the only sound that's left | After the ambulances go | Is Cinderella sweeping up | On Desolation Row

A while back, Joe Duemer bemoaned his students' lack of appreciation of literature, notably Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. By way of commiserating with Joe Duemer's ever optimistic view that some day he'll lecture an appreciative class, I commented that I was working on something. I was but, like much of that which I scribble, I chucked it. Why? Anger, I guess. Anger, not at Joe's students for being irredeemably dumb humans, but a deep-seated anger at the brutal, ugly, indifferent world I see us bringing into being. Anger at myself, too. Yeah, I thought... I'll show his students fear in a handful of dust. Joe's charges sparked something in me at the time and, because I've written much around and about Conrad's Kurtz and Marlow, I got stuck into a rereading of Victory. All the better to light a fire beneath their brains.

Yes, I was getting angry with myself. Life's a two-way street but I tend to lose sight of the other lane. My linear focus sometimes puts me on the side lined by the shrill riot squad of my choice. I don't like it. Victory became, I guess, the beginning of my recovery from an impotent response to the existential horror unleashed on a naive and unsuspecting world last year by the United States of America and all those who sail with her. Sometimes, words become noise for me, and noise a mind-numbing din suppressing all thought, deadening all feeling and passion. Reading Conrad and reveling in that of which Joe's young students have no appreciation, i.e. delicious irony, I found myself in Axel Heyst, the sorry fool, Scandinavian clown, and doomed chief protagonist of Victory. In Heyst, I could find that side of me I despise but pity (generously) and, in so doing, rekindled my empathy for the likes of the Swede, Kurtz, George W. Bush, Andrew Sullivan and evil people in general. I realised that, Blogging for Bush, I'd become my own Romeo. It was time for me to leave; to rejoin the human race.

In Conrad's words, I heard the world again and, rather than continuing to follow trains of thought set in motion by the likes of the Vonnegut and Sartre I was reading, I chased down the music of voices from afar. The harmonicas started to play the skeleton keys and the rain. And today, writing this, these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.



Now the moon is almost hidden | The stars are beginning to hide | The fortunetelling lady | Has even taken all her things inside | All except for Cain and Abel | And the hunchback of Notre Dame | Everybody is making love | Or else expecting rain | And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing | He's getting ready for the show | He's going to the carnival tonight | On Desolation Row

I've always thrown myself into either selfishness or outright rebellion. Perhaps I was looking to do the latter but found the former when, in September 2002, the Satan in the White House, George W. Bush, decided to go for broke and kill as many people as it would take to impose his ignorant will on the world. Unilateral mass murder and global greed are not my scene no matter how much they are ours and I spontaneously resist them. Neocons, neoliberals... don't split hairs, they're all the same to me. If they have a rallying cry, it is "Exterminate the brutes." Setting up Iraq's invasion had taken decades of planning, a staged Pearl Harbor incident—falling towers—for which Bush and his gang will never be held accountable, the obliteration of Afghanistan, and the deaths of tens of thousands. American acceptance of the neocon agenda and global indifference to its execution set me (and millions of others) to raging for a year. Bush and his handlers crossed the line in the sands of the Mesopotamian desert and Western civilization's slide to perdition became at once an irreversible fall into ignominy, disgrace and oblivion. Afghanistan and Iraq costituted an horrendous perversion of the daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.

I guess those of us shouting our possible futures lost ourselves in the noise. Our hollow rebellion achieved nothing. As Camus points out, "Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic." The truth is that people like the U.S. president and similarly blinkered radicals on the other side of the fence will forever come and go, mumbling of Dickleangelo. By the by, I thought Bush did a pretty good job with Tim Russert on the weekend. He has potential great potential and, should he ever find himself out of a job, could become a spokesman for JINSA or some other prominent Middle Eastern lobby group dedicated to obliterating world peace.

By last December, I was sick of it all. A dumb blogger, I'd picked up on stuff the papers have yet to write. The banality of it all left me numb. I desperately sought my version of Saddam's spider hole, my shadow under the red rock. When the drumbeat hooves of the Riders of the Apocalypse threaten your sanity, self-preservation takes on the rosy glow of a healthy alternative to shouting at the Thunder, no matter its ugly source. Joe Duemer then roused me by proclaiming his bemusement at his students' inability to appreciate the social and dramatic irony suffusing Conrad's writing. Instead of drawing useless conclusions from their myopia, I thought I'd ask them to consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as they. Why not? Let's exterminate the brutes (the politicians and the students). Let's educate them and educate ourselves.

I guess, from a blogger's point of view, others' inability to comprehend the irony of America's actions bemused or confused me more than most. I am, after all, a furriner, a professional and a hard man to boot. So I couldn't blame them (the politicians, students, media, bloggers, etc.). People are people. Some are mathematicians; some are carpenters wives… Don't know how it all got started; I don't know what they're doing with their lives. Either way, there is, as the i Ching tells us, no blame (well, sort of). But, yes, my idiocy had tripped me up before and I'd stopped writing altogether. Faced with the mute intransigence of an ugly world, I had become one of Joe's students, had lost my sense of humour and had retreated completely from the Jug jug jug jug of Desolation Row... It was easy enough...

Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window | For her I feel so afraid | On her twenty-second birthday | She already is an old maid

For the record, and before I continue, it's amazing how a two-month hiatus can span a dramatic refocusing of one's view of the world and other people. Since early December, I have met people, been places and seen things way beyond the experience of most. I'm not free to detail the minutiae of where I've been, what I've seen or what I’ve felt but, as they say, I am here to jot a note reflecting the sum of that experience. I'll just have to rearrange faces and give them all another name; something Andie Miller feels I might have done for myself. I guess I have. It had been easy enough in my dark state of mind to take a decidedly 'inverse' view of writing. Words, as I have said, became noise. The chatter of the blogs and the media sickened me. We are all, to a degree, self-obsessed, but this fascination with the self booms out of the blogs like an exploding Thermobaric Pressure Bomb. One of the most beautiful pieces I read on blogging recently, contained this passage:

What makes me blog? It is a primary passion. I have often realized that blogging and Internet surfing in general makes me sad. I can't forget one evening after reading a paper on an hermeneutics colloquium in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, when, walking through the city, I discovered its streets quite empty. I was surprised by the great numbers of internet cafes to be found, though. Lots of young people in carrels staring at iridiscent monitors. Look at all the lonely people, I thought. It made me feel so sad. I thought that Internet surfing was such a lonely, melancholic activity. A form of ontological hunger.

That's from Ernesto Priego's Resistances, Responses. Yeah yeah, I know. Things aren't quite like that. Blogging is, to put it simply (as Niek Hockx once did so eloquently), a way of putting stuff onto the Internet. It's called communication. Some have written great pieces reflecting the nature of blogging as a freely given expression of self in the past couple of months. They've written of the greedheads, self-promoters and traffic chasers with satisfactory disdain and demonstrated, more than adequately, that intelligent life survives. Chris Kovacs' explosive piece from the Korean Peninsula blew me away. I wasn't surprised by it—he always has been a great person and writer. Self-obsessed? Yes, Kovacs is self-obsessed. Does it matter? No. Why? Because our self-confessed punk always retains his sense of humour and, through it, shows his huge appreciation of life and other people. Life is not black and white, thank God. Kovacs is a rebel too. He'll make an unlikely bloody saint but I believe Father Christopher is leaning on the Pontiff to have Chris canonized by years' end.

