In Flight

Artichoke Circus

2007-10-03T00:04:00.000+01:00

(and unresolved dilemmas)

Before Ductape died (for my part I think he is dead and I miss him greatly) he and I were writing something together. For this last year, I’ve been unsure what to do with it. On the one hand, it was part of a correspondence which is clearly private. On the other, it was also a collaboration within that correspondence which both of us had intended to be read by others when it was eventually completed. It wasn’t complete last September. But nor did it break off abruptly: we had got stuck a while before that.

We had encountered changes that needed making and some basic questions that needed answering before we could keep on writing. And events intervened. The Lebanon was being bombed. In retrospect, I think Ductape's health was failing. Also I was not writing much: La belle dame had dropped by and words had become dangerous creatures.

But I think that perhaps had circumstances been otherwise, we might eventually have found a way out of our narrative difficulties. Counterfactuals. As it was, they weren't, we didn’t and I don’t want to change what was written now, since I think some parts of it may be among the last things he wrote. Though not the last.

It’s hard (at least I've found it hard) to know what to do with words that have, if only by default, been entrusted to your keeping, but which – at least at some point – were intended to be read by more than one pair of eyes. I thought about what to do about this over the last year, but have reached no conclusion: I still don’t know whether this is a betrayal of trust or not. We didn’t -- and in particular Ductape didn’t – think that it was finished. But I cannot fix or finish it by myself and some of you were his friends, the people for whom he wrote.

So.

If parts seem clumsy or inept, they are almost certainly mine since Ductape didn't do clumsy or inept.

Artichoke Circus.

Where did I find this place? In a memory. Look see? Over here.
A dubious pause and a raised eyebrow.
"Well it's a good enough place to meet isn't it? A place that is no place at all. One can come and go, traceless. Singularly apropos."

You follow the voice over to a rather distressed looking picnic table, there in what passes for a park for the kids to run around during the day, letting off steam. It's darker here, away from the floodlit carpark, from the loglo of McDs and Burger King. The air smells of oil and fumes. Beneath that, the smell of stale cooking fat and old fries. Yet catch that midsummer breeze in just the right way and there's a hint of something not yet vanquished, not yet destroyed utterly.

"Like Ithilien" she mutters beneath her breath, "Yes. This is my memory of it."

Her companion does not hear. He is preoccupied with the discovery of a fire fly, and its periodic hopefully-green glowing.

"What's it's name?" he says, looking up.
"It doesn't have one. But we called it the United States of Generica. "

Out on the highway a military convoy trundles through the night.

"So." she says, "What shall we discuss on this shortest night? Manifest Destiny? The End of Empire?

"Is there a difference?" the old man asks, smiling down at the firefly, with whom he has made friends. It perches comfortably on his finger, blinking companionably in the gathering dusk.

"In their ends, I mean," he eyes his DoodleBurger skeptically. "They have always been symbiotic, like conjoined twins that cannot be separated, that live only a short time, though to their parents, it seems an eternity. The fact is, we are all just people. There is no Master Race, no Manifest Destiny, no Empire. These are more truly fairy tales than fairies and goblins and enchanted forests. Although unlike the fairies and the enchanted forests, they call forth the worst that is in us, worse even than the mischievous goblins."

He nods farewell to the firefly, who makes its blinking way off into the sky, and takes a hesitantbite of the DoodleBurger, nods approvingly. "Good. They remembered the extra pickles."

"I suspect I'd need more pickles still," she replies grinning, picking lazily at a strawberry parfait. Lifting her spoon, She raises an eyebrow towards her companion.

“We are all just people?There is no Master Race, no Manifest Destiny, no Empire?” These things, then, are mere chimeras. Figments of a feverish brain, of paranoid imagining? Will-o-wisps we have been chasing through a forest to our boggy doom.” She smiles. “Windmills. Not giants after all.”

She pushes the half-finished parfait aside, not before having extracted, with care, one last strawberry, though not the last. And looks at her companion seriously.

“In that case, all of our rejections and denials (flawed though they doubtless have been), all our disruptions, disputations and dissolutions (morally compromised to their core though they may be) – all have been truly full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Harsh words hurled at an imagined foe.”

“I wish that were so. I would like to die happy. But it is not. We are not just people.“

She pauses for a moment as a security guard makes her round of the car park.

“We are people, yes,” she continues quietly, once the guard is out of earshot,
“but we are also the things that people make. And to our great misfortune, Master Races, Manifest Destinies and Empires have been among these made things.”

“And are we not so neatly caught between truth and falsehood? For if these things are to be unmade again, we must deny them existence, we must reject them utterly and steadily. Yet if we simply deny their existence – if we say all innocent and unawares, “Oh but there is no such thing as Empire! The Master Race? Who are they? I never heard of them before!” then whether our innocence is sincere or feigned, we cannot help but make invisible its consequences, its damage done.”

She looks around the carpark again. The security guard has resumed her post outside Burger King, on the other side of the lot. A worn, sharp vegetable knife has materialised on the table between them. She shakes her head. “Another memory.” She picks it up and rests it carefully in her left hand flat across her palm, fingers folding up and closely over the blade.

“It is tempting to imagine that they do not exist, that these things that people make are in some sense not real because they are made and can therefore be unmade. The knife is relatively simple to regard as real, it is material. We can see it, touch it, guess what its effects might be. From here in Generica? Though no less material, perhaps it is true that Empire is not so visible here as elsewhere. But that – as you observed to Alex – is only because in the eye of the hurricane, there is no wind.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, she puts the knife down between them. “So. What is to be done?” she asks. "How may we escape this snare?"

"Well, yes, they exist in the same way that fat exists on the butt of an insecure and slender young girl, gazing into her mirror."

The old man decides not to tell his companion that those are not strawberries, but chunked and formed vegetable protein, not unlike the DoodleBurger itself, only the extrusion settings are different.

"And so I suppose we make arguments against them for the same reasons we try to reason with the young girl."

The firefly has returned. It seems to like the old man. Or maybe it is hoping for a crumb of DoodleBurger. If so, its hopes are beyond rewarded, as his benefactor decides he has more than achieved his textured vegetable protein requirement for the day,and lays the dubious sandwich down, only a few bites eaten."It is our destiny to fight phantoms," he muses. "All those things that don't exist, with which we seek to destroy ourselves."

He pulls a pair of glasses from a pocket in his garment. His distance lenses. He puts them on and gazes out across the parking lot, and is caught by a billboard "WORLD'S BIGGEST ARTICHOKES KIDS AND SENIORS FREE.""Do you like artichokes?" he asks, pointing at the billboard. "I am a senior." He looks around for a few more seconds, and apparently decides he has had enough distance vision, replaces the glasses.

"The girl, you see, will starve herself. She will pretend nothing is wrong, and eat her meals, but vomit them up in secret. She will do this until one day her mother catches her unawares, in her underclothes, and sees the bony shoulders, the ribs like a concentrationcamp photo, and then, if it is not too late, the whole family will live around the cause of saving her life. But even in the hospital, hooked to her IV pole, when she looks in the mirror, she will see a fat butt.

So it is with Empire, so it is with Manifest Destiny.Just a bunch of white people who think their butts are fat. At least in this particular century, it's white people. A while back it was Persians."He looks quite old enough to have been witness, possibly participant, in events "a while back," but it is with remarkable agility that he springs up from the plastic table, after murmuring his farewell to the firefly in some ancient (or not) language."Let's go see those artichokes!" He rubs his hands together in anticipation, licks his lips. "I hope they will have lemon butter!"

She too gets up, casting a brief surreptitious glance at her backside, choosing a moment when her companion’s attention appears to be fully fixed upon the possibility of artichokes. “But it is fat, there’s just no getting around it.” she thinks ruefully. She shakes herself. After all, there are worse things. She’s not hooked up to an IV. The trick is to try and see clearly what is there, fat or no fat, ghosts or no ghosts. Or both, even, depending on which of one’s mismatched eyes one peers through.

"Looks like it’s still open” she says, staring out across the car park in the late twilight. “See, there’s lights on and they’ve got seats out on the verandah. This wasn’t here last time.”

She picks up the knife – “In case we have to cut the prickly ends off the leaves. Or that pithy stuff” she explains, tucking it out of sight. “I love artichokes. Especially with garlic, but lemon would be good too.”

As they amble across the car park, she regales him with a tale of the time she learned to distinguish between anchovies, artichokes and garbage disposal units and why the remnants of the second should never, ever, be put into the third.

“Green. Stringy. Stuff. Everywhere. ” she concludes, grimacing. “Who’d have thought one artichoke could have so much of it? .”

Taking a seat at a wooden table on the verandah, they take turns looking at a menu and discover a broad assortment of artichoke-devouring options, several of which require thoughtful and detailed investigation, consumption and comparison.

“So it is with Manifest Destiny so it is with Empire – yes, I think that we agree. But listen,” she thinks aloud, as they sit there, replete with artichoke in many delicious forms, contemplating the deep blue evening sky, “The girl on the IV, surrounded by her loving family – she will not recover, I think. She may linger but she will not live, until she sees what is there, the delusion, that it is a delusion, and the harm she does by acting on it. Until she sees that, she will not see a need to end it. And where will she learn to see? And how?

“We may reason with her – as you said – tell her that she is, in fact, not only slender but dangerously emaciated. We may place the mirror before her face. We may drag her from her bed to measure her height, weigh her body and show her the BMI index, but what she will hear is that we, being fat, lazy and undisciplined are jealous of her determination, her self-control, her wholehearted desire to be thin, her willingness to do whatever it takes to reach that goal. Her single-mindedness. And if we acknowledge this as well – if we say to her that this – our fat, lazy and undisciplined jealousy of your determination – is what she will hear when we say this and it this is a predictable symptom of this illness? Well, sophistry can be added to that list easily enough.”

“I remember sitting in a room with someone who had once been a friend, holding my hands tightly together so that I would not hit her with them and realising for the first time that although I had the strength to bodily pick her up and hurl her to the other end of the room – and for that matter, the necessary rage to make such a choice seem attractive – it was not in my power to move her conscience one single inch.”

And so beloved ancestor, with the irritating persistence of an uncooperative and childish descendant sitting in the back seat of a car, asking every two minutes “Are we there yet?” I shall repeat my question: what is to be done?

He gestures to indicate that he cannot answer just yet, he is still finishing up his Artichokes Rockefeller, wondering whether there really is a difference between anchovies and garbage disposals, he is not fond of either. He smiles to himself as best he can, under the artichoke-stuffed circumstances, at the array of empty dishes at the girl's place, waiting to be collected.

Woman, he corrects himself, but he cannot help but think of her as a child, when they cross busy streets, he takes her hand protectively in his own, careful to let her think she is assisting his aged self make the journey safely.

He is glad to see her eat. She is too thin. "How to move a conscience," he finally mumbles, almost to himself. "There really should be a pamphlet orsomething. A website. With easy steps and a diagram." "I think it is like teaching," he continues, pushing back his dish, reluctantly acknowledging that he has reached his personal limit of artichoke consumption, and a bit concerned that his astonishing capacity for same may cause the restaurant's management to revise their "SENIORS FREE" policy, at least on the All-U-Can-Eat buffet.

"No one ever teaches anyone anything, really. You just make the resources available and sit back and watch them learn."

"Where y'all from?" asks the cashier as the girl - the woman - hands her a plastic card. "Y'all ain't from round here," she pops her bubblegum to emphasize her remarkable perceptive powers. "Yourn's free, youknow," she shouts at the old man, unaware that at this moment, he can hear the slurp as a child over at the BurgerDoodle finishes his WildBerryFreeze. "Seniors is free," she explains to the woman, voice lowered to a normal decibel level, swiping the plastic card through a machine, waiting for another machine, somewhere, to respond, and agree that the impressively low sum of $7.99 US may be safely deducted from or charged to, yet another machine somewhere else.

"You know who he looks like?" she asks conversationally, as they all wait for the hiss and clicks that will indicate that the electronic question and answer session has concluded,

"He looks like the feller they got on the television set, th'terst, you know, that blew up the nine-a-leven? With all them people in it? Oh I know he ain't, he's way too old, plus he's one o' th' nice ones. I c'n tell th' nice ones." She leans toward the old man, grins. "You ain't fixin t' blow up nothin', is ya?" she shouts.

"Could we have some bubble gum like yours?" the old man places a coin on the counter, takes the little squares from her astonished hand. It jumps at his touch, as if from an electric shock.

"He speaks English real good." The cashier is, after all, a professional, who must be able to recover quickly from shocks to the system. "You speak English real good," she shouts in the direction of the old man's ear. He inclines his head to her graciously. "You will permit me to return the compliment."

Sometimes we must lie to be kind, he thinks to himself, as they settle into the car, leaving the cashier to stare at her hand where the ancient fingers brushed it as they took the gum, as if looking for some kind of mark.

"Pay-gy," she calls to a waitress, " You got smora them pills like you gimme that night Misty got th' po-leesecalled on Dwayne?" Peggy nods obligingly and goes off to get her purse. The cashier looks as if she might burst into tears.

"So it is with moving consciences. We cannot do it, they must move themselves. At best, we can make vehicles available." The old man blows a bubble and pops it, quite pleased with himself, undisturbed by the fact that he is no match for his companion's skills in this department.

"The Americans like to say, you know, that Uncle Tom's Cabin changed peoples' hearts, and was the real catalyst for the re-framing of slavery. Even Abraham Lincoln himself is alleged to have indicated as much to Ms. Stowe. But I think this is a myth. The real reasons were economic, as they always are. But the public is always encouraged to attribute such things to something less mundane, more emotionally uplifting, a book, Gandhiji, Patrice Lumumba, Dr. King, Nelson Mandela. Not to take away from any of them. All were the vehicles for moving many consciences, and this is a good thing. But we must not deceive ourselves, and if we look about Soweto today, or the projects a few miles from Dr. King's tomb, if we leave the big city and observe the plight of Dalits in almost any village, we must acknowledge that on the whole, only a small percentage of consciences have been moved."

An open thread!

2007-03-09T22:58:00.000Z

"Choking on the ashes of our enemies" is a phrase I've had in my head for a while, perhaps because I do bear grudges.

There was a Yoko Ono piece -- it was part of a book of performance pieces that I read a long time ago: a little book of instructions though not of the saccharine type.

It said something along the lines of, "Go sit by a river and wait. Sooner or later, the heads of your enemies will floating by." Some rivers even have comfortable benches along their banks where one can sit and eat sandwiches while one waits.

I suppose I've been thinking of that phrase "Choking on the ashes of our enemies" in the context of the empire and its inversions: the colonies. Certainly it is true that imperialism begets resistance: that those of us who try to find a place in resistance are in a sense Empire's estranged offspring, its changlings, its cuckoos in the next. But I've been thinking of Said too and his firm conviction that despite the pen much in its hand, despite its efforts to persuade us that it has defined every inch of us, that we are not creatures to be explained solely in terms of our oppositional relationship to empire (to the extent we manage one). That we don't necessarily have to be rebellious offspring, but could be cuckoos and changlings instead. That we are something else beside -- not simply creatures of imperial make.

And I guess I've been thinking about that whole macrocosm/microcosm thing.

Not coming to many conclusions. Just thinking. And looking forward to hearing Nanette's thoughts on absolute freedom of speech.

How to break a silence

2007-02-05T22:32:00.000Z

How to break a silence?
Shatter it like glass?
Crunch it underfoot like a snail trodden on by mistake?
Pretend it didn’t exist, like a cat sidling back after a week (months?) spent tomming about the neighbourhood?

The last is tempting, but doesn’t seem quite right. So.
Silence? Yes.
Meaningful silence? No.
Sometimes things acquire their own momentum.
I didn’t mean to be away this long.

La belle dame dropped by for a few months. That’s not such a big deal, but it is among the reasons I’ve not been around much except in an very occasional ‘Hi. I’m still alive.” kind of way. She started packing her bags back around the end of October, and I think she may be finally out the door again for now.

Hard to tell. That’s what I thought a while ago, but she ended up staying a while longer. She’s a tedious houseguest and I don’t much enjoy her company.

Outwaiting her requires three things: memory, indifference and distraction.

Memory is the hardest. When she has her hooks in you, it can be difficult to recollect that she has loosed her hold before and may do so again. Memory and a touchingly irrational faith in induction.

Indifference is by far the easiest, though there’s little to be said about it. Or rather, there’s too much to be said about it and sometimes less is more.

Distraction is the most interesting. Absorbing, anyway. Some decent work gets done when la belle dame comes by, but little of it involves writing. Language, or at least producing language, becomes something best avoided. Reading is safe enough. That’s a kind of burying oneself in other people’s thoughts and lives, but writing is different.

