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October 30, 2006
Australia will leave Iraq when we tell them to - US official
Well, that's that then. Uncle Sam has told Nephew John when he can leave Iraq. "When we go out, we want to go out together," said Christopher Hill, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Now, ain't that sweet. How much pull this Hill feller has with President Puddin' 'n' Pie is moot, but even Georgie's maid has enough clout to tell Australia what to do.
Kim Beazley, who wants to exit the disaster zone as soon as Aussies forget who he is and puts him in The Lodge, will now have to suffer the Commentariat's slings and arrows as they accuse him of putting the relationship with America at stake.
Me, I think we should get the hell out of there at first light tomorrow. This is George W. Bush's mess. He's the one who dealt with the über-trauma of 9/11 by whipping out his six guns and shooting at everything in sight. He started the Iraq war with the overwhelming support of his deluded countrymen so let him finish it. John Howard alone is responsible for getting Australia involved; every poll from the very beginning indicated that the majority of Australians were against sending our troops there. He just did it to please the Bully-in-Chief so let him wear the blame for never once considering the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and for making Australia a terrorist target.
It is now clear that the continued presence of hated foreign troops is only whipping up the insurgency. Iraq as a nation is finished. Let those who are still alive after three and a half years of unnecessary bloodshed carve it up along sectarian lines and get on with life after one of the most sickening invasions in history.
Once again, it was America who started it; let them deal with the consequences of their fatal stupidity.
And let's have no more self-righteous bleating about cutting and running.
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 1:08 PM | TrackBack
October 27, 2006
The ABC is dying
I don't know if the Howard Government realises it yet, but their campaign to neuter the ABC is within a whisker of completion. With the exception of the current affairs shows -- Radio's AM, The World Today, PM, and TV's Four Corners, and Lateline -- Auntie has turned into a snooze-a-thon suitable for old ladies and gents taking their tea in comfy armchairs. Well, what can you expect after ten years of funding cutbacks and incessant hectoring about its so-called left-wing bias. A recent screening on pay TV of the 1993 miniseries, "The Leaving of Liverpool" shows the strength of ABC's drama department when it had proper funding. Today's national broadcaster is not even a shadow of its former self.
The Howard Government has stacked the ABC board with its own: Janet Albrechtsen, who would have flourished as a propagandist for Hitler, and Keith Windschuttle, the state-approved revisionist of Australian history. His ascendance to centre stage in the so-called History Wars would be knee-slappingly hilarious if it wasn't so alarming. In saner times, Windschuttle would be just another nutter clamouring to be heard.
But it's those remaining current affairs shows that remain a thorn in John Howard's intolerant side. Now his government has installed a new managing director, Mark Scott, who has set up a new position, that of the director of editorial policies. It will be this factotum's duty to inform the government of anyone who steps out of line with the new "Editorial Policies 2007," and to insure the demise or "rehabilitation" of the current affairs shows.
When the few remaining socially conscious citizens still employed in the mainstream media complained of government interference over what amounts to a Bureau of Censorship, the Commentariat pilloried them.
Take Gerard Henderson, in his opinion piece in The Age:
Interviewed by ABC radio last Thursday, [Liz] Jackson objected to a management-initiated proposal whereby, under the ABC's revamped editorial policies, the showing of a documentary by leftist film director Michael Moore would need to be balanced by a follow-up panel discussion. She initially described such a scenario as a "problem" and then went right over the top by depicting the proposal as "verging on Stalinism". Really.
So here was a senior ABC journalist asserting that a genuine debate on the public broadcaster over a controversial film could be equated with a communist totalitarian regime that murdered tens of millions of citizens of the Soviet Union. How defensive can you get? And how insulting to the memory of the real victims of real repression?
Later that evening Kerry O'Brien introduced the Clarke-Dawe segment on the 7.30 Report with the comment that the subject matter was a "bit close to home". It certainly was, in a self-indulgent way. The comedians mocked Scott's plan to establish, within the ABC, a director of editorial policies who will report to him in his other role as the ABC's editor-in-chief. To Clarke and Dawe, the suggestion that the ABC's editor-in-chief should ensure that a range of views are heard on the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster is a matter requiring ridicule.
Henderson and his fellow travellers keep trying to equate people with a social conscience to communists or socialists or worse, appeasers of terrorism, when it is the policies of Howard's Government that come closest to communism's repressive need to quash dissent.
I'm going to assume that when Liz Jackson called adding the panel discussion to the documentary a "problem," she was referring a time slot issue: documentaries normally take an hour, but with an added panel discussion, the show would impinge on the next program. Simple.
What she depicted "as verging on Stalinism" sounds like a frustrated response to the government's insistence on the panel discussion. When the government of the day interferes with public broadcasting it verges on Stalinism.
If the documentary had been in favour of Howard or Bush's policies, you can bet there would have been no request for a panel discussion. This government doesn't want balance; it wants opposing views to be silenced.
Henderson then rounded on John Clarke and Brian Dawe and their satirical five minute spot once a week at the end of the 7:30 Report. Needless to say, this spot was neither more nor less biting than any other. It's just that even five minutes of dissenting opinion is too much for the Hard Right to bear. Henderson's message: Get rid of them all.
Nothing will stop Howard's conservative pit bulls. They've got a taste of blood and viscera; they've latched on to the throat of democracy and it's impossible to get them off. But then, they have nothing else to do. Their plate is nearly empty, save for business and the straitening and punishing of their lessers. They seem totally unaware of the ramifications of their policies and thus pay no attention to them. Iraq? Democracy will be peachy for anyone left alive. Global Warming? Don't be ridiculous.
It's just about all over. They've set up umpteen inquiries into bias over the years, all of which were knocked back. Poll after poll has shown that most Australians are satisfied with the ABC. Never mind. This government has never had the interests of the Australian public in mind. All that matters is their Thatcherite ideology and power. They have no credibility, and so nothing they do is credible.
But the damage they have done may be permanent.
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 2:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 26, 2006
America: Morally confused and dangerous
Every couple of months I catch up on films in the "new to weekly" section of the local video shop. You know the deal, one or two overnighters with five weeklies for a pretty good price. Filling out the latest bunch was The Bourne Supremacy. Yes, it was made in 2004, but some of the "new weeklies" are even older.
Hey, I was riveted from start to finish. "Boy, was that fun," I said to the dog, as no one else in the house will have anything to do with this kind of shit. (Incidentally, the dog prefers the early films of Kieslowski, but will endure anything for a cuddle.)
I'll have to admit that I enjoyed the first one, The Bourne Identity, mainly for Matt Damon-Bourne's love interest, the exquisite Franka Potente. Franka's face comes from the age of Greek Goddesses. The nobility of her classic bone structure makes her a perfect fit for the prow of a ship. Yet, in Tom Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior, her face, framed by hair the colour of pale yellow flowers freshly picked by a young woman who is about to fall unconscious from a heroin overdose, became soft and yielding, demure to the point of giving the impression that she could be led to a softly lit room and ravished quietly. Yet again, in Run, Lola, Run, her face, framed now by flaming, hennaed hair, the same intense colour no doubt sported by the legendary She Who Must Be Obeyed, became raw sexuality, knocking passers-by off their feet with a sweating, animal lust …
Er, heh-heh, but that's not what this article is about.
The Bourne Supremacy was a ripper waste of time, a jolly good way to passively experience killing people while killing time in my lounge room. Movie finished, out the door to mow the lawn, but not before adding several more kill notches to the butt of my fantasy weapon of revenge.
In the end, I could rent five weeklies a day for months on end, each with similar themes of the violent invincibility Americans so love. (Wait a minute. Thanks to American cultural hegemony, everyone in the world sees and loves these films.)
Bourne is invincible. He knows how to win every fight and get out of every scrape. He can avoid hundreds of police converging on his exact whereabouts simply by walking away at a brisk pace. With a SWAT battalion about to break his door down, he will deftly climb out the window and up a conveniently placed ladder to the rooftops, over which he will hop with the greatest of ease because there is nothing he cannot do. He has as many passports, as much money, and all the artillery he needs, which he keeps in a locker at a bus station in a town in a country that he can get to with more greatness of ease, no matter how far away he is. Everyone knows where he is most of the time, especially the film's nearly robotic assassin (which is why he needs to make all those miraculous escapes). But somehow no one knows where this locker is.