"It's a long list, Father," slurred the Holy Father in sixteen languages.

"Fuck you, Lolek. They're my friends and if you omit them from the Heavenly Host I'll see you in hell," screamed Father Christopher (without malice—as a cheerleader would to his supporters on losing a primary).

Cardinal Ratzinger smiled nervously, signaled to the Vatican Guard, and then hesitated when Marek pointed his 30mm cannon at them.

"Oy yoy yoy," intoned the Pope, thinking how nice it would be to have a cup green tea. "It's a long way from Wadowice." He raised his piercing eyes, fixing my Spiritual Advisor to the end of his all-seeing Gaze. "I assume you've vetted the lot?"

"The lot—about the time the doorknob broke." Father Christopher's tone softened and, putting the palms of his hand together (as if in prayer), he bowed deferentially. "Saints all… the whole fucking bunch. Gave me coffee, Camels, books, music... those that couldn't wished they could. Wonderful people. They'd make a useful contribution to Heaven. Boost the Pilgrim Church on Earth and all that."

"Okay, then," mumbled the onetime Cardinal Wojtyla in Armenian, his thoughts returning to the afternoon spent with Magda on the banks of the Skawa. "We'll canonize them on Ophelia's twenty-second birthday."

"You don't want to do that," muttered Father Christopher. "She's already an old maid. Justin Timberlake's popped her iron vest."

"Eh?" The Pope brightened visibly, his eyes filled with a vision of Magda basking under Noah's great rainbow. "She bathed my feet with soda water, you know?"

"Ah, fuck it, I have to go, Your Holiness... er, Boss," stammered our Spiritual Advisor. "The New Agers and EGR Irregulars are battling it out at the Jesus Bunker and I have to give them oranges and lemons at the break. Besides, I'm having some people over for a workshop later this evening."

God's Vicar waved our leader out of the basilica. "Bring 'em on, boy. You go and take care of God's business. The peace of the Lord be with you always."

To her, death is quite romantic | She wears an iron vest | Her profession's her religion | Her sin is her lifelessness | And though her eyes are fixed upon | Noah's great rainbow | She spends her time peeking | Into Desolation Row

I later told Shelley that although I'd read some of Sartre's stuff as a kid, I'd never studied him. I therefore made a start, but didn't get very far. You know what it's like... you read about someone who's formulated a view of the world you take for granted and you think "Ho hum"? I guess I just agree with the guy. The ever-elegant Jonathon kept me going for a while because I wanted to answer a couple of questions he raised in my mind about the nature of angst, freedom, nausea, absurdity and myriad other clearly defined concepts. I never did get to comment on Jonathon's articles—which should not be missed—and probably won’t... philosophy is a discipline and I'm not disciplined. For what it's worth, the net result was a jaundiced view of others' interpretation of David Weinberger's statement, "We are writing ourselves into being." It's a statement with which I agree wholeheartedly, but it doesn't (with respect to David’s learning and insight) say very much. We're 'everything-ing' ourselves into being. It's what we fucking do... heh.

At some stage, Father Christopher's demented chattering doll and manservant RageBoy stuck up a poster of the movie Being There on my Spiritual Advisor's site. I liked it. Despite protestations by the whole blogging community, RageBoy is on the list Father Christopher has given to the Pope. I guess there is hope, even for one as depraved and irredeemable as RB. The juxtaposition of those two words, "being" and "there", is awesome. It's the story we tell ourselves. It keeps us going. It turns Desolation Row into Kovacs' street party. Mind you, they've never been very different. But, go on, admit it. We're a hopeless bunch of hosers, doomed to an eternal state of becoming.

However, if we can get people like Joe Duemer's students to wake up and smell the horror, this need not be what we professionals like to call a bad thing. There will no longer be any need to peek or judge. Once you've been to Heaven, you'll always remember Hell. For a while, though, (and forgetting Hell, Heaven, Hell fuck) I found myself chained to Roquentin's tree. When life is reduced to a feeling that all we are seeing are instances of an infinite series of possible instances, and we have some idea of the immensity of what we might see, words fail. Somehow, blogging loses its importance or value and one feels that which so many kind-hearted dullards wish for us, i.e. "Get a life." I had one but was so close to it, I got lost inside of it.



Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood | With his memories in a trunk | Passed this way an hour ago | With his friend, a jealous monk | He looked so immaculately frightful | As he bummed a cigarette | Then he went off sniffing drainpipes | And reciting the alphabet | Now you would not think to look at him | But he was famous long ago | For playing the electric violin | On Desolation Row

Besides meeting strange people, feeling the rise and fall of a drowning spirit and seeing things most would not wish on their neighbours or Dick Cheney, I spent time with Joseph Conrad. Among other things, of course. Victory, in which pessimism and negation driven by a shared guilt triumph over love and devotion, tells the sad tale of the doomed Swede Axel Heyst, his equally tragic Lena and a twisted set of villains, all of whom echo or mirror aspects of Heyst's repressed character. Set on the remote islands of Sourabaya and fictitious Samburan in the steamy Malay Archipelago, Victory sees Heyst, weighed by his father's bleak outlook, distancing himself from humanity by taking to the one-time coal-mining island of Samburan, over which the jungle crouches, humped in silence, under a smouldering volcano.

Heyst, like Conrad's Kurtz, is a man who believes in 'progress'. Samburan was home to his former employer, the Tropical Belt Coal Company and, when the company pulls out, Heyst decides to stay behind. His decision did not surprise me. At the outset, Conrad spells out our commitment to hoarding natural reserves.

"There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as 'black diamonds.' Both these commodities represent wealth, but coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one's waistcoat pocket — but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel."

Heyst should've worked for Bechtel. Like all sedentary men of progress, he spends his life vegetating—waiting for the coal-fired volcano above and behind him to blow him back to life, extinction, or a Washington D.C. think tank.

Much like the ginger tuber I spoke of earlier, Heyst goes into a self-imposed hibernation, neither living nor dead, with a little patience. And much like the colonial invaders of the Congo or Iraq, he pays no heed to the people who control his life and movement on the island; his Ariel-like Chinese servant Wang, or the Alfuro people who zealously retain possession of most of the island. Wang, to whom the sexually ambivalent and ultimately impotent Heyst relinquishes his manhood in the form of his revolver and his safety—his keys, typifies the European abroad. He is Kurtz without balls. A colonial, no matter his emotional or sexual inadequacies, needs to eat, however, and Heyst, nursing his contempt for humanity, heads back to Sourabaya for provisions. While there, he takes scornful pity on an English prostitute, Lena, harassed by the base German inn-keeper, Schomburg. Heyst takes Lena, a sensual woman, back to Samburan. The girl, not realising Heyst's vanity requires no response and makes a welcome of indifference, confuses her attempts to protect him for love. Back on Samburan, their futile attempts to coexist are marred by the Swede's lack of emotional commitment and inability to comprehend anything but a vague sense of his own desolation—which he projects onto humanity as a whole.

The raging Schomburg's altogether Teutonic and human response to Heyst's perceived onslaught on his manhood is to vilify the Swede absolutely, culminating in his dispatch—on the false promise of hidden treasure—of three inter-continental killers to murder the recluse. The languid homosexual and thoroughly evil Mr. Jones, his criminally insane 'secretary' and bisexual batman Martin Ricardo, and the apelike slave Pedro hit Samburan and, as the story burns to its inevitable close, we watch love's emaciated potential starve in a lush tropical setting that amounts to little more than an emotional desert. After the tempest, the island, purged of European violence and depravity by Wang, falls into the hands of the Chinese Ariel and his Alfuro wife.