When I was a musician, I used to spend lots of time practicing and doing technical exercises when she came by. Spatial things also work. Complex and addictive games which (though trivial in themselves) require concentration and attention to detail and possess their own internal logic that bears little resemblance to the external. Immersing oneself in datasets (or in voluminous masses of qualitative data, for that matter) – also works and is quite a good guilt-free alternative. Anything that involves obsessively looking for patterns in a massy morass of information that is messy, complicated and enough to absorb all of one’s attention.

(It is a little disconcerting just how much of my life – even when la belle dame is not about – is organised around having such things readily to hand, just in case. Other, more well-adjusted individuals have security blankets or teddy bears.)

How to describe that wordless world? It’s not like much of anything. One does not inhabit it as a person, but rather as a kind of machine. Cartesian dualism is out of fashion (for good reasons even), but it does accord so very neatly with experience. For there are no experiences to be had there. That world does not lend itself to discrete memories or to emotion. It is not a place where life happens, though sometimes it is a place where certain kinds of knowledge are produced.

If it reminds me of anything, it is of swimming in the ocean on a choppy day, in the wind and rain. When one swims underwater, the chop, the rain, the wind are all happening somewhere up there, but not to you. Not while you’re immersed, though, certainly there are consequences to remaining beneath the surface forever. Seachanges and whatnot.

Anyway. Enough. Tedious topics for troubled times.

I haven’t been writing, but I have been – well lurking and reading both. In latter days the former has been providing moments of unintended comedy (well, bitter farce, anyway - I never was too good at telling the difference), and moments (hours even!!) of déjà vu. And sympathy for those who have been dragged around this particular merry-go-round once more.

The latter means that I am in the fortunate position of having read some really good books, though I’m only going to mention two here.

Go read The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. In terms of form, it’s the most elegant thing I’ve seen since Black Orchid . Sheer brilliance. Parables of the Cold War played out in a down-at-heel seamy post-Soviet Moscow. Sparse, austere and terse. Go. Read.

At least over here, The Day Watch is now out as well.

Bonnie Honig has a book out (and has had for a while) called Democracy and the Foreigner . It’s a clever book which suggests that relations between democracy and foreignness can be read as gothic romance. Definitely worth a look – it’s an intriguing book and she’s a fine writer.

I miss DTF a great deal. At first I had thought he might just be on hiatus, but it’s a while ago now since I stopped thinking that. Which should really be a whole post of its own. And will be. Except.

Transmutations

2006-10-31T23:36:00.000Z

Tonight will be a dangerously in-between time. The leaves are still green on the trees but the evenings are cold and it is dark by five. Tonight will be a night for making sure no lights are visible to the street and leaving knocks at the door unanswered. Tonight the cat will stay inside no matter what.

There are the dead and then there are the living, but how can they be told apart? Well yes, the dead ones are supposed to be ashes, under the ground, or carefully labelled parts in crypts. Occasionally suffering a sea change is also acceptable. But that’s what is supposed to happen. It doesn’t always.

I mean look at me. Am I the woman I once was?
No.
I don’t think so either.

Even the memories are those of a stranger: a remote assemblage of things that happened some place else a long time ago to a casual acquaintance who subsequently drifted out of touch as such acquaintances do. When did she move out? And who or what moved in instead?

No. Those questions are too disingenuously innocent. When did I kill her off? Why? And how did I end up inheriting the body? Why isn’t it safely underground or decently scattered ashes?

None of which I say to the woman sitting opposite me. I fear I made a mistake when I let her inside. But when we were children we were good friends. So what else could I do?

“It’s all so shamelessly self-indulgent” she continues smoothly without pause (and I must confess that I have lost all track of what she is saying or how long she has been saying it), “Just like recounting dreams. That too is fascinating to the dreamer (and why shouldn’t it be?) but so interminably tedious for those forced to listen to endless recitations of “and then suddenly I realised that I wasn’t naked in my old high school auditorium at all, but stuck in Euston Station with the train just pulling out. What do you think it all means? Do you think it was about S-E-X?” She pulls a quizzical face, exaggeratedly wide-eyed.

“No,” she replies sharply to her imagined interlocutor, “It’s about being an unutterable B-O-R-E!” She sighs. “I’m probably not really cut out for this whole dream analysis schtick,” she says, “but the money is good.”

I shift in my seat wondering if I should try for a word in edgewise. I think she should leave now. I thought she was leaving already. The taxi to the airport has been called but it seems to be taking forever to arrive. Me? I just want my life back.

“Anyway” I think irritably to myself, “I never dreamed things like that. All my life – and hers too – I dreamed of two things: journeys and deaths. Both of them my own.”

There is no describing the country of those journeys: it is beautiful and it is terrible and it is home. To describe the deaths that find me there would miss the point. Yes. They are nightmares but I hated to wake. Though it is perhaps amusing that the means by which I sometimes met death never once coincided with those which I used, from time to time, to seek it out.

Oh yes. That’s what she was saying was self-indulgent. Talk about full circle. Her sister and the saga of finding the right doctor and the right medication and the right dosage and the right talking treatment and why doesn't she just get over herself already and stop being so interminably B-O-R-I-N-G and it was just like her clients and they were just as bad.

But there are no bottles of pills in my kitchen cupboard: there have not been for some years now. And I do not drive. Were my arms bare today (though why would they be on such a clammy chill evening?) there would be no scars or scratches at which to be alarmed, though the particularly observant might note bruises that looked recent. And these last few years it is true that I have developed a seemingly unquenchable thirst for solitude.

She, on the other hand, is infinitely more garrulous and more brittle. Her expressions, so vivid on the face, never once reach the eyes. She speaks words spun out of glass at shattering point.

Outside the taxi pulls up. Finally.

“Anyway – so lovely to see you again! When are you coming out next? I know. I know. It’s a long flight. But when you do go home, do come and stay with me!” she says as the taxi pulls up. “I didn’t really mean that about my sister. I do love her really. She just doesn’t seem herself any more. And I shouldn’t bitch about about my clients – hope I didn’t bore you – but there’s something so liberating about just cutting loose and letting it all hang out. It’s such a release, you know? Cathartic!”

“That’s fine. Take care. Have a safe journey.”” But some unknown impulse makes me add at the last second,“I don’t know about catharsis – I was never much good at that. Repression on the other hand." I shrug. "Turning that pressure upwards and inwards notch by notch until it crushes you into something else.” I shrug again. It is as close to an admission as I have ever come. “Anyway, take care.” I say again and smile. But I don’t know if the expression reached my eyes or not.

She looks puzzled for a second, then heads for the taxi. I watch her carefully as she goes and politely wave goodbye. Did her feet quite touch the ground? Did she look a little transparent as she got into the cab? Translucent? Does that brilliant lipstick hide cold pale blue lips? How did she come to inherit the body? Perhaps I should have asked her.

No matter. It is not a question I know how to answer properly. Why should she?

The taxi pulls away. I herd the cat back inside. Lock the front door and secure the chain. This door will not be opened again tonight, no matter who comes knocking. I turn off all the lights visible to the street and retire to one of the back rooms with a book. To do otherwise on this night is to invite lit fireworks through the mail slot and smashed eggs on the windows.

But the kids roving about in the supermarket vampire costumes are okay, really. And if the ghostly dead get out and about once a year, what of it? When push comes to shove, it’s the ghosts of the living that spell trouble. And we're so much harder to spot.

Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures

2006-10-18T01:31:00.000+01:00

Alabanza

2006-09-11T14:53:00.000+01:00

Alabanza

by Martin Espada

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.

Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish rose before bread. Praise the bread.

Alabanza. Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning, where the gas burned blue on every stove and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers, hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.

Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher who worked that morning because another dishwasher could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen and sang to herself about a man gone.

Alabanza. After the thunder wilder than thunder, after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows, after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs, after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen, for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo, like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face, soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations across the night sky of this city and cities to come.

Alabanza. I say, even if God has no face.

Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:

Teach me to dance. We have no music here.

and the other said with a Spanish tongue:

I will teach you. Music is all we have.

Open Thread - Question Everything Edition

2006-09-09T00:38:00.000+01:00

I don't actually have any questions, and it's not necessary that you have any either - I just thought we might as well have a place where we can throw "conventional wisdom" out the window, if we want.

Or, jabber about whatever anyone wants! I, as they say, have got nothin' .

Caution! Fairie Crossing

2006-09-06T03:02:00.000+01:00

US developers think they have it bad, having to plan around spotted owls and other endangered species. Little do they know what other wee creatures could be in the way...

Fairies stop developers' bulldozers in their tracks

VILLAGERS who protested that a new housing estate would "harm the fairies" living in their midst have forced a property company to scrap its building plans and start again.

Marcus Salter, head of Genesis Properties, estimates that the small colony of fairies believed to live beneath a rock in St Fillans, Perthshire, has cost him £15,000. His first notice of the residential sensibilities of the netherworld came as his diggers moved on to a site on the outskirts of the village, which crowns the easterly shore of Loch Earn.
He said: "A neighbour came over shouting, `Don't move that rock. You'll kill the fairies'." The rock protruded from the centre of a gently shelving field, edged by the steep slopes of Dundurn mountain, where in the sixth century the Celtic missionary St Fillan set up camp and attempted to convert the Picts from the pagan darkness of superstition.
"Then we got a series of phone calls, saying we were disturbing the fairies. I thought they were joking. It didn't go down very well," Mr Salter said.
In fact, even as his firm attempted to work around the rock, they received complaints that the fairies would be "upset". Mr Salter still believed he was dealing with a vocal minority, but the gears of Perthshire's planning process were about to be clogged by something that looked suspiciously like fairy dust.
[...]
"A lot of people think the rock had some Pictish meaning," Mrs Fox said. "It would be extremely unlucky to move it."
Mr Salter did not just want to move the rock. He wanted to dig it up, cart it to the roadside and brand it with the name of his new neighbourhood.
The Planning Inspectorate has no specific guidelines on fairies but a spokesman said: "Planning guidance states that local customs and beliefs must be taken into account when a developer applies for planning permission." Mr Salter said: "We had to redesign the entire thing from scratch."
The new estate will now centre on a small park, in the middle of which stands a curious rock. Work begins next month, if the fairies allow.

This is even better than the Garden Gnome Liberation Front!

I showed this story to a British friend, mainly because I wasn't sure if it was something real or a spoof (British humor is sometimes difficult to get... there you are, laughing away and then you finally figure out that the joke was on you). Anyway, he said that it seemed real to him... in many rural societies in Britain pixies and elves and fairies are still very much believed in. Or, at least such a part of the thousands of years old (pre-Christianity) traditions that actual belief or disbelief is immaterial.

That makes sense and considering that a number of cultures have `little people' traditions, although by different names, well... who knows?

[This is a news article from the beginning of the year I am just posting as filler, cuz everyone seems to be on writer's block break. Besides... in my opinion, it's just the best story ever. ]

We're here today, you die tomorrow. A little token for remembrance.

2006-08-31T16:36:00.000+01:00

The targets are the children, of course.

The initial blasts may be for whoever is in the vicinity of the dropped bombs, but the little unexploded, sometimes brightly colored bomblets, that mimic food packages? Or are dropped 72 hours before a planned cease-fire?? Those are for the children, so that they can keep dying or being maimed long after a war is over.

Who else runs heedlessly across the grass, looking over their shoulder at the kite they are propelling, laughing and leaping with joy until the moment they seem to leap higher than ever, only to come down in pieces. What others, no matter how many times you warn them, reach out their small hands to investigate what is this new thing in their now very short world.

Remember me, the wee bomblets are saying, sending a message from a people to a people long after their representatives are gone. Remember what I can do to you - my power is such that I can snatch your children from you anywhere. Your garden, their playgrounds, their schools, the road to the market, any little place at all - that's the beauty of it. And it can all be done while we are sitting at home in our easy chairs, watching our own children play outside in the pool, having nothing to remember.

Remember that you can't do anything at all about it... except bury your dead. You can rage and cry and shake your fist, talk about morality and mercy, about proportionality and accountability, about justice and non-combatants - but no law will touch me, because I am within the law. In fact, I am the law - my power deems it so. If I want to space out the killing of you for two days, two weeks or two decades, the law has said it is perfectly okay. A child, a stranger, a grandmother, a groundskeeper - a leg, a hand, an eye or a life, it's all in memory of me.

Remember what I can do to you - my power is such that, with nary a footstep set on your patch of earth, I can dig your grave and put you or your children in it in the same blink of time, and never break a sweat.

Remember me as you lead the blind, steady the halt, bind the wounds of the maimed and feed the motherless with the milk of despair.

Remember me from generation to generation, our little giftlets demand...

...yet we are always so surprised when they do.

Thinking out loud - Human Nature

2006-08-23T23:45:00.000+01:00

I have to confess that I am not an anthropologist. That subject actually interests me, but I've not done any study of that field and so my question probably already has been answered by those who have, but it's fun to ask anyway. (As this is not a real post and is just a thinking out loud thing, grammar and spelling don't count)!

Anyway, every once in a while I'll read of some really reprehensible behaviour by a person or a group of people ... mobs screaming at marching Latinos or people calmly discussing the benefits of torture or any number of other things, and if you express disgust or dismay sooner or later someone will come along as say, "Well, what can you do? That's just human nature".

This is the answer whether the question is about racism, oppression, mobs, income inequality, and many other things.

So, of course my question is... is it? If there are humans around the world whose behaviour doesn't fall into these sorts of patterns, does that negate the "it's human nature" thing, or does that mean that these humans are maybe not progressed enough to have this particular nature of humans?

It seems to me to be yet one more type of thing, such as "you can't judge things that happened years ago by the morals of today" or whatever, that is brought up when discussing the past actions of say, Empire or slavery or something. This might wash, if there were not also people during those times that protested, said this or that was wrong, that they would not participate and so on. Which group was displaying human nature? The "everybody" that "does it" or the few that don't? Who decides which nature if human and which is not?

If you consider the fact that in 100 or so years, people will perhaps (hopefully!) be past the point of warmaking... possibly because things are so messed up everyone needs each other to survive, will they look back on us and say that you can't judge things by their time and morals, even though there are those of us who recognize that war is not a productive or right thing?

Counting Cherry Stones: the White Feather Wielder and the Down-trodden Woman

2006-08-21T13:09:00.000+01:00

I tried writing about them separately. They wouldn’t have it. No sooner did I get to describing one of them and there was the other, beating the door down, getting her feet under the table, shaking her head, rolling her eyes and saying “You think you’re going to write about her and leave me out of it?”.
I looked at them – unreal though they are – and they looked alike. Are you one and the same then? I thought. Through one eye they are almost impossible to tell apart; through the other one would never have thought them related. Not identical then, but not easily separable.

They are the two heads to the same coin. Mirror images. Inversions. When one’s down the other’s up. Janus looking forward and back. Two-faced.

Like Rosie, the white-feather wielder casts her echoes before her, flowers strewn before the troops departing for battle. Once she was a Spartan mother sternly instructing her son, “Come home with your shield or on it.”

Ninety years ago or thereabouts, she strolled through these streets, cool and slim in long Edwardian skirts, white feather held jauntily between thumb and forefinger seeking out unmilitary men. Men to chastise for their ununiformed unmanliness, for above all she is a womanly woman.

The white-feather wielder is man-made and in that she is the same as many womanly women. Rosie also sprang fully-formed from the forehead of J. Howard Miller, a latter-day Athena for an industrial age. She too had her avatars and her priestesses to officiate at her altar poised precariously on the fuselage. Is the white-feather wielder also a goddess then? Or is she a demon, this womanly woman? Lamia. Seductress. Despatching young men to drown in mud, just as the sirens sang them down beneath the swell. Her creator described her and her gift as “far more terrible than anything they [men] can meet in battle.” Perhaps to those who believed in ideas of manliness and womanliness she was more terrible at that.

Unlike Rosie, the white-feather wielder has not gathered a stable iconography about herself. She has not become a symbol of women’s liberation or power. She did exercise a particular kind of power though, using her words to persuade men to go and slaughter or be slaughtered. Perhaps the War Poets caught her off-guard: some of them took a dim view of drowning in mud and a dimmer view still of the particular form of manliness which she upheld. In any case revival efforts in World War II failed dismally. She had come to be seen as a woman who used her feminine wiles to send young men to their deaths. A Lorelei repeating endlessly the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Like the leopard, she had to change her spots. Scatter her feathers to the four winds. Feathers? What feathers. No feathers here. These days, she’s a ‘security mom.’ For a while before that she was a soccer mom: she still is. Clad in jeans and sneakers, slightly harried, ferrying the kids to practice in the SUV with the the red-white-and-blue festooned bumper and the yellow ribbon (faded now from a couple of years of sun, rain and snow) drooping from the antenna. She’s all for staying the course: after all the troops are protecting her children from terrorism. And if that means recruiters in schools – well that’s what it means and that’s all there is to it. It’s like the man on the T.V. said “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

“And after all, look how they treat the women!” she says. “Just barbaric.”
The coin spins on its edge and comes down heads.