Who taught him how to be invincible? The CIA. That's right, the same agency with the real-world reputation of having its collective head up its collective arse when it comes to simple, basic intelligence. The CIA, as we can plainly see from black-lined FoI records and movies like this, knows the best methods for killing anyone anywhere, but not much else.
With Hollywood conveyor-belting films like this, it's no wonder America is so fucked up. See, American males are being shown up there on the big screen how cool and easy it is to be invincible. A good percentage of them walk out of the theatre thinking they could do a Bourne. What makes these American blokes different to the rest of us is that they can stride across the street to a gun shop and buy a weapon (or weapons) to prove their newfound invincibility.
But what is turning the country schizoid is that while Bourne is a good guy who breaks the bad guys' rules, it's no longer easy to differentiate between the two.
The CIA were the good guys once upon a time, but now we know them to be professional assassins who bring down governments unsuited to American imperialism.
The President used to be a very good guy. But starting with Nixon, the presidency has gradually lost its status as the goal of every red-blooded American. With Bush2, we clearly see that the President of the United States is the modern equivalent of the cattle baron in old Westerns who is a model citizen by day, but by night, is the head of a ruthless cattle-rustling syndicate.
So, who is the bloke who has just seen The Bourne Supremacy, or one of its endless clones, going to emulate? The bad guys or the good guys? If he doesn't know which is which, who then is he going to eliminate with his brand new weapon (or weapons) to prove his invincibility?
These days, the US is such a miasma of confused morality and selfish agendas that people no longer trust their elected leaders. Except, of course, for fundamentalist Christians. They still believe in George W. Bush, their surrogate saviour. And well they should, for he and they both share a yearning for Armageddon.
In the end, if our morally clueless Bourne-watcher wants to prove his invincibility, he -- and of course it is always a he -- can make it real simple. In the tradition of those who have gone before him, he has only to lock and load and blow away the nearest group of vulnerable folk.
-- Benoît Balz
Posted by Benoît Balz at 1:55 PM | TrackBack
October 25, 2006
The Dogwhistler's Spawn
| What the Dogwhistler really means ... | ... and the happy chappies who tune in |
|---|---|
 Copyright © 2006, Maurie Gee |  |
The dearth (death) of values of any kind under John "The Pied Piper from Hell" Howard has contributed to the sickening story of the abused girl from Werribee.
The parents of these boys, like so many Australians, have been put to sleep by the apathy encouraged by John Howard's "relaxed and comfortable" message. They may have been able to distinguish right from wrong once upon a time, but they certainly have not passed the distinction on to their children.
Howard's message is this: "Everything my government does is for your good. Hundreds of refugees subjected to years behind razor wire is for your good, because they will not attack you there or take your jobs. But I not only care for you, I also care for the 600,000 Iraqis who have died in the war that will never end, nor should it. Had they lived they would certainly have enjoyed democracy. As for the so-called corruption of my cherished ministers year after year, let me assure you that they have done nothing wrong, they are fine people who have your interests at heart. And remember, when you hear the sound of my voice, so soft, so soothing, you will slowly drift into sleep, with the warm knowledge that everything I have done is for y-o-u-r v-e-r-y o-w-n good."
Here is Child Psycholgogist Dr John Cheetham Attack similar to Nazis, psychologist says:
The acts of up to a dozen youths filmed sexually abusing and degrading a teenage girl were similar to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, a child psychologist says.
"It's the sort of behaviour you would expect in a prison camp. It's something like a flashback to the Second World War and the way the Jews were treated," Dr Cheetham told the Nine Network.
Those involved in the attack were likely to be angry, resentful poor achievers who had not developed a set of values.
"Somewhere along the line they have not learned to have a social conscience and to respect the dignity of human beings," he said.
John Howard's "greatest" achievement as Prime Minister has been to attack and bury the concept of "social conscience". It's something afflicting the elite, latte-cum-Chardonnay set. It's akin to being a socialist, a communist. In ten years he has dogwhistled Australians into a gutless disregard for the suffering of others, and he has done it in the most dishonourable way, by appealing subliminally to their basest, most selfish instincts. That it also happens in other countries reflects the cold-blooded ideology of his ruling mates: "Me and mine and to hell with everyone else."
The DVD boys of Werribee are a tip of the iceberg. The same is happening in other schools. They are the disastrous result of what amounts to the neo-Nazification of Australia. Only under John Howard it is called Family Values.
-- Olney Garkle
Links:
Outcry over teenage girl's assault recorded on DVD
Schoolyard bullies make ground on net
Posted by Olney Garkle at 12:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 24, 2006
The Y Chromosome (or, the root of all evil) strikes again
Trauma may be defined as a disturbing gap in the continuity of meaning. To live amid too much injustice and popular indifference … is a real trauma. In times ... where mania and intoxication pose as passion, where children learn that crazy is normal, the shrug is replacing the deep conscience and the password to the future is "whatever". -- Michael Leunig, "Gripped by mania posing as passion" - The Age, 30 September 2006
In the latest episode of life under John Howard, the weasel who mistook ethics for a communist plot, a gang of Werribee, Victoria schoolboys encircled a girl with "mild developmental delay," led her to a secluded place and urinated on her, set her hair on fire and forced her to "perform lurid acts on them". They then produced and sold a DVD of the crime, with "special features" showing them dropping flares on a homeless man and throwing eggs at taxis. The DVD cover says: "... the movie is brought to you by the teenage kings of Werribee. No one messes with us. We only mess with them."
These are the young men who will grow up to join the Howard Party or sympathise with it. They will become politicians, priests, bankers, cops and mercenaries -- in short, the worst possible people who inevitably rise to the top.
But they didn't emerge from nowhere. Here are their parents, presumably already members or supporters of John Howard's nation of relaxed and comfortable zombies:
"The two parents of the two boys that made this laughed it off and said it was just a bit of fun."
"A brother of one of the teens told the Herald Sun he thought the film was disgusting. Parents said they did not approve of the film but were aware of its contents."
It would appear that these parents have forfeited their right to be the guardians of their sons.
Could this have happened without the perverted influence of John Howard? Of course. These boys have doubtless tapped into various rape web sites that like to tout rape as a way of life rather than a crime. But ten years of reinforcement of non-core as the key word to values cannot have helped.
Hopefully, Sen-Sgt Paul Mullett, secretary of Victoria's Police Association, will take time off from defending his torturers in the Armed Offenders Squad to see that these little bastards and the genetic garbage who are their parents are given, as he says, "the full force of the law".
Meanwhile, our heartfelt sympathy goes to the parents of the girl. This is every mother and father's worst nightmare.
-- Olney Garkle
The girl's father speaks:
RealMedia, WinMedia, MP3
News links:
Father vows justice on DVD gang
Hunt on for boys behind sex abuse DVD
Students condemn attack DVD
DVD of girl attack sparks probe
Abused DVD girl met attackers online
DVD of girl attack sparks cyber-bullying warning
Posted by Olney Garkle at 3:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 22, 2006
The Weekly Gee (30)
Copyright © 2006, Maurie Gee
Posted by Olney Garkle at 11:43 AM | TrackBack
October 21, 2006
Government turns its back on sick RAAF airmen
Many years ago in a previous incarnation I was a young airman in the RAAF. Most of the time I did what I was told and did not think of the future. One of our many jobs was to photograph the inside of the fuel tanks of the F-111 aircraft. While they were being serviced, we, like all the rest, just did our jobs believing our leaders knew what they were doing and were not incompetent morons trying to kill us in chemical warfare. We were at the time more concerned about our electronic flashes setting fire to the residual fuel vapours and burning us alive inside the fuel tanks than the long term effects of the chemicals we were covered in.
After a few years it started to become increasingly obvious the chemicals involved in this process were harming the troops. More and more of us became ill with strange skin and psychological disorders, wives and partners became sterile, the suicides started. Being a good government-run organization, everything was denied until the overwhelming weight of evidence forced an open enquiry.
Experts in the field testified about the hazards of those chemicals, the same chemicals that now require a full safety suit and breathing apparatus. We were told not to worry and promises were made as to compensation. As before, everything would be taken care of. Head of the Australian Defence forces Angus Houston met with our members regularly over four years and repeatedly assured us at each meeting, "you are still RAAF family and we will take care of you". Yet on 6 September 2005 the RAAF wiped their hands of us and told us we were on our own and were to have no more contact with their representatives.