Victory jerked me back to my senses and a healthy appreciation of irony—which, I suppose, I frequently equate to "humour". Balance, as they say, is everything and Joe Conrad has, if anything, a remarkable sense of balance. Accused of racism in Heart of Darkness, he uses homosexuality and misogyny in Victory to portray emotional dysfunction, sexual sterility and man's seeming need to indulge a ghastly appetite for gratuitous and brutal violence. If Kurtz's crime was a full appreciation of a barbarous life of violence lived under a thin veneer of sophistication, Heyst's was his infantile inability to realize any life at all.

Fuck the critics. I doubt Conrad was racist or homophobic. On the evidence, those making such accusations should look to themselves. No stunted bigot could produce such art. And if the motivating impulses in Victory are as suspect or contentious as they are in Heart of Darkness, Conrad's mastery of structure is as evident in the one as it is in the other. As each remarkable, brilliantly drawn character meets his or her match in another, we find their equal there too. Heyst's spectral former partner, the effete Morrison meets the mock martial masculinity of Schomburg (whose wife's resilience balances Lena's insecurities), the sexless Heyst meets the murderous violence of the sexually bent Jones, and the Oriental resourcefulness of Heyst's servant, Wang, meets the dumb obedience of Pedro's Caliban.

In perhaps the most gripping scene of the book and a piece giving full expression to Conrad's suggestive genius, Lena (who should have blogged as her sense of self relies on Heyst's verbal affirmation of her being) meets Martin Ricardo. If consensual rape exists, it does so because Conrad has written it. Lena's rape, so rudely forc'd and taken, is one of the finest pieces of writing I've read and should get even Joe Duemer's students steamed up. Conrad's artistry also allows for the most fluid yet tight narration. Time and sequence appear incidental only because they are not. Everything Conrad writes has something Andie Miller alerted me to, a force Poe called unity of purpose. Yet Conrad's is a unity of purpose based on artistic and human deception, mistrust and sexual ambiguity—and it results in an oblique style that is as sexually explicit as the novel's setting is unreal.

Victory's end is intentionally unsettling. Heyst's death by fire signifies—for me—his end while Mr. Jones's death by water foreshadows his and evil's eternal rebirth. Those definitely are not pearls that were his eyes. Recalling his lost partner Morrison, the emotionally and sexually detached Heyst's death was that of one of Camus's Byronic heroes, who:

"...incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action. To love someone whom one will never see again is to give a cry of exultation as one perishes in the flames of passion. One lives only in and for the moment, in order to achieve the brief and vivid union of a tempestuous heart united to the tempest."

Ah, whatever... I'd moved on, up, out, into and—it now seems a logical, albeit instinctual step—back to The Waste Land.



Dr. Filth, he keeps his world | Inside of a leather cup | But all his sexless patients | They're trying to blow it up | Now his nurse, some local loser | She's in charge of the cyanide hole | And she also keeps the cards that read | "Have Mercy on His Soul" | They all play on penny whistles | You can hear them blow | If you lean your head out far enough | From Desolation Row

Before I get into that though...

After reading Victory, I had no desire to reread Heart of Darkness. While the former depicts love's failure to penetrate reason and indifference, the latter hints at the difficulties we face in realizing it. I've dedicated several blog entries to Heart of Darkness and Coppola's Apocalypse Now because their narratives said a lot about where I was at the time. Now, as Conrad's just pointed out, we're the sum of our selves, so I'm aware not of having to keep on keeping on as much as I am of being in a different space. Like the Hanged Man, a rereading was not on the cards. Or like Madame Sosostris, so I thought.

Besides, we never—and Joe's students would do well to mark this, escape Joe Conrad or our own hearts of darkness. We'd rather deny our selves than admit that. Just ask Bob Dylan. Reading Victory, I remembered deciding on first hearing it in the late 70s that Dylan's Black Diamond Bay was not influenced by Conrad's Victory; it told the story with the same lyricism T. E. Lawrence ascribes to Conrad:

"I wish I knew how every paragraph he writes (do you notice how they are all paragraphs: he seldom writes a single sentence?) goes on sounding in waves, like the note of a tenor bell, after it stops. It's not built in the rhythm of ordinary prose, but on something existing only in his head, and as he can never say what it is he wants to say, all his things end in a kind of hunger, a suggestion of something he can't say or do or think."

But Joe's students wouldn't know what to make of this, would they? I mean, they're the sexless young men carbuncular watching old Cronkite reading the 7 'o clock news (let them have John F. Kerry). Who the fuck is Bob Dylan anyway? Like Heyst's, theirs is a deliberate, defensive act of detachment, damning them to an ignorance of themselves and a seat in what even South African sports commentators today refer to as the bleachers.

More (before continuing), I've a bone to pick with Loren, who feels Eliot's The Waste Land to be too cerebral and lacking in feeling. Loren, that poem has fucked with people's heads for decades only because their heads are fucked. I'm no teacher, critic or student. I have no formal education or inclination to delve into allusion. Yet, as a kid, the tempest that is The Waste Land went straight to my heart; not my head. Like Conrad, Eliot balances both the head and heart. Yes, The Waste Land is chock full of complex allusion, but that density stems from young Thomas's peculiar and, again, humour-filled sense of irony (he was 34 and the poem's birth had been a long and difficult one).

I guess, as is the case for most things in life, if you don't get the funny part, it's not worth the effort. Okay, back to the point... Which was? Ah, fuck it...



Across the street they've nailed the curtains | They're getting ready for the feast | The Phantom of the Opera | A perfect image of a priest | They're spoonfeeding Casanova | To get him to feel more assured | Then they'll kill him with self-confidence | After poisoning him with words

For my part, I've been listening to Eliot and Conrad through Bob Dylan for decades and, weird sod that I am, that small irony cracks me up. Why? Because since I've had Internet access, I've seldom found the three linked in any meaningful way. Most don't seem to get it. Yet, if Dylan's Desolation Row, structured much like Black Diamond Bay, is not Dylan's response to The Waste Land, I don't know what is. A while ago, Mark Woods pointed to Greil Marcus's Where Is Desolation Row?, in which Marcus likens the song to James Ensor's nineteenth-century painting, Christ’s Entry into Brussels. It's a good article, pointing to similar visions but, besides the vivid color and vibrancy of Ensor's painting, that's where it ends. You can find Desolation Row, with all the grotesquery, heroes, clowns and villains, as easily in Bosch or Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I found these artists present at a tremendous site by Rickard A. Parker detailing Eliot's myriad allusions, all of which, for Loren's benefit, do little to add or detract from a careful reading of the poem. (I've just stumbled on the site's map. At about 1,000 pages, it's a bloody resource.)

Eliot preceded Dylan. Conrad preceded Eliot. Ensor preceded Conrad. Bruegel and Bosch preceded the mad Polack by 400 years. And Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet from the thirteenth century from whom all artists filch, preceded them by another two centuries. Yeah… No single person writes a book, poem, or song. Out of place in a relativistic world, art is as much a 'becoming' thing as we are. Let me say this much. If, on listening to Bob Dylan, I heard only Bob Dylan, I would not listen to Bob Dylan. Genius that he is, Dylan writes and sings from a particular time and place, one born out Walt Disney's triumph over taste. Dylan's Desolation Row, as apocalyptic as it is, portrays a secular world dominated by allusions to consumer Cinderellas and Robin Hoods stripped of sex. Dylan is a lyrical hyperlink pointing to the underlying rot portrayed by the likes of Conrad, Eliot and those who came before them, and to whom they allude.