Sometimes she’s Belgian. Perhaps she’s a nun in a torn habit. More recently she’s been spotted in a chador. But she has worn many different kinds of clothing in her myriad lifetimes, she has lived in many different places. Once she may have been a kidnapped bride. Did she stand atop Troy’s towers? Perhaps so, but now she has been safely reduced and diminished so that the one central fact of her life, the sine qua non of her existence is her oppression. She is dust beneath the enemy’s heel, foreign or domestic: bereft of agency or resistance. She has no avatars, only involuntary sacrifices. What woman would choose to embody her?

Like the others – the Grocer’s Daughters, the Rosies, the White-Feather Wielders, the Down-Trodden woman is a type, a figure, used in service of war-making. Which is not to say women are not often oppressed, or even to debate which forms of oppression are to be considered culturally superior. That is not the point. The point is that the Down-trodden Woman, whoever she is and whereever she comes from, needs liberating and we know just the folks for the job. Results guaranteed.

She is a strange creature, this Down-trodden Woman. So clearly visible in the Enemy’s citadels, yet when the citadel is stormed she evaporates like a puddle on a hot day. Her liberation is so instantaneous it leaves no trace. Practical indicators of her presence– the number of women being raped, for example – may increase quite dramatically. And certainly it is true that after liberation, actual women may also have far less in the way of practical opportunities to keep themselves from such things as starvation. All of which might suggest that the Down-trodden Woman should still be there, that she had no business leaving yet, but no. She has gone her ways. She vanished the moment the first ‘liberator’ passed through the gate.

To complain about such practical indicators – to gripe and moan, to whine and wail, to bitch – is simply to mistake the nature of the Down-trodden Woman’s Liberation. It is symbolic. Or perhaps more accurately, it is nominal, pertaining to names. The Down-trodden Woman is Liberated because certain generous gestures have been made. Certain phrases have been pronounced correctly. Incantations recited over just the right bubbling stew.

The lives and living conditions of actual women have absolutely nothing to do with the Down-trodden Woman’s Liberation: they never did.

Smoke and Mirrors

2006-08-15T23:03:00.000+01:00

Illusions and sleight-of-hand on a mid-summer’s morning.
I first about heard it on the radio when the alarm clock went off.

‘Evil terrorist plot foiled.’ ‘Terrorist attack imminent.’ Critical Alert. Agitation. Excitement. News anchors sounding solemn. Abandoning civil liberties to save them. Mass detentions. Men with guns at airports. WMD in the tampax. Saving the West from the deadly twin spectres of spectacle cases and baby food. And all that jazz.

Performance theatre at its finest, deserving of awards all round, followed by an extravagant cream tea at the parish hall with lashings of strawberry jam and generous helpings of Auntie Marjorie’s Victoria sponge.

Smoke and mirrors

Then again, one cannot know that for sure?

Wouldn’t a propagandist have managed to come up with something a little more inspired? Inventive? Original?

Given the situation, such things, such grandiose plans are not utterly remarkable. After all, any number of grandiose plans involving planes, bombs and civilians as ingredients are not only made but also implemented with monotonous regularity. And by thoroughly respectable members of society no less: certain heads of state routinely order such plans implemented by the truckload and who could be more respectable than they? It’s true that their well-refined recipe calls for a slightly different combination of the ingredients – they prefer to fill the planes up with bombs, take them up reasonably high and then drop the bombs on the civilians from a height, rather than just combining all three at once. And currently they express a preference for seasonings like white phosphorus, depleted uranium, cluster bombs and such. It must be a style thing. Why the one is deemed so acceptable and the other so appalling.

But where such recipes exist, so too will innovation. Regrettably, therefore, it would be naïve to say that the whole thing is prima facie impossible. Invented from whole-cloth. The fervid nightmare of a fevered brain. The sort of thing that nobody would ever do. It isn’t. Things just like it happen every day.

Smoke and mirrors.

Then there are the intermediate options, the dim and murky possibilities that lie between those two. There may have been some people who did have grandiose plans (along with a lack of discretion) whose ‘discovery’ was saved for an opportune moment and who knows? Perhaps for public consumption, their plans were made a little more grandiose. Elaborated on some. They provided the outline: others fleshed it out.

There was Reid – seemed like it was just the day before that he was describing various human rights as ‘made for another age.’

Another age. Presumably not this age of
smoke and mirrors.

Or perhaps it was just the U.S. dog wagging the U.K. tail.

I’ve had my doubts about that one, I must confess. Some of the colonies – like this one in fact – do have a kind of limited Home Rule and it did seem very well-timed, not to mention well-tailored for indigeneous consumption. There’s nothing like long queues for bringing out a kind of enculturated compliant stoicism. But perhaps my doubts are ill-founded.

Q: What does theoretical parsimony look like in the absence of credibility?

A: Smoke and mirrors

Perhaps (Probably? Certainly? I suspect the latter) there was someone who was tortured. The U.K. is a part of that extensive spiderweb of rendition and torture: presumably it’s good for something. And there are a lot of names there. Someone (some ones?) hurt beyond the edge of endurance, saying anything at all to make the pain stop? (It’s true that evidence based on torture is now supposed to be inadmissable, but how would one know whether or not it was used?)

Smoke and mirrors

And doubtless a whole myriad more of intermediate possibilities, blurrings, smudges, shades all of which strongly resemble
smoke and mirrors.

Of this I am told we may all be sure: that it has nothing at all to do with foreign policy whatsoever. Which comes as a huge relief, because if it did have anything to do with foreign policy then there really might be widespread scepticism. After all as Max Hastings has observed, “one could nowadays fit into an old-fashioned telephone box those who believe anything Bush or Tony Blair says about foreign policy.” He was writing about the U.K. but he seems to have confused an ‘old-fashioned telephone box’ for the Tardis. It’s an easily made mistake in this place of
smoke and mirrors.

We Are All Hezbollah

2006-08-13T23:47:00.000+01:00

Today, on another blog which I will not name, in order to spare the poor tired fingers of the operatives of GIYUS et al, I was privileged to see what is to my knowledge, the first instance of an American even hesitantly approaching the momentous and terrible utterance of the Forbidden Phrase:

Lebanon has a right to defend itself

Hezbollah, like "Al Qaeda," has "morphed;" as a Lebanese lady said the other day to a western reporter, asking some predictable question probably on the order of "but of course you don't support the people who dare to defend you against the Sacred Israel?," to which the lady replied, "We are all Hezbollah."

And all over the Majority World, in the same spirit that so many there, as well as in the more affluent 15% world said on one day in September not so long ago, "We are all New Yorkers," many, many people are saying "We are all Hezbollah."

Hezbollah, having "morphed," is no longer a struggling little band of guerilla fighters, no longer a political party in Lebanon, no longer even the only entity in Lebanon that has provided the nation what infrastructure and services it has had for the past far too many years.

Today Hezbollah has, and not by its own hand, but by the hand of the Enemy, undergone a magical transmorgification into that most powerful, yet ephemeral and yes, dangerous thing an entity can be.

Today Hezbollah is a symbol.

And not just any symbol. It is a noble symbol, a symbol of something very laudable, at least in the minds of the Majority World, namely Resistance against the tyranny of the US and its fat little pitbull there in the Levant, it is now a symbol that trumps and transcends the luxury concepts of politics or theology, it is now a symbol of the most primal and basic instinct we have: protecting our children, our future, preservation of our species from the fearsome beast, protecting our babies from the predator's talons, from the hungry tiger of the night, the horde of brutes from the tribe across the river, across the Blue Line.

When someone, somegang, anyone, anygang, rushes snarling into our cave, gaping maw set to devour our young, We are all Hezbollah.

And frankly, the Majority World has been in sore need of a little Hezbollah for quite some time.

Considering the Situation, we need all the Hezbollah we can get.

(Crossposted from Enemy of the State )

Looking at Kings

2006-08-09T18:30:00.000+01:00

Forewar(ne)d

Another old re-post from BT and dKos: I've said it before, but this one probably is the last or close to the last in any case. At present I'm once again looking at glass and wrestling with writer's block, which from memory was what was going on when I wrote this. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose and all that. And 'supporting the troops' continues to be the last thing on my mind. So it's sort of apropos, even though in the interim I have drawn the conclusion that allusions, anecdotes and vignettes are no more nor less, but exactly and precisely as effective as blunt words in terms of their general audibility to imperialists. Took my sweet time about it, but there's little that can be done about that now.

Looking at Kings

I've not been writing much lately. That's for a couple of reasons. One is that I've been looking at glass and canals with an over-interested eye lately. The other rather more serious reason is that I've been trying to think about what a colonial subject might say to her imperial masters. Even a cat can look at a King.

DuctapeFatwa recently wrote of colonialism as a religion

"You can no more convince a colonialist that the world is not the property of the west, specifically the US, than you can convince a Christian that Jesus was not crucified or a Muslim that the Angel Gabriel did not visit Mohammed."

Which got me thinking. Never a good sign.

And a few days ago, I saw a diary over at dKos about sending presents to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and what a wonderful idea it was. Which got me thinking some more.

One of the things it got me thinking about was the difficulty of having honest conversations with colonialists - on whom, I might add, the Republican Party has no monopoly. Imperialism is a thoroughly bi-partisan policy: its flavour may change, but not its substance. Though from where I stand, it always tastes bitter. The difficulty proceeds, I think, not so much from the desire to keep the peace by keeping one's peace, but from a gap where words fail. Oh - the words can be spoken plainly enough, but their utterance would render my imperial masters deaf to the speaker.

Hence my silence.

When I was in New Zealand, one of my lecturers was a recent Russian émigré. He was far from my favourite person, but I remember one of the things he said well enough to paraphrase it. "You will no longer find," he said, "great composers in Russia. Now that anything can be said freely, nothing will be said of substance." What he meant, I think, was that political constraint can result in the production of a musical language that is subtle, rich in allusion and veiled political meaning. I suspect his fears for Russian music were misplaced: evidently he did not foresee Putin.

So let me try to accomplish with allusion, anecdote and vignette what I fear blunt words will not convey.

*

If you're a U.S. citizen, your military used the first city I lived in as a supply base for the land it occupied in the frozen South - though it's not so frozen now, is it? Your nuclear ships (though your military coyly declined to confirm or deny whether they carried nuclear weapons) moored in the great volcano crater that is Diamond Harbour. Sometimes I'd see your soldiers on the bus. Indeed, my brother married the daughter of one of your ex-soldiers, formerly stationed there in that wild and woolly colony at the end of the earth, until he grew too accustomed to Southern skies to return to the homeland. As colonists from more than one empire had done before him.

*

In a world where geography so often defines destiny, my brother and I both made what used to be termed `good marriages' by the cynical - or perhaps they were just intensely practical. But the dowries and settlements we brought to our nuptials concerned the currency of citizenship.

*

In the 1980s, the colony where I grew up staged something akin to a populist, non-violent revolt against its imperial masters. I wouldn't say it managed to get out of the imperial bedchamber, but it certainly threw the bedcovers about a bit and complained vigorously about having a terrible headache. It got off pretty lightly. Frankly, I put that down to most of the inhabitants having white skin. Had the country had the same demographics as Grenada, I suspect the fallout may have been rather different. But my imperial masters graciously confined themselves to threatening to assassinate the then Prime Minister David Lange (admittedly your Vice-President's threats were perceived at the time as having about the same level of credibility as the subsequent denials that they were ever made). Various imperial officials announced in peeved tones: "We're not talking to you any more." N.Z. was suspended from ANZUS - though this was hardly a punishment -- everyone I knew considered it proof positive that every silver lining has a silver lining. From the sidelines, Bob Dole twittered about imposing economic sanctions -- but unlike Iraq, N.Z. has no new graveyards filled with infants' bodies. More recently, a refusal to creep back under the imperial duvet scuppered a free trade agreement between the U.S. and New Zealand. Like I said, the colony I grew up in got off pretty lightly. It's still just a colony though, with limited Home Rule.

*

I moved to the heart of the empire.

I went out with a bunch of (U.S.) grad students to celebrate my flatmate's birthday.
Being politically inclined, we started talking about U.S. foreign policy and bashing Bush. I contributed some uncharitable remarks about Clinton and the bombing of Sudan's pharmaceutical factory. (Apparently Christopher Hitchens was experiencing a welcome remission of popinjayitis when he wrote this back in '98). Most likely, I also waxed lyrical about Madeleine Albright. In a fairly stunning non sequitur, I was told that, "You're just jealous because New Zealand didn't fight in World War II."

The woman who said that was kind and intelligent and would certainly consider herself liberal - possibly even leftist. She hated Bush and I wouldn't be at all surprised if she was been out there campaigning for Kerry last November. But imperialism is a power relation that promotes asymmetric information.

*

A friend of mine is at a union meeting. In his first and only language, he explains, patiently and painstakingly to an uncomprehending room, that since the British colonised the country that he came from, he has as much claim on the English language as anybody else. He passes around a copy of his immigration documentation, which is marked "Subject does not speak English. Instruction will be provided upon arrival." He explains how he was required to attend 'English language instruction' classes before being permitted to teach. "But __" someone says, "we don't mean you. You speak English fine - hell, you speak English better than me! But you've got to understand that we've got a duty to protect our students."

Words failed.

*

Well - if you've made it this far through my self-indulgent rant, let me close by telling you something about me. I took the nickname dove some years ago now - it's one I've used in a few different contexts. It's kind of a reminder. I wouldn't describe myself as a naturally peaceful, or non-violent, or particularly compassionate person. I tend to favour a cold fury over sorrow. But growing up red (or at least, deeply pink) in a post-Stalin world provided a fairly compelling reason to think carefully about the proper relationship between means and ends. And that led me to non-violence.

So I oppose the war and I'm committed to non-violence.

And here's another place where I think words often fail. For many, opposing the war and being non-violent means `supporting the troops by bringing them home.' That's not what it means for me. `Supporting the troops' is the last thing on my mind.

Counting Cherry Stones: Rosie the Riveter

2006-08-06T13:42:00.000+01:00

All the day long, whether rain or shine,
She's a part of the assembly line.
She's making history, working for victory,
Rosie the Riveter.

Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage,
Sitting up there on the fuselage.
That little frail can do more than a male can do.

Rosie's got a boyfriend, Charlie.
Charlie, he's a Marine.
Rosie is protecting Charlie,
Working overtime on the riveting machine.

Is this what liberation looks like?

These days she's her own icon. A minor American Goddess for a major American Century, emblazoned on posters, key-rings, T-shirts, badges and other spaces dedicated to devotional display. Fridges, for example. She's a feminist icon too, at least for a particular strand of feminism.

"We Can Do It!" she proclaims boldly, displaying the muscular strength in her good right arm. Her stare is level: the arc of plucked eyebrows, the mascara artfully-thick on those lashes, the red luciousness of her lipstick diminishes the seriousness of her gaze not one little iota. "We Can Do It!" Jaunty but nevertheless determined in the polka-dotted headscarf covering her hair.

Rosie is feisty and feminine. Strong and (hetero)sexy. Binaries fall before her gaze like so much wool from the shears, like scales from the eyes. Hence her divinity, hence her iconography.

But who are the "We"? And what is the "It" that "We" can do?
And just what was the history that Rosie was making?

Like all goddesses, Rosie predates herself. At least some of her foremothers lie over the Pond, entangled in the tall tale of 'How The Vote Was Won.' When World War I broke out the Pankhursts, 'First Family' of U.K. feminism fractured: Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst suspended hostilities, ceased calling for suffage and urged women to enter the munitions factories. Which many did: it was good pay and what pay wouldn't do, loyalty to Empire would.

But my affections lie with Emmeline's awkward and contrarian daughter Sylvia, who was having none of it. A pacifist, expelled by her family from the Women's Social and Political Union in 1914; she later got chucked out of the Communist Party of Great Britain for good measure. She endured forced feeding, was imprisoned for sedition and argued with Lenin. Her life began in Manchester and ended in Ethiopia: she was an emigrant. She never did master the art of going along to get along. Anything that could be done an easy way, she inevitably found the hard way. Stubborn and obdurate. People like that should be loved (though they seldom are) for their lack of expediency and their mulish honesty. Their beliefs might shift with time, but their truthfulness does not.

I digress.