Now we find that only those who were assigned to work in those tanks applying the toxic goop will receive compensation, and good luck to them. They deserve every cent they get, but those who dealt with SR51 outside the tanks or on an occasional basis will not be eligible for compensation regardless of symptoms, medical advice or need. This amounts to almost half of the claimants. Those who handled the chemicals, those who washed the floors and dumped the containers, those who burned the remainders in open pits while standing breathing the smoke, are not eligible for compensation.
There is nothing particularly unusual about the government screwing those less fortunate, but here comes the killer punch. The maximum compensation available to claimants on an Ex-Gratis basis is $40.000. Our beloved leaders and those responsible for protecting us have promised to allot one million dollars per person to fight claims made by anyone affected by the chemicals. This, then, is a fighting fund of $580,000.000 of taxpayer's money to counter the claims made by some 580 maintenance personnel,
Unfortunately, FOI restrictions do not allow us to find out how many political cronies have retired from the halls of Canberra on stress-related pensions and generous Ex-Gratis payments after suffering paper cuts or coffee burns, but us guys who just did what we were told and followed orders sure don't get to feed off the scraps of their gravy train.
We are allowed to watch as those defenders of liberal rights, the courts and legal system, take our money and our compensation to buy a new Lexus or BMW for the latest trophy wife.
I am getting old and I am sick. I am not as sick from the chemicals as much as sick of the total disregard of the ordinary Australian person in favour of the rich, powerful and well connected.
I know I am barking at the moon, I know there is little hope of a fair go, We sing the praises and heap glory upon those who die rich and famous. We ignore the ordinary men who offered to give their lives to defend Australia, Australians and the Government of this country.
-- Ferris Darkwater
Posted by Olney Garkle at 11:31 AM | TrackBack
October 20, 2006
Lest we forget: SIEV-X - ideological murder on the high seas
Fatima Alazami, 5, one of the 146 children who died at sea trying to reach a new life in Australia
It has been five years since 19 October 2001, when the Howard Government allowed 353 refugees to drown to prove a xenophobic point.
And they are still trying:
'Siev X' sinking incident to enter classrooms
Nelson attacks school text's Siev X claims
Govt won't support SIEV X memorial
That's the government a majority of terminally shamed Australians have been happy to re-elect over and over. This country will never regain its honour until the ministers responsible are tried for crimes against humanity.
For the complete history of this disaster: The official Siev-X web site
Report by Bilegrip's predecessor, Scum at the Top, with Philip Ruddock's cold-blooded appraisal: Her desperation for "positive outcomes" is over. See also the article following.
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 10:36 AM | TrackBack
October 19, 2006
Steve Fielding is a naïve rube
How has it happened that vital policies meant to dilute what's left of democracy in Australia are in the hands of a wacky Christian who garnered less than a mere 2 per cent of Victoria's vote in the last election?
Steve Fielding, the Family First (?) Senator, clearly has no bloody idea what he is doing. He cannot properly answer questions on why he has just voted for or against a bill. When pressed over and over for a reason, he can only say (as Misha Schubert puts it: like a doll that blurts out a handful of mindless recorded phrases when you pull a cord: "Look, Family First believes families are a foundation stone of our community."
Oh, yeah? Then why has he given James Packer's PBL carte blanche to expand its gambling empire?
And what was in it for families when he voted to outlaw compulsory student levies? That cynical policy had only one motive: to outlaw any possibility of left wing students having a forum for expression. The reality is an utter diminishment of student life, with universities cutting back on student services left, right and centre. How can that be good for families? It's doubtful Fielding had any idea what he was doing.http://www.bilegrip.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=217&blog_id=2#
This morning, on Jon Faine's ABC radio show, Fielding actually did give a reason for passing the media bill. He claimed over and over that ownership does not influence content. Good Lord, he would have to be the only man alive who believes that.
Parliament is a joke when greenhorns like Fielding get elected. But when they wield pivotal power it is a tragedy.
-- Olney Garkle
Further Link: Onus is on Fielding to explain himself
And a letter to The Age:
Media bill: Just who is the 'Judas' here?
So Federal Labor MP John Murphy likens Family First senator Steve Fielding to Judas Iscariot for supporting the Government's media bill (The Age, 19/10). The bill is doubtless a bad one and democracy will suffer as media diversity is further decreased. It is indeed difficult to know how further aid to the media barons sits with Family First's values.
However, Mr Murphy and federal Labor must remember that Mr Fielding is a problem of their own making. Mr Fielding has his Senate seat only because of an unprincipled and incompetent preference deal between the ALP and Family First in which the ALP directed preferences to Family First ahead of the Greens. So it is a bit rich when he derides Mr Fielding as Judas. Who betrayed his own party's membership, Mr Murphy? No ALP member I know thinks that Family First is ideologically closer to their views than the Greens are.
Labor members who have had a gutful of the righteous hypocrisy of Mr Murphy and rest of the ALP machine can also cry "Judas!" loudly and clearly. It's pronounced "Greens 1, Labor 2" on your next ballot paper. -- Dirk Baltzly
Posted by Olney Garkle at 3:38 PM | TrackBack
Peter Norman betrayed again
This small article, next to one about the Howard Party's authorised sporting icon Don Bradman, caught my eye in today's Herald Sun. Read it 'n' weep.
A new documentary about the life of Australian athlete Peter Norman has been thrown into disarray after precious footage of the Olympian's funeral was stolen.
The film and $5000 worth of video-editing equipment was snatched from the four-wheel-drive of Norman's nephew and producer, Matt Norman, in Ballarat on October 13. The theft is a huge setback for the documentary, with the only vision of the funeral and intended end of the film now gone.
Four days' worth of interviews were also taken.
Mr Norman has already had to take out a new mortgage on his Ballarat home after spending $1.2 million on the project and can't afford new equipment.
"If there are any companies that want to help us out with $5000 they will get major credits in the film," Mr Norman said.
Peter Norman, who died at his home in Williamstown earlier this month, aged 64, was the third man on the victory dais when Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their Black Power civil rights protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
The Herald Sun also believes Mr Norman has been left with a $60,000 bill after flying Smith and Carlos to Australia for his uncle's funeral.
It is believed Channel 9 agreed to an exclusive story with the pair, including the payment of their trip, but shelved the plan half an hour before they arrived.
Mr Norman's film, Salute -- The Peter Norman Story, is nine years in the making. It is due for US release in February.
The theft is bad enough, but how about the new "Aussie values" version of integrity displayed by Channel 9! Someone in the government must have got to them. Norman's heroism at the '68 Olympics has undergone a Stalinesque purge in John Howard's Australia, where standing up for human rights is equivalent to being a commie. You can bet 9 would have spent ten times that amount for the slightest anecdote about Bradman. Footage amounting to, say, ten minutes could easily have been padded out to an hour with commercials.
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 2:52 PM | TrackBack
October 18, 2006
Two important films trashed by the critics
1) V for Vendetta
The right wing hates this movie, and it isn't hard to see why: it explodes all their pretensions about being the party of "freedom," and it pretty clearly parallels the hypocritical cant of the War Party as it pretends to battle "terrorism" while engaging in a campaign of state terrorism that far surpasses anything a small band of amateurs could possibly hope to dish out. They must find particularly galling a subplot in which evidence emerges that a deadly series of biowarfare attacks attributed to "religious fanatics" (and we don't mean George W. Bush and Jerry Falwell) turn out to be the work of a sinister cabal inside the government – the perfect excuse for a crackdown. All of this – economic collapse, political turmoil, the dictatorship of "the Party" – is clearly identified in the film as the product of a series of wars, stretching from Iraq to Syria to Iran and beyond. I was particularly intrigued by references to "the former United States of America," and hints of a future history in which imperialism has drained the once mighty U.S. until it is a pitiful husk of its former self, crippled by economic dislocation and embroiled in civil war. -- Excerpt from Justin Raimondo: Go See V for Vendetta
It's almost embedded in our DNA, this knee-jerk shock at enactments of social conscience. Churchgoers are lectured about the brotherhood of man, the quality of mercy and the Golden Rule: do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. Yet the minute they step outside, they are greeted by the world of cold-blooded patriarchal capitalism, embodied by the Rule of Greed: do others before they get a chance to do you.