And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls | "Get Outa Here If You Don't Know | Casanova is just being punished for going | To Desolation Row"

In Desolation Row, wherein Eliot's unreal city spreads to cover the globe, Dylan defers to The Waste Land by specifically acknowledging both Ezra Pound and Eliot (fighting in the captain's tower), the former being the person to whom the latter dedicates his poem. This holds some relevance for Joe Duemer's little Bradford millionaires. Joe’s attempt to rouse his students from their river's tent might have failed, but Conrad's evocation of the Thames Estuary as a former dark place of the earth was not lost on Eliot, Conrad's words coming back to illuminate The Fire Sermon.

Eliot, with Pound's assistance, beat The Waste Land into shape over time. Initially, the epigraph of the Sybil from the Satyricon of Petronius was taken by a piece from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the passage in which, after Kurtz realizes the horror of a futile existence under the impassive gaze of a scornful crew member (yeah, leave it as it is... it reads fine), is dispatched with a grunt, "Mistah Kurtz, he dead". It's all heart and no head (and so much for the ignorant Black—his was an informed contempt echoing that of a Chinese servant on the lost island of Sourabaya).

However, as Rickard Parker points out in Exploring "The Waste Land", Pound felt the passage lacked the weight needed to convey what was to come. He was right.

Sheez... academics must be sick of this sort of shit... Eliot, in 1922, exposed our present sate of complacent idiocy. The Waste Land, as far as I can tell, and after listening to Eliot's reading, is Gonzo poetry at its best. Eliot's voice carries the truncated sneer of the latter-day poet as he slathers a sordid sexuality across the face of his work. His is the voice of a tired man who longs for the songs of the ancients to startle bored lovers' ears, to invest the walking dead with a sense of that which lies beyond their petty selves, to reignite the divine in the mundane, and return that which is holy to its rightful place. And, quite frankly, he sounds as though he couldn't give a damn whether people listen to him, Bob Dylan, Joseph Conrad or anybody else.

"Jesus fuck, it's about time," screamed Father Christopher, beating me about the head with an empty carton of Camel. "That's the lamest piece of shit I've ever read. Just lay it on the little fuckers. Give it to them straight and, em... hard. Heh..."

"Whaddaya mean?"

"For Christ's sake," raved my Spiritual Advisor, spittle speckling my monitor. "No Love Lost. Tell 'em. There's No Love Lost. It's all here—in the Jesus Bunker. And, of course, at Amazon as soon as I get it together..."

He appeared distracted, dropped the cigarette carton to the floor and headed for the kitchen. "I need some strong coffee. Check the PayPal account." He stopped. "Where's Marek?"

"He stayed behind. At the Vatican. Ratzinger asked him to spend the weekend with him at his place on the Starnbergersee. Marek squealed 'peekaboo' and cancelled his return flight. You'll have to send RB to get him, I'm afraid."

"Forget it. That little fucknozzle has a suicide-bombing mission in Boulder tonight. The New Agers are holding another Tofu Expo. Phil McGraw's in town with Oprah and a horde of emotional cripples in tow. Where're the girls?"

"They'll be here later. Our True Love Seminar and Workshop only begins at eight. Mel Gibson and the Caviezel boy will pitch at about nine. You fix the candles, incense, driftwood and copper?"

"Yeah. The fruited vines, synthetic perfumes, jewels and binoculars too."

"Don't forget the carvéd dolphin."

"Nah, it's ready. The sushi bar delivered."

"Good stuff. We'll be doing the Shakespeherian Rag tonight. Roquentin in the U.S.A."

"You betcha. We'll be looking into the heart of light, the silence." Father Christopher seemed mightily cheered and headed back to the kitchen, singing under his breath, "O O O O, it's so elegant, so intelligent..."

Now at midnight all the agents | And the superhuman crew | Come out and round up everyone | That knows more than they do | Then they bring them to the factory | Where the heart-attack machine | Is strapped across their shoulders | And then the kerosene | Is brought down from the castles | By insurance men who go | Check to see that nobody is escaping | To Desolation Row

I dunno... I'd started this as a note... If the priest wants a detailed exegesis of the works of Conrad, Dylan and Eliot, he can fucking well write it himself. Anyway, all we have left are the rats and sex.

While pondering the unwillingness of Joe Duemer's students to read a story narrated by a fictitious character who'd lived to tell Conrad's and our tale, I thought of rats; Eliot's rats. The connection made had nothing to do with the kids Joe tutors—I'm sure they're all fine people (reading a couple of their trial blogs a while back, I was mightily impressed by some of them). My thoughts of rats arose from my perception of the space in which Joe's students exist as opposed to that in which Eliot lived. Besides the obvious connections between Eliot's rats' alley and Dylan's Desolation Row, Eliot's fondness for rats (but, more especially, the cats that ate them) has always gnawed at me. How many of Joe's students have ever seen a rat, I wondered. How many have lived at all? What happens in America? Do they kill them all at 20?

In 1901, the British Imperial Army brought rats and bubonic plague to Cape Town. It was an ugly time. But it could not have compared with the ugliness of the front during WWI when trench rats swarmed the muddy lines of a four-year battlefield stretching across Europe and the bones of ten million dead. Surviving poison gas, millions of rats (each pair of rats would multiply four hundred times in a year) scavenged the rotting food from tin cans tossed over the top to litter No Man's Land, rummaging through piles numbering thousands of tins, setting up a nightly clatter that could be heard by the men in the mud. Gorged and emboldened by the ceaseless presence of the soldiers, the rats would snatch food, attack the wounded, run across soldiers' faces as they slept and would feed on the corpses of those killed during advances on the other side's lines. Starting at the eyes, the rats would finish off a corpse within a day or two.

One soldier described finding a group of dead bodies while on patrol: "I saw some rats running from under the dead men's greatcoats, enormous rats, fat with human flesh. My heart pounded as we edged towards one of the bodies. His helmet had rolled off. The man displayed a grimacing face, stripped of flesh; the skull bare, the eyes devoured and from the yawning mouth leapt a rat."

The war and the Spanish Flu Epidemic (which over two years killed close on 70 million worldwide) ended four years before Eliot published The Waste Land. Rats run through A Game of Chess and The Fire Sermon like an arterial tide, sometimes unmentioned. They and the bones of the eaten dead must have left millions of Europeans with ghastly memories.

Yet, listening to Eliot's reading of the poem, I was struck by how his familiarity with his work lifts our lewd and bawdy lives of smut, lust and bored indifference way above the obfuscatory smoke and self-important analyses of pious academics. Bringing it all back home, Eliot places his art where it and our lives belong—with the reader or listener in the street—on Desolation Row. In a typically British tone, Eliot's voice gives new meaning to many phrases—sometimes fleeting, sometimes lasting. His ironic humour, best evinced in his conversation with Stetson, tells me the First World War affected the literary editor's third decade profoundly. His "Come in under this red rock" reminds me of Father Christopher during his rebellious phase when, throwing over the traces and casting aside his frock, he terrorized the young sons of a local Smyrna merchant, Mr. Eugenides. Fetchin' Gretchen and a delegation from Rome backed by RageBoy put a quick end to that little scene, though.