Rosie had her forerunners: they built the shells with which much of World War I was fought and in their day they too were seen as 'liberated.' Breaking new ground. Proving themselves worthy. New Women, not like those Old Women. According to the Official Historical Narrative, their willingness to be militarised was rewarded with the Vote. But isn't that the way with new godesses? Don't they always eat the memory of their mothers? How else could they be so brand-spanking-shiny new? So iconic, so stripped of the messiness of life. And contrarian Sylvia? Relegated to the margins, to the footnotes: she too is history. Perhaps there are worse fates -- at least on the sidelines one is less likely to be chomped upon.

Who are the 'We'? And what is the 'It' that 'we' do?

'We' are the women who consent to be militarised believing that militarisation leads to liberation. 'We' believe that consenting to militarisation will give us the power to protect those whom we love; that it is a means by which women will finally be treated as men's equals; that it is a means to economic freedom; that it is a means of political equality; that it is how 'we' women can gain the respect which 'we' have for so long wanted. And because 'we' have hungered for respect, because 'we' have hungered for liberation, 'we' grasp the proffered militarising hand that promises those things without asking too many awkward questions.

This is an old delusion; a long-standing hysteria.

As for the 'It?' Well, it's not just riveting any more: it never was. We nurse. We weld. We manufacture. We crack codes. We buy war bonds. We invest. We sell arms. We go out and buy, buy, buy to keep confidence high. We enlist. We fly planes. We cook. We shoot guns. We break down barriers. We challenge sexism. We're strong and (hetero)sexy, just like Rosie. We do what we're asked. We do what we're told. We even tell people how we could do it better given half a chance. And we believe that this will be our independence, our liberation, that this time, proving that 'We Can Do It!' will make us free. And above all we believe that this is feminism and that we are feminists. Look at Rosie -- how feisty she is, how feminine: is she not the image of feminism? Isn't she divine!

Looking for power in the wrong places.

61 years ago today, the U.S dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was dropped from a B-29 built at the Martin Bomber Plant in Omaha, Nebraska. 40% of the workers there were women: most likely Rosie riveted bits of that plane together. That bomb (I was about to say Hiroshima, but the city was not the bomb despite the way in which they have become synonymous with each other) still claims about 5000 lives a year: about half of those are presumably women and the other half are those whom some woman, somewhere, loved, whether as mother, sister, wife, lover, daughter, niece or last but not least, friend. Three days later, they dropped another bomb on Nagasaki. And Rosie's rivets held again.

So. What does Rosie have to say to those women's corpses and the corpses of those whom they loved? What does "We Can Do It!" mean to them?

Is this what liberation looks like?

Two Coastlines

2006-08-03T21:03:00.000+01:00

I.

A peninsula near the city, encircling a deep-blue-sea harbour. Red rock that crumbles under the fingers. That harbour is a caldera: the peninsula a crater. This is a place where the earth’s patience is thin. An early map, drawn before imperialism was yet a foregone conclusion there showed it as an island, but it is not. (It was a delicately coloured map, not yet the bloody hue it assumed in old, battered school atlases remembered from primary school.)

Whether it through possession of one of those early pre-imperial maps, through not being good at map-reading, or simply because those are treacherous waters, at least one ship’s captain missed the entrance to that deep sea harbour, sailed into the bay neighbouring and lost his life giving it a name. Taylor’s Mistake. It already had a name of course. It didn’t need a new one.

I used to go walking out onto the steep hills and along the tops of the cliffs around there on that peninsula. It’s beautiful. I’d give it that. Even bereft of its forest, even open to that bone-bleaching sun. Sheep-skulls in long grass, sometimes with remnants of flesh still clinging to them and a cloudy buzz of blowflies. In summer the grass has the colour of gold: in that part of the country, winter was the green season. That’s changing now. Macrocarpa outlined against a deep blue-gold skyline. There, one could look away from the smog lying on the city. But all of it, bones, tussock, macrocarpa, smog is profoundly unnatural to that place which was forest before empire burned it.

Vestiges remain. In some places there are still stands of kahikatea. Matagouri – which I had always imagined as the inspiration for barbed wire – still grows like a snare on the hillside to bloody the hands of the unwary. Certainly it cut mine on occasion. Now there’s a metaphor for those who like such things: te whenua still resisting the hand of the colonist’s descendents.

Apparently there’s a network of disused tunnels out there: occasionally one would meet someone who claimed to know someone who used to go role-playing out there, clambering about in the cold roots of those hills pretending to be someone else. But as I never met anyone who had done so themselves, I have more than half consigned that tale to legend.

But this I have seen for myself.

A concrete emplacement, set concealed in the hillside, invisible from just a few feet away. It is an ugly thing, long abandoned. The steps one descends to enter it long ago began to crack: its interior stinks of piss and wretchedness. Barely clearing the grass, unable to be skylined, a wall-less stretch surveys a reach of harbour. This emplacement is from World War II, but some date back to 1900 and paranoid fears of Russian invaders.

A few come in pairs, the remnants of a narrow trench running between them. There is the red metal-rusted place where the gun was mounted once. It was removed eventually but they couldn’t be bothered removing the emplacements so they left them, cracking piss-stinking concrete on a marred headland.

It’s been over sixty years now: they are practically historical architecture. And no, this has not been a peaceful place for a long time and even now it lies beneath a shadow. Or so it is rumoured.

Would I even want them removed for that matter? What is better? That the scar, that sordid ugliness should remain – a visible reminder that militaries never do clean up their messes? Or that kahikatea and other trees belonging to that long-since burned forest should put their roots down in place of those emplacements? Could they even live there now on those bare wind-battered headlands?

II.

A coastline on the South-West peninsula of another island.
A path winds around the coast for hundreds of miles, across the cliff-tops, down steep winding ways onto beaches rocky and sandy. Through holiday towns throbbing with a fevered gaiety in summer: quietly desperate in winter. A few years ago I walked on that path for a few days.

It is beautiful. I’d give it that. In summer wildflowers cling to the rock faces and all manner of moths and butterflies are on the move. There is the long curve of the horizon. Closer to hand, perhaps heard rather than seen is the roar of breakers on rocks.

It used to be tin country, until the tin ran out.
Mine shafts dissect these hills: those near the paths are sometimes surrounded by wire fencing. Others, which have become home to bats, have strange-looking chimney-like hats: bat-doors to the bat-caves.

It used to be pilchard country, until the shoals were fished out. Now huge sunfish bask off those coasts, far from what were their usual haunts before the climate changed.

This was wrecking country. Perhaps on this headland bonfires were lit to lure ships onto the rocks. Gotcha. The ultimate practical joke.

Now it is tourist country and perhaps there is an element of the trickster in that too – in the endless pasties, the clotted cream, the boat trips to see seals.

It is a peninsular, but in some of the inland villages there are still people who have never in their lives seen salt water.

There was a steep bare hillside, that day, stripped of everything but grass. The path was grassy, hard to distinguish, and the hillside dropped away steeply: just out of sight began the cliffs.

I had been expecting it: I had looked at the map. But then again, it was not what I was expecting. There was the sign as advertised, warning that the hillside ahead might have unexploded ammunition, mines and things that go bang. It even had little icons of exploding people flying through the air, for extra added emphasis. All the obvious stuff: Don’t pick anything up. Don’t step on anything protruding from the ground.

It also said ‘Keep on the path.’ I looked down: presumably I was now on the path. Of course I had thought I was on the path before, but I’d had to leave it and walk uphill a bit to be able to read the sign. It didn’t seem terribly pathlike but then neither had what I had previously thought was the path. The sign (and the guidebook no less!) also said keep the white markers to landward. I looked around. The only white marker I saw was a painted white pole attached to the end of a fence further down the hillside, nearer to the cliff face, though I could not see where that began. ‘Perhaps’ I thought, ‘the path goes on the other side of that fence, because that’s the only way for there to be any white markers to landward here. And it would sort of make sense to have a fenced off path if there were things that explode. In which case where I am standing is not the path. That's fine: it certainly doesn't look like one.’

So I edged my way slowly down the hillside to the fence and when I got there, I realised that I was actually quite close to the cliff and that such land as was on the seaward side of the fence was undercut enough that nobody was going to walk along that. At least not for long. Realising as I looked along that sweep of cliff that there was every reason to assume I was standing on land that was just as tenuous, I went back up the hill and considered my options. Eventually I picked my way across the hillside.

The sign, the white pole on the fence, and the absence of white markers (and a path for that matter) are things I’ve wondered about occasionally since.

Was it a practical joke to paint that pole white and stick it there? Had the actual markers been removed? Was it one of the ‘gotcha’ moments of that wreckers’ coast? Instead of being luring ships onto the rocks, luring walkers over the cliff? For what were the bonfires but false markers?

Or was it the opposite of falsehood: a truth albeit twisty? After all, imperialism (and certainly imperialism is something which that military has a particularly deep investment in) is about establishing rules that people cannot follow if they want to live and then using their disobedience as the excuse to kill them. How simple and elegant an illustration for domestic consumption then: a sign instructing one to keep to the path with the white markers to landward or risk being exploded, coupled with no path and a white marker placed on the very edge of a cliff.

Follow the impossible rule or else . . .

Moral Equivalency Permit

2006-08-01T15:14:00.000+01:00

While I respect Dove's wish that this blog be an International space, I think the struggle taking form now between the anti-war left and the military left in the U.S. is one that has great international consequences.

Cross posted with minor deletions and additions from Even Flow

Where can I get mine, and what are the requirements?
Judging by recent arguments among supposed left leaning supporters of the military, unless you are active duty and are willing to disobey your orders to fight in Iraq you have no real right to ask any soldier to stand down and disobey illegal orders, let alone have an opinion about it. Excuse me but the last time I checked every citizen of America has the right to their opinion and there is no military test that you are required to pass in order to voice it. In fact, any honest military person will tell you that that's exactly what they're supposed to be serving for. That some who I previously considered allies are now basically telling anyone who holds a soldier to his duty to defend the Constitution of the United States to shut the &$!* up unless they're laying their own life on the line in an illegal war is a pretty good sign of some pretty stark lines beginning to be drawn in the sand, or circling of wagons as DTF would say, between the military left and the anti-war left, including those on the anti-war left who still support the troops by fighting to bring them home alive and now. Those in the anti-war community who aren't anti-military, and I would argue that they are the majority of the modern anti-war movement, are very different from the historical anti-war movements of the past, particularly the mass movement of the 1960's and 1970's who were definetily more anti-military, though I've been told by some Vietnam Veterans, and read Veteran testimonies that the stories of Vets being spit on by anti-war activists were fabrications of the pro-war right.

The story of Vietnam era soldiers who revolted against what was clearly an immoral and unwinnable war is largely unknown in this country. It's assumed that the civilian anti-war movement of that era was the most influential group attributed with bringing an end to that war. They were a part of it, but I don't think they were the biggest force behind the end of the war. According to the new documentary, Sir!, No Sir!,

"In the 1960’s an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn’t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War has been the subject of hundreds of films, both fiction and non-fiction, but this story–the story of the rebellion of thousands of American soldiers against the war–has never been told in film.This is certainly not for lack of evidence. By the Pentagon’s own figures, 503,926 “incidents of desertion” occurred between 1966 and 1971; officers were being “fragged”(killed with fragmentation grenades by their own troops) at an alarming rate; and by 1971 entire units were refusing to go into battle in unprecedented numbers. In the course of a few short years, over 100 underground newspapers were published by soldiers around the world; local and national antiwar GI organizations were joined by thousands; thousands more demonstrated against the war at every major base in the world in 1970 and 1971, including in Vietnam itself; stockades and federal prisons were filling up with soldiers jailed for their opposition to the war and the military.

Yet few today know of these history-changing events.

Sir! No Sir! will change all that. The film does four things: 1) Brings to life the history of the GI movement through the stories of those who were part of it; 2) Reveals the explosion of defiance that the movement gave birth to with never-before-seen archival material; 3) Explores the profound impact that movement had on the military and the war itself; and 4) The feature, 90 minute version, also tells the story of how and why the GI Movement has been erased from the public memory.

Sir! No Sir! reveals how, thirty years later, the poem by Bertolt Brecht that became an anthem of the GI Movement still resonates".,

"General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect: He can think".

Brecht's poem can be found in full at the beginning of the book Soldiers In Revolt, written by David Cortright, an exhaustive and statistical analysis of the anti-war movement and revolt by GI's during the Vietnam War, how they impacted the ability of the U.S. to continue the war, and they're contribution to it's ultimate end.

From the introduction to the book, written by Howard Zinn:

"Soldiers in Revolt documents one of the least known and most
important aspects of the Vietnam War: the rebellion among U.S.
soldiers opposed to the war. From the front lines to stateside military
bases, the U.S. armed forces were wracked by widespread
resistance, including combat refusals and mutinies. GIs produced
more than 250 antiwar committees and underground newspapers
to voice their discontent. A new chapter looks at the enduring
imprint of this period on the U.S. military and the lessons that this
era holds for the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
David Cortright, in this remarkable book, reminds us, as the war in Iraq continues,
that a point can be reached where men and women in uniform can
no longer tolerate what they begin to see as an unjust war. It is encouraging
to be reminded of the basic desire of human beings to live at peace
with other human beings, once they have divested themselves of the dceptions,
the nationalism, and the racism that is provoked by war".
—from the introduction by Howard Zinn

The question is, do civilians have the right to encourage active duty soldiers to disobey orders? Well sure, they have the right. But on a moral level should it be required or demanded, as some are now doing, that civilians first risk their own freedom, lives, and the livelihood of their own families before they ask soldiers to do the same. No, I don't think it's right to demand it. But in fairness, I think some sort of shared sacrifice should be seriously considered by anyone doing the asking. It's easy to understand and empathize with the frustration and the fear that active duty soldiers and their families are facing in the Iraq war. But their lashing out at those in the anti-war movement who are fighting to bring about the end of the war through different means, including expecting soldiers to uphold their oath to the Constitution, and the efforts to remove those soldiers from an unwinnable, dangerous, and most probably illegal war, can't be tolerated. It seeks to stifle dissent. It seeks to make illegitimate any argument put forth by those who haven't served in the military. And that is a dangerous thing to a democracy. It's dangerous because it seeks to reverse the democracy's bedrock tenet that the the government be civilian led, not military led, and that the freedom to dissent in this country not be predicated on one's willingness or not, to serve in it's military. Soldiers have a duty to their country and it's stated and ratified principles and are obligated to refuse illegal orders. Citizens have a duty and an obligation to hold their government accountable for it's actions and it's abuse of it's military. Both of these groups have an obligation to each other to not only stand up for each other, but to also hold each to it's obligations.

Why Armies Target Civilians

2006-07-28T23:49:00.000+01:00

From Targeting Civilians, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

"Perhaps the most hideous precedent established by Lincoln’s war, however, was the intentional targeting of defenseless civilians. Human beings did not always engage in such barbaric acts as we have all watched in horror in recent days. Targeting civilians has been a common practice ever since World War II, but its roots lie in Lincoln’s war.

In 1863 there was an international convention in Geneva, Switzerland, that sought to codify international law with regard to the conduct of war. What the convention sought to do was to take the principles of "civilized" warfare that had evolved over the previous century, and declare them to be a part of international law that should be obeyed by all civilized societies. Essentially, the convention concluded that it should be considered to be a war crime, punishable by imprisonment or death, for armies to attack defenseless citizens and towns; plunder civilian property; or take from the civilian population more than what was necessary to feed and sustain an occupying army".

I think it can be safely said that the deliberate killing of civilians by armies engaged in warfare was used tactically, if not strategically, long before the American Civil War. What I want to get at is the continuing practice of it by so called modern armies, operating under, or in non compliance with international law. In recent weeks we've seen the most stark examples of this practice as Israel has launched a massive and sustained bombardment of southern Lebanon. I'm not interested so much in discussing Israel's justification for the attack, but rather what it's military objective is, and how it is allowed, under international law, to continue it's brutal targeting of civilian infrastructure, housing, hospitals, and even convoys of fleeing civilians.

Israel's official stance is that anyone remaining in southern Lebanon is a terrorist. This must also include U.N. Peacekeepers as it appears now that they were also intentionally targeted.

There are many examples of civilian infrastructure and cities being targeted in recent history. In WWII British and American commanders justified the razing of Dresden , Germany because they claimed it was a rail hub for transporting German reinforcements to the Eastern Front. And so, in an effort to aid Soviet forces advancing into Germany from the east they justified the obliteration of an entire city, with the deaths of civilians and refugees reaching into the tens of thousands. Why obliterate an entire city when bombing the railroad centers would likely have been sufficient to to their goal of slowing or stopping German reinforcements?

From Wikipedia, Chuchill's response,

"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the TERROR , though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than that of the enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive."