Centuries, if not millennia, of hectoring by the ruling classes against those who question authority, against those who would prefer a world where cooperation replaces bloodshed, have left us a fragmented species, not knowing whether to believe what our hearts tell us is good for us or what they tell us is good for us.
V for Vendetta is a wakeup call, a reminder of the wretched little men who stand over us like giants because they own the governments we think we have installed. They have sold us for a dollar with their lies and nationalisms and then bought us back for a penny with their somatic consumer delights. Everyone has their price, and the price of the mass of men and women has been their pride in the ability to think for themselves.
This is not a film that advocates terrorism, but a film about terrorism. It's also about heroes and their opposite: mercenaries. Mercenaries are the assassins of dissent, who act on behalf of governments who remain in power by activating the worst traits in their citizens as if the latter were robots. Heroes act on behalf of the simple decency stolen from people by the great deceivers. They are the legends that never die because they stand for freedom, not slavery.
V for Vendetta will have you cheering, if you have a heart, that is.
2) The Da Vinci Code
Is this a good film? A bad film? Who cares? It certainly isn't awful. Dan Brown may have "borrowed" the central theme from others, but that theme is vastly important to what may be a terminally duped species.
Many people like to call this film (and the book) a fiction, some requiring it to be capitalised and italicised … FICTION. But is it? Why is this idea of Jesus and Mary Magdalene getting married and having children any more fictitious than the "official" version handed down all these years by a patriarchy frightened and hateful of women?
The version of Christianity we're stuck with has done little but promote war and repression. A matriarchal Christianity would have worshipped the mysteries instead of armaments and the stock exchange.
The Da Vinci Code is essential viewing mainly for the twenty minutes or so of dialogue between Langdon, Neveu and Teabing in the latter's study. See it and then take another look at Da Vinci's Last Supper (click on the photo). Given what we know about those who have ruled since the time of Jesus, and especially after Constantine, it's hard to discount the far more plausible theory that Jesus did in fact marry Mary Magdalene, but that his simple humanness was never going to be good for the business of religion.
Imagine what Christianity could have been. And look at what it has become.
-- Benoît Balz
Posted by Benoît Balz at 4:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 17, 2006
The Australian: Official organ of the Howard Party
The flagship Murdoch newspaper in Australia is The Australian. Not a tabloid for the brain dead like the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph, The Oz is a broadsheet aimed at the latte-sipping, chardonnay-swilling right wing elite. (Oops! As we all know, that's what the left drinks. Conservatives, not wanting to be tarred (and hopefully feathered) with the same brush, can be found drinking theirs out of paper bags.)
Of course, ring-ins from the other side buy the paper too, mainly to see what The Lone Lefty, Phillip Adams, has to say, and what misanthropic fulminations the papers cast of right wing robots are up to.
All three papers amount to what Willy Bach calls "Murdoch chip wrap," except that The Australian never has enough pages to hold more than a minimum order, while the other two are the wrong size.
The Australian's editorials are a real hoot, if you like Goebbels-inspired intolerance of everything that moves. (That which is static or regressive, like the Howard Party ideology, is, of course, championed.) But the opinion page contributors are the scariest. Janet "The harridan's harridan" Albrechtsen, General Greg "War is peace" Sheridan and Frank "Eat my elderly stool" Devine, all have this way of screwing up facts to suit their ideology. The same could be said of blogs like Bilegrip. But these arthritic fogeys are fully salaried and government-condoned right wing loonies while left wing loonies like me have to fund our own fulminations. Let's face it, by and large the media is under their control.
Yet, they're still trying to muzzle the ABC. Along with The Age, the ABC is the only mainstream media daring to interpret the world differently from the jackboot's in power. For them, no lefty comment is good lefty comment.
You have to read this opinion piece by one, Rudi Michelson, published yesterday in The Oz. Titled, Privatise the ABC, Michelson rails against the lowered standard of ABC content, without addressing the cause: years and years of government cutbacks. His solution is privatisation in order to save taxpayers money (which for the right is all that matters), so that Australians could have yet another commercial television channel and three more commercial radio stations all pouring out government propaganda in between mind-numbing advertisements. But best of all, Aussies would no longer have to put up with dissenting opinion.
Even though the ABC is a shadow of its former self, they still see it as a hotbed of content favoured by totalitarian regimes of the left (yes, the poor things still think Communism is a threat). And they want it replaced by a commercial venture that promotes totalitarian regimes like their own.
Michelson actually says this: "Government broadcasting is favoured by totalitarian states and Islamic theocracies. New Zealand has no government broadcaster and the CBC in Canada gets 60 per cent of its revenue from commercials."
He neglects to mention the most respected broadcaster of all times, the BBC. The last I heard Britain was not a totalitarian state, though, like Australia, it's heading that way. Furthermore, the CBC used to be non-commercial like the ABC and the BBC. When the hated Mulroney government made the changeover, Canadians protested vehemently. But what could they do? They were under the thumb of a misanthropic conservative government.
As letter writer Greg Hamilton said in The Oz,
"Rudy Michelson informs us that the reasons for establishing the ABC have become totally irrelevant. He may just as well tell us that Thomas Jefferson was wrong in warning of the need to maintain public dissent in order to preserve democracy. Or, equally, he may want to try to convince us that diversity is pernicious in society, that commercial media is good and public media bad, and that four legs are good and two bad, unless they have wings."
What is wrong with these people, who so vehemently advocate a world shrivelled to consumerism and flag waving? As we've said somewhere before, like factory recalls of automobiles with defective parts, they should be recalled by the incompetent god who made them … for having been issued with defective souls.
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 3:25 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 16, 2006
Profiles of madness: What drives the men who run the world
The following indented excerpts are quoted from Managing the Madness, Antonella Gambotto-Burke's review of Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work, by Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare, published 23-24 September 2006 by The Weekend Australian. My comments follow each indentation.
The Corporation, an award-winning documentary, posited that the modern corporation is, in itself, a psychopathic entity: "The institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath."
You can see it, hear it and damn near smell it everywhere. From the phoney, oily-voiced loudspeaker announcements at shopping centres to straight-faced protestations of innocence from high-flying disordered personalities who run corporations like Enron. Somehow the human race has got to get over predatory capitalism. It's so pre-history!
In the journal Psychology, Crime and Law," the authors report, "researchers Board and Fritzon administered a self-report personality inventory to a sample of British senior business managers and executives. They concluded that the prevalence of histrionic, narcissistic and compulsive personality disorders was relatively high, and that many of the traits exhibited were consistent with psychopathy: superficial charm, insincerity, egocentricity, manipulativeness, grandiosity, lack of empathy, exploitativeness, independence, rigidity, stubbornness and dictatorial tendencies."
Some of these traits could be applied not only to myself but everyone I know. But we're only hurting each other. These men are basically teaching millions that this kind of behaviour -- rapacious individualism devoid of humanity -- is OK.
Characterised by a disturbing lack of empathy, psychopaths have little insight into their behaviour. Their life judgments are poor … and they rarely learn from experience, meaning that dysfunctional behaviour is repeated ad infinitum. Their hallmark? Pathological lying.
Who do we know who fits that description? Why, Little Johnny Howard, that's who. The difference between corporate high flyers and politicians is nil.
"They cross back and forth easily between lying and honesty during conversations," the authors observe, "because they do not have the guilty feelings the rest of us have when we try to tell a lie."
Personally, I hate feelings of guilt, but it shows I have a conscience, the built-in monitor that alerts me to those moments when I transgress against others.
Another defining characteristic is the refusal to take responsibility. Psychopaths are never accountable. All blame is externalised (circumstances, fate, luck, brainwashing, the weather). "Pointing the finger at others," Babiak and Hare conclude, "serves the dual purpose of reinforcing their own positive image while spreading disparaging information about rivals and detractors. They do this by positioning their blame of others as a display of loyalty to the listener."
And if the listener happens to be a mob of yokels tuning in to talk back radio, the psychopathic Prime Menteur can easily blame everything from terrorism to the drought on the opposition party and anyone else who thinks differently. "All that matters is the objective: that is, to discredit those who see through them."
Business structures and procedures have changed dramatically since the early 20th century, when the turgid bureaucratic model optimised productivity. The mergers, acquisitions and takeovers of the 1970s and '80s not only trimmed a lot of corporate fat, they also created a demand for a new kind of player: not the steadfast "company man" of the past but an entirely different model: the corporate predator.
