Indecent Obsessions

'I am Gnossos.'

They'll buy you a suit of clothes | and pay to get another nose | so no one will turn you away. | You'll wear a tie and hope to die | if anymore you try to fly | from people with nothing to say.

Hi Chris

Yeah well, you know... [...yes, she does ... yes, she does]. Besides, somebody has to deal with the bats, locusts and frogs... Hmm... you're one sick bastard, my friend. Why the hell else would we love you so?

Mike

PS: Yes, it's all there. And more. I suspect you've been reading stuff off my hard drive, you swine. A couple of weeks ago (the day after the Hungarian Grand Prix), you posted 'it's up to you'. I was mucking around on my keyboard that evening, tapping away:

"Taking a smoke break outside work at the end of last week, I noticed a playing card, the jack of hearts, lying at my feet. Under a gray sky torn by a cold wind, its vivid color ripped me to the core. A playing card in mint condition does not materialise in a street full of beggars, office workers, motor vehicles and noise.

It was one of those "What the fuck! Who's messing with my head?" moments. With Lily, Rosemary and the bloody card on my mind, everything rolled over.

Nothing's been the same since. And the mind-freaking clarity of Locke's simple synchronicities does not help. Sometimes, I think he's usurped Father Christopher's position or, while hunched over the stenography machine under FC's office in the Jesus Bunker, has qualified himself as some sort of New Age Celestine Prophet.

Luckily (they say it counts), though he's arrived to steer me across the Styx, I'm still lucid enough to distinguish twisted from bent and projection from intent.

But his post opens my head as if with a can opener and I see Ouef cutting incandescent kings and aces, the scarlet Ferraris taking the Hungarian Grand Prix, Gnossos with a bottle of Metaxa and a plastic magenta straw in his left hand, cards in his right, images from Cidade de Deus, and the perfect, red-clad backside of a Budapest grid girl.

And the music, while still Dylan, has changed. Under the red sky? City of God? Fuck. Then again, from Cape Town to Boulder to Varadero Beach to every street, why the hell not? You never know just who might turn you to salt.

The jack of hearts? I've every and no idea what it means."

Okay, it was for both of us, but I tossed it. I was going nowhere fast (heh...).

So cut your hair and never stare | at people who ain't aware | that every morning they wake up dead. | Take off your boots and find your roots | and join the ranks of young recruits | who have a collectivized head.

Richard Farina

Adaptation

Of Passions, Kings and Orchid Thieves

Where time is a memory...



Maybe the ghost orchid only blooms in the minds of people who've walked too long in the swamp. Susan Orlean

'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood | When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud | I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

I'm lugging several books around with me. Having revisited Conrad and Eliot in January, I moved on (or should that be "back") to Camus and Sartre. Sometimes, it's necessary to retrace your steps if you're to see where you're headed. I've trawled The Rebel, The Fall, and Exile and the Kingdom, enjoying all three—even though I recognise them as old friends; mirrors on a wall. Afterwards, I felt something to be missing. Y'know the feeling... heh. So I moved across to Sartre's Words (I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it...), distancing myself from any association with the horrible little man's subtitle... of course.

On the Powell's site, Words is accompanied by an extract from Paul de Man's 1964 review of it, published in The New York Review of Books. The review is open to only those prepared to pay for it. Who said irony is dead? Anyway, I read the Sartre because he and Camus will forever be linked. I do not (as mentioned in a post below) pretend to understand or empathise with the philosophers, but I find the meaning in statements such as Sartre's "Hell is other people" in stories like Camus's The Guest (the other telling story in that particular anthology being the first, The Adulterous Woman).


"Boy, I'd love to find a portal into your brain." Valerie

And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured | I'll always do my best for her, on that I give my word | In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Still I was restless...

...and so took Milan Kundera's The Joke from the shelf. I think I've found what I'm looking for. I'm feeling more settled than I have in a long time. This edition has a foreword by the author in which he mentions the book's first publication in Paris with a foreword by Louis Aragon. I do not know the surrealists but have clung, since finding it last year, to the beauty of Aragon's short explanation of their form, A Wave of Dreams:

Dreams, dreams, dreams, the domain of dreams extends further at each step. Dreams, dreams, dreams, the blue sun of dreams at last drives the steel-eyed beasts back to their lairs. Dreams, dreams, dreams on the lips of love, on the figures of happiness, on the sobs of attention, on the signals of hope, in the yards where a people resign themselves to serving pickaxes. Dreams, dreams, dreams, nothing but dreams where the wind wanders and the barking dogs go out into the road. O great Dream, in the pale morning of buildings, don't be led off again by the first sophisms of dawn, those chalk cornices where, leaning over, you mingle your pure, weak strokes with the miraculous immobility of the Statues! Scatter these intolerable clarities, these bleedings of heaven that for too long have bespattered my eyes. Your bedroom slipper is in my hair, genie with the smoky face, stunning shadow coiled up in my breath. Take over the rest of my life, take over all lives, tide rising with a foam of flowers. Omens above the houses, visions at the bottom of pools of ink and in the coffee-grounds, migrations of birds on the laterality of soothsayers, hearts consulted by bloody fingers, announce-the times unwrap themselves from their draperies-your reign and your cyclone, adorable siren, incomparable clown of the caverns, o vision leaning back on the coral, color of falls, odor of the wind! more...

Yeah... rest easy, Allen Ginsberg, great voice of the darkling night.

I guess life is more about memory and forgetting than anything else. If memory serves me at all, Kundera wrote about this best in Immortality, wherein a poolside gesture by a woman named Agnes drives his reflections on passion and desire. But for me, now, most things have to do with Ludvic's insight while walking along the banks of the Ostrava:

"I was well aware that the nightmarish phantasmagoria of the landscape was merely a metaphor for everything I had tried not to recall after my encounter with Lucie; I seemed to be projecting suppressed memories onto everything I saw around me; the desolation of the fields and courtyards and warehouses, the murk of the river, and the pervasive chill that gave the landscape its unity. But I understood there was no escaping those memories; they were all around me."

Ever had that feeling? That realisation of your projection? It's decidedly weird, almost hallucinogenic. I project a great deal, but then I get Meryl Streep to act things out for me.


"You are what you love, not what loves you." Donald Kaufman R.I.P.

Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved | Everything up to that point had been left unresolved. | Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Last week, Wendy and I watched Adaptation on the box. Based on Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, which I have not read, I found it fascinating. Orlean developed the book from her 1995 article in The New Yorker, Orchid Fever, a piece that hints at far more than orchid-collector John Laroche's eccentric obsessions. A film is what you make of it and perhaps I make too much of this one. Be that as it may, I reckon David Denby's New Yorker review is a bucket of shite. He ends his critique thus:

But the distraught Charlie, to our amazement, is impressed by McKee's platitudes, and abruptly turns the orchid story into a violent melodrama after all. What then envelops Orlean and Laroche and Charlie (who writes himself into the story) is awful nonsense. Drugs, guns, car crashes, alligators—the movie becomes a complete shambles, and far more desperate than anything conventional filmmakers would fall into. It's hard to know how to read this mess of an ending. Is it a way of throwing in the towel after a long struggle and "adapting" to Hollywood? Or is it meant to be taken as a savage parody of selling out? The first possibility is sad, the second condescending to the audience. The trouble with experimental comedies is that it's often impossible to figure out how to end them. But at least this one is intricate fun before it blows itself up.

Crap. It's one of the best movies I've seen in a long time and, as time goes on, it gets even better. As I've said, I've not read Orlean's book and had not read Orchid Fever until starting this blog entry.

I came to the movie cold, expecting that which the blurb gave me, insight into the fucked-up lives of orchid collectors, a demented species of horticulturists, adventurers, crooks, smugglers, deviants and seed gatherers of an exotic type. I also expected to learn something of the plants. Orlean doesn't tell us much about orchids, epitomised by the elusive Ghost Orchid (polyrrhiza lindenii). The Ghost Orchid, in its role as the Holy Grail, is both the star and the villain of the piece.