A gallows humour must have carried many through the post-war years, not least Europe's artists.



Praise be to Nero's Neptune | The Titanic sails at dawn | And everybody's shouting | "Which Side Are You On?" | And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot | Fighting in the captain's tower | While calypso singers laugh at them | And fishermen hold flowers | Between the windows of the sea | Where lovely mermaids flow | And nobody has to think too much | About Desolation Row

Rats and sex. In Victory, Conrad uses a sexual retard and a supporting cast of inventive deviants to portray love's futility in the face of our often violent indifference to sex. There is as little love in The Waste Land, and as much sex. Eliot is blunt. Twentieth Century sex, as gratuitous pleasure, pain, duty, obligation, thoughtless off-loading or indifferent fuck, as rutting, rape or perversity, as hetero-, homo- or bisexual, or as style, fetish, or genre, shows us to ourselves in all our nakedness—Nero's Neptunes all. A complex person, Eliot's use of deeper or higher purpose (through his allusions to mythic characters) is ironic, humorous and devastatingly effective.

Wondering about the typist home at tea time, the rats scavenging rotting food from her empty tins; musing on her automatic hand, the broken fingernails on Margate Sands, Albert, Lil and Philomel, the wind under the door and other withered stumps of time, I thought not of the mildly seguing powers sex holds over me, but of the universes and worlds peopled by those to whom sex is not a sacred rite of renewal, a sharing of all that we are, a true and complete moment's surrender. Wendy and I recently watched a programme insert on bondage, wherein a university psychologist justified its increasing popularity as a therapeutic alternative to vanilla sex. Call me what you will, but when I get tired of vanilla sex, they can take me out and shoot me.

I thought of the ginger planted by my kids many weeks ago. It's now beginning to grow. It doesn't know or care, but then it's a plant.

Eliot and the tertiary psychologist left me wondering what hope or dream drives people for whom sex is automatic, unthinking, functional, utilitarian, something—among the other things—they do? What hope or dream is left for those who've been raped or abused; those for whom sex will always be an expression of a power representing not life, but violence or death? I don't know because I grew up to appreciate that moment's surrender as an unconditional expression of me. I guess their dream is a day-to-day reality, the dark and brutal world I see us bringing into being, the world in which anybody not busy being born is a busy dyin'. They stand condemned to hang suspended, nailed to lifetimes playing plastic Ophelias, forever romaticising the death of never-lived pasts. It was ever thus. I just need to be reminded of the fact more often than most.

Listen, Father Christopher's guests are starting to arrive for the workshop. Ah hell, it’s Dr. Phil and Oprah, with their horde of emotional cripples in tow. They’ve lost their way to the Boulder New Age Paint and Ochre Expo in Mudville. They’re entering the perimeter gates of the Jesus Bunker and Marek’s sent the Irregulars to the machine-gun nests. It's getting late—I gotta go.

I dunno... I'm as much into casuistry as the next Jesuit and I dig post-modernism in my own ill-informed way. But shit, you know, we've a lot to answer for. Unlike Loren, whom I admire greatly, I don't see Eliot's poem as negative at all. Why? Is it because I naively believe that, in having retained a sense of my religious and spiritual roots, I can choose to beat a path to redemption; that I at least stand a chance of seeing my own way through this mess? Am I, in my ignorance, perpetuating for myself a myth most intuit we no longer need? Am I, in my certainty of having got something right, reinforcing for myself the very narcissism against which my Spiritual Advisor and Mentor so valiantly wages Eternal War?

In short, have I adopted the fucking missionary position?

Well, yes and no but, really, I don't think so. The world has been a fuck up for as long as we've rolled in its dust. We are always of the idiot generation, the one that tries to impose real-world compromises on the un-real ideals that sustain us. There's nothing wrong in that; we're human. But taking ourselves seriously is a big mistake. Applying the same logic to ourselves as individuals, and expecting life to conform to our perversions—whatever their nature, is out-and-out lunacy. For Douglas Adams, the answer to these problems was 42 and for Brother Marek it's Peekaboo. I have no answers to offer but those that are there and they fall somewhere between the two.

Father Christopher's called for some ambient music. Gibson and Caviezel are rocking to the Black Eyed Peas and Where is the Love?. Dr. Phil is giving them decidedly strange looks and Father Christopher is fixing him a drink.

Allan Moult has just arrived with advance copies of Leatherwood Online. I wander over to chat to him. Coloured lights fill the garden and Sweet Melinda, Saint Annie and Angel (who just got back from the coast) are dancing naked in the Hyacinth Pool. Caviezel and Gibson have joined them. The Black Eyed Peas shake the earth, the stars stream like sparklers across the sky, and the halogen lights of the lookout towers on the perimeter fence sweep the surrounding forests and mountains. We know the Fundamentalists are getting restless, but it doesn't bother us. We're sitting on the deck overlooking the amphitheatre above the Jesus Bunker. I sip Coke; Moult whiskey.

"So you dumb bastard, how's tricks?" I ask him. He gives me a twisted smile, stands up, approaches McGraw and drops a Tasmanian Devil down the front of his trousers. As the pop-psychologist runs screaming onto the lawns leading down to the Jesus Bunker, the devil from under Down Under returns to his seat, and smiles.

"Ding-dong, bell," he muses. "It's his kind that sends the willing likes of Joe Duemer's students off to war."

"So it goes," I respond. "Trust me."

Note: A belated welcome to the sudden surge of visitors from Expecting Rain, a site dedicated to the peregrinations of the wandering troubadour, Bob Dylan. The title of the site is—obviously—taken from the song mentioned here, Desolation Row. Coincidentally, I'm reading a cheerful little book at the moment, Albert Camus' The Fall (among other titles). In 1956, Camus observed, much like Dylan:

"A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted."

Indeed. We shall see... For now, though, all I have added to this post is a link to an essay on Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, a book into which I'd dearly like to sink my teeth.

Yes, I received your letter yesterday | (About the time the door knob broke) | When you asked how I was doing | Was that some kind of joke? | All these people that you mention | Yes, I know them, they're quite lame | I had to rearrange their faces | And give them all another name | Right now I can't read too good | Don't send me no more letters no | Not unless you mail them | From Desolation Row

Pork Rinds and Pretzels

Pork rinds and pretzels...

She was the rose of Sharon from paradise lost | From the city of seven hills near the place of the cross | I was playing a show in Miami in the theater of divine comedy. | Told about Jesus, told about the rain, | She told me about the jungle where her brothers were slain | By a man who danced on the roof of the embassy.

Bob Dylan | Caribbean Wind

The first prisoners were moved from the runway to a truck, from there to a launch across the bay, and from there to the bare mesh cages which would be their home for the first few months of 2002, the original detention centre, Camp X-Ray. Those initial images of blinded, deafened, mute and bound men in glaring orange became a potent weapon in the hands of those who opposed the manner in which the Bush administration was coping with terrorism, particularly in Europe and the Muslim world. A country which would not countenance an international criminal court, the pictures seemed to say, had built a harsh international jail. The bizarre setup of Guantanamo itself, a fortified American toehold in one of the world's last outposts of communism, added to the sense of prisoners being cast into the centre of concentric circles of isolation. Cubans remember, if few others do, that the world's first concentration camps were built on their island by the Spanish in the 1890s.