There's that word, TERROR. Could that be the reasoning behind such attacks? Convenient though that Churchill thought it wise to give closer consideration to those tactics, but only insofar as not to lay waste to the spoils of war that the victors would claim for themselves.

Others however, considered it a war crime,

The absence of a direct military presence in the centre of the city, and the devastation known to be caused by firebombing, is regarded by supporters of the war crime position as establishing their case on a prima facie basis. They contend that these points are sufficient in themselves, without considering the absence of military necessity, the civilian death toll, and Dresden's cultural significance.

Why then was the attack not prosecuted as a war crime? Especially in light of this. From The Hague Conventions,

Aerial area bombardment and international law
International law up to 1945

Article 25: The attack or bombardment of towns, villages, habitations or buildings which are not defended, is prohibited.

Article 26: The Commander of an attacking force, before commencing a bombardment, except in the case of an assault, should do all he can to warn the authorities.

Article 27: In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps should be taken to spare as far as possible edifices devoted to religion, art, science, and charity, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not used at the same time for military purposes.
The besieged should indicate these buildings or places by some particular and visible signs, which should previously be notified to the assailants.

I suspect the answer might have something to do with the exceptionalism of the allies.

As I've said, there are countless examples throughout history and more recently.
U.S. targeting of civilians in Fallujah in 2004. Civilians who were trapped within the city by American forces that ringed that city. And not content to just commit that crime, the U.S. used a banned weapon, white phosphorus to attack them, at first claiming that the weapon was used only for illuminating those they wished to liberate from the terrorists. Only later was the U.S. forced to admit that it used the munition as a weapon, which is not permitted.

Shake and Bake

"WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes where we could not get effects on them with HE [High Explosive]. We fired "shake and bake" missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out," the article said.

A word about the term "shake and bake." Anyone with a family to feed in the US knows what this term, properly "Shake 'n Bake, means. Made by Kraft, it is a seasoning which is put into a plastic bag with chicken and shaken before before baking. Its use gives the article the smack of reality. It's the kind of thing US soldiers would say.

War terminology...Operation Shake and Bake. What I would like to say about this isn't fit to print here.

Further examples from other wars, Rwanda, Myanmar, Nepal, and Kosovo.

But in my opinion, the worst case of targeting civilians was carried out by the one nation that holds itself above all others as a beacon of human rights, the U.S., and it's total annihilation of the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end or WWII.

It's true that there were legitimate military targets within these cities, but that's not why they were wiped off the map. Truman claimed to be saving lives by taking lives. But the lives he sought to save were U.S. military, not Japanese civilians. Of course minimizing your own casualties is only prudent when engaged in war. But to commit the murder of 200,000 people can only be called what it truly is, and what it's purpose truly was, TERROR.

It's not a very wide leap to make from Truman's thinking of 60 years ago to George Bush's and his puppet, Ohlmert's thinking of today. Where Bush and Ohlmert are going a step beyond is in their opposition to a cease fire in Lebanon. Think about that for a moment. The international community and the U.N. are officially calling for an immediate cessastion of hostilities by Israel because of the overwhelming casualties being inflicted on Lebanese civilians. And yet Bush refuses to back a ceasefire. He has his own reasons for prolonging the conflict there, because it's a stepping off point for his long wished for attack against Iran. Widening the so called War On Terror. What the whole world now sees and knows is that it is his actions and his complicity in the targeting of innocent civilians that are the biggest cause of world wide terror and the continuing use of terroristic tactics.

Counting Cherry Stones: The Grocer's Daughter

2006-07-28T07:28:00.000+01:00

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich man, Poor man, Beggarman, Thief.”

It’s a rhyme for counting cherry stones. A kind of game.

You count the stones and they tell you who will be your husband. Or rather his occupation, which amounted to the same thing for those of an age to play it. It’s from a time before mine, when girls – or at least the particular girls likely to have leisure for such games – were expected to take husbands (not partners, not girlfriends, nor to live in glorious solitude). And from a time too, when the equivalent rhyme for those particular girls didn’t let them count too many cherries.

It’s cherry season here in a dangerously over-heated summer. I’m counting stones, but the types turning over in my head don’t come from the rhyme.

Grocer’s Daughter, Rosie the Riveter, White-Feather Wielder, Downtrodden Woman.

My typology is no more exhaustive than that of the original rhyme. The world of the cherry stone is contracted. Compressed. In each case, however, something is going on with women (and maybe, ‘womanhood’) and something is going on with war (and perhaps also with the institutions that organise it). So let us take a closer look at these types, these tropes, these cherry stones. Although real women inhabit them from time to time they are not real. Do not let that deter you: it is their irreality which might illuminate. War is also a fiction: it requires the suspension of disbelief. Pretences must be made and accepted; lies told and acquiescence given. Let’s begin with the Grocer’s Daughter.

The Grocer’s Daughter

She has her historical antecedants, usually of nobler birth. But these are liberated, democratic times, no? And in these modern liberated democratic times, up she popped from humble stock: the grocer’s daughter.

“A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us,” she said straightfaced. Or possibly with an wry smile, over a cup of tea in a bone china service. With lemon.

The Iron Lady not for turning, the woman on top, making the hard-hitting decisions with the hardest of them. Playing with the boys’ toys. She owes nothing to ‘Women’s Lib’ (though her existence will be used to dismiss persistent inequalities – ‘Look at the Grocer’s Daughter! She made it, didn’t she?’).

She’ll drink deep at the well of domesticity when it suits though: what was that she said? Oh yes. “Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.” The deployment of domesticity here is no accident: it allows the female ‘leader’ to position herself / be positioned as a ‘proper woman’ – a wife, a mother. Her construction as spousal helpmeet or mother relies more on her femaleness than the presence or absence of actual spouse and children. Indeed, sometimes this construction can work better in their absence, since that strengthens the idealised familial bond between the grocer’s daughter and the state. She has no husband: she is wedded to the nation. She has no children: she is mother to the state. The personal subsumed utterly in the political. Her status as exception more obviously evident.

When she supports, orders or advocates the killing of other people’s children, however, this is seldom taken to reflect on her own construction as maternal. Rather it is evidence of her toughness, her firm grasp on Realpolitik. She is able to transcend women’s sentimental weaknesses: she is worth taking seriously. Alone of all her sex.

Yes, its essentialist – it’s the undiluted essence of essentialism, the real deal – but that’s the whole point. What toughness won’t cover, this brand of maternalism will and vice versa. They reinforce each other, they lend each other credibility.

Grocer’s daughters are rare, it’s true, but Maggie was not an only child.

Here comes Madeleine Albright, Clintonian champion of the indispensible nation, making her own “very hard choices” about Iraqi children because the price is right, “the price is worth it.”

If it doesn’t look worth it to me – if indeed it strikes me as perverse to apply such a calculus of thrift at all – doubtless the Grocer’s Daughter would find that perfectly explicable. I’m simply not tall enough. As a foreigner, I do not see far enough into the future. And those Americans, alas too few in number, who also lack sufficient stature? Child-like. Sentimental. Well-meaning but in need of (maternal) protection from the harsh reality of life. And the harsh reality of life is that the price is worth it: it’s a steal at the price.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

(Madeleine Albright 19/2/1998)

If we have to use force, it is because we are America.
Let the words melt sweetly on your tongue like honey. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America.” Roll them around your mouth and spit them out like poison. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America.”

(Do you see? Beyond those borders – within them, yes, possibly it would make some differences – November may not matter terribly much after all if it comes to that. Because the price is right, the price is worth it.” Even if it is a ”“very hard choice.” Straight from the donkey’s mouth.)

Anyway, Maddy is so yesterday. Which is when the Rome Summit failed

“Fighting escalated on both sides as the much-vaunted peace conference in Rome broke up after failing to reach agreement to call for an immediate ceasefire. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, backed by Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, resisted calls from 13 other countries, as well as the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, for such a ceasefire. Ms Rice said: "We have to have a plan that will actually create conditions in which we can have a ceasefire that will be sustainable." Mrs Beckett said: "Even if you could get a ceasefire half an hour ago, you would probably be back in hostilities in a few days."

Everyone knows it: a ceasefire – even a temporary, fleeting one that broke down in a few days – would have given some people a chance to find what refuge they could. It would have saved some lives. And even life for a day is still life. Even the Grocer’s Daughters know that. But they are tough. They make hard-hitting choices. They are serious. They understand Realpolitik. It was a ‘very hard choice’ but in the end a ceasefire was not worth the price.

To the Grocer’s Daughters:

Stay your hands.

“I want not to ask you but to tell you not to participate in the oppression of your sisters. Mothers who abuse their children are women, and another woman, not an agency, has to be willing to stay their hands. Mothers who set fire to school buses are women, and another woman, not an agency, has to tell them to stay their hands . . .”

Toni Morrison, Commencement Address, Barnard College, 1979.

Stay your hands.

Arms and the Poodle

2006-07-25T22:34:00.000+01:00

It’s true. He has stood up on his hind legs, widdled on His Masters Trousers and bitten the hand that feeds him. Bravo. Perhaps that crack about sweaters was the last dog biscuit, and after carefully considering the bowl (which says Fido) and the collar (which says Fido) and the flea-infested kennel (which says Fido) he decided the time had finally come to use those back legs of his to get that collar over his ears and skip the light fantastic.

Don’t hold your breath. This is spinnery on speed: Hargreaves would down tools and stop tinkering with that Spinning Jenny to look on in dumbstruck awe. Business as usual: an attempt to position the U.K. as the conciliatory, humane ones whose soldiers take their sunglasses off and wear berets all the better to reassure a fearful populace. Certainly not the kind of folks who would take photos of themselves sexually abusing and torturing Iraqi civilians for their personal gratification. Thumbs up, anyone?

Yes. Tony made a phone call to Olmert to voice his deep concern. And he has urged the U.S. to ‘understand.’ Apparently this constitutes “dramatic criticism” and is a startling and unprecedented display of independent foreign policy making.

Kim Howells, a British Foreign Office Minister (ie not very high up the tree) has also been speaking out, calling for Israel to show “proportionality and restraint”

I’d planned on having a bit of a field day at Howell’s expense. I thought I’d ask that awkward question “So, Mr Howell, what would have been “proportionate?” One of those photographs? Two? One fifth of them? A half? Inquiring minds need to know. If something is disproportionate, there must have been some another portion that would have been proportionate no?

And – I was going to wonder – has he simply been misinterpreted in his calls for ‘restraint?’ After all, according to Clare Short (admittedly She Who Is Known For The Foundation of the ‘I’m Going – I’m Going – Really Any Minute Now I’m Going. Honest’ School of Resignation -- but still it’s true that in the end she did go) and as documented by Mark Thomas in As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela; Underground Adventures in the Arms and Torture Trade ,

“. . .every minister who makes a foreign trip has three briefings: one from their department detailing the purpose of their trip, a second from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office explaining the political situation in the country the minister is to visit, and a third briefing, talking points, from Downing Street, things to mention and plug, like Arms Deals. Every time there is an arms deal in the air it is a minister’s duty to talk it up, no matter what the purpose of the trip. They could be visiting victims of the tsunami or having a meeting about carbon emissions, and somewhere on their to-do list scrawled in biro are the words – ‘Big up the guns.” (123)

‘Was this what that phrase ‘restraint’ was about?’ I was going to muse. After all, various U.K. companies do an excellent line in handcuffs and other assorted accoutrements of the torture trade. And they’ve got good contracts in high places: the handcuffs used in Guantanamo have “Made in England” stamped on them. (Thomas, 212). Perhaps Howell was taken out of context, I was going to speculate – perhaps there’s a big deal in hand-cuffs going down and he’d been told to ‘big up the cuffs and tell them BOGOF on the netting.’

According to the Guardian , an anonymous ‘senior Israeli diplomat’ described that ‘Poodle To The Poodle Phone’ moment thus: “'The tone was very positive. We agree on all major aspects of this crisis and are greatly appreciative of Britain's position.”

Well may they be, since the U.K.’s sales of arms to Israel almost doubled to a not insignificant £25m.

The Foreign Office claims that “ that all exports were considered under the government's official criteria. "The bottom line is that no piece of kit is used for external aggression or internal repression."

Children’s parties. That’s what they’re for. An alternative to Bonzo the Happy Clown and purple dinosaurs.

So yes. Field day. Planned excusion to the sunny uplands.

But looking at Howell’s words again and doing a bit of reading between the lines, I think that perhaps (just perhaps, I wouldn’t venture anything stronger than that) there may be a bit of a cri de coeur going on there. Albeit expressed unfortunately not in its vehemence but in its moderation. And yes, in its argumentation too: the reason to refrain from killing children is not that

“Every person who has got a mobile phone, every person who can take a photograph of somebody being blown to bits, or a child with a limb missing, is a reporter now.”

But such errors in argument are not uncommon when one is desperately trying to persuade. Who can say for sure what is in his heart or where it might eventually lead him?

Enough.
What is to be done.
Opposing the arms trade is a piece in this jigsaw puzzle I think.

It’s late in the day, but here are three things you can do (depending of course on what you already are doing -- you may already be running at full tilt – whether on this or any of a myriad of connected issues).

1) Knowledge is the beginning of power. Inform yourself and inform us. Places to start reading include Control Arms and also the Amnesty International USA pages on arms control. And there’s this for some recent (sad) history. And as in all things, google is your friend.

I must admit – digressions, diversions, excursions and expeditions are always very welcome - but I’d kind of like it if one of the things people used this thread for was ‘here’s what I found out.’ That could be ‘here’s what I found out about who is selling what to whom.’ It could also be about ‘what can be done to stop it?’ Or ‘What have people done? What worked? What didn’t?’

2) These folks Campaign Against the Arms Trade could probably use some support. If you know of other similar organisations – whereever they may be based – that could do with any of the various kinds of support and involvement that such organisations can generally use, tell us about them.

3) Do you have stocks? A portfolio? (Unlikely, I know) But on that slim off-chance, take a look at who you’re investing with: maybe do some rethinking and reorganising if it strikes you as necessary. Do you have a pension? (Unlikely, I know) But again, on that offchance, take a look at who they invest in. Do you need to do something about that?

War Without Borders

2006-07-23T08:40:00.000+01:00

It seems that almost everything I write recently drifts into the area of gaps, of divides, disconnects, and which have a measure of bridgeableness and which do not, of wagons circling and doors closing, and others opening.

There is something in the nature of some of us, I think, that naturally rebels at the suggestion that a gap is unbridgeable, a divide so deep that no compromise, no negotiation is possible. And so we hammer away, ignoring smashed fingers, because that something in us does not want to "give up."

There is such a fine line between giving up and recognizing that our energies are sorely needed somewhere else that many of us often miss it. In our zeal to bridge that gap, we often lose sight of the one thing any compromise or negotiation needs most: a recognition and comprehension of the other party's point of view.

Even as we cajole and wheedle and try to choose the best words to make them see ours, the temptation to wishfully craft theirs into what we long for it to be is sometimes just too strong.

Extricating ourselves from such a predicament can be a painful process, as it challenges our stubbornness, and forces us to acknowledge things that we wish were not so.

But as painful as it may be to confront and accept the fact that someone else's point of view is indeed one that our own moral absolutes will simply not allow us to meet halfway, that there are some drawing rooms into which we should not enter, and in which, if we have entered, we should not remain.

People in gated communities put those gates there for a reason, and rather than crashing those gates, even if our gesture is tolerated for whatever reason, our efforts will be better spent in working toward our goals outside of that "closed space," and if we are also obliged by circumstances to circle our wagons, we can make the circle a large one.

The Situation that is now upon us does not recognize national borders, nor ethnic or religious divides. It is universal, it is basic, and it is absolute.

How ironic that the words of a man disliked by so many both in and outside of so many spaces so aptly and so tragically correctly define the plight of us all: "You are with us (US policies) or you are with the terrorists."

It is this sorry rag of truth that we all share. We are on either one side or another. We are either for invasion, occupation, kidnapping, torture, etc etc etc, or we are against it.

It does not matter whether one side calls the other "terrorists," or "extremists," or "radicals," "obstructionists," "rejectionist," "anti-business," and calls itself "patriotic," "pragmatic," "centrist," electable."

It does not matter whether the other side calls its opponents "the real terrorists," "nationalist," "racist," "colonialist," "imperialist," "exceptionalist," and calls itself "the real patriots" or "pro-peacce," or whatever term each side wishes to apply to the other, whatever term each wishes to apply to itself.

Just as the Situation knows no national borders, neither does it bow to nomenclature. It is a divide that cannot be bridged by euphemisms or presentation strategies or even the current favorite "nuances."