The people tracking these elusive plants in Governor Jeb Bush's state of oppressive heat and tropical dis-ease are decidedly twisted but, just as Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had little to do with desert-bike races, high-octane drugs and crew-cut police conventions and everything to do with Dr. Johnson's quote prefacing it, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man," Adaptation has little to say of the plant and its latter-day hunter gatherers and much to say of the greater collector, i.e. people—whoever and wherever they may be. It is not only the John Laroches (Chris Cooper) who get to inherit the Earth. We too are "other people".


"Cut it down, Russell." John Laroche

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, | Poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail, | Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Adaptation is a love story. What else? What else works? Nothing. It had to be a love story, but it's an intelligent love story, where self-absorption, passion and obsession dominate a love relegated to fleeting moments of unseen beauty deep in the Fakahatchee swamps and its characters' strangled hearts. It's intelligent because, through the shambles of its evolution, it retains the strength and thrust of its frequently misguided human intensity.

It's not the usual love story because it has to do with one person, the viewer. No, not the stars nor even the abiding presence of that elusive state of delicate completion, the Ghost Orchid. Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), the scriptwriter from hell who eventually gets it and the girl, Laroche the toothless swamp-monkey, orchid devourer and main love interest, and Orlean, the fucked-up, repressed writer whose inability to express herself blows the movie to its conclusion are bit players, scrambling for their scattered lives.

In Adaptation, Orlean tells the story of her love-lost life. Okay, what the hell is passion? What is obsession? What is lust? I don't know, but I do know they're linked. We need all three and it's sometimes bloody difficult to tell them apart. To do so takes an insight and self-awareness that cannot descend into any of them. Lacking passion, Orlean certainly can't help herself falling into it. Bored and over-privileged (working for The New Yorker helps), she heads off—without a suitcase full of drugs and bats outside of Barstow—to find fulfilment in her character's opposite (Laroche), a cranked orchid collector with a bad case of life. As portrayed, Orlean (awareness) and Laroche (passion) are one-dimensional characters in dire need of each other if they are to realise themselves. "There you go. We're twins" says Orlean. Once plugged into the toothless obsessive, she definitely wants more and sets about rearranging everybody's psyches.

Laroche is a compulsive dilettante who flits—much like the insects that pollinate his flowers—from one interest to another. His saving grace is that, unlike Orlean, he's been whacked by tragedy to an acceptance of life as it presents itself to him. He therefore moves comfortably from one passion fest to another. But he lacks awareness or a sense of his quests. Orlean, aware of her sterility but as oblivious to others' needs or shortcomings as Laroche, is fascinated by the serial loser determined to crack the big time (cloning the rare Ghost Orchid) and life in general. But she tries, as he observes, to ride his passion to her fulfilment.

A normal person stuck in a rut where passion is another country and her husband has become a drag, she is desperate to claim a thoughtless zest for life similar to Laroche's. Her chief flaw is to see more in the flower hunter (he reminds me of John Fowles's The Collector) than a low-rent horticulturist or pointing finger. Before looking at herself, Orlean takes Laroche for the real deal, a toothless flower guru capable of cloning a million Nirvanas, and sets herself up to take a fall as hard as any Laroche has experienced. Orlean's redemptive potential lies in her intuitive grasp of Laroche's dumb acceptance of our need to seek a coming into being as magnificent as that of the Ghost Orchid, which flowers once in a blue moon.


"Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind?" Robert Mckee

Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there | With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair. | She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

That's where the story might have ended. However, movie rights to Orlean's book result in the obsessively neurotic Charlie 'Being John Malkovitch' Kaufman being assigned to script it. Kaufman, charged with translating a passion for flowers to the screen, tries to mirror Orlean's written reflection of an indeterminate inner reality. With a writer's integrity, naked authenticity and indomitable will (and without contacting Orlean and Laroche), Kaufman immediately spends half the film screwing his anxieties into a box with his brash but generally likeable alter ego, his lame-brain twin brother Donald. "Julius and Philip Epstein, who wrote Casablanca were twins," writing lecturer Peter Mckee tells Charlie, who is torn between himself and himself.

They weren't twins, of course. But then, neither are Charlie and Donald.

Kaufman's insertion of himself into the movie as a third, composite character—containing attributes common to both Orlean and Laroche—is a twist of genius. It doesn't show immediately. He gets nothing done fast and grows desperate just as quickly. His quest, seemingly altogether different from Orlean's or Laroche's, is no different to theirs. All three seek the Holy Grail, the fleeting purity of the Ghost Orchid. At least Charlie is honest. His desperation is obvious and, dragging his shadow behind him, he's as selfish as all hell.

To break the impasse—his inability to script Orlean's story (a fiction), Kaufman throws the three characters together for the second half of the movie and all hell breaks lose. This is a funny film, and Streep is a funny lady. "We'll have to kill him," she says, speaking to Laroche of Charlie when the latter discovers the lady and the tramp deciding to settle for lust.

Yeah, well, once Charlie, his brother Donald, Orlean and Laroche finish with each other, two characters are history and the other two indulge in some serious soul-searching. Cineplex idiots (for example, The New Yorker's David Denby) might find the going difficult when the movie takes off as it appears to descend into farce. It does not. Instead, it becomes a black-humoured journey to the heart of darkness and "the way things are around here", the end of the road for Laroche and, for Orlean, disillusionment and a return to the beat at The New Yorker. For a newly integrated, invigorated Charlie Kaufman, there is a brief flowering of the Ghost Orchid in a promise of some reciprocal sex and, who knows... perhaps love.


"I'm probably the smartest person I know." John Laroche

Now there's a wall between us, somethin' there's been lost | I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed. | Just to think that it all began on a long-forgotten morn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Laroche loved orchids but I came to believe he loved the difficulty and fatality of getting them almost as much as he loved the orchids themselves. Susan Orlean

The Ghost Orchid (Holy Grail, choices not taken, possible futures left unmade, or that for which we invariably long) retains its form throughout the film—even as it morphs during the second half in and out of the characters and they in and out of it. In having arrived at a level of adaptation balancing a swift flowering and reproduction with a seductive memory of its beauty, it has reached the taunting stasis of perfection. Hence our desire to possess it and, given our vile natures, kill it. Herein lies a delicious irony. The movie's characters, fictions of real people we take as being true, contrast sharply with the Ghost Orchid, a flower of which little is said but which we immediately endow with as much myth and mysticism as we have in us. Why? Because its perceived beauty and sexual significance mock our messy humanity.

It's only through neurotics, frauds and failures like Charlie Kaufman and ourselves and through realising the ultimate sterility and lifelessness of the Ghost Orchid itself that we come to understand that there is no redemption in perfection. Like our gods, we either adapt or we die. Ultimately, with death always answering life's immutability, both come together.

What's the message? I dunno... Can you realise yourself without other people? I guess… if you realise yourself in them. I guess too, the thing is to maintain the tension between our competing selves, between passion and obsession, ecstasy and boredom, fantasy and reality, being and nothingness. Yeah... in so many ways, this film is about the boundaries or limits we either do or do not set for ourselves. Charlie is all about boundaries and confining himself to them, so much so that, twisted with angst, he explodes into his doppelganger before finding himself a mix of the two. Laroche knows no boundaries and pays the price through social and legal boundaries imposed on him.

Orlean is the writer, the boundary rider. Knowing they're out there, but not having set hers appropriately, she explores the unknown and, in doing so, takes a fall but lives to tell the tale and mend fences.


"We have to kill him." Susan Orlean

Well, the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount | But nothing really matters much, it's doom alone that counts | And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

We all have our desired Ghost Orchids and, damn it, we need them. I'm all for orchids. But the stronger our passions, the more we project them and the larger our shopping baskets become. Sometimes, we're given opportunity to fill them. But I sometimes find myself hoping that, if confronted by one of my Ghost Orchids, I'd duck and run. Well, maybe not run; I'll just play things cool... thinking things through, you understand. Either way, there was no way Orlean should've opted for an affair with Laroche. She dropped her husband like a sack of shit and without explanation.