The "company man," the "man in the grey flannel suit," used to be a subject of derision. But since his transformation into the macho corporate predator, he is suddenly the goal for all MBA's. Politicians have changed as well. Our Johnny is nothing if not a political predator in the pocket of corporate predators.
A far more aggressive psychopathic subclass brings to mind the leadership style of certain religious heads and politicians. "This group, the corporate bullies, seems to reflect many of the traits of the macho psychopath: they are primarily abusive rather than charming [and] rely on coercion, abuse, humiliation, harassment, aggression and fear to get their way."
See the life and times of Pat Robertson, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and our own Bill Heffernan.
As Babiak and Hare emphasise, the reality is that "there is no evidence that psychopaths derive any benefit from treatment or management programs."
Like pedophiles, there is no hope of rehabilitation. Corporate, religious and political leaders from every country exhibit these traits of madness. They have infected the people who work for them, who pray with them, and who vote for them. They are probably the patriarchal psychopaths we deserve, at least for so long as we choose competition over cooperation, exclusiveness over inclusiveness, and indifference over compassion.
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 1:55 PM | TrackBack
October 15, 2006
The Weekly Gee (29)
Copyright © 2006, Maurie Gee
Posted by Olney Garkle at 12:02 PM | TrackBack
October 13, 2006
David Hicks incarceration counter
The people at Fair Go for David Hicks tell me that the probable date of his capture was 9 December 2001. I have adjusted the counter accordingly. --OG
***
A few weeks ago someone wrote to The Age, congratulating the paper on keeping the David Hicks story alive. The writer went on to suggest that The Age print a daily update on the number of days Hicks has been held without trial.
As far as I know such a counter does not exist. I'm no whiz at these things, but I've set up a simple arrangement that includes his picture and a counter indicating the number of days since he was captured and held without trial. It sits in the right column of Bilegrip's main page.
I've been unable to determine the exact date of Hicks' capture in Afghanistan. It is known to have been sometime in December 2001. Until someone tells me otherwise, I have set the counter from 1 December 2001. This means the figure is probably overstated by several days.
If some has or can put together a more sophisticated counter, I would be happy to use it instead. Until then, this one will have to do.
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 11:38 AM
October 12, 2006
The power of fear
Who says the pro-Israeli lobby doesn't wield disproportionate power with the United States government? Not only does it influence to the point of controlling US foreign policy in the Middle East, but it also scares shitless some nations with embassies in the US.
Australian author and former publisher Carmen Callil has become embroiled in a dispute over freedom of speech in America after a party celebrating her new book was cancelled because of her opinion about the modern state of Israel.
A party in honour of Bad Faith, Callil's account of Vichy official Louis Darquier, who arranged the deportation of thousands of Jews, was to be held at the French embassy in New York this week but was cancelled after the embassy became aware of a paragraph in the book's postscript.
You would think that any self-respecting Jew would snatch up Callil's book in a jiffy. But, no. There is one paragraph -- in the postscript -- that dares to question the policies of modern Israeli governments.
So the French embassy cancels Calil's party, and the Polish consulate cancels a lecture by an American Jew, Tony Judt, on the influence of the pro-Israeli lobby on US foreign policy.
Umeruhca, the land of the free? More like a land to flee.
Links:
Author shunned for Israel criticism
Party Cancelled, Callil Attacks Her Protestors
Sorrow Without Pity (review of her book)
Meanwhile, here in Arsetralia, the daily fear quotient was raised from a rictus to a scream with this headline on the front page of today's Age: WORST DROUGHT EVER, TIPS COSTELLO.
Costello? He's the Treasurer, for Christ's sake. Shouldn't someone from the Environment Ministry speak on this subject? (Uh-oh, that's Ian Campbell. Forget it.) But then Petey likes to pontificate on any subject that comes into his oh-so-fecund mind. And he's not alone: all Howard's chillun do. Just about every day some Minister who knows little about his or her portfolio is heard prattling on about some other subject they know absolutely nothing about. With the help of the Murdoch fright sheets, they do a bloody good job of goosing Mr and Mrs Relaxed and Comfortable into shrieks of fear over their morning tea. "Oh my God, Ethel, we're rooned!" "But, Ed, just yesterday Mr Howard told us that nothing bad would happen if we just kept voting for him. He's such a nice man."
From terrorism, "It's never gonna end, you mugs!" to headlines like today's, the poor Howard-voting stupes are kept on a constant yo-yo of psychological torture laced with soothing remarks from the man whose vision for his nation is a barely visible electrocardiogram reading. And when, occasionally, it flat-lines, then it's Labor's fault and/or the fault of International Socialism! Amazing how these antediluvians keep raving about Communism. Haven't they heard what happened to it?
We may very well be entering the worst drought since the white folk sailed here from the home of cricket and announced the wide brown land to be Terra Nullius. (Remember, until the 1960s Aborigines were regarded as fauna and didn't count in the human population. They still don't.)
But rest assured, little or nothing will be done in the way of help from the government for whom global warming is a furphy. Expect lots of fearspeak to be accompanied by blaming the state governments and little else.
Nice to know our government is working so assiduously to look the other way.
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 2:29 PM | TrackBack
October 11, 2006
Stephen Sewell's lamentation for a fallible species
"Orwell seemed to get it right when he came up with the phrase, 'War is Peace'. The Bush Administration has been trying to find ways to make torture legal and tear up the Geneva Convention, all in the name of peace." -- V. J. Foster, member of the Actors' Gang. See Orwell's future is here, say actors
There was an opinion piece in The Australian yesterday, in which Hal G. P. Colebatch complained that the Left is still running the cultural agenda: "…on cultural and intellectual matters at least, conservatives remain an embattled minority," said he. Well, duh. Without the Left there is no culture. But that hasn't stopped the conservatives from trying to Dick-and-Jane what's left. Another term of Howard Party devolutions and Australian "culture" will amount to a yawning silence, punctuated by the flapping sound of a million waving flags.
To illustrate the assault on culture, the dismissal of ethics and the sneering disregard for simple human kindness being perpetrated here and abroad, take a squiz at Australian playwright Stephen Sewell's cri de coeur on the folly of mankind, "Theatre at the end of history". A lamentation for the ages, Sewell's essay could easily stand alone for future planetary visitors (at least from the Australian perspective) as the summing up of a species that held so much promise but chose, instead, to remain willfully ignorant.
We are reprinting the entire essay, but for openers, here is an excerpt:
Like lame ducks squawking mindlessly on the bridge of a heavily listing ship, our political leaders have by and large demonstrated their absolute irresponsibility and complete incompetence to lead or even to recognise the dangers hurtling towards us, and if we are to be saved, it won't be because we've listened to our leaders and stayed in bed. It will because we have reclaimed civil society and started a dialogue aimed at finding the answers we so desperately need - beginning with asking the questions we so desperately need to ask: how have we allowed greed and avarice to blind us to the threats to our own survival? How did we allow ourselves to believe that patently unsustainable practices could form the basis of any kind of life that could be sustained? How could we have imagined that a society that cared nothing for justice or truth would be either just or truthful when it came to dealing with us? And in that reclamation of civil society, and the rebuilding of our community, it is the artists who now must step into the breach and provide what our politicians have so glaringly failed to provide, and that is the kind of hope and meaning that comes from looking facts in the face and dealing with them honestly while we still have the time.
Read Sewell's essay:
Theatre at the end of history
By Stephen Sewell
Reprinted from The Age, 9 September 2006It is difficult, contemplating contemporary events, not to despair of the human adventure. Across a wide horizon, from the chaos and madness of the Middle East, to the disintegration of democracy in our own country and the death of the seas about us, world events seem to be marching remorselessly in one direction, and while the eternal Panglossers might wish to say it ever was so, it is at least worthwhile taking a breath to consider where we are, where we might be going, and what implications that might have for the work of our civilisation.
For if it's true, as the scientist, Professor James Lovelock wrote recently that "before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable", it would seem an appropriate time for everyone, including the writers and artists who contribute so much to our understanding of the world, to consider some fundamental questions - starting with what does it mean?
If the end result of all our dreamings is a world where our dead children will be heaped in piles, what point all our beautiful thoughts and words, music and paintings? Indeed, was there ever a point, or were we just deluding ourselves as we devastated one another and the planet, while art distracted us from the essentially predatory nature of our species. Are we an animal in fundamental conflict with itself, a torn creature no smarter than a bacteria in a Petri dish of declining nutrients the world would be better off without?