James Meek | People the Law Forgot Part I

Atlantic City by the cold grey sea | I hear a voice crying, "Daddy," I always think it's for me, | But it's only the silence in the buttermilk hills that call. | Every new messenger brings evil report | 'Bout armies on the march and time that is short | And famines and earthquakes and hatred written upon walls.

The first thing that strikes the lay student of military commissions is the enormous power vested in the US deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, who is the commissions' 'appointing authority'. The judges - seven in a capital case - are appointed by Wolfowitz. Any judge can be substituted up to the moment of verdict, by Wolfowitz. The military prosecutors are chosen by Wolfowitz. The suspects they charge, and the charges they make, are determined by Wolfowitz. All defendants are entitled to a military defence lawyer, from a pool chosen by Wolfowitz. The defendants are entitled to hire a civilian lawyer, but they have to pay out of their own funds, and by revealing where the funds are, they risk having them seized on suspicion of their being used for terrorist purposes, on the order of Wolfowitz. Defendants need not lose heart completely if convicted. They can appeal, to a panel of three people, appointed by Wolfowitz. When it has made its recommendation, the panel sends it for a final decision to Wolfowitz.

James Meek | People the Law Forgot Part II

Of possible further interest...

• Sam Smith (May 2003) | The Iraqis Will Have to Learn Democracy Someplace Else
  
• Lt. Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., USAF (1992) | The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012
  
• Lt. Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., USAF (1996) [308 KB] | Melancholy Reunion: A Report from the Future on the Collapse of Civil-Military Relations in the United States

The cry of the peacock, flies buzz my head, | Ceiling fan broken, there's a heat in my bed, | Street band playing "Nearer My God to Thee." | We met at the steeple where the mission bells ring, | She said, "I know what you're thinking, but there ain't a thing | You can do about it, so let us just agree to agree."

Bob Dylan | Caribbean Wind

Turkey Joins Coalition of the Grinning

Bush Proves a Costly Trouper

Cooks Tour of Baghdad Causes Bad Acid


"Turkey has joined the Coalition of the Grinning"

Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief | Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief | Saying, "Tell me great hero, but please make it brief | Is there a hole for me to get sick in?"

Bob Dylan | Tombstone Blues

They tried everything in the book to get Turkey to join the party and give invasion forces flyover rights, but not even a $3 billion bribe did the trick. It was up to the party boy himself to give critics the bird this past weekend in what many, including Halley (to my surprise), regarded as a "brave and cool" morale-boosting exercise.

For my money, the sub who came up with The Turkey Has Landed, hours after news of Dubya's Persian Pork Party broke, took the cake. I think it was the Independent, but I could be (and often am) wrong. In the spirit of reciprocity, the paper's Phil Reeves and David Usborne afford an Iraqi opportunity to deliver his thanksgiving message. "To hell with Bush," said Mohammed al-Jubouri. "He is another Mongol in a line of invaders who have destroyed Iraq."

What have the Iraqis against Turkey?

It's taken the mainstream media a while to figure out that W.'s latest campaign stunt was a shameless Republican attempt to burn the Democrats in the great electioneering cook-off. It was paid for by the taxpayers, but at least they're slowly realizing just how cynical their PreZnit can be. Robert Jensen and Sam Husseini were out of the blocks at CounterPunch before anybody, running a scorching piece of satire, New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks, within hours of Dubya's return. They've since been followed by a more serious look at America's freewheeling Jamie Oliver by Dave Lindorff. In Bush's Baghdad Pitstop, he revisits war zones trodden by former U.S. presidents, notably Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam, and raises the possibility:

"...this latest presidential war-zone junket will someday be seen as a precursor not of victory, but of increased bloodshed, a wider war, and quite possibly, of another humiliating defeat for American forces."

David B. Livingstone puts it all into perspective at AlterNet with A Chickenhawk Thanksgiving in Baghdad (and confirms the Independent as the source of my favored headline). Calling the round-trip campaign photo-op "...a propaganda coup of the first order, replete with adoring camera angles and wildly cheering multitudes, all conducted under a shroud of Stalinist press secrecy", Livingstone pins the tail to the donkey with his assessment of the visit.

Just as the Thanksgiving holiday itself was the unintentionally ironic creation of a group of colonialists whose descendents proceeded to virtually wipe out an entire indigenous population, Thanksgiving in Baghdad 2004 served as an unblinking and unthinking exercise in reactionary gall, undertaken by a president seemingly incapable of comprehending the real meaning of his actions.


"Okay, who wants the left wing?"

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly | Saying, "Death to all those who would whimper and cry" | And dropping a bar bell he points to the sky | Saving, "The sun's not yellow it's chicken"

Bob Dylan | Tombstone Blues


U.S. media and public interest combine
to give us the Dance of the Seven Veils

A Note on Dylan Bob Dylan said that which needs saying way back when. I quote Tombstone Blues for a reason. Several in fact. Following the lead offered by Salome and John the Baptist, the U.S. taxpayer and the American money mogul have asked their chosen Herod, a flunkey of the dreams of empire and big business, that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein's heads be brought to them on a platter.

Herod had a soldier do the job for him and Salome got off on the gory result. Well, the above is the bang Americans get for their buck; an army of occupation, two iconic Arabs on the lam, and a trillion-dollar turkey. Like it or not, the dullards of the right must admit the symbolism is there. It's the reason most with half a brain continue to scoff at Bush's costly campaign jaunts and his spin wizards and PR people continue to trip over their repressed psyches.

As John Pilger points out and this sorry episode demonstrates, Bush and his centurions cannot help but "put the lie to their own propaganda".

Bush and Bob Set to Stay

Democracy to be Buried in 2004

When the velvet glove comes off, the iron fist remains


"We've got a deficit because we're at war."

“Different faces, but no regime change. We will be standing still and the situation in Zimbabwe will continue to decline.”

John Makumbe | Zimbabwean political commentator

With Bob Mugabe's threats to withdraw a suspended Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth, thereby pitting African states against their Commonwealth fellows, the power of tyranny is showing its hand. Across the Atlantic, George Bush's unashamed use of presidential privilege, taxpayers' money, pre-nomination Democratic Party in-fighting, and others' misfortune for selfish ends shows how easy it is for those who have attained power to cement their positions.

Occupying different sectors of the geopolitical spectrum, Mugabe and Bush might do the world a favour by showing democracy up for the joke it has become. While Bush represents powerful, private U.S. military-industrial interests, Mugabe is a self-made man, running his country as a Mom and Pop store for personal gain. Bush, an executive, has shareholders to whom he must answer. Bob deals with family. Both, however, are in it for the money and, where large sums are involved, people die. It was ever thus.

Now that Western media monopolies have successfully airbrushed Bush's crimes (his rape of the U.S. economy and illegal invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq), he is free to consolidate his beachhead on the Middle-Eastern mainland and his hold on the U.S. political system. As Democrats squabble over who should oppose the GOP death's head late next year, his political axmen are ridding the corridors of political power of all opposition, ensconcing themselves in the belly of a beast displaying a rapacious appetite for excess, deception and deceit.

Mugabe, promising retirement and a retreat from mainstream politics, is steaming ahead with plans to expel white farmers from Zimbabwe, crush his opposition and entrench Zanu-PF's position for decades to come. When the smoke and mirrors are removed, politics becomes a simple exercise in clawing one's way to the top and staying there.

Bush and Bob have much in common.


"We do not kowtow to erstwhile imperialist forces..."