Orchids, perhaps of different species and types, can be grown, but they demand care and nurturing. A potential for love, fuelled by passion, is always unlikely to amount to much more than sex. Should it in fact be love, a love laid bare can tear the stars from the sky and render our and other loves meaningless. Common sense and a modicum of intelligence should tell one that messing with passion is a dangerous thing. It's the force that through the green fuse drives the flower and is sacred. Orlean and Laroche mess too easily with its power. We're not speaking self-castration here either. Restraint has become an altogether too uncommon word.

Nowhere is this more evident in the movie than in the mixing of Orlean's and Laroche's chemistries. He becomes her Ghost Orchid, she his collector. By plucking him from his natural habitat, she destroys him and a part of herself. And the scriptwriter gets the girl. An infinitely better alternative. Yup... were I given the chance to find that orchid, I'd probably step back... for all the right reasons, of course. Left untouched, unblemished and forever unreal, it remains out there and, in memory, always in bloom. Were I to change that (no matter the reality—even if dormant or dead, it lives), it'd surely die in me and, for the flower or myself, what would remain? It's a bastard, but I prefer the quiet life.

Passion is not a choice; it is a curse. I'd rather die on the road to Jerusalem or Camelot, or live forever at the edge of the lake than watch an orchid wilt.


"I'm sorry I have to do this, dude." John Laroche

I've heard newborn babies wailin' like a mournin' dove | And old men with broken teeth stranded without love. | Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn? | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Passions? Having ridden them to ground, we are all crucified on our passions. I'd rather have Susan Orlean and Meryl Streep tell me that than an asshole like Mel Gibson. Given their chosen subjects and their treatment of them, I reckon Orlean has, for better or worse, a far greater appreciation of religion and humanity than does Gibson. The God from Down Under is a fucking bore, another God killer. After reading several good articles on his film, I took the matter to Father Christopher.

For those who know me, this will come as no surprise. Father Christopher, my mentor and spiritual advisor, is well acquainted with orchids, gods, and sins of the flesh. He sees angels too, but we won't go into that now. The last time I brought it up, he beat me about the head with a stolen mitre and sprayed mace into my eyes. "You fucking amoeba," he screamed, "What the hell do you know of angels?"

Nothing, I suppose, so I left it at that. On gods, orchids and sins of the flesh, though, he is more forthcoming.

"Some think I'm a fucking misogynist," he giggled.

"I wonder why," I sneered.

"You little shit," he retorted. "They don't understand me."

"For once," I agreed, "You may have a point."

They say a prophet remains unrecognized in his own country. Well, somebody said it... But I'm no Boulder-ite and can recognize a prophet at thirty paces. And I can state, with a straight face and without equivocation, that I reckon Father Christopher has nothing but the utmost respect for people, whatever their sex, gender or proclivity. Why? Because he has known and overcome evil. More than that, he continues—despite insuperable odds (himself)—his quest to hunt down his Ghost Orchid.

I hope he never finds it.

We were spraying plants in the orchid house while Brother Marek squeezed potatoes into bottles outside in the rain. "So what's his buzz?" I asked, nodding in the direction of Gibson, crucified to the main gate of the perimeter fence surrounding the Jesus Bunker.

Father Christopher's face grew dark. "I found him breaking into the orchid house. We had a little chat."

"Eh?"

"Eh... what?"

"About what?"

"About why he'd want to pinch my orchids."

"And?"

And what?" People grow decidedly testy when it comes to discussing God or orchids.

"And what was the result of your bloody conversation?"

"He crucified himself to the gate." Father Christopher snickered. "But I just ignore him. He thinks he can take everyone along for the ride, poor sap. But it's his trip and his trip alone."

"You sure about that?"

"Well, yes. Besides a small amount of psilocybin. But that was only to loosen his tongue."

"And?"

"Like everybody, he spoke a lot of crap. His is what one might call a futile passion."

We could see Brother Marek finishing his work. After slipping three bottles into his pocket, he called the dogs and headed for the perimeter gate, passing Gibson on the way out. He threw him a bone.

"Peekaboo, Mel. I'm going out to exercise my anguish."

Gibson groaned. Fake blood seeped from his mouth.

Brother Marek stopped. He turned slowly to stare at the figure crucified to the gate of the perimeter fence. He shivered. The sky grew dark and the rain turned to a scarlet mist. Marek's eyes narrowed angrily. Father Christopher and I could hear the strains of Lord Randall drift in on a quickening wind.

"What did you say, Mel?"

"I asked God to forgive you," mumbled the Australian millionaire.

We barely saw the bottle pass from the pocket of Brother Marek's cossack to his hand. It arced through the rain and exploded to a shower of fireworks against Gibson's head.

Marek was angry.

"You want me forgiven, Mel? Hey, fuck, who killed God, Mel? You killed God, Mel. And you're still doing it, you sick fuck. You're doing it over and over again in cinemas around the world. And you're doing so in a vile and disgusting manner, you crass boor. Hey, look, no blame, we understand that. The King is dead, Mel, long live the King... It was ever thus."

Marek gathered himself and turned as if to walk away. He paused, turned back, and then marched on Gibson's spread-eagled figure.

"But why choose God, Mel? Have you no fucking self-respect? No self-esteem?"

He stepped back. He was shaking with rage. He moved forward quickly, slapping Gibson across the face, one, two, three times. And once more for luck.

"And now that you're killing Him, Mel, can you stop doing it? Are you sure He's going to live forever now that you've laid your grubby hands on Him? Nah, you can't, can you, because to you God's a collector's item, a fucking Florida orchid you hope will survive. You have to carry on killing him, don't you, Mel? Why? Because to you there is nothing but the violence, the brutality, and the gore. Why's that Mel? Because you're an orchid collector, Mel, that's why. You come like a thief in the night."

Marek spat on the ground. "You can kill your God as often as you like, but even a dumb bastard like you knows that you haven't the power to raise Him from the dead."

Lightening flickered in the East, illuminating a crucifix against the sky. In the far distance, a wildcat growled. The drumbeat hooves of four approaching riders sounded against a wind that began to howl.

Brother Marek appeared tired but content. He turned from the figure on the fence. "For an orchid thief, Mel, you're a dumb sap. Now that you've killed your God, you have nothing left. And I have nothing to say to you."

I turned to Father Christopher and smiled. "He's okay, that Brother Marek. I always did like him. Is he going to fetch the girls now?"

"Yes," answered Father Christopher quietly, a particular flower on his mind. "It grows only in the Andes, you know." He walked to the window, tracing a shadow on its pane.


"I just wanted. That's all." Susan Orlean

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes | I bargained for salvation an' they gave me a lethal dose. | I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

In his preface to The Joke, Kundera writes:

If a man loses the paradise of the future, he still has the paradise of the past, paradise lost. From childhood I have been fascinated by the folk tradition called The Ride of the Kings: a singularly beautiful ceremony whose meaning has long been lost and which survives only as a string of obscure gestures. This rite frames the action of the novel; it is a frame of forgetting. Yesterday's action is obscured by today, and the strongest link binding us to a life constantly eaten away by forgetting is nostalgia. Remorseful nostalgia and remorseless skepticism are the two pans of the scales that give the novel its equilibrium.

It is in this equilibrium that we find our Ghost Orchid, not crucified but suspended. "Since the ghost orchid's roots blend so well with the tree bark, the striking white flower looks as if it is suspended in midair."

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera's character Mirek says: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." This observation became little more than a fashionable aphorism, but it has always stayed with me. My struggle is not so much against forgetting as it is against what, why, how and, perhaps, who I choose to remember. Just as it is easy to confuse passion, obsession and lust, it is all too easy to confuse remorseful nostalgia and remorseless skepticism with their cousins, remorseless nostalgia and remorseful skepticism.

Perhaps that's why, with Camus's haunting words and visions absorbed, I have orchids and fences on my mind... a level of adaptation balancing a swift flowering and reproduction with a seductive memory of beauty and the possible attainment of a static and perfect peace. Ah well, screw that... I gotta go. The Union Central's pullin' out and the orchids are in bloom. I've only got me one good shirt left and it smells of stale perfume.

And there be orchids out there...

We're all one thing, Lieutenant. That's what I've come to realize. Like cells in a body. 'Cept we can't see the body. The way fish can't see the ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell.

Cassie — The 3 | Screenplay by Donald Kaufman R.I.P.