Such thoughts are not new, and have perhaps always occupied our species as we lurch from one disaster to the next, forever ascending a tower of ever increasing mastery and technique, making each new disaster more horrible than the last. Why has there been advance in every field of human endeavour except the one that matters most: the civilising of our own barbarous spirit? When we look at the pictures of torture and degradation from Abu Ghraib, is our shock because it seems so alien to our nature, or rather that it seems so familiar, a commonplace of human life, from the Nazi death camps to ancient Roman games and amusements, whose ubiquity throughout history points overwhelmingly to the conclusion of Pasolini in his much-banned film, Salo; that once you give human beings absolute power over someone, they will do anything and everything their feverish imaginations can come up with. Have we reached the limit of what we might do to one another, or are there unplumbed depths waiting to be explored?
Of the latter I have no doubt.
But if there are degradations and abominations so far unimagined still ahead of us, or perhaps being enacted this very day in some horrid man-made hell-hole somewhere in the world, then by the same logic there are new heights of creativity and humanity also awaiting us, and the future holds the promise not only of new Mozarts and Shakespeares, but of even greater artists whose work will help us plot our way through this strange and fractured world. For that is the point of all art, and most notably my art, theatre, where the values of our turbulent societies are placed in the crucible of the stage and subjected to the blowtorch of drama in order to find out what's real. It's here, in and through art, that we have defined ourselves from time immemorial, from the ancient rituals once used to sanctify the world through to the theatre of war many still appeal to to give their lives meaning, and it is across the many and varied stages and roles we play that our societies are constituted. Society is theatre and art is fundamental to our entire understanding of ourselves as creatures in a world of change.
Which means that artists are the most important people in any society, and that everyone is to some extent an artist.
It's hard to imagine a human being who on a daily basis doesn't exercise some degree of creativity. Indeed, it is the suppression of creativity and the insistence on mechanical repetition that is most resented in any activity, and when we are subjected to such a regime the experience is one of being turned into a slave, a drudge, an automaton or machine beneath human contempt. And such treatment can frequently provoke the most violent resistance. Our creativity and individuality are central to our perceptions of ourselves as human beings and the sense of respect and self-respect that makes life possible. But while everyone is creative, the masters of their art are called artists, and it is the artists in any field who are capable of using the materials and techniques available to them to imaginatively recreate the world in which we live. The poets who can with words fill darkness with meaning, the painters and photographers who allow us to see things that have heretofore been invisible; the composers and musicians who can take us into the uncharted recesses of our souls; the dramatists who through the medium of the stage can weave all these other arts into a complex and layered play of illusion and revelation in which the nature of truth is mysteriously revealed; and all the artists all together in whose hands and through whose mouths we are worked and spoken, shaped and formed, remembered and projected into a future being born in the very process of being imagined; the masters, those artists who turn flat, dead factuality into the stuff of life and meaning and give us reason to live.
For living is a hard thing, requiring considerably more than food and shelter, requiring meaning and with meaning, hope. No one can live without hope, just as no one can live without meaning, and meaning and hope are inextricably intertwined, for if our life has meaning, then we have hope, and if we have hope, it's because we sense a meaning; and so hope and meaning are core elements not just of human society, but of human life. And this is the key to the power of art, for meaning, and therefore hope, is its very cloth; the stuff from which all else is spun. Artists create because, no matter how bleak their visions might be, they are optimistic enough to hope their offerings will have meaning for their fellow humans. And a society will exist just as long as the artists believe in it enough to keep telling their stories.
This is not to say that those stories are always well received, or that the power of artists always celebrated. On the contrary, considerable effort can sometimes be made to blunt, suppress or marginalise the unwanted story and to replace it with the officially sanctioned one; the single grand narrative for which John Howard is currently calling. And while not surprising in dictatorships, such a cultural intervention and attempted manipulation in a democracy is an unexpected admission of the extent to which the Government is diverging from the mainstream cultural values of diversity, plurality and mutual respect that have made Australia such a haven for so many over recent decades, and such an inspiration for tolerance in a world exploding with prejudice. Of course, this cultural agenda is only one arm of an overall policy aimed at remaking Australia, now considerably advanced and which has led to artists being replaced by hacks, drones, spin doctors and media manipulators as the generators and regurgitators of an official culture. But like all such efforts throughout history, all that has really been achieved has been a deepening of the general cynicism infecting society and a kind of samizdat social discourse in which the real artists encode their messages in seemingly innocuous artefacts that only people alert to their true meanings can discern. As is apparent from the fate of the ABC, we are entering the world of the whispered conversation, where the only people who can speak loudly - shrilly - are the ones endorsing the official line, and the vibrancy and diversity that once marked Australian society is being replaced by a dull conformity spiced with gossip and scandal to make everyone think they're still alive.
When really we're dying. Because as I indicated earlier, the real source of hope in any society is its artists, and when those artists are being sidelined, attacked and silenced, what is really being attacked and silenced is society itself. The real values of the society are replaced by the faux values advertising executives are enlisted to promote, and society itself is replaced by a kind of brittle caricature, from which we all inevitably feel alienated because it only has a marginal relationship to the society in which we actually live.
When the Federal Government started locking up refugees, it wasn't just refugees being locked up, it was all of us; and when Australian audiences started being deprived of the opportunity to see theatre about refugees, it wasn't just the cause of the refugees that suffered, it was Australia. We are living in a disintegrating community increasingly held together by the formal elements of our relationships, and this corporatisation of our society is robbing us of the things we most need, a sense of hope and meaning, and though the causes of large social changes are complex, such developments certainly don't dampen the dramatic surge in young people emigrating overseas, and the epidemic of youth suicide stabbing a knife into the heart of the country. If there's no hope, why stay? Here in Australia, or here at all?
But perhaps these are minor considerations compared to the incredible challenges rising before us. Climate change and ecological catastrophe are upon us, irrespective of what the Government thinks, or how it wants to cynically manipulate it to promote the interests of uranium miners, and if all modern politics is about media management and the juggling of perception for as long as you can get away with it, then time is running out, because no matter how much you want to avoid it, the world is real, and is rushing towards us at a terrifying speed.
Like lame ducks squawking mindlessly on the bridge of a heavily listing ship, our political leaders have by and large demonstrated their absolute irresponsibility and complete incompetence to lead or even to recognise the dangers hurtling towards us, and if we are to be saved, it won't be because we've listened to our leaders and stayed in bed. It will because we have reclaimed civil society and started a dialogue aimed at finding the answers we so desperately need - beginning with asking the questions we so desperately need to ask: how have we allowed greed and avarice to blind us to the threats to our own survival? How did we allow ourselves to believe that patently unsustainable practices could form the basis of any kind of life that could be sustained? How could we have imagined that a society that cared nothing for justice or truth would be either just or truthful when it came to dealing with us? And in that reclamation of civil society, and the rebuilding of our community, it is the artists who now must step into the breach and provide what our politicians have so glaringly failed to provide, and that is the kind of hope and meaning that comes from looking facts in the face and dealing with them honestly while we still have the time.
But of course, we may not have the time, and that famous tipping point beyond which there is no stopping the natural forces from wreaking their destructive revenge may have already, as Lovelock believes, been passed.
So what then?
If that terrible moment has come, and we are now in the grip of something that cannot be shaken off, then at least now we can be honest with one another, and honest with the children we have so disastrously betrayed. And if that is possible, then perhaps we'll go to our deaths with something like dignity; still ruing our own foolishness and the foolishness of our forebears for sharpening the axe that beheaded us all, but at least not abandoning ourselves to ghastly fear and panic as the war for oil becomes the war for water, becomes the war for oxygen, becomes the war for anything at all.
A war spreading like an all-conquering monster across the dimming globe where our species is reduced to a hideous gibbering mass of barbarous cannibals the likes of which have never before been seen. And in that dignity we might even sustain a hope, like the hopes that have been sustained throughout the darkest times in history that against all odds we might survive, if for no other reason than sheer dumb luck, because our own mental capacities have proven so obviously barren; that we might be spared the disaster we so richly deserve and that now, armed with the knowledge of what could have been we set about undertaking the kinds of changes we need to make in order that our children might live at all.