M-Net's Carte Blanche ran a good insert Sunday giving a potted history of Mugabe's likely successors. Each is as loyal to Zanu-PF as the other and all are Mugabe men. Their accession to Mugabe's vacant throne will mark the continuation of Zimbabwe's descent into a spiral of violent self-interest, human rights abuses, hunger, disease and death. Mugabe's personal choice is his Speaker for Parliament, Emmerson Mnangagwa.

The self-proclaimed Son of God, former Zimbabwean Minister of Justice and State Security, Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) chief and all-purpose, bargain-basement mass murderer has all the credentials needed to continue Mugabe's rein of terror. As Security Minister during the early 80s, he was the hand guiding Colonel Perence Shiri's Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, a skilled assassination unit that slaughtered 20,000 ZAPU supporters throughout Matabeleland. Tens of thousands were tortured and many towns and villages razed. The Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference publication, Report on the 1980s Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, is still available on the Web.

A dab hand at the 'divide and rule' stratagem, George Bush need not send out U.S. special forces operatives to murder millions of Americans in the run up to the 2004 presidential elections. As much as the polarization of American society shows Bush to be hated, it also shows him enjoying more than abundant support. The Guardian's Gary Younge points out that a dearth of political debate in the United States has sent Americans scurrying back to traditional political homes from where they will cast their ballots. The silencing of debate on foreign policy (for which the U.S. is most hated overseas) means voters will not be stirred beyond their normal ether-soaked torpor. As much as the Democrats have stirred up opposition to Bush, the Republicans have countered. The GOP also has time, unlimited resources, and virtually every social instrument on their side.

In the unlikely event Bush should throw away a second term, John Makumbe's words quoted above more than adequately cover any U.S. alternative. Whereas Zimbabwean opposition members face death daily working a democracy seen as Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change's (MDC) best chance to oust Mugabe, American voter apathy in the face of an electoral machine hijacked by the incumbent will see a crooked, vindictive, and small-minded man poisoned by grandiose delusions returned to the White House.

I'm now taking bets on Zanu-PF and Bush being reelected next year, their positions disproportionately strengthened for having seen off limited, wishy-washy opposition forces and strategies, and their suspect victories having been deemed free and fair by international observers intimidated to an unseeing acceptance of flawed democracies not worth the price they charge for participation.


"Democracy is a Conversation"

So are markets...

Resource: Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference Report on the 1980s Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands

How to Drink and Drive...

...and Other Stuff to Mess with Your Head

Novel ideas to solve South Africa's road carnage



Asked a girl what she wanted to be | She said baby, can't you see | I wanna be famous, a star on the screen | But you can do something in between | Baby you can drive my car | Yes I'm gonna be a star | Baby you can drive my car | And baby I love you.

The Beatles | Drive My Car

Of 280 million Americans, more than 40,000 die each year in motor vehicle accidents. It's an horrific figure. It represents 14.8 fatalities per 100,000 people. Were 60 million Britons to drive like you people, 17,000 would bleed to death in, on, or around the mangled wrecks of their automobiles. Fortunately, the British are a sensible bunch and only 3,500 do so (6.1 deaths per 100,000 people).

What is it with you Yanks? Why, in a First World country boasting new vehicles fitted with the most up-to-date safety features, do so many people die on the road? I'll tell you why. I'm something of an expert in these things. It's George W. Bush's fault. He's the problem. Get rid of him and you'll wipe the smirk off every British car-wreck survivor's face. You'll all be able to drive wherever you want to go, whenever you wish to and at whatever speed you choose.

Hmm... were it that simple.

The above aside, I do remain something of an expert on matters relating to carnage, mayhem and bloodletting. Well, it fascinates me. There are several reasons for this, the main one being that I stand a bloody good chance of becoming road kill or mortuary meat. You see, although only 10,000 people die on South Africa's roads each year (almost three times as many as in Britain), we have 40 percent fewer people than the United Kingdom.

Despite there being plenty of space for us to avoid each other, a staggering 26 out of every 100,000 South Africans will die in motor vehicle accidents this coming year. Yes... 200,000 will die of AIDS. That we know. Unlike AIDS, though, road deaths are avoidable. Look at Britain. Just as there are reasons the British are so cautious - they live in a small, pokey place full of twisting lanes and Masonic traffic cops, are slowed by big red buses and never have far to go, there are several good reasons so many South Africans end up dying at their steering wheels.

Like those peopling the United States, we South Africans live in a big country. For our population, we have roughly the same amount of land per head as Americans and we travel similar distances. Yet, statistically, an American visitor to South Africa is more than twice as likely to die here as at home. Once over here, things get worse. Factors come into play that raise the chances of our visitor dying a brutal death.

South Africans do not, as I've pointed out elsewhere, have all that much money. In fact, the average person is unlikely to own a car. The average car owner is unlikely to ever own a new car, and the second-hand car he or she drives is, on average, thirteen years old. That's part of our bad-driving problem, but it doesn't begin to give us the whole picture.

In 1996, there were 765 cars for every 1,000 Americans. That's a fair whack of motor vehicles. In fact, it's a disgusting number. There are more cars per person in the United States than anywhere else on the planet. Down here at the Southern Tip, we are not blessed with an abundance of gas guzzlers. In fact, Uruguayans, Macedonians, Libyans and Latvians (as well as the citizens of 49 other countries) own more cars per 1,000 people than we do. We come in at 146 vehicles per 1,000 citizens.

That's six million motor vehicles or five times fewer cars per person in a country with a population an eighth that of the United States. Which has... Good grief, this can't be right... 214.2 million cars? Nah... it is correct. Jesus, you have 35 times more cars on your roads than we have here. Is that right? I don't believe it. It would bring your safety record (40,000 deaths per annum) right in line with the British. In fact, you have no problem.

214.2 million cars in one country. I've never considered such a thing... no wonder the environment's stuffed. Okay, let's just go with an arbitrary figure here. The average American is about ten times more likely to die on a South African road than on a North American black top. Tenfold approximations, when related to manmade disasters and other social ills crop up quite frequently in South Africa. It's a good indicator of death by unnatural causes.

Unless, of course, you're speaking of death by shooting (the U.S. lies a distant fourth) or rape (an emasculated U.S. limps home in ninth position here). In these savage arts, we have no peer. I have my doubts about the scoring for murder. How the hell do the Columbians do it? We shoot people. What do they do? The States does not feature, trailing a distant 23rd.



I told a girl that my prospects were good | And she said baby, it's understood | Working for peanuts is all very fine | But I can show you a better time | Baby you can drive my car | Yes I'm gonna be a star | Baby you can drive my car | And baby I love you.

The Beatles | Drive My Car

Okay, back to the roads. So we have all these old cars. But so do the Cubans, and they don't use their vehicles as cast-iron suicide vests. South Africans kill each other with cars because when their ammunition runs out (35,000 people are shot dead each year - again ten times as many per capita as in the U.S.), they get drunk. In fact, we get ten times as soused as anybody else. P.J. O'Rourke once wrote about it. He failed to mention that, once legless, we hit the roads.

Were such a situation to prevail in most countries, citizens would start muttering about 'law and order', 'effective policing' and the like. And that's where the motivation for this little reflection comes in. South Africa's largest mass-circulation newspaper, The Sunday Times, delivers some startling facts (via allAfrica.com). Well, they should be startling, but I've had my suspicions a long time and they don't shock me. How's this for a statistic?

South Africans have one traffic officer for every 10,804 citizens. In Europe, one traffic officer serves 800 citizens.

Heh... I knew the buggers had disappeared. Countrywide, we have only 4,181 traffic officers. That's the equivalent of 26,000 traffic officers in the United States or 5,500 cops to cover the UK. Says the Times:

Figures provided by the Transport Department this week revealed that: South Africa had up to 10 times fewer traffic police than considered desirable; and that ... There are only 1.32 traffic officers per 100km of provincial road. ... Wendy Watson, general manager for the Transport Department of Transport's Land Transport Regulation, confirmed this week that the number of traffic cops was 'very far below international standards'.

Duh! Wendy Watson might state the obvious, but she's not as dumb as she makes out. Apparently:

"...the situation [is] not as bleak... it seemed there were 3 826 Metro police operating in Gauteng, Durban and Cape Town whose job it was to help police motorists."

I don't like the sound of that. "...it seemed there were 3 826 Metro police ... whose job it was to help police motorists." You're telling me. Starting work at 07:00, I come home at 16:00. Each day, I see Metro police driving through the chaos. Quite what hours they keep is beyond me, but I certainly don't see them in the morning. Either way, they look tired; the driver is usually asleep at the wheel and his buddies are comatose beside and behind him. The Metro police...

Ah, forget about it. If you're keen, you can read of the Tshwane (Pretoria) Metro Police here. There is nothing anyone can teach these guys about corruption, state-sponsored crime or out-and-out thuggery.



I told a girl I can start right away | And she said listen babe I got something to say | I got no car and it's breaking my heart | But I've found a driver and that's a start | Baby you can drive my car | Yes I'm gonna be a star | Baby you can drive my car | And baby I love you.

The Beatles | Drive My Car

Anyway, the country's non-existent Metro police are included in the figure giving us "...10 times fewer traffic police than considered desirable". That they're not traffic police in the first place doesn't seem to worry the bureaucrats. Frankly, I'd rather have the army policing the roads. I've wanted to shoot quite a few drivers... Mind you, this is happening quite frequently. Last week, a guy was shot for jumping a red light. Ms. Watson goes on to state:

"In Western Europe and Australia, they have one traffic officer for about every 800 people, but they don't have people like the South African Police Service (SAPS) and Metro police who also do traffic law enforcement."

They're bloody lucky. In twenty-five years of driving, I have not seen a police officer (SAPS) pull a driver off the road for a traffic offence. Not once. Nor have I heard of it being done. I am willing to bet my last pocketful of small change it does not happen. This next statement I can believe. Apparently half the R32-million budget allocated to the annual holiday road-safety campaign Arrive Alive will be spent on marketing. That's about par for the course. I can go with that one. I wonder who's doing the marketing?

The Sunday Times goes on to quote Gerrie Botha, manager of National Standards and Guidelines in the national Transport Department. Gerrie, no doubt an expert on law enforcement who resents being tied to a desk, "...conceded it was 'possible that we have too few people'."

I kid you not.

"Our traffic officers are not working efficiently because they have a variety of tasks that they should not be doing," said Botha. "They spend 50 percent of their time in court either preparing for, or waiting for, cases to come up and capturing contravention information. I don't think that one should use trained traffic officers to sit in an office to capture data."

You don't, huh? Well, Bubba, you're in charge of national standards and guidelines in the national transport department. Do something about it. Is it any wonder we South Africans have a drinking problem? Or are prone to fits of anger? And just when we're fit to drink ourselves to a crazed rage, someone steps in to make us thoroughly depressed. (I've edited the following for clarity. The article is so full of typos it's just about meaningless in places.)

Raymond Holland-Chapman, labour relations officer spokesman for the Independent Municipal Allied Workers' Union, said traffic officers are 'overworked', 'underpaid' and 'highly stressed'.

"Metro police officers in Johannesburg for example don't only deal with traffic control but they have to do the same type of work the SAPS is doing on top of that," he said. Holland-Chapman said traffic cops earned between R5 500 and R6 000 a month and therefore resort to working overtime "...because they have to make a living". They are under so much pressure "the level of post-traumatic stress is at its highest level ever".

Silas Letsimo, Gauteng provincial Secretary for the South African Municipal Workers' Union, said that for a mere R3 600 to R5 000 one cannot expect traffic officials to put their lives in danger for their jobs. Letsimo said officers work more than the expected 40 hour week and are not even compensated for putting in overtime.

"This festive season they are expected to work much more than 40 hours. A road block for example may start at six in the evening and end the next morning, but the officers will not be compensated. The relevant departments are therefore not abiding by national labour laws," he said.

The danger, Lesimo said, is that officers are unhappy with their working conditions and this will affect their productivity. Morale was low among traffic officers and this was affecting their productivity.

My God. I sometimes do understand the frustrations of the gougers raping the South African economy. I really do. At R5,500 to R6,000 a month and working a forty-hour week, these bastards in blue are paid more money than most. They're either a bunch of shiftless, skinniving lead swingers or their union guy is a wanker. There is a distinct possibility both might hold water. The underlying truth, though, is that most don't do their jobs.

Anticipating carnage, we're now drinking ourselves stupid. The liquor industry has stepped in to help us return to our senses. They're putting warning labels on wine bottles "...to help reduce South Africa’s high rate of alcohol abuse". Just when you thought... yes, well.

"Hi, my name is Mike and I'm an alcoholic."

"Hi Mike."

"I'm here by the Grace of God, the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and the guy who put warning labels on wine bottles."

"Great stuff, Mike."

Yeah, but this guy really deserves a medal:

Winemaker Pierre-Jeanne Gerber, who has been working with the Western Cape province’s health ministry to create legislation governing the production of the labels, said he embarked on the project to highlight the dangers of alcohol abuse and foetal alcohol syndrome. “On these labels I state quite clearly alcohol abuse can destroy lives and should be used responsibly,” he said. A report released recently by South Africa’s Medical Research Council (MRC) said that half of all murders and road accidents and more than 60 percent of hospital trauma cases were the result of drunkenness. “I simply see myself as a frontrunner on something that will ultimately be done by all wine producers,” Gerber said in comments quoted in the Cape Town based Saturday Argus newspaper. According to the MRC, alcohol abuse costs South Africa at least nine billion rand (1.3 billion dollars / 1.1 billion euros) a year, with about 5.9 million men and 1.63 million women engaging in risky drinking - drinking five or more beers or glasses of wine at one sitting for men and more than three drinks for women. “The idea of alcohol warning labels and its effects is not new,” Gerber said.

I bet it's not new. Others with the same idea were probably laughed out of the room. It makes as much sense as my pack of cigarettes asking me if I'm pregnant or Los Angeles county officials telling computer vendors and distributors to lose master and slave as adjectives for primary and secondary disks. Mr. Gerber's wine labels will do as much for substance abuse as the Metro Police will do to curtail dangerous driving.

Note You do have two hundred million vehicles in the States. The British, who have 426 vehicles per 1,000 citizens, have 25.5 million motor vehicles cluttering their little rock in the middle of the North Sea. That's disgusting too. No wonder nobody gets killed. How can one move 25.5 million cars in such a small space? Why don't their cars fall of the edge?

Beep beep'm beep beep yeah | Beep beep'm beep beep yeah | Beep beep'm beep beep yeah | Beep beep'm beep beep yeah...

The Beatles | Drive My Car