Well, I'm livin' in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line | Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine. | If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born. | "Come in," she said, | "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

Bob Dylan | Shelter from the Storm

Note Posted in March 2004 but, what the hell...

New World Disorder

Eliminating uncertainties...

I've not been blogging much recently, but so what? Many other people have been. For the past two days, I've found myself stuck at Kathryn Cramer's place, following the Scratcher story and relearning all that which I once new of quantum mechanics. Okay, it wasn't much, but for a mathematical illiterate, I surprised myself and, a couple of years ago, found it remarkably enjoyable. Today, having followed several links for dummies, I know infinitely more.

Look, the Cramer and Hartwell families are decidedly weird. They're seriously bright but seemingly ordinary people who delight in exploring all that which comes to intelligent minds. I've reveled in taxing my brain and watching the brains of others taxed. I've no idea whether Kathryn's father John Cramer and Shahriar S. Afshar have relegated Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg to the status of "has beens". I'm in no position to criticise any of these guys. When push comes to shove and even when distilled to PowerPoint, I give up on Malus and Furry (EPR Experiments) and the intricacies of the quantum handshake. That I'm able to hang on to the shirt tails of what they're into, i.e. pushing the outside of the envelope of possibility by redefining the rules by which we define ourselves, is enough for me.

But yes, blogging has to be simpler than this. Then again, perhaps not, especially when using MT. Please, would somebody help Kathryn get rid of her recurring comment spam? For now though, I see this tidbit from Reuters. Thatcher family moves to America. Ho ho ho... why the hell not? Let's have a couple for old times sake, Scratcher and George W. Bush's NY bash.

Don't feel like it? Then read Manuel Valenzuela's Cradle of Devastation (courtesy of Tom at the InformationClearingHouse), and the following, Public Power in the Age of Empire, from one of the most remarkable writers of our time, Arundhati Roy (courtesy of Bill Connolly).

In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of the distinction between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into society. This could be a sign of a robust democracy, but unfortunately, it's a little more complicated and less pretty than that. Among other things, it has to do with the elaborate web of paranoia generated by the U.S. sarkar and spun out by the corporate media and Hollywood. Ordinary Americans have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's al-Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba. it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the most powerful nation in the world - with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its history of having waged and sponsored endless wars, and the only nation in history to have actually used nuclear bombs - is peopled by a terrified citizenry, jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear. more...

US Threat to Africa Grows

Liberia and São Tomé paint the forward path


Hunting Bambi in Monrovia, Liberia

"We import fifty per cent of our oil. Supplier number one is Canada, two is Saudi Arabia, three is Venezuela, four is Mexico, and five is Nigeria. Folks have finally figured out that we don’t need to rely on the Middle East for oil. African oil is less sticky than the stuff you get in the Middle East, and much of it is in deep water far offshore, so the natives don’t notice it being taken, whereas in the Middle East it’s pumped out of the ground under the noses of Wahhabi fundamentalists. Then you have São Tomé, which is basically the only stable democracy in West Africa. It’s perfect."

US State Department official

Preoccupied with secrecy and media, we lose sight of that which lies immediately before us. Jon Lee Anderson, writing in The New Yorker, describes the horror of Liberia, a globally sanctioned, ongoing genocide. In The Devil They Know, he chronicles the life and times of President Charles Taylor and those living in "the United States’ bastard colony in Africa."

On my last night in Liberia, I was visited in the restaurant of my hotel by Samuel Kofi Woods and a social worker who provides therapy to Liberia’s ex-combatants. The social worker told me about a young man who confessed that it had been his "job" to slit open the bellies of pregnant women at a roadside checkpoint. He and his comrades would take bets on what sex the fetus was. In recurrent hallucinations, the man sees the faces of his victims walking toward him, and he shouts out at them, "It wasn’t only me!" This particular case, the social worker acknowledged, is hopeless, as is that of another man—a victim—he is treating. The man’s entire family of eight were slaughtered in front of him; one of his children was picked up in the air and literally hacked in two before his eyes. The man had been left alive "so that his suffering would be greater." And it was; the man was drinking and drugging himself to death. The social worker himself had to undergo counselling, he confessed, after he witnessed killers tear the heart out of a living man, then boil and eat it. It happened in broad daylight in Monrovia, just two years ago, at a gas station near the Eternal Love Winning Africa road junction.

Our New Best Friend

From the savagery of Liberia, where Kurtz's vision leaps from every shadow, Anderson takes us back a year, to São Tomé and an equally compelling piece, Our New Best Friend. The United States' interests in African oil are no secret but, should any remain, Anderson bares them. He writes of a country which, although its government is in turmoil following a coup last week, plays Paradise to Monrovia's Hell. Offering an F. Scott Fitzgerald glimpse into an African way of life and a political naivety soon to be obliterated by United States and African oil barons, Anderson writes of a party at the presidential palace.

One evening, Fradique held a dinner to celebrate the anniversary of São Tomé’s independence. Tables for about two hundred people were set in the front garden of the Presidential palace, an elegant pink-and-white mansion that once housed the colonial governors. It was lit up dramatically and looked like a big cake. Around noon the next day, in Independence Plaza, opposite the corniche, where a grandstand had been erected, a group of women were dancing, animated by free beer and Carnival-style music coming from speakers. Several men and boys had climbed into a breadfruit tree to get a better view. Amiable-looking soldiers wearing red berets and holding Kalashnikovs stood at attention when a security convoy drove up, followed by a cavalcade of cars led by two Mercedeses. One, which had a red license plate with the letters “PR,” for “President of the Republic,” was carrying Fradique and Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a tall thin man in a dark suit. Omar Bongo, the dictator of Gabon, was in the other Mercedes. Bongo is a tiny, natty man, very black, and he wore what looked like custom-made shoes with platform heels. His wife is a rather queenly woman, much younger than him and a head taller. She was wearing a great deal of gold jewelry, a gold-and-purple print dress, and gold-rimmed Gucci sunglasses. She ascended the grandstand and took her place next to her petite husband. Bongo has been in power since 1967, and has long enjoyed a close relationship with French oil companies. Obiang has held office since 1979, when he overthrew his uncle and had him executed. In the last few years, Exxon Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, and a host of smaller U.S. companies have secured lucrative deals with Obiang for a share of Equatorial Guinea’s estimated billion and a half barrels of offshore oil. Both Bongo and Obiang are exceedingly corrupt and exceedingly wealthy.

Attentive security men from the three countries stood on the grandstand, and there were more of them near the official cars parked at either end of the plaza, suspiciously eying passing theatre groups and undulating women in batik sarongs. A soldier on the roof of a building at one corner of the plaza surveyed the scene with binoculars. Two Arabs in suits—Obiang’s Moroccan security guards—stood at the back of the grandstand. Inebriated dancers and mimes swayed to the sounds of drums and flutes. A group of men were dressed up as women, some in headdresses and clothing decorated with mirrors and bits of gold. Several children jumped between sticks that men held on the ground and slammed together. Two men briefly and exuberantly simulated copulation in front of the grandstand—Mme. Bongo averted her gaze—and pranced off again.

Bongo and Obiang frowned stolidly at the spectacle, staring straight ahead through their dark sunglasses. Fradique, who was wearing a gray suit with a quaint bow tie, smiled and nodded, apparently delighted with the chaos. President Obasanjo of Nigeria was supposed to have been at the ceremony, but he didn’t arrive in time. His jet flew into São Tomé that evening, and he went off to meet privately with Fradique.

'The Americans want to build a naval base here.' ... 'Fuck 'em. Remember Mogadishu, Afghanistan, Fallujah, Najaf...'

Bongo, Obiang and Obasanjo are global players and hard men to boot. They are the future in a region soon to be dominated by the US. These realities come hard on the heels of George W. Bush's push to establish a global Pax Americana, and we must take them into account if we are to be human. Peace is the last thing on Bush's mind, the ousting of France as an oil-rich regional power the first. Is Fradique's ousting within days of the US president's departure from Africa coincidental? Coincidence plays no part in politics. Read Monica Moorehead's short article, Why Bush Wants Troops in Liberia and give Khaled Hanafi Ali's piece, The New U.S. Strategy in Africa, a thorough going over. You'll be hearing plenty about the Chad—Cameroon pipeline before long.