The only path to a solution, if there is one, begins with acceptance of these painful truths, with meeting the reality of the Situation head-on, despite our very natural fear, and very natural desire to take refuge in the comfort of semantics and platitudes.

Two recent comments on my blog, as well as an article pointed out to me by catnip brought this home to me with a terrible and inescapable starkness.

One, from a tireless peace activist, stunned by the fact that she is now at risk, not from some shadowy foreign "terst" entity, but from her own countrymen. The Situation, remember, is knows no national borders. It is the Ultimate and Extreme non-national space.

The other, from a very courageous man who has not only the bravery and nobility of soul to make a journey so agonizing, so difficult, that those of us who have not had to make it can only imagine the wrenching pain of the process, but a man who also has the grace and pure-hearted generosity to have shared every step of his passage with earth residents, that we might all be edified, inspired, and educated by his heroism. He pointed out a hard and universal truth: Aggressors put their fate in the hands of their victims.

These two, both Americans, might take some small measure of comfort to know that they are not alone, that while the Situation knows no borders, at least
one of their countrymen has moved his wagon next to theirs, and I suspect we may be hearing from more.

As events unfold (are you as tired of reading that phrase as I am of typing it?), we will all go through some painful and unpleasant experiences, offline, we will watch helplessly as families divide, as office water coolers ring with angry words, we will be witness to all the various ways in which human beings make manifest the grim and unbending horror of the Situation.

Online, the "kerfluffles" and textual hysterics we may have seen are nothing to what we will see. We will receive emails verging on, even descending into, "hate mail" from internet friends we have for years called "brother." With eyes still wet from those inbox tears, the online phenomena we see will, like its offline homologue, involve irrevocable dissolution of longstanding friendships, as individuals come to grips with the totality, the vastness, the all-encompassing and unbridegable gap of the Situation.

We will variously bid farewell to innocence, or "put away childish things," as the Christian bible says, and with that unglorious weight of sadness and fear in our hearts, reluctantly move our wagons into one circle or another, and forsake the relatively irrelevant and picayune battles that have of necessity and by definition failed to stave off the inevitable, and prepare ourselves for the War without Borders into which we are all, every one of us, without exceptions, thrust into by the universality of the Situation.

NOTE: This will probably be cross-posted elsewhere, but not on any "gated communities for white Americans." ;=>

Ringing the Changes

2006-07-17T23:41:00.000+01:00

“I shall not keep you long, he cried. Cheers from all the assembly. I have called you all together for a Purpose. Something in the way that he said this made an impression. There was almost silence, and one or two of the Tooks pricked up their ears.
Indeed for Three Purposes!

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

Alas, it's not my eleventy-first birthday party, but like Bilbo, I shall not keep you long. I do however have Three Purposes. And purposes well worthy of their italics I think. If I’m really lucky, I might even manage an Announcement.

Actually the Announcement should come first.

InFlight is changing.
No, that's not quite true. InFlight has changed.
And now it's about to change some more.
InFlight is becoming a group blog.

Which brings me to those Three Purposes. Or Three Graces perhaps, because certainly I consider all three of them to have grace in abundance.

I've asked Nanette, supersoling and DuctapeFatwa to become -- well I'm actually not sure what the right term should be. FPers? That's a bit arrogant for what is a very little blog. Contributors? But everyone who posts makes a contribution, often far more of a contribution than the 'post' per se as one can plainly see by looking back through the archives.

Hmm. People who post articles and/or facilitate other people posting articles on occasion and/or generally keep things ticking over. That's what I've asked them to be. All of them were doing that already, but I've asked them to do it here as well, as they see fit. And to my delight (and immense relief!) Nanette, supersoling and DuctapeFatwa have all agreed. Logistics are still being sorted out (what a wonderful euphemism that is for 'dove is still figuring out how blogger works!')

And while I'm at it there are a couple of other things I wanted to say as well. (If brevity is the soul of wit then alas. . .)

There is something about InFlight that I'd like not to change. Doesn't mean it won't of course.

I'd like it to be non-national space. I think it has, for the most part, been non-national space so far and I'd like it to continue to be.

I guess I've also been thinking about homes and coalitions and how these things are not like each other.

And I've been reading and thinking a bit about Bernice Johnson Reagon's speech, Coalition Politics:Turning the Century

I'd like to discuss her speech: I'm not quite sure where to begin. The century she spoke of turning has of course turned in the interim. But twenty-five years on (more or less) since she spoke it seems to me that her words could have been said for the first time this morning. Anyway, every time I think I've got the beginnings of a coherent sentence, I find myself turning my head this way and that, saying 'hmmm. Do I really mean that?' and going back to her words.

So I'd like to invite someone to start. And someone else to join in. And when I find some words, so shall I.

Typing (and Thinking) out Loud Part II

2006-07-17T20:42:00.000+01:00

In the last Typing (and Thinking) out Loud thread, Nanette observed something 'weird' while writing about bell hooks's conclusion that "This means that the world we have most intimately known, the world in which we feel "safe" (even if such feelings are based on illusions), must be radically changed. Perhaps it is the knowledge that everyone must change, not just those who we label enemies or oppressors, that has so far served to check our revolutionary impulses." ( bell hooks, From Margin to Centre 166).

Nanette said:

You know how sometimes you hear a word or a phrase that you've probably heard thousands of times in your life, but at that particular point in time it just sounds... weird? Like it's a new thing, and maybe doesn't belong there. This happened to me yesterday when reading an article and having it say "human rights organizations say... ".

Human rights organizations. Care for the children charities. Anti poverty/feed the poor organizations.

Don't those just seem... well, weird? Why, at this point in time... or really, at any point in time, should we need huge, international organizations that have to lobby for human rights? Or beg for food to feed people? It doesn't usually seem weird though, it seems like well... that's how things are supposed to be. After all, someone has to do it. Right? But it all seems backwards.

Yes. I think it does seem backwards. I think we've come to take some things that we shouldn't have as 'natural', 'inevitable', 'that's just how it is.' Human nature.

When one is told 'but that's just naturally how it is,' I think it can be useful to take a long hard look at who benefits and who does not benefit from that particular natural state. And how? Because asking those questions might lead us to wonder whether 'it' -- whatever the 'it' may be -- is in fact an intractable 'state of nature' or whether it is instead no more than a 'state of affairs' that just happens to be wearing a convincing disguise.

So. What are the 'it's' you would like to make unnatural? Why? And where would you begin?

---
As a postscript, I just wanted to say 'welcome' to everyone who has come here to write over this last week. It's good to see you here, albeit not always under the easiest of circumstances and certainly in far from the happiest of times.

Words fail

2006-07-16T18:29:00.000+01:00

It looks like where my grandparents lived
when they were still alive.

Bushfire country.
The forest burned and given to gorse,
parched scrub, sharp stones and dusty heat
that burns again each summer.

These tinder-dry days olive groves are grown there
and olives but not infants.
I mean there are no infants hanging in the olive branches,
no tiny legs, no little limbs.
The infants are alive not in the olive tree.

Don't cry. She has no use for your tears.
She had a water bottle.
If that will no longer serve, your tears will not revive her.
Light no candle. This is bushfire country.
A candle is the last thing anyone in their right mind needs.
You comfort no-one but yourself
with tears, candles, poetry.

Typing (and thinking) Out Loud Thread

2006-07-14T08:45:00.000+01:00

Alas, I'm not going to be able to do anything but sporadic typing and thinking until tomorrow. However, the last thread may be getting a bit big and unwieldy so I thought I'd provide a brand new comment thread for people to keep talking here as well if they wish. (Obviously people should feel free to keep posting to the previous discussion though, especially if they are replying to comments there -- this is 'another' space, rather than an 'instead of' space)

People might want to post questions too for people to discuss -- I've heard from at least one person who would like to do that, and this would be a good place for that.

In the interim, because I see (in inchoate ways thus far) this issue as being so closely linked with and to feminism, I thought I'd quote something bell hooks said at the conclusion of Feminist Theory; from Margin to Centre

The formation of an oppositional world view is necessary for feminist
struggle. This means that the world that we have most intimately known,
the world in which we feel 'safe' (even if such feelings are
illusions) must be radically changed. Perhaps it is the knowledge that everyone
must change, not just those we label enemies or oppressors, that has so far
served to check our revolutionary impulses. Those revolutionary
impulses must freely inform our theory and practice if feminist movement to
end existing oppression is to progress, if we are to transform our present reality.

Anyway, I think there are things to muse on here. Just very briefly in terms of contextualising her conclusion. I don't think bell hooks is saying that oppression doesn't exist, that it shouldn't be called what it is, or that those engaged in oppresion shouldn't be called on that (or that doing that calling is itself an act of oppression). I do think she's saying that it's a rare person who isn't or hasn't been complicit in oppression themselves in one way or another. Certainly, that's one I'd have to put my hand up to.

Alex through the Looking Glass

2006-07-10T01:59:00.000+01:00

Mr Eldritch has always known just what to say.
Harsh words for harsher places, but that is, after all, his vocation.

"Alice in her party dress
She thanks you kindly
So serene
She needs you like she needs her tranqs
To tell her that the world is clean"

For Alice, read Alex. Her party dress is blood-stained and her eyes have that familiar glassy look. Serenity in a bottle, composure in a needle. Alex is innocent: it's not the world she needs to be reassured is clean (though it isn't) it's her party dress. And her works.

As I've written elsewhere (Let's talk about Alex), Alex isn't a real person. She's a stock character, but she resembles something that exists in the world: I should know, I've resembled her.

Before I get stuck in, I should probably start out with a warning: long, long, meta ahead. It's not even meta about In Flight: it's meta about BT. And yes, I will be naming names and linking to posts, because on the whole I'd rather people weren't wondering who I'm talking about. But I probably won't cite many actual quotations because I don't want to give them room here.

But I'm going to start out with a brief and pointed digression.

Catherine McKinnon has asked some really tough questions about what female consent to heterosexual sex means in places where, by and large, rape happens with impunity. The places I think of when I read her work are the places I've lived: New Zealand, the United States and more recently the United Kingdom. (I must confess, that while I'm naming names, my sources in this case are still languishing in a garage in the United States. I am writing from memory: as a result I am probably grossly simplifying her argument or simply getting parts of it wrong: the inevitable shortcomings should therefore be ascribed to me, not her.)

If I remember her rightly, she argues in societies such as New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, some women are generally understood to be unrapable. They cannot be raped because their consent is already presumed: any sexual act involving them is therefore automatically by definition consensual. On its face, it might seem a bit of a nonsense, but let me try and give a couple of examples.

It is well-known that women who work as prostitutes find it almost impossible to obtain rape convictions: as sex workers, they are understood to be 'unrapable:' their consent is presumed.

Until quite recently in New Zealand (1985), it was legally impossible for a husband to rape his spouse. While a married woman might be rapable by a stranger, she was unrapable by her husband. Despite the change in law, convictions for spousal rape (and its relative, date rape) remain very rare. One might conclude from this that while girlfriends and wives are legally rapable by their boyfriends and husbands (which is to say they can be raped because they can refuse consent), in practice they are still considered unrapable within the context of that relationship (they can't be raped because their consent is already given).

Part of the reason why McKinnon's taxonomy (if I'm describing it correctly) is hard to get one's head around is that one would normally think of being 'unrapable' as a good thing, as implying that one is not powerless, but powerful -- but within the context of her argument, to be 'unrapable' is to not have one's right to refuse consent recognised or acknowledged within the broader society, which actually puts one in a weaker position than the 'rapable' woman who at least has the possibility of some kind of redress.

Anyway, when a rapist rapes an 'unrapable' woman -- a woman whose consent is automatically presumed -- he often won't think that he's done anything wrong and he will vociferously claim innocence. And most of the time, a majority of people will agree with him. I don't think there's anything particular controversial in that observation: certainly it matches what I've seen in the world closely enough.

Here endeth the digression.

What does any of that have to do with meta? What does it have to do with Alex? What does it have to do with what's been happening at BT?

Resemblance is what it has to do with these things -- not identity, but resemblance. I am expressly not saying that anyone has been raped on BT. That would be a bit silly. But I am inviting you to keep in mind a more general idea that might be abstracted from McKinnon (or rather from my crude and possibly inaccurate recollection of a paraphrase of part of her argument). That is, the concept that there may be constructed -- through language, because language matters here folks -- classes of people whom it is by definition impossible to injure. Not because they are powerful, invulnerable superheroes who cannot in fact experience injury, but because an injury to them is not considered to be a real injury (raping one's spouse was 'impossible' in New Zealand until 1985, remember?) . Such 'uninjurable' people can be injured with impunity: innocence and goodness is maintained throughout. And I must admit, whenever I think of innocence I think of Alex in her bloody party dress. So serene.

What I see happening at BT (and elsewhere too, but most clearly at BT, perhaps because that's where I look most closely) is the gradual construction of a class of people whom it is, by definition, impossible to injure. A class of people about whom and to whom anything may be said, with no moral consequences -- with no loss of 'goodness' or 'innocence.' There are, as it happens, some social consequences and these are seen as sad and perhaps even inexplicable. After all, nothing is being done that is wrong.

So who is this class of people? At BT, I would suggest, they might be defined as presumed foreigners who critique the United States in ways that USun's find uncomfortable. Though generally presumed exempt by citizenship, USuns who are critical of the U.S. military and of U.S. empire, or who dissent (as several have) from the construction of this class of 'uninjurable' people' can easily enough be included in it on a case-by-case basis. How? It's easy. Describe them as having been corrupted -- led astray -- by that seductive foreign voice.

"I do not like Ductape Fatwa's diaries, I don't believe they serve useful purpose and that now they actually cause some of my fellow countrymen to lose touch with honesty and integrity."
militarytracy, (July 7th 2006)

Which brings me to Ductape Fatwa, the current Unacceptable Other du jour at BT. Widely perceived and portrayed as the bringer of dissent, disruption, disunity, divisiveness, broad brushes, sweeping generalisations, negativity and all manner of outrages.

Hmm. I suppose I should declare where I stand in this: I'm one of the evil co-conspirators, no less. Apparently, catnip and I have magical powers of appearance and the ability to bless people with our mere presence. Who knew! Seriously, I consider Ductape Fatwa a friend, an ally and yes, an honorary ancestor. He's one of the people whom I'm lucky enough to get to think in writing at and whom I'm lucky enough to get to read.

And Ductape Fatwa has said that it's 'not about him' except in a symbolic sense.

But that symbolic sense is important. Close attention to the language used to justify the ad hominem attacks tossed his way -- and language usually rewards close attention -- reveals that his detractors often justify their ad hominem attacks by gesturing towards aspects of DTF's identity. From their perspective, this presumably locates him within a class of people who are 'unattackable' or 'uninjurable,' whose words need not be read and to whom anything may be attributed. I say 'presumably' because I think that's what's going on: I see no other rhetorical purpose for such gestures.

For example, one of Sallycat's ad hominem attacks was predicated on Ductape Fatwa's 'foreignness.'

"If you don't like this country and the people trying to take it back - stay
away. If you don't like soldiers doing a job they were ordered to do - and
their generals are trying to stop - stay away. If you hate what America
stands for that much - go find a European Blog...or some other country -
just go away. This is my country and I will defend my fellow
countrymen...from those that do not understand the people and the government
are not always the same. Go elsewhere...or just stay away we are mostly
American's here and you are offensive to those of us that believe in what we
stand for as a people."

What is being claimed here, at least on my reading, is that BT is a place for Americans and those who are not 'my fellow countrymen' (presumably both naturalised citizens and permanent residents are excluded from this group, as well as those who live elsewhere in the world) are not welcome unless they 'believe in what we (Americans) stand for as a people.' DTF is quite right: it's not about him -- it's about anyone critical of 'what we stand for as a people' who is not among 'my fellow countrymen.' And if you are in that set of people, you are offensive. You are in that 'uninjurable' group.

More recently, DTF's words were discounted on the basis of his presumed origin as a refugee.

When one's words can be discounted on the basis of foreign origin, presumed or actual (and I would argue, equally on the basis of religion in DTF's case) or presumed refugee origin -- when one's words can be dismissed on the basis of the writer's religious, national, or ethnic identity, it is not surprising that they are often misread. It requires increasing amounts of charity to interpret such misreadings as innocent or unintentional, especially when the same misreadings occur repeatedly.

For example, DuctapeFatwa has repeatedly been accused of supporting FGM, where casual perusal of what he has actually said on the subject -- on my interpretation at least -- indicates a position in line with the practices being advocated by UNICEF in its efforts to end FGM.

"UNICEF is working with partners who have identified several critical elements necessary for mass abandonment of the practice. These include using a non-coercive and non-judgmental approach; raising awareness in the community about the harmfulness of the practice; encouraging public declarations of the collective commitment to abandonment; and spreading the abandonment message within communities."