But if it doesn't, and eternal night falls upon us, then everything we've thought, dreamt, painted, sung, imagined, hoped for, written about, drew or sculpted will be so much rubbish littering a fly blown planet, and that will be the final meaning of it all: our own foolish recklessness reduced everything we loved and everything we valued to nothing at all. Whatever eyes might one day gaze upon it can contemplate us as some among us contemplated Ozymandias, perhaps recalling those dismal words: "Here we lie, creatures who imagined we were gods and blessed by God; look across our dusty wastes and be warned."
Those warnings have now been coming for decades, and we have not yet heeded them, and so far the conflict in our hearts between our voracity and our good sense has always been won by our voracity, but if there is a time for sense to prevail it is now, and if there is a place it can be played out, it is in the civilising forge of art, where the barbarous weapons of the war that has started can be beaten into the tools we need to reach the stars.
For it is surely not too late, never too late, to look into the mirror and see what we've become, and in seeing what we've become recall what it was we set out to achieve. Was it this? To be counted among those lurching like blood-crazed murderers across the planet? Was it this? To be joined with the hated names that have spread fear and terror among the people of the world? Was it this? To carry our own children to the funeral pyre and throw them in?
The choices are stark, the options are few and diminishing, the real, so long denied, excluded and repressed, has returned, and now in the theatre at the end of history, we confront yet again that same question that has haunted us throughout the eons: what does it mean, and pausing with trembling heart, we look into the abyss and await the answer.
Well, some have said that history is indeed coming to an end. Not the species or the planet, but just that period between pre-history and post-history. Bilegrip will be discussing this subject at length in the, er, future.
-- Olney Garkle
Stephen Sewell Links:
Theatre at the end of history
The Hot Seat: Stephen Sewell
Dark heart beats in the emerald city
Posted by Olney Garkle at 12:44 PM | TrackBack
October 10, 2006
Peter Norman stood for humanitarian values, not Howard values
Peter Norman, Tommie Smith, John Carlos
The so-called "values" touted by politicians like John Howard are hollow and meaningless, useful only for the black art of wedge politics and the pursuit of conformity.
But for Peter Norman, who died at age 64, values were real.
On the victory dais of the 200m event at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, Norman, who came second, stood willingly with winner Tommie Smith and third place runner John Carlos as the latter two protested injustices against black Americans. LIFE magazine and Le Monde have declared the photograph to be one of the 20 most influential images of the 20th century.
Directly after the award ceremony Smith and Carlos were withdrawn from the relays and expelled from the Olympic Village. Things got worse after they returned home.
On their way to the medals ceremony, Carlos had asked Norman if he believed in human rights. Norman said his mother and father had raised him in the Salvation Army and he had been taught to take care of all people who could not take care of themselves. He proudly donned a human rights badge in support of the civil rights protest.
At Norman's funeral yesterday, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who flew in from the States, talked about Norman.
Smith told Norman's family: "Peter Norman's legacy is a rock. Stand on that rock."
Carlos said, "As we stand here thinking about Peter Norman, think about the courage of a man who said, 'I'm standing with you'."
He spoke of the hatred they knew would be directed at them. "Not every young white individual would have the gumption, the nerve, the backbone, to stand there."
Carlos recounted the conversation they had before going out for the medal ceremony. They asked Norman if he believed in human rights. He said he did. They asked him if he believed in God. Norman, who came from a Salvation Army background, said he believed strongly in God.
"We knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat. He said, 'I'll stand with you'." Carlos said he expected to see fear in Norman's eyes. He didn't. "I saw love. Peter never flinched (on the dais). He never turned his eyes, he never turned his head. He never said so much as 'ouch'. You guys have lost a great soldier." Carlos said that Norman deserved to be as well-known as Steve Irwin. "Go and tell your kids the story of Peter Norman."
Peter Norman still holds the 200m record for the fastest Australian. What a mensch.
LINKS
Quotes above come from these two articles:
Martin Flanagan: 'Tell your kids about Peter Norman'
Michael Davis: Final salute to a courageous athlete of Olympian values
SUBSEQUENT LINK
Greg Baum: Athletes' final salute to an Australian great
And here is a letter to The Age (11 October):
Not a 'Howard hero' Did I miss something or am I correct in thinking the death of an Australian who really stood for something other than driving very fast or teasing dumb animals did not get the usual trembling bottom lip eulogy from John Howard that he evidently reserves only for his special Australian "heroes".
Perhaps Peter Norman's 1968 stance in support of Tommie Smith and John Carlos does not rate as significant in Howard's scheme of things, but I feel positive millions of ordinary Australians admired him for his actions and mourn his premature death.
Richard Couper
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 12:20 PM | TrackBack
October 9, 2006
Hicks shafted by Australia's elected traitors
"My God, American people would not accept this. The American Government would not accept this for one of its own citizens. -- Major Michael Mori, US military lawyer acting for David Hicks.
The penny has yet to drop for most Australians. But it is slowly being dislodged from its safe perch on their altars of apathy and greed. With each passing day of arrogance, corruption and incompetence, the disengaged electorate -- so relaxed and comfortable they have become comatose -- are beginning to realise that while the rogue, extreme right wing government they have kept in power for the last ten years has fattened their wallets, it has sold their souls to market forces and made them the unnecessary target of terrorism.
Richard Baker writes in The Age, What US says about Hicks is OK by Canberra, that, in effect, the pompous peacock, Alexander Downer, the cadaverous crow, Philip Ruddock, and the shopping strip solicitor turned strutting fool hen, John Howard, have handed over our national pride and sovereignty in the person of David Hicks -- and by inference any other Australian who differs from their views -- to the most cretinous bully in the schoolyard, Umeruhca's tinpot turkey, George W. Bush. In return, they get his protection to pose as important sub-lieutenants in the arse end of the world
The government of Czar Howie (a fitting name for terminally embarrassed Australia's leader) has continued to turn a blind eye to the brutal injustice inflicted on Hicks. You would think that he was the most evil person who ever lived, and that no punishment was too good for him, to hell with due process. And yet, he has never been tried, only held prisoner against the Geneva Convention -- for five bloody years.
Now we find that this traitorous government of ours has relied on assumptions without proof that Hicks was not being held in solitary confinement (typically euphemised as a "single-occupancy cell"), when all along he has "been held in a cement cell with a steel door for 23 hours a day," and that, according to a visit last week by Major Mori, he was fat, pasty, unfit due to lack of exercise and had poor eyesight and mental health. "They put him in there to isolate him, sensory deprive him and break him. Unfortunately, I think it is working."
Interestingly, those quotes are not in the online edition referred to above. You will have to buy the Monday, October 9, 2006 edition of The Age to read the full account.
LINK:
If you ever doubted that the arts are central to a free society, read this: Doing the Guantanamo shuffle.
MORE LINKS
Letters to Hicks censored, lawyer says
Lawyer says Hicks abuse covered up
Meanwhile, Robert Manne has returned to last week's infamous Quadrant speech to assess Howard's claimed victory in the culture wars:
During the past 10 years Australia has undergone a profound conservative-populist transformation. The Howard Government has abandoned the quest for Aboriginal reconciliation. It has ended discussion of the meaning of multiculturalism. It has closed our borders, by the use of military force, to all those seeking refuge by boat. It has adopted a foreign policy of a more uncritically pro-American kind than was seen even in the era of Menzies. And, by its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, it has turned its back on the international fight against global warming.
Howard is a man of old-fashioned and dogmatic opinions and emotions. He will act on these principles at least up to the point where adherence to them seriously threatens his grip on power.
His prime ministership now reminds me of Sir Robert Menzies' in its final years. Because of a certain stubbornness and inability to respond to the winds of change on racial questions, such as apartheid and the White Australia Policy, Menzies quite suddenly began to look like a man from a bygone era.
The same is happening to John Howard. Through a romantic attachment to American civilisation and a lazy commitment to the American alliance no matter what, Howard has led Australia to a humiliating foreign policy of automatic loyalty and into complicity in the moral and strategic disaster of Iraq.
Accompanying Manne's opinion piece is this cartoon by Australia's currently most biting cartoonist (a pity they no longer allow decent reproductions):
Courtesy, John Spooner, The Age
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 1:59 PM | TrackBack
October 8, 2006
The Weekly Gee (28)
or
Wannsee, NSW. Howard Youth greet their idol as he departs the Quadrantstag after triumphant speech, "Endlösung der left wing untermenschen".