As noted in a post below, "...Liberia is just another bloody country - albeit a country that the US will use as one of its many launch pads for armed intervention and military takeovers in Africa. The Economic Community of West African States' [ECOWAS] decision to inject 1,300 Nigerian troops into the conflict as the first step towards deepening regional involvement is not good news. Close to 1,000 people have died in fighting around the capital, Monrovia, during this past week. Nigerian involvement bodes well for the Americans, whose newspapers appear to have missed the São Tomé coup. US and Nigerian oil interests are in synch as it were, and peace [read regional dominance] will be imposed with a zeal that should show up Charles Taylor's warlords for the kindergarten teachers they are."

Visons of hell. Despite Fradique de Menezes' return to power this week, he is monitored by a junta supporting the plundering of the country's oil reserves. Coup leader Fernando Pereira says the military will have the major say in determining the future of the country's huge oil reserves of some 4 billion barrels of crude. Iraq is the prelude to something far worse, the continuance of a US foreign policy dedicated to Shrinking the Gap, leaving the poor of the world to eat dirt and live out their lives in pain, pus, blood and abject misery. There's bound to be blowback though. Africa is not the Middle East. Should the US' proxies be unable to deliver, all one can say is, "Remember Mogadishu".

"I think Africa is a continent that is going to be of very, very significant interest in the 21st century."

General James Jones Jr. United States European Command

A State of Terror Too

George W. Bush's State of Dreaming

For the innermost decision | That we cannot but obey | For what's left of our religion | I lift my voice and pray: | May the lights in The Land of Plenty | Shine on the truth some day.

Leonard Cohen | Land of Plenty

...the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.

Rebuilding America's Defenses | Project for a New American Century

South Africans, schooled in the politics of state-sponsored terror, the "divide and rule" stratagem, and fortified by healthy doses of pragmatism and skeptism, remained unmoved by sentiment surrounding 9-11 commemorations this past Thursday. The Bush regime's despicable program of acquiring oil and other resources by invasion and occupation has ensured the evaporation of goodwill towards the United States and the growth of a rampant and vituperative anti-Americanism.

Thursday's ceremonies, replete with the nauseating schlock that shrouded the air like dust from the fallen towers throughout the year following their collapse, carried with it the requisite contrived hype designed to move a veritable library of recently-published books, documentaries and films. Among the latter, we find the dubious DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, designed to fit President George W. Bush's campaign for re-election in 2004.

Many people, however, opted for contemplation this year. Such quiet reflection evinces a dawning realization of the exploitation of the event, the shameless promotion of a global reign of terror and an ad hoc hegemony by a cynical state apparatus. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's statement did little to undermine this view: "Let this day always be a reminder ... why we must fight and win this global war on terror."

The U.S.A.'s grip on that elusive commodity, corporeal security, is absolute. It has never been in doubt. With the largest defense budget the world has known, the ability to blow the globe apart many times over, and a globally pervasive surveillance and policing capacity, the United States cannot be defeated militarily or by random acts of terror.

Yet, since September 11, 2001, the Bush regime has unstintingly, fallaciously, and for its own selfish ends, linked its future to national security concerns.

9-11 was a tragic, spectacular event, an attack on American life and property by, in the main, Saudi nationals. There is, however, no evidence to suggest a sustained terror campaign being waged against the American people or their government. Much as a single advertisement promoting a product in a magazine is a costly and wasteful exercise, a single attack on American soil would constitute a campaign destined to collapse at the outset. Two years ago, the only things to collapse were the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Nor was the country's grip on material security loosened by 9-11. Any stated weakness is mythic, in keeping with the scripted charade we are watching play itself out wherever Bechtel, Halliburton, multinational oil companies and vested-interest groups and think tanks have an interest.

In terms of lives lost, it can be argued that 9-11 was not the most devastating terror attack carried out on American soil. The April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, killed 168 people. 2,800 people died in New York, Washington D.C. and in a Pennsylvanian field on September 11, 2001. Man for man, the nineteen hijackers aboard the four airliners each accounted for 147 lives, falling far short of the indivdual tally of the American from Oklahoma City, still the most lethal terrorist the United States has ever known.

We who live elsewhere know this. But body bags and statistics mean as little to us as they do to our political leaders. The symbolism of the event counted for more than the lives extinguished. It is that symbolism that is being abused. Just as we do not trust statistics, we know that the Bush regime's ability to "fool all the people all the time" is overrated. There are as yet no real and imminent external threats to U.S. hegemony. Where the United States' leaders would have us see "terrorists", we see only the administration of George W. Bush.

Bearing in mind Shakespeare's observation "Security gives way to conspiracy" (Julius Caesar), attention needs to be paid to demands for full, open investigations into 9-11, anthrax, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the duplicity of America's military-industrial leaders. The maxim, "The enemy is never without, always within", holds good. There is an author behind every scripted tragedy. More, to sustain a myth, one needs a director. It is he and all those supporting him who must be shown to be making executive decisions that kill Americans and tens of thousands of non-U.S. citizens.

America's actions following 9-11 have elevated to center stage something far greater than material security. Security, in name, has given way to conspiracy in shameless practice. Since his injection into the White House by the United States Supreme Court, George W. Bush has built his presidency on conspiracy in the name of national security. Until he is shown up for the fraud he is, he and his cohorts will continue to exert inordinate influence on U.S. foreign policy for decades to come, whether in or out of office (with or without the help of 'revolving door' friends such as the Carlyle Group and Halliburton).

If the congressional report into the 9-11 massacre denies its readers access to information spelling out a U.S.-Saudi plot devised and implemented by the National Security Council, it delivers enough to hang minor players, the U.S. security apparatus. Given detailed briefings by 11 countries and having tracked many of the operatives as they went about their training over two years in the United States on visas issued in Saudi Arabia, the FBI had all the information needed to stop the operation, first proposed in 1996.

The DoD had more than adequate opportunity to scotch its execution from the same Andrews AFB where, to now, as many as 1,325 wounded U.S. troops en route to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington or the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda have been stretchered from C-17 transports. (A further 4,500 have been shipped back from Iraq suffering mental and physical ill health.)

Even with excisions, it should be apparent to all but the willfully blind that George W. Bush and his cohorts had all the intelligence they needed to appreciate just how their allowing of such an attack (the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon) could profit them and, by extension, the United States in the long term.

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney sums up the administration's approach to adversity: "...the Good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would normally not choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

For financial gain (which equates to power), the American security edifice (subject to extraordinary bureaucratic frustration in the months preceding the hit), was ordered to stand down for a day and 2,800 people were sacrificed at the slippery altar of untold millions of barrels of oil by avaricious, unscrupulous representatives of a military industrial complex gone mad.

Later that day, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, scribbling furiously in his notebook, made a point of including Saddam Hussein's name among those destined to find themselves on the receiving end of long-planned terror offensives. George W. Bush, a glove-puppet operative, then tucked his treason into his Bible and implemented the Project for a New American Century's (PNAC) Plan A.

This blueprint for global domination first saw the light of day as Rebuilding America's Defenses (download) and had been bubbling on a backburner since 2000, waiting to be lent luster by the imperious National Security Strategy of 2002.



Now, there's a woman on my block, | She just sit there facin' the hill. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Bob Dylan | License to Kill

While Bush Inc. does not have the wherewithal to impose outdated notions of empire on the world, it does have the will and the deterrent power of its formidable arsenal to destabilize key states and regions.

Presently, as European countries scrabble for oil in the Libyan desert, the Bush Gang fights Russia for supremacy in the Caspian Basin and more established Middle Eastern oil markets. Traditional business partners Saudi Arabia are playing both off against each other. They need to. Backed by a myopic electorate, Bush is plunging Iraq into a designed chaos and permanent occupation, setting it up as a future oil supplier and springboard for a Saudi takeover.

Increasing tension between the two former allies in terror has been exacerbated by the Saudis exploiting Bush's increasingly desperate, poorly crafted attempts to quash evidence of U.S. complicity in 9-11 and its leading role in the acts of mass terror following it, i.e. the illegal invasions and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Having seen the Taliban pay for their refusal to accept U.S. conditions for piping oil from former CIS states and the Caspian Basin to the Indian Ocean (an attack sketched by the Clinton administration, fleshed out by Bush's team and placed on his desk four days before the Twin Tower attack), the Saudis need all the leverage they can lay their hands on.

With a potential U.S. occupation force already in place in their country and 130,000 troops across their northern border, the desert-kingdom co-conspirators behind 9-11 need the attentions of the U.S. and its president's father, George H. Bush (Saudi and South Korean bagman for the Carlyle Group), like they need a hole in the head. The Russians offer them an air of respectability George Bush Sr. does not possess.

The groundwork for PNAC Plan B, a fallback, was already well under way on September 11, 2001. United Sates oil companies cling to the West African coast like maggots to a cadaver, the vanguard of earth movers gouging the earth for gold, diamonds, uranium, timber and coltan. Pillaging African oil from Equatorial Guinea, the Niger Delta (where they are well-placed to head off the southern surge of Islam), Gabon and Angola (where 90 percent of the country's oil is pumped from the secessionist Cabinda enclave), U.S. interests effectively divide a world charted by the Pentagon's New Map.

The United States all but has West Africa in its pocket. Should the Middle East fall to the U.S. military, Bush's successors will hold East Africa and European interests in North Africa in a vise. The notable exclusion of South Africa from the Oil Belt (or The Gap, as the war-makers choose to call it) makes it increasingly likely it will see a return to its colonial roots as a victualling station for armies on the move northwards and to the Chain of Steel strung across the East.

The dollar, controlling global oil, will hold sway over the Euro and the Yen.

Millions are in little doubt that George W. Bush was aware of the attacks planned for 9-11. Nine months after his injection into the White House through the manipulation of the democratic process, the presidency of George Bush Senior's son was moribund. Osama bin Laden, the scion of a family extremely close to the Bushes, allegedly gave George's career as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces a shot in the arm.

A desperate Taliban, urged by circumstance and the US security services, were offered a Saudi hit squad of convenience and the opportunity to make a statement. Earlier in the year, U.S. government representatives had threatened, "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." Facing occupation, they opted for the pre-emptive strike.

Whether or not bin Laden was working for Western, Saudi or Taliban interests, remains to be seen. While hundreds have been incarcerated at Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, bin Laden and Mullah Omar (identified as the masterminds behind the attack in less time than it took George W. Bush to respond to news of it) have deliberately not been brought to book with the lightning speed that characterized the identification and arrest of minor players remaining alive after September 11, 2001.

Today, looking remarkably relaxed and towards the future, bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, stroll among the flower bedecked mountains of Northern Pakistan, issuing hollow threats. In New York, Baghdad, Kabul and hundreds of cities and towns around the world, grieving families mourn their dead.

If, over two years, anything has been demonstrated beyond doubt, it is the selective ability of the U.S. security apparatus to apprehend those they purport to seek. In this instance, those arrested were the minions, the 9-11 fall guys. All had been under intense surveillance for years. None were arrested before completing their mission. Members of the British SAS at Tora Bora, having trapped Osama bin Laden, experienced first-hand the obfuscatory meddling of politicians who allowed bin Laden and Mullah Omar to slip to sanctuary in much the same way Saddam Hussein has done.



Goodness hides behind its gates | But even the president of the United States | Sometimes must have | To stand naked.

Bob Dylan | It's Alright Ma

Despite overwhelming evidence of a negligence transcending the criminal, the Bush regime's hold on the reins of global power has never been tighter.

Indulging a childlike petulance, U.S. citizens remain under a spell cast by a corrupt and belligerent leadership while they came to terms with the graphic symbolism inherent in an unknown force pulling down of the pillars of the temple. In a tragic, ironic twist, and much like the white supporters of the apartheid state (see A State of Terror), Americans seem incapable of accepting their leaders' complicity in terror. Much like those who bolstered the apartheid regime, American citizens have more to fear from their leadership cabal, an elite that benefits from perpetuating their fear of inadequate security, than anyone or anything else.

The threat this elite poses to American security is as real as the fear it has sown among the American people.

9-11 has been unashamedly abused to further the arguments, agendas and portfolios of all who attach to it any meaning beyond that evident in the tragedy itself. In keeping with PNAC policy dictats, draconian 'pre-emptive' security legislation designed to prevent the possibility of such attacks recurring, allow far more devastating, unprovoked attacks on states or persons deemed enemies by American politicians interpreting intelligence as they wish.

Is it any wonder the world chooses to despise the United States rather than empathize with it?

Such legislation, contradicting the spirit of the Constitution of the United States, directly affects American citizens and all those living outside the country's borders. The outsourcing of torture, detention without trial, invasive surveillance by electronic, digital and other means, an increase in 'visible policing', never-ending war, the dissemination of misinformation through a pliant media, and the perpetuation of a mythic threat show Americans to be perhaps more insecure today than at any time in their country's history.

That Americans fail to see through the so-called War on Terrorism continues to amaze South Africans. We watch agog as Bush's opportunistic inhumanity, driven by his Global Transaction Strategy, deprives people around the world of their human rights in the name of, you guessed it, security. Tin pot dictators, smaller in stature than the U.S. president only by virtue of his obscene war-making budget, are stepping up campaigns of terror against their own people. Hundreds of thousands are dying as a direct result of the Bush Doctrine.

Through pre-emptive war, a blatant disregard of international peace and law-enforcement agencies, the suspension of fundamental human rights, the trashing of democratic values and processes, conspiracy and disinformation, security legislation and a manufactured state of domestic terror, criminal negligence and perhaps treason, the United States government has turned a spectacular, extraordinary tragedy into an iconic fallibility of convenience it continues to use to its financial, strategic and treacherous advantage.

We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.

National Security Council | The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

[First posted at Open Source Politics, September 2003]

Note I'll get back to regular blogging sometime soon. For now, my life has been turned on its head. More later...

al-Sadr Takes Najaf

Protesting Mogdada

"Moqtada al-Sadr is free to go anywhere he likes and as far as I hear ... probably he will stay in his house in Najaf, but he is as free as any Iraqi citizen to do whatever he likes."

'Iraqi Minister of State' Kasim Daoud

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and militant cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's victories in Najaf and Kufa, as well as previous Iraqi victories against U.S. occupying forces in Fallujah and other cities, must leave George W. Bush and neo-con America feeling bitter, twisted and decidedly angry.

al-Sistani's plan, accepted by the U.S. and the puppets presently doing duty as an 'interim government', calls for Najaf and Kufa to be declared weapons-free cities. It demands that all foreign forces withdraw from Najaf, leaving security to the police. Most importantly, it calls on the 'government' [read U.S. taxpayer] to compensate those harmed by the fighting.

The United States is on to a hiding to nothing as, enjoying the imprimatur of Ayatollah al-Sistani, resistance to its occupation strengthens to encompass a broad base of Shi'ites and Sunnis. Nothing has reinforced this base more than the bad grace with which al-Sistani's compromise was accepted. 74 people marching on the Imam Ali shrine, now packed with pilgrims and militia, died in skirmishes between pilgrims, militia, police and U.S. troops through the day.

With U.S. forces having visited a mini-Holocaust on the city, their pre-withdrawal stoking of anarchy signals murderous intent and the al-Mahdi Army would do well to remain alert.

Or, as the world prepares itself for New York's gauche and tacky celebration of The Bush Doctrine at the Republican Convention, can ordinary Iraqis rely on their American allies to hold their government in check?

"When a foreign army invades a country about which it knows virtually nothing, there is plenty of deliberate brutality, but there is also the unintended barbarism of blind ignorance."

Naomi Klein

Blogger Baldoni Murdered by Islamic Army Extremists

al-Jazeera reports 56-year old Italian blogger and Diario journalist Enzo Baldoni murdered by his kidnappers, members of the so-called Islamic Army of Iraq, only three days after his August 24 kidnapping on the road to Najaf.

Italy's chief drug lord, gangster and money launderer Silvio Berlusconi, who also poses as prime minister, had this to say of the journalist's gruesome death. "There are no words for an inhuman act which at one swoop wipes out centuries of civilisation and returns us to the dark times of barbarism."

Politicians certainly have a way with words. Either that, or they have a manual. While I'm sure his thoughtful, considerate words will be a great comfort to the late journalist's wife and two children, I've a feeling the man should have used them in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent sacking of Baghdad.

Had he done so... Well, he didn't, did he?

Update on Thatcher Arrest

From the Guardian. Thatcher family had bags packed ready to flee to US, police say

As the apparent plot to overthrow the president of Equatorial Guinea continued to unravel, the elite Scorpions police unit said it had arrested Sir Mark after learning that he had put his house on the market, arranged to sell four of his cars, found boarding school places in the US for his two children and bought his family plane tickets to the US.

When officers arrived at his home in the upmarket Constantia suburb of Cape Town at 7am on Wednesday, they found the Thatchers' suitcases packed and in the hall. The house had been placed on the market for 22m rand (£1.8m).

Hmm... Equatorial Guinea, oil, corruption, coups, politicians, big money and... Of course, the U.S. With the United States giving sanctuary to more tinpot dictators, genocidal maniacs and all-round crank cases than any other country in the world (hell, it exports them), why should such a report surprise me? It doesn't. It reminds me of good old Kurt Cobain:

Where do bad folks go when they die? | They don’t go to heaven where the angels fly | They go down to the lake of fire and fry | Won’t see them again till the fourth of July.

Nirvana | Lake of Fire

Note For all and any information pertaining to the botched Equatorial Guinea coup, Mark Thatcher, Simon Mann, James Kershaw (said to hold the "Wonga list" identifying those bankrolling the venture), Nick du Toit, and the Zimbabwe trial of more than 60 mercenaries, visit Kathryn Cramer's remarkable site. She has it covered. And yes, while Kathryn's mix of down-home reflections, provocative questions and informed comment might set Dave Winer and Doc Searls's hearts a'pounding (along with all those keen to equate blogging and journalism), she renders the debate irrelevant by delivering compulsive, intelligent reading. As with most I've crammed into my blogroll, her site defies stereotyping (it ain't political, personal or 'what have you'). If it is to be reduced to cliché, 'must read' will do the job.

Once a War

Once a war...

The rapid course of developments in Iraq has led to a variety of different analyses. These rapid changes are due to the sensitivity of the issue, which has involved the Shia leaders and the holy shrine of Imam Ali (AS).

In the absence of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, U.S. forces brazenly disrespected the spiritual beliefs of the Shia, but the return of Iraq’s most respected Shia cleric will certainly change the course of events in Najaf. The following points are a summary of the rapidly changing developments in Iraq:

1. The opportunist U.S. forces started attacks on the shrine of Imam Ali (AS) in the absence of Ayatollah Sistani, who had traveled to Britain for medical treatment. However, the clashes in Najaf demonstrated their fear of the power of religion.
   
   
2. While certain official news agencies pointed to Washington’s efforts to prevent or delay Ayatollah Sistani’s return to Najaf, he returned home to live among the oppressed Iraqi people.
   
   The fact that Ayatollah Sistani has called on the Shia to march to Najaf, ordered the occupiers to leave the city, appealed to Muslims to break their silence, organized massive and popular demonstrations in Najaf, and promised to walk at the front of the protest shows that the religious leader has called upon the nation to form a front against the occupiers.
   
   Under such circumstances, neither the U.S. forces nor certain suspicious elements in the Iraqi interim government will dare repeat their insults or offenses against the holy shrine.
   
   The presence of the cleric in Iraq has given special strength to the resistance against the occupation and any challenge of this resistance will lead to another Vietnam.
   
   
3. Ayatollah Sistani will strengthen the resistance with wisdom and change its nature. The U.S. is well aware of the power of fatwas in mobilizing the masses. It also knows that no military power can withstand this spiritual power, a fact which is not understood by treacherous elements within the Iraqi interim government.
   
   Therefore, the occupiers’ plot to foment sectarian violence and trick certain Shia resistance groups into adopting unreasonable approaches which eventually force them off the political stage will not be materialized.
   
   
4. Now it is the duty of the interim government to motivate neighboring Muslim countries to help resolve the Najaf crisis, rather than prioritizing the goals of occupiers. Otherwise, it cannot expect those countries to help establish peace and stability in Iraq.
   
   
5. Millions of Iraqi Muslims, led by their religious leader, are currently approaching the gates of Najaf, and the occupiers can clearly notice that the majority of the demonstrators are unarmed.

Faith, motivation, and compliance with the religious decree form the most powerful weapon against the occupation. This weapon alone can destroy the 150,000-strong U.S. force in Iraq.

The United States should realize that continuing to commit atrocities against the Shia community and attempting to prolong the occupation will make the Iraqi Shia go off.

Tehran Times

Thatcher Arrested for Funding Equatorial Guinea Coup

Earlier today, the Directorate of Public Prosecutions' Scorpions Unit arrested notorious arms dealer, failed rally driver and recidivist mother's boy Mark Thatcher at his Cape Town home. Bulelani Ngcuka's spokersperson, Scorpions spokesperson Makhosini Nkosi said: "We are investigating charges of contravening the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act. This is in relation to the possible funding and logistical assistance in relation to the attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea."

News24.com reports:

The arrest came as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was due to arrive in Cape Town, leading the biggest delegation ever to South Africa for two days of talks aimed at putting relations with Pretoria on a stronger footing. Thatcher, who lives with his Texan wife and two children in Cape Town, was due to appear in a Cape Town court later Wednesday, the spokesman said. He has been linked to one of the alleged masterminds of the coup plot, Simon Mann, who is on trial in Zimbabwe in connection with the attempt to topple veteran President Teodoro Obiang Nguema in Malabo. more...

Due to appear in the Wynberg Magistrates' Courts today, it's not clear whether Capetonians stand any chance of seeing the son of gun-running former British prime minister Baroness Margaret Thatcher run out of town or extradited to Malabo to join eight South Africans, six Armenians and four Equato-Guineans standing trial for the botched March coup attempt. One of Thatcher's alleged co-conspirators, Nick du Toit, has been identified as the coup mastermind and faces the death penalty if found guilty. Another 70 men are on trial in Zimbabwe for offences related to the alleged coup bid.

"Your family are always your closest friends." Margaret Thatcher

Premature Ejaculation

"Iraq wins again!"

Iraqi police arrested some 400 Shiite Muslim militiamen at the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, a spokesperson for the interim government said on Friday, as fresh clashes broke out in the city. "Iraqi police entered the shrine in Najaf city and all armed militia were evicted," the spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said in Baghdad. more...

The fate of a radical Shi'a rebellion in the holy city of Najaf was uncertain on Friday amid disputed reports that Iraqi police had gained control of the Imam Ali Mosque. A senior Interior Ministry spokesman said police entered the shrine and arrested hundreds of militiamen loyal to rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to end a two-week revolt that left hundreds dead and helped drive world oil prices to record highs. more...

The Iraqi interior ministry and the US military both told Reuters that Mr Sadr was rumoured to have fled overnight from the shrine complex, which had been used by rebels as a base against US-led forces. The interior ministry said Iraqi police had moved into the shrine, accompanied by clerics, and 400 militiamen were said to have been detained. more...

Iraq's United States-backed caretaker government cried victory on Friday in its 19-day standoff with Shi'ite Muslim militiamen in Najaf, but on the ground rebel fighters remained firmly in control of their stronghold in the city's holiest shrine. Despite protestations from the Interior Ministry that police had taken control of the Imam Ali Shrine and detained several hundred militiamen loyal to Shi'ite radical leader Moqtada al-Sadr, an AFP correspondent in the shrine said he had not seen a single policeman. more...

Note For even greater distortion, read Iraq prepares assault on war-torn Najaf.

Headliners

Impunity (The White House Press Corps)

"Last week's convention of minority journalists was the largest ever—7,000 strong. Kerry spoke: standing ovation. Bush spoke: no ovation. Traditionalists in the press said: unprofessional! Critics on the right cried foul. UNITY, coalition of minority voices, didn't know what to say. And group think appealed to all."

Jay Rosen opens the scabrous wounds of several heated debates in that short paragraph, and reactions to his posts explore responses given the Bush and Kerry Show at the UNITY Convention, journalistic codes of behavior, and the standing of minority journalists.

I'm still wondering what the buzz is about. As far as I can make out, seven thousand top-drawer journalists drawn from minorities under-represented in U.S. newsrooms gathered in Washington to thrash out issues concerning them and the media. They invited George W. Bush and John F. Kerry to address them. In a presidential election year, a refusal to speak would have been electoral suicide. Kerry spoke to a standing ovation and Bush to stony silence.

So what's the problem? The right, using every opening to perpetuate racism in the newsroom, used circular argument, vacuous definitions of professionalism, and hollow but vindictive rhetoric to slam delegates for 'unprofessional conduct'. This has inflamed debate around non-issues, strengthening the hold on editorial offices of those who shout, "See, there's good reason we don't allow spics, latinos, niggers, Koreans and Muslimoids in here."

If that's professional journalism, give me un-professional journalism every time.

And that's another problem. So-called progressive reaction to the right's interpretation of the receptions given Bush and Kerry has been potentially self-defeating. Those who address allegations of 'unprofessional conduct' as a debating point are wasting their time and energy. These red herrings are divisive non-issues.

As far as response to the speakers is concerned, I'd ask whether journalists at the UNITY love fest were attending as delegates or as reporters. If they were delegates, they were private citizens first, journalists second. Just how does one expect minorities—who were abused to give Bush the 2000 election—to receive the smirking, ignorant and ill-prepared president of the U.S.A.? With open arms? And how does one expect them to receive a gregarious and forthcoming Kerry? With a stony silence?

Well, yes. I cannot understand why delegates gave Kerry a standing ovation. By the same token, I cannot understand why they allowed Bush attend at all. It would make some sense if Kerry's reception was engineered solely to highlight disdain felt for Bush. But Kerry is as much an enemy to minorities as any member of the Bush Gang. To preserve the white-male domination of government and business, Kerry would see minorities herded into cattle trucks, shipped off to Arizona and made to sew mailbags till Kingdom come. He is as different to Dubya as an apple is to an orange. While an apple doesn't have bastards, it's still a fruit.

Do UNITY members not see this?

One argument could be that Kerry was there as the representative of a political party that professes—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—to stand for all that is good, right and just in the Constitution of the United States. For that reason, he might have been tolerated but, hell, everybody knows he's as much into bondage as the incumbent president.

Okay, so why was Bush, who is good only for gaffes, invited or allowed to speak? He represents the party (remember, he's there for himself and the GOP, not the presidency) openly standing for everything minorities loathe. I don't know. Ten years ago, in South Africa, you did not get members of an oppressive regime wandering in to such fora. On occasion, politicians would try to muscle their way in, but every attempt ended in violence. Why? Because those on the receiving end of discriminatory legislation refused to be mocked by those who sought their enslavement. They knew that, to be heard, they would need to send a strong message. So they locked down and told the state to go to hell.

Either the UNITY people, as Americans, are into civility in a big way or they've refined servility to an art. The depth, scope and pragmatism of advertised convention workshops give the lie to the latter assumption, but the sooner UNITY realizes continuing to bow and scrape before the great white chief perpetuates oppression, the better.

Accommodation is comforting, but it's also delusional.

Another thing. Did the Bush-Kerry show demonstrate the power of UNITY? Yes and no. As said before, only a political suicide would ignore a captive audience of 7,000 journalists. It's a powerful lobby in anybody's book. But while coverage given the event by the mainstream press drew attention to the movement's inherent strength, it highlighted its dependence on a media establishment that despises and turns on its members. We see this in media attribution of unethical or unprofessional conduct to delegates scorning Bush.

In other words, publicity tells us the UNITY movement has numbers, but it allows its clout to be defined by media that refuse to include its members. That's not something about which it should boast. Dependence militates against independence. Just how far is the ever-accommodating UNITY prepared to go to see affirmative action implemented in the newsroom?

The right is laughing right now. I'd say that while UNITY cheers the likes of Kerry, conservatives have every reason to gloat. Their small victories are being mirrored everywhere, from Najaf to DC. They're certainly not political or ideological victories. We're seeing the triumph of rampant consumerism. Most of us are, at heart, Oliver Twists and all we really want is "...some more." Like manipulative drug lords, the U.S. administration allows sufficient consumer goods (and media are consumable goods) to trickle down to dependent markets and, whaddayaknow? Sniff, sniff...

Consumerism is the opiate of the masses. It keeps them satisfied and reins them in, whether in the newsroom, at the ballot box or on patrol. There is no longer room for idealists and revolutionaries in what has become the New American Century. Like it or not, black or white, rich or poor, journalists or otherwise, we are all neocons now—wired men in suits. Groupthink rules. It is, after all, the Bush and Kerry Show.

"We didn't come here to the nation's capital to celebrate." ... "You know why we're here. Too few blacks. Too few journalists of color are employed in America's newsroom."

Herbert Lowe, President of the National Association of Black Journalists

Note The above is an ad hoc response (my day job demands I get some sleep) to Jay Rosen's first two posts on the subject. He's posted far more. I realise my comments might sound critical of him—for raising 'non-issues'—and UNITY—for not setting fire to newsrooms across the U.S. And my observation of our newfound global neo-con status derives from sentiments better expressed by William Cook in The Rape of Philomela at Counterpunch. Yet, although I feel my language precludes nuance, my criticisms are not intended as barbs. Impatient by nature, I see them aligning themselves with incoming responses to Jay's initial post.

Ernest Sotomayor, UNITY's president, guest blogs on Jay's site and spells out his organisation's position on media response to delegates' reactions to Bush and Kerry. "Huh?" seems to sum it up. In other words, "What's the issue?" "Where's the story?" "What are you people talking about?" Etcetera. Importantly, Sotomayor details UNITY's reasons for bringing Bush and Kerry to the party:

"The reasons for having the candidates are simple and as journalistically sound as ever: to raise issues that are important to the people in the communities from where we came, but aren’t parts of the discussions on the campaign trail. They include questions about sovereignty on Indian reservations, media ownership, affirmative action, Filipino-American veterans getting their dues, immigration, etc. If we felt we had more people in the press corps who understood these issues, or understood that they are important to tens of millions of Americans, there wouldn’t have been a need for us to ask the candidates to appear before us and discuss them." ... "As for the charge that we’re activists, the plea is guilty. We advocate for fair, representative, accurate journalism, by changing the complexion of newsrooms, not just racially and ethnically, but through the natural diversity of thought that occurs when you bring in people with different backgrounds."

In his post, Sotomayor acknowledges important issues being given only "cursory examination". Appropriately, he seems to point out that while these issues may be important to UNITY, a refusal by the establishment to acknowledge their import leads to problems for society as a whole.

The social nature of the problem is highlighted by Jay following Sotomayor's post with a guest blog by TV news veteran Terry Heaton. Heaton questions UNITY members' approach to managing diversity in the workplace and argues against some consequential typecasting. Doing so, he shows a signal lack of appreciation for what Sotomayor is aiming at in the italicised text above. In other words, he does not realise that the problem is his or that his view is, to put it kindly, anachronistic and of a type that leads to tokenism. The vacuity of Heaton's view is pointed out by Andres Martinez, backed by a succinct comment from Tim Porter, who examines entrenched, ass-about-face attitudes here.

Hmm... I do tend to blog on the run. I see Tim Porter covering the same ground more effectively and in greater depth than I'm able to. Happy in the knowledge that bloggers are not necessarily journalists, I urge you to read his blog post for a clearer, journalistic perspective.

A last point. Given the failure of affirmative action to effect change in North American newsrooms and the mindsets of those occupying them, surely it's time minority journalists asked themselves whether they really want to go there? As new and alternative media take hold in increasingly fragmented societies, journalists are needed more than ever before. Why forsake UNITY for membership of old media? Why not jump ship and learn to swim before they do. Lead. Don't follow.