For example, he is repeatedly accused of making generalisations about all Americans, when as supersoling recently pointed out, this is simply not the case.

Now, this might sound like it's all about DTF after all. But actually it's not -- except in a symbolic and exemplary way. Really, it's more about what can be done and what has been done to people, once they/we are defined as 'unattackable' and 'uninjurable:' people to whom and about whom anything can be said without moral consequence.

Let me be blunt(er) in closing. When I saw Sallycat's diary Rhetoric of Hate, my first thoughts were essentially those of catnip who wrote

"Let's see if I've got this straight:
posting a diary that reflects the
opinion of much of the world about the attitudes of most Americans = being
hateful
telling said diarist that he is a "Republican troll" who writes
things that are "pathetically fucking stupid = not being hateful
What strange parallel universe have I dropped into here?"

I had the same reaction. It seemed to me bizarre that a group of people (Sallycat, NAG, militarytracy, Egerwaen, etc.), whom, based on their previous behaviour I expect as a routine matter of course to see attacking someone whom I respect (not least because of his steady, determined refusal to respond in kind in the face of considerable provocation) with misrepresentations, misreadings and virulent ad hominem attacks, then turned around and with no apparent sense of irony, posted and/or participated in a discussion purporting to be about peace and tolerance.

It struck me as utterly shameless behaviour.

But then I realised. They feel no shame because they don't think they've done anything wrong. As Sallycat puts it in her response to catnip, "I stand by my comments in that diary." And the reason they don't think they've done anything wrong (at least so far as I can tell, from their words) is because as a foreigner, as a presumed refugee and as a Muslim who says things that make USuns feel uncomfortable, DTF is among a class of people who cannot be wronged, cannot be maligned and are not part of that 'all' who are susceptible to injury. And because of this, a certain wide-eyed innocent eye-lash fluttering 'who me?' can be maintained throughout.

And like I said before, when I think of innocence, I think of Alex in her bloody party dress.

She needs you like she needs her pills
To tell her that the world's okay

Now, I'm not claiming innocence, Alex. I'm sure I've said some things that hurt to hear. And we both know that I resemble you all too often. But no matter how many pills you take, the world will still not be okay. And if you want those bloodstains out of your party dress, then you're just going to have to wash it clean.

Core Warrior Values

2006-06-26T22:44:00.000+01:00

Like military intelligence, it is an oxymoron, though not devoid of (unintended?) resonances.

Core Warrior Values.

Isn't it a wonderfully macho phrase? Staunch. Robust. Muscular. Just look at those rippling core warrior values. Cor.

Why 'Warrior'? Why not 'Soldier'? Or 'Military'?

The word choice will have been deliberate.
Somebody thought about it, probably more than one somebody.
A public relations officer somewhere mulled it over, showed it round the office. Asked their manager, "Hey. What do you think? Warrior? Or Soldier? I wondered about 'Military' but - meh - it just doesn't have the right ring to it. Too stodgy. Too organisational."
Maybe they even did a focus group.

Warrior. Not Soldier.

Perhaps 'soldier' also had too much of that organisational reek. 'Soldiers' follow orders, do what they're told. They permit their autonomy to be erased. They consent to be reduced to cogs within a very particular kind of machinery. That's not nearly as cool as being a 'warrior.' The term 'warrior' lends itself to associations with nobility, with heroism.

And also, 'soldier' might lead to further inconvenient questions. Like "But were they not being cog-like then, when they murdered that toddler?" and "But weren't they just 'completing their mission' when they shot that man in the wheelchair?"

It might lead us to the conclusion recently drawn by the peerless Gary Younge that "These atrocities are not contrary to the ethics of this particular occupation but the natural and inevitable consequence of it." As he said in the same article "This is what occupation is; this is what occupation does."

Let's look at the phrase holistically for a second: "Core Warrior Values."

What are they? Well the PR machine would have it that they're about things like not killing civilians (or at least not killing the conspicuously unarmed ones, unless you have to hand an adequate supply of shovels and AK47s with which to appropriately outfit your victims. It remains advisable, however, to remember that no matter how many shovels you lay down beside that little pre-schooler's corpse, the total effect is always going to lack a certain verisimilitude). In other words -- well, for all the obvious reasons, 'core warrior values' training is not going to be about persuading warriors to act decently. At best it's an effort to persuade them to refrain from the most egregious forms of indecency in those situations where discovery and publicity is likely.

But like so many of these resonant phrases, 'core warrior values' turns truth on its head. Up is down. In is out. Speech is silence. War is peace.

If you want to know about core warrior values, go ask the Sabine women (and wasn't it just too cute for words how that worked out?) Go ask the inhabitants of any of a wide array of towns and cities after the Mongols came. Or those from Constantinople just after the Fourth Crusade. Or the estimated 12, 000 Jews who died in the Rhine Valley, killed during the First Crusade by Crusaders en route to Jerusalem. Ask those who fled to al-Aqsa mosque what those crusaders did on arrival. I suspect they would prove quite informative about what -- traditionally -- have been 'core warrior values.'

Evidently, it's a tradition embraced with some enthusiasm by the U.S. military and their (I'm not quite sure what the right word should be. Colallies? Allonies? Coalitionies? Colonition? I think that last might be my favourite) Colonition.

And as for 'Core?'

It could mean 'hard' -- I suspect that was what that PR officer was going for. Like 'the solid unshakeable core.' Or 'hard-core.'

But I find myself thinking of a different core that's kind of squishy and surrounded by something even squishier (maybe even a bit mouldy in places -- not green or black mould like you get on bread, but that white, powdery-looking stuff that collects on the particularly brown, almost liquidy-soft spots like mini-snow-drifts). The whole thing smelling somewhat fermented. Maybe a bit vinegary. A bit like cider, come to think of it.

The Use of Walls

2006-06-22T21:48:00.000+01:00

Living in that particular island, one became accustomed to being bounded. There, to your left, was the Pacific Ocean stretching all the way to Chile. Over the Alps, to your right, the Tasman Sea beat upon those black iron sands. It is true that from the tip of the North Island, island hopping was barely possible (certainly people had made that trip in reverse, but Kupe’s epic voyage from Hawaiiki is beyond the means of most to emulate, even with different destinations in mind). Erewhon is a long way from anywhere.

The water is a wall. A flat, final frontier stretching far beyond the curvature of the earth.

It is a safe, politically stable place. Occasionally, nevertheless, standing on that windswept beach in a cold Southerly and staring at that horizon, the thought might drift across your mind: "If things go wrong, there is no escape." And it's true. Close the airports and suddenly those islands look a whole lot different. Claustrophobic. Isolated. Like a trap.

Given this context, land borders were quite the novelty. To go from one country to another, without getting on a plane and flying over salt water for several hours. Extraordinary. The best efforts of border control notwithstanding, there remained something liberating about those crossings into Canada.

But despite its land borders, the U.S. is (at least in my experience) an insular place. What happens beyond its borders -- and what it does beyond its borders -- is seen as remote and unreal. Peripheral to the main sweep of history, even when the events comprising that history take place in that mysterious and exotic elsewhere. How else can the Vietnam War (Invasion? Occupation?) be understood primarily as an American tragedy?

Possibly it's a size thing: the U.S. has a profusion of States, each with their names, geographical locations and State Capitals to keep tabs on and locate accurately on maps. Small wonder, perhaps, that the colonies, the client states, the occupied terrain, the savage barbarian lands to be subdued don't too get much of a look in. Or perhaps it is simply a hallmark of imperial powers. Was the U.K. similar during those long years when the sun never set on its bloodied-red dominions? Certainly other similarities are evident in the self-portraiture: both imagine themselves as benevolent, democratic, humane, agents of liberation and modernity. Exercisers of a civilising influence. Behold those wondrous railways! Witness those free elections!

But I have digressed.

Whatever the proximate cause, the U.S. is insular and desires to be more so. It aspires to insularity, to the condition of being an island. To that end it builds walls: huge monstrosities of walls complete with watchtowers, floodlights, sensors, ditches, barbed wire and armed vigilantes, linking a myriad legion of smaller walls, equally monstrous in intent, though not in scale. Barbed wire and concrete from sea to shining sea.

Firstly in the South, since fear of the Other is the engine driving this machine. Those folks up North -- despite their many languages and hues -- are for the most part still imagined as white English speakers a la that lovely lady who sang that song about her heart and that ship that sank -- and doesn't she do shows in Vegas now? (Yes, I know. So do you. But it is perception that matters here, for beyond the borders we enter the land of the unreal). Nevertheless, the North is unlikely to prove immune forever. Are there not already rumblings and grumblings about 'back doors' and 'soft laws?' Are not the gates already closing?

Then they shall be an island in truth. Isolated. Impassable. Free from undesirable influx, ingress, influence, incursion, invasion, immigration, innundation, infestation and insinuation. Quarantined. Safe. Secure. Invulnerable. Preserved from the foreign, saved from the alien, they shall be free to focus their attentions on the enemies within.

There's this thing about walls. Like knives, they cut both ways.

Those sensors cunningly placed to detect ingress can as easily detect egress.
It is a very simple matter to direct the floodlights inwards.
From the watchtowers one has 360 degree vision.
That concrete edifice, that extravagantly snarled barbed wire will tear the hands of those seeking exit just as painfully as it does those seeking entrance.
The ditch does not care which way people attempt to traverse it.

Just as it made no difference to that flat and final frontier (stretching all the way to Chile) whether it excluded or incarcerated.

Open the borders.
The world was never meant to be a prison.

Music for the People

2006-06-20T21:39:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time I found a collection of G.B. Shaw’s music criticism in a second-hand bookstore. It only cost a dollar, so I bought it. I didn’t know much about Shaw – only that he’d written a play I very much liked (Arms and the Man) and that he had a reputation for a fierce wit. Well-earned. Leafing through the book I found gems such as:

“There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem."

Happy are those composers, performers, musical impressarios and organisers of choral festivals who did not happen to be living and working during his tenure as a music critic, for he was that most dangerous of creatures: an honest man. I took it home to read in more detail. After all, it was only a dollar. And at some point in the following days I found this:

“What we want is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if all Beethoven’s scores perish in the interim.”

I was training to be a musicologist at the time – in other words preparing for a life focused around ensuring that scores – Beethoven’s and others – don’t perish, literally or figuratively.

I typed out Shaw’s words, printed them off and propped them up on top of my monitor. The rest of that term, I used to glance up at them occasionally, while I wrote about fourteenth-century motets, or – yes— Beethoven’s approach to form. But whether or not I looked at that piece of paper, it looked at me. After that term I don’t remember what happened to it: perhaps it was lost or discarded when I moved. It no longer mattered by then: Shaw’s accusation, his question, was in my head every time I set finger to keyboard or pen to paper.

I fought him. Every day for more than six years, I fought. I accused, I denied, I contradicted, justified and rationalised, weaved, dodged, ducked and dived with the best of them. For though I was an economic emigrant, money was not my only motive. And I had something to lose: I had left a lot of people and all the places I knew, to pursue this particular future.

The opening salvos in that long war of attrition were sadly predictable.

“How dare you, George?” (he just hated being called George, so I called him George on every possible occasion – Georgie Porgie if I were feeling particularly vindictive), I said between clenched teeth, “How. Dare. You. Judge. By what possible right? You –a writer of clever social comedies for the leisured classes – yourself a music critic! You are a complete hypocrite. Shame on you.”

“What we want,” he replied with infuriating calm, “is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if all Beethoven’s scores perish in the interim.”

But this time, I heard what had been there in those words the first time too. Accusation? Yes. Perhaps. But self-accusation in equal measure. And whereas he was dead, I was still alive.

“But George.” I said after some pause. “This isn’t my fault. Really. It isn’t. I did not invent Empires. I did not make the munitions. I didn’t go soldiering. I did not build the barbed wire borders. The thumb screws, the hoods, the exposed wires, those prison cells with grated drains? – these were not of my construction. The maquiladoras? Not of my manufacture. I have not grabbed land in the Taranaki, or anywhere else for that matter. In the bigger scheme of things I am innocent: there are no flies on me. I am not to blame for sexism, for racism, for xenophobia, for homophobia, for imperialism, for any of that. Why then should I not live my life in peace and quiet, doing something which – after all – does not cause anyone any particular harm? There are many far worse things I could choose to do.

“What we want,” he replied, rootling through my well-stocked fridge, rummaging through my full cupboards and wardrobe, casting a sceptical eye over my over-burdened bookcase and peering out my dorm window out over the peaceful snowbound town, “is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if all Beethoven’s scores perish in the interim.”

I had little reply. The point was clear enough.

Truth be told, those opening salvos were brief. A week? Two weeks max. And from there, Georgie and I settled down in our respective trenches for a long slow war of attrition. The weapons of choice? Justification. Rationalisation. Prevarication.

“Hey George,” I shouted across No-Man’s Land, “I teach people – students, yeah? That’s useful isn’t it? And music can be political and we need to know how that works don’t we?”

But George was having none of it. He just sat there, hunkered down in his trench, darning his socks, looking smug. “What we want –” he began to call back –

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Shut up already.”

I told George to ‘Shut up’ most days for a good few years, but he just didn’t seem to do so. And in that time I came up with any number of variants on the general theme, but the answer stayed the same.

“Hey Georgie” I yelled much later, thinking that maybe this time I’d discovered a devastating new tactic that would keep him quiet once and for all, “Look at this – I’m doing all this union work. Lots of it – oodles of it. That makes it ok, right? I can keep on with the music thing if I’m doing stuff like this the rest of the time, can’t I?”

He didn’t even bother opening his mouth. He just raised an eyebrow from across No-Man’s-Land and even at that distance I could see he was going to give me one of those Looks.

It was a long slow war: in the end it was a relief to lose.

The more I tried to justify what I was doing, the more my deeds required justification.

The more I tried to give reasons, the more they seemed like rationalisations.

And the thing about both justifications and reasons is that sooner or later, they run out. About six years in, I found myself one day with nothing left. There was nothing more I could say to Shaw's words.

“Yes,” I was finally forced to concede, “That is what we want. And yes, if we have that, people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if . . .”

It was the first moment of peace I’d known for a long time, that moment when I realised I couldn’t be a musicologist after all.

(Though to an external observer it might have seemed that nothing changed, or rather, not immediately. I still finished (most of it was already written by then, after all – and figuring out what one cannot do is not the same as discovering what one can) but what usually serves as one’s introduction to a field became, to all intents and purposes, my farewell.)

It’s not that I sleep better now exactly, but what keeps me sleepless is not that particular angst, not that particular maze of justification. It’s not that I’m out of the woods, either – but it is true the trees do seem sometimes a little less entangling. So there’s something I want to say which is well overdue:

Hey Bernard. Thanks. A thousand thanks. And I’m sorry that I called you names.

Touring the Archipelago

2006-06-17T18:31:00.000+01:00

It’s true. I was – what’s that word? Tail-gating? Band-wagoning? Jumping on the band wagon. That’s it. I’d seen the “This blog is anti-torture” logo a few places around the Eegian Neighbourhood and so I signed up. (Now I just have to figure out how to do the Tapir thing)

It’s quite easy to sign up – all you have to do is click the link and follow the instructions. The harder thing is writing something about torture. They’re after more bloggers, so if you’re even slower to jump on a bandwagon than me, click that ‘Join Us’ link just under the logo.

I suspect I’m not the first to observe that one of the side-benefits this idea is that it exposes you to a lot of other good bloggers out there who write on – well, all manner of things political actually, and in all manner of styles.

So let me take a leaf out of Nanette’s book and take you on a very abbreviated tour of an extensive archipelago.

First stop, Kel’s The Osterley Times. It’s primarily a news blog, focusing on U.K. and U.S. stories from a U.K. left perspective. If you want to get a sense of what’s going over this way, this is a great starting point -- here is an example of what I like about it.

“Most reasonable people can conclude that any Israeli footage taken from a drone that shows people sunbathing on a beach is unlikely to have been taken whilst that beach was, according to Israel's own timeline, being shelled.”

Kel – you have mastered the art of dry understatement.

South Africa has been on my mind this week for both personal and political reasons – well, I can write about the political ones anyway. It’s 30 years now since schoolchildren in Soweto took to the streets to protest against the use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in their (chronically and deliberately underfunded) schools. (There’s a great Guardian article by David Johnson on this). Over at Crossing the Line: Life in Occupied Palestine , Christopher Brown has a powerful account of the ways in which the apartheid regime used sleep deprivation as a form of torture.

Meanwhile at My Occupied Territory; thoughts in a space, moi has provided an informative and excellent account on the extraordinary rendition of Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian citizen, rendered to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured for thirteen months.

He says of his ‘occupied territory’ that:

although i have occupied this blog, i do not plan on enforcing this occupation through concrete barriers that will prevent visitors from traveling though this site. Nor will I use security check points to make sure that individuals have the right nationality/race/ethnicity in order to comment.

Grin. Bravo.

Finally (well I said it was abbreviated) Al-Baal has a tale to tell (June 12th so you have scroll down a little) about a Swedish controversy over the naming of wines. Enjoy.

On Solidarity

2006-06-14T20:16:00.000+01:00

Be warned. I'm not sure that I'd call this an optimistic diary. `Somewhat bleak' might be a better weather forecast.
When I was in high school, a good friend introduced me to Crisis. It was the first comic I ever read. I used to wait for him to get his copy every month so that I could shamelessly borrow it before he'd even finished reading. Before I found Crisis, I had no idea that comics could be something other than super-trashy stories about super-macho heroes and super-scantily-clad screaming (though never ever shrill) women. Shows what little I knew - those were the glorious years of the Hernandez Brothers Love and Rockets series, and Neil Gaiman's Sandman, not to mention his ethereal and utterly remarkable Black Orchid .

I first encountered Pastor Niemoller's famous words on the back of one of those Crisis issues. You all know the ones:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

For a long time I found those words very powerful. If you had asked me why I thought politics mattered, I might well have paraphrased Niemoller. If you asked me what I thought solidarity was, the odds are pretty damn good that I would have pointed you to the back of that comic. "Hang together," I would have said, "Or you will hang separately."

But then I found that all too often, you will hang separately anyway.

I still greatly admire Niemoller. But I've come to harbour some serious doubts about these famous words as a prescription for solidarity. Not recently - my doubts been stewing away quite merrily for some years now. But it would be fair to say that lately they've come bubbling up to the surface again.

At their crudest, Niemoller's words invoke a kind of self-interest. "Defend others," they proclaim, "if you want to be defended in your turn." I am not suggesting that such self-interest is malicious: it's a rare motive that is not mixed. But I think this crude paraphrase offers some clues about why we end up hanging separately.

In our barbed wire world, equality is the rarest of commodities. All of our relations are power relations, predicated on inequality and our efforts to bolster or undermine it. And let me add some bluntness to my earlier crudeness. Those with power often perceive that they can afford to betray those without power, because they don't believe that they'll ever actually be so vulnerable as to require the defence of the powerless. The citizen does not in her heart of hearts believe that she will ever need to hide in the basement of an illegal immigrant. The captain of industry does not imagine that a pauper shall keep him from starvation. In the U.S. and the U.K., the Christian woman does not envision a time when a Muslim woman will shield her from religious persecution. The imperialist does not dream that he shall be saved from subjugation by a colonial subject. And frankly, those perceptions are usually accurate. After all, the ability to betray with personal impunity is an integral part of what having power and privilege is all about.

Interpreted as a prescription for solidarity based on enlightened self-interest, I think Niemoller's words assume an equality that is seldom present. Read more literally, they explain why we too often hang separately.

But I'm not done with Niemoller's words just yet.

I was at a union stewards' meeting soon after the U.S. attacked Iraq. By that time, stewards' meetings had become something I forced myself to attend. Climbing up those stairs to the office/meeting room, I'd feel my mask fall into place. You know the one? The mask you put on because you're going to a place where you know that you are despised because of who you are and what you believe, and you don't want to give the bastards the pleasure of your pain. After four years of sitting in that room of mostly white, mostly U.S. faces, I had learned to keep my mask very firmly in place.

One of the items at the meeting involved a resolution condemning the U.S. invasion. Nothing that would make much practical difference, but a kind of belated `going on record' to express support for anti-war groups in the area. There was a round robin `discussion.' "Unions are not political organisations," one person said. "we should not be endorsing or opposing this sort of thing." Another volunteered that "This won't make any practical difference, so we shouldn't bother talking about it." But the argument that received the most attention went something like "We shouldn't condemn the U.S. invasion of Iraq, because that would show a lack of solidarity with union members who support the invasion."

So where does solidarity end and complicity begin?

And if self-interest, enlightened or not, will not serve as a basis for solidarity, then what can replace it?

Apologia

Another old diary -- this one's from BT, June 10, 2005.

On Voice and Anonymity

2006-06-11T10:12:00.000+01:00

Anonymity is one of the few non-violent tools available to the relatively weak for use in improving their circumstances.
It is the veil that liberates. It allows at least some few who would otherwise be voiceless to come to voice, to tell their stories, to describe the world as it appears from their vantage point. Sometimes it allows a cat to look at a king – or if that is too optimistic – to at least think out loud about looking at a king, to speculate upon the nature of that glorious visage.

That is why journalists interviewing children seeking asylum who have had to go into hiding do not reveal their names.

It’s also why the Samaritans doesn’t require your identity before they’ll listen to you.
And it’s why, at least in some places, you can report hate incidents anonymously.

One of the beauties of blogism is that it can allow people who are relatively powerless (not absolutely powerless mind you, but relatively powerless) to come to voice without the mediating influence of journalists – be it benevolent, malicious or merely indifferent. And we must recognise that for some, this coming to voice is possible only because of anonymity.

The sixteen-year-old kid living in FredPhelpstown Central who is questioning her sexuality is more likely to bring her voice, her thoughts, into the public sphere if she can do so without the prospect of additional harrassment, violence and the small but not insignificant risk of death that would be attendant on the revelation of her identity.

For the relatively powerful, one’s name is one’s protection. It confers authority, it establishes their credentials. Sometimes it even grants a kind of impunity. For the relatively powerless, however, one’s name is often one’s greatest vulnerabilty. The vulnerabilities associated with one’s name are – to give one salient example – why refugees often lack identity documents.

It may be tempting to say that those who write anonymously just lack the courage to put their names to their words. To say that they simply need to learn to stand up for themselves or else, shut up or change what they say. I’m suspect most of us have seen such claims made in a wide variety of online and offline situations.

My rather brutal response would be: ‘Go tell that to Sophie Scholl.” As it happens, one cannot. She and others in her circle of friends were beheaded soon after their identification. One might, I suppose, make the claim that her interrogation and show trial provided her with a valuable opportunity to learn to stand up for herself: it’s not a case I’d care to make myself. Personally, I would rather she had lived on, along with her brother and friends to continue their work in cowardly anonymity.

Of course, her case is an extreme example. The claim that that it is isolated or exceptional, however, is difficult to sustain in our barbed wire world: Sophie Scholl merely inhabits a position near to one end of a particular continuum of political vulnerability.

In light of current events, I think it would also be useful to remember that even those who are relatively powerful in one context, may nonetheless be relatively powerless in another.

Let me digress a little (or a lot).
There’s an opera by Verdi called I Vespri Siciliani

Verdi was on a bit of a nationalist kick when he wrote it (but was Verdi ever not on a nationalist kick, she says, rolling her eyes?). It’s a political opera about a French invasion of Sicily. In the opening scene we see subjugated Sicilians being menaced by French soldiers, with what – at least in performance – usually involves thinly veiled threats of sexual violence against Sicilian women. Rape has been an established weapon in war for a long time now.

And indeed sexual violence – or more particularly, the ways in which rape is used simultaneously as weapon of war and as justification for war – is one of the main themes that runs through this deeply cynical opera. (At least I read it as deeply cynical)

After a bit of a setup, in which we are told about Our Noble Heroine Elena and the tragic death of her brother, she is introduced to the stage and vows to be avenged for her brother’s death. At the same time, she first encounters the French military, one of whom – an obnoxious individual by the name of Roberto tells her to sing for him. (Again, the staging usually makes plain the pleasure demanded from her voice is sexual)

She refuses. He threatens her with his ‘sword.’ Elena is a pragmatic woman and so she sings.

The other Sicilian women on stage watch intently.

Now this is an important moment: Elena is the most powerful Sicilian woman there is. If she can be raped with impunity (even figuratively) even while wearing mourning for her brother – what is there that cannot be done to those Sicilian women with less power? Whether those women liked Elena is beside the point. The reason they watch so intently what becomes of her is that whatever is done to her can so much more easily be done to them. After all, Elena is a powerful woman.

The purpose of analogy is not to assert identity, but rather to delineate points of similarity and difference. Nevertheless, while I think it important not to confuse that rare beast, solidarity, with the more pragmatic act of supporting someone for reasons of expediency, there may still be occasions when that pragmatic support is both right and necessary.

To Stay or Go through a Foreign Pair of eyes

2006-06-10T01:46:00.000+01:00

It’s a perennial argument, one of those old conundrums. An evil regime comes to power. What does one do? Go into exile? Stay and wait it out? Stay and resist? Some infinitely complex combination of all three? Are those who leave cowards who are giving up? Are those who stay complicit, responsible for propping up the regime? And what about those who cannot leave?

“Come on and let me know, Should I stay or should I go?”

After November 2004, it was an argument that folks from the U.S. had quite a bit. As someone who lived there for a long time, and as someone who’s not terribly good at staying put, it’s one I have a stake in.

Many of my close friends in the U.S. are non-nationals. When I think of them, it's with a low-grade anxiety, a nagging fear and a sense of threat, as though a door were slowly, almost imperceptibly, closing on them. Increasingly I feel that same worry and concern for my friends who are U.S. nationals.

I think that the presumption that those who leave are giving up, abdicating their responsibilities, abandoning their brethren, or turning their backs on political activism, is deeply mistaken. I think that presumption weakens our ability to resist the Bush regime by blinding us to the fact that all politics - even the most local of politics - is ultimately global in its implications.

We live in a world where `all the planet's little wars are joining hands.' (apologies to The The )

But so are all the world's little struggles for human rights.

I don't think it matters where you push back, so long as you push hard. It doesn't matter to me whether you want to fight primarily on the terrain of anti-war activism, or ending torture, or anti-racism, or electoral reform, or combating homophobia and heterosexism, or opposing sexism or any of a number of other human rights issues – so long as you do so in a way that recognises that all these struggles are linked.

Similarly, the geographic region of the planet that you happen to live while you're pushing back doesn't matter to me either. It does, however, matter to me that you get to choose where to live: one of the ways that I push back is by supporting freedom of movement.

It is true that only U.S. citizens vote in U.S. elections, but they don't have to be in the U.S. to do so.

And they sure as hell don’t have to be in the U.S. to take part in struggles for human rights. These are global struggles: they are not national.

Say it three times fast - the struggle to get rid of Bushco and his supporters is international not national. Even within U.S. borders. Maybe you can't tell just by looking around you, but I'll guarantee that the next time you're out on a big protest march some of the people you're marching side by side with will be foreigners. That was true in 2004: it is even more so now.

Let me tell you a story.

Shortly before I left the United States, I was talking with an old friend from a sophisticated, vibrant, thriving, lively metropolis - one of the greatest cities of the world. I'm from a small, provincial, little city on a small sparsely populated island. Both have their beauties, both have their uglinesses. But if we'd stayed put and not ventured into the wider world, we'd never have become friends.

We're both long-time foreigners and activists – well all our adult lives, anyway. We were talking about why he had decided to stay and why I was leaving (or rather why I was glad to be leaving, since leaving for me had rather little to do with choice).

He quoted John Lennon, "If I'd lived in Roman times, I'd have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire . . ."

And I thought about that for a bit. Neither of us were huge fans of empire. Indeed, several years earlier that John Lennon quotation had been a small part of why I had moved to `Rome.'

I answered, "Give me a lever long enough and a firm place to stand" or words to that effect.

And our conversation drifted on to other topics.

Perhaps because we'd both been foreigners for a long time and because we'd been through some rough fights together, there wasn't any talk of betrayal, or abdicating political responsibility, abandonment, or complicity. He didn't accuse me of giving up the fight. I didn't accuse him of propping up a military empire through his taxes.

I know I can count on him to be pushing hard in his corner of the world, whereever that may be at any time. I'm pretty damn sure he knows he can be counting on me to be doing the same in mine, wherever that may be at any moment.

Being a habitual foreigner is costly - I don't think it's the easy option some think. You end up missing a lot of people and being homesick for a lot of different places. I still see ghosts all the time - my good right eye tricks me into thinking I see old friends in places where I only have new friends. It's easy to be lonely. Everywhere is home and nowhere is home. Everything is transient and temporary. Contingent. And you never quite fit in, you never simply `belong.' Not even when you go back to the places you first came from. Always, you must answer questions about `where are you from?' - questions to which there are no longer any simple answers.

But the costs are also the prize. And the prize is that the old national allegiances don't fit any more. Because you have friends and allies strung out across the world like pearls, and your loyalties are to them and to the ideals that you share with them and these are the property and product of no single nation. And through them your loyalties are to the world - and not to the little patch of dust and earth where you happened by pure chance to be born.

Apologia:
This is a dusted off and tidied version of something I posted back at dKos on 1/4/05, when someone was being hauled through the coals for having the temerity to announce that he was emigrating.

This is what Complicity looks like

2006-06-09T06:49:00.000+01:00

A web of collusion tethered to four continents, ensnaring the world: a secretive geography of fear.

It is a perverse reflection of the forced immobility of refugees. Those who flee torture are held paralysed in the static limbo of the detention centre, the temporary hostel, the holding pen. Those whom certain client states (doubtless for reasons of political expediency and the preservation of ‘special relationships’) consent to persecute are forced into flight. Not flight from torture but towards it. And – in some cases at least – they are not flown far. In the cautiously discrete words of Dick Marty, “a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that secret detention centres did indeed exist in Europe.” Dick Marty Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights Alleged Secret Detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe Member States ( Draft Report Part II , June 2006, 1.8.23). It is thought that Rumania and Poland currently harbour secret CIA detention centres.

The chief-spider-in-charge officially began the weaving of this web in the mid-1990s. The programme was devised under Clinton by Michael Scheuer (who remained in the employ of the C.I.A. until November 2004) as a way of taking “terrorist suspects in foreign countries ‘off the streets’ by transporting them back to other countries, where they were wanted for trial, or for detention without any form of due process.” (Marty, 2.26)

Rendition. It’s a lovely word in its way, doubtless chosen with exquisite care. On its surface it’s merely another mealy-mouthed euphemism: kissing cousin to ‘collateral damage,’ ‘surgical strike’ and ‘shoot to incapacitate.’ But as Naomi Klein and others before her have observed, torture is predicated upon a ‘knowing / not knowing.’ It is a secret that is really no secret at all: a “semi-clandestine institution” (Sartre, “A Victory” Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism ). And herein lies the particular appropriateness of ‘rendition’ for it is a semi-clandestine word. Though bland enough on its surface, it bears the resonance of other meanings (albeit philologically distinct): to rend – to tear with violent force; to render – to extract (fat) by melting (meat).

And in selecting as his leitmotif the spider's web, Marty chose well. For even the process by which prisoners are ‘prepared’ with a ‘security check’ for ‘rendition’ bears a grotesque resemblance to the spider’s systematic entombment of its prey.

85. The general characteristics of this “security check” can be established from a host of testimonies as follows:

i. it generally takes place in a small room (a locker room, a police reception area) at the airport, or at a transit facility nearby.

ii. the man is sometimes already blindfolded when the operation begins, or will be blindfolded quickly and remain so throughout most of the operation.

iii. four to six CIA agents perform the operation in a highly-disciplined, consistent fashion – they are dressed in black (either civilian clothes or special 'uniforms'), wearing black gloves, with their full faces covered. Testimonies speak, variously, of “big people in black balaclavas”, people “dressed in black like ninjas”, or people wearing “ordinary clothes, but hooded”.

iv. the CIA agents “don’t utter a word when they communicate with one another”, using only hand signals or simply knowing their roles implicitly.

v. some men speak of being punched or shoved by the agents at the beginning of the operation in a rough or brutal fashion; others talked about being gripped firmly from several sides

vi. the man’s hands and feet are shackled.

vii. the man has all his clothes (including his underwear) cut from his body using knives or scissors in a careful, methodical fashion; an eye-witness described how “someone was taking these clothes and feeling every part, you know, as if there was something inside the clothes, and then putting them in a bag”.

viii. the man is subjected to a full-body cavity search, which also entails a close examination of his hair, ears, mouth and lips.

ix. the man is photographed with a flash camera, including when he is nearly or totally naked; in some instances, the man's blindfold may be removed for the purpose of a photograph in which his face is also identifiable.

x. some accounts speak of a foreign object being forcibly inserted into the man's anus; some accounts speak more specifically of a tranquiliser or suppository being administered per rectum - in each description this practice has been perceived as a grossly violating act that affronts the man’s dignity.

xi. the man is then dressed in a nappy or incontinence pad and a loose-