Copyright © 2006, Maurie Gee (Thanks to Richard Neville: scroll down for original)
Posted by Olney Garkle at 2:56 PM | TrackBack
October 6, 2006
Shades of oppressions past
Fanatics in the autocratic oligarchy of the John Howard Party (formerly the Australian Liberal Party, the party of decentralised small government) hardly ever take a breather in their obsession to turn Australiastan into an authoritarian branch of the neo-con empire.
Just the other day book-banning advocate and Attorney General for Crimes Against Humanity, Philip "Heil" Ruddock, was blithely stating that sleep deprivation was not torture. Oh, yeah? Then how come I go bananas when events conspire to deprive me of sleep over a period of days? Sleep deprivation is at the black heart of psychological torture, often making the physical tortures of fingernail pulling and genital electrocution unnecessary. Unless, that is, the torturer just needs an orgasm.
One wonders what other forms of torture Ruddock might consider to be merely coercion, and will he write the rule book on what is and what isn't. No doubt those in the profession of extracting confessions through torture, posing these days as the guardians of democratic freedom, will heed it's every word.
A couple of days later Our Glorious Leader came over all stroppy with his condemnation of everything to the left of Genghis Khan.
Today, Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop is pushing for Howard Party control of education, claiming that left-wing ideologues in state governments have hijacked what is being taught in schools. "Some of the themes emerging in school curriculum (sic) are straight from Chairman Mao -- we are talking serious ideology here," said she.
I think we can all agree that educational standards in Australia and elsewhere are stuffed, but that devolution has been in progress for some forty years. As with every pronouncement made by Howard Party stooges, this is simply a grab for centralised control to further its right-wing ideology.
Poor Julie Bishop. Like all the other Ministers and backbenchers under Howard's malign tutelage, she has lost whatever integrity she once had. I wonder if any of them realise how completely Howard has sucked them dry of their humanity. Only Petro Georgiou remains miraculously unharmed.
It's amazing how often the Howard, Bush and Blair governments use Stalinist and Maoist totalitarian regimes as examples to fulminate against the left, when in actual fact they are modelling themselves on those very regimes.
It's hard to believe they are unaware of this. But then, maybe it's a simple case of projection. That is, the attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as a naive or unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt. Yep, it's always unconscious.
As for their antisocial and undemocratic policies, their is nothing unconscious in their demonic urge to straiten and punish.
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 3:03 PM | TrackBack
October 5, 2006
John Howard's "Dick and Jane" version of moral clarity
O didn't we rejoice at the official Naming of Heroes by the man who towers above stink beetles, John W. Howard. Speaking at the 50th birthday of Quadrant, the journal the CIA helped with start-up funding, His Nibs also let fly the usual wan invective about how everyone who isn't a card-carrying Capitalist is a card-carrying Commie. That's our boy: up to date as a Pat Boone record.
But, say, who were those heroes, anyway? Winston Churchill? Mahatma Gandhi? Nelson Mandela?
Nope. They were Margaret "Social conscience is for sissies" Thatcher, Ronald "If I had a brain Nancy would've noticed" Reagan, and Pope "Let those liberation theologists eat lead" John Paul II.
Pee Wee John thinks he's a man of steel 'cause Georgie told him so, but we all know he's just a sterile little twit with the creativity quotient of a conservative, which is none above minus. That bit about the Pope was doubtless a last minute brainlet-storm to satisfy fascist Catholics like Pell Pot and Tony Abbott. And maybe he thought it would be cool to have three instead of just two heroes, when in fact he only has one, forget about Ronnie. And that's the Mad Thatcher, whose malevolent influence has to place her as one of the top ten evil beings of the 20th century.
What our Prime Homunculus loves most about the old bat is her "moral clarity". Hee-hee, moral clarity.
Like all conservatives, reactionaries and outright fascists, Johnny's and Maggoty's ideas of what is and isn't moral are to be found in the Dick and Jane guide to life on the planet Pleasantville. Here is a partial take on the Dick and Jane books Bill Bryson read in the Fifties (from his book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid):
In the Dick and Jane books, Father is always called Father, never Dad or Daddy, and always wears a suit, even for Sunday lunch -- even, indeed, to drive to Grandfather and Grandmother's farm for a weekend visit. Mother is always Mother. She is always on top of things, always nicely groomed in a clean frilly apron. The family have no last name. They live in a pretty house with a picket fence on a pleasant street, but they have no radio or TV and their bathroom has no toilet. The children -- Dick, Jane and little Sally -- have only the simplest and most timeless of toys: a ball, a wagon, a kite, a wooden sailboat. No one ever shouts or bleeds or weeps helplessly. No meals ever burn, no drinks every spill (or intoxicate). No dust accumulates. The sun always shines.
Bryson likens these folks to the characters in a film of the time, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These are the kind of people conservatives want us all to be. Why? Because conservatives are cowards. Because the conservative dream (and what a tiny, insulting dream it is) is for there to be certainty. Simple values, family values and moral clarity all lead to conformity, the conservative ideal. In the conformity, and thus subservience, of the masses lies the road to power for the cunning and the clever, the little-picture people for whom mindless religion and commerce is the one true god.
Moral clarity? Conservatives are amoral cardboard cutouts, the kind who speak with lifeless platitudes while condemning real people to suffer. And that's what John W. Howard has achieved for his relaxed, comfortable and lifeless Australia: a nation forever at war with Iraq, with terrorism, with its own people. Orwell's Big Brother never had it so good.
-- Olney Garkle
Posted by Olney Garkle at 3:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 4, 2006
Bilegrip under new management
From today, I, Olney Garkle, am the head chingon of this sadly neglected blog. I assume all administrative and editorial duties held by the previous chingon, Theodore G. Willikers, reduced these days to a gibbering, stubble-faced shadow of his former self.
Poor Willikers fell into a funk sometime in August. It suddenly occurred to him that nothing was going stop Australia's nation-wrecking slide into zomboid conformity under the yoke of the ruling Christian/capitalist cartel headed by the man whose name he could no longer utter without screaming but who is known to brainwashed children throughout the embarrassed land as "Howie".
Willikers telephoned me late that month, obviously under the influence of one tequila, two tequilas, three tequilas, floor, and for several minutes spluttered in a terrified voice about the nation being taken over by pod people. "They hatch in the back yards of aspirational voters," he whispered. "I heard their unearthly sucking and popping coming from next door the other night. I haven't slept since."
Yesterday afternoon, I found him staring at a computer screen of lottery numbers. "They're all there," he said. "Now I've got to get them in the right order so I can flee this pop stand."
When I mentioned his predecessor, Harold Hark, and the hard times that have befallen him since he fled to Europe, Willikers squeaked in despair. Or was it a squeal? It was an unnerving sound, that of a man who is ready to die with one last gasp of defiance after months of unmerciful torture, but whose final utterance is robbed of all dignity when, to his mind-unhinging surprise, the torturer disallows the Hollywood ending by crushing his nuts in a vice.
Still, Willikers was reluctant to give up the helm. "What about my reader?" he cried. "I can't just leave him, possibly her, in the lurch!" "You have done so already," I told him, instantly regretting my succinct brutality. "Nobody comes here anymore, not even Technorati. They have treated your pathetic pings of late with utter disdain. Do you think a blog with a measly page rank of 2 is of any interest to them?"
Willikers's head dropped to his chest as if picadored. "I failed," he wailed.
"Nonsense," I assured him, simultaneously slipping my trusty SanDisk into a USB slot. "You're efforts to reawaken larval Australians have been, er, very, um, helpful." While he blubbered into his cup of corpse-cold Oolong tea (my God, he puts milk in it!), I transferred the Bilegrip files, left the complete 15½-hour miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz to cheer him up, and exited quietly.
With any luck, Bilegrip should be up and running by tomorrow. As well as submissions from the old regulars, those fainéant flâneurs, Benoît Balz, Gort Slypesunder and Hyper Roland, look for the work of new contributors Thomas Pinche, Tara R. Bümdier, Eckhart Higbigiggy and Ferris Darkwater. (Chet LaMerde has not been heard from since his last posting of 10 August. ASIO? Let's hope he's not found by one of those early morning dog-walkers.
As for Willikers, may his numbers come up and deliver him from evil.
-- Olney Garkle (more info on Garkle here)
Posted by Olney Garkle at 10:41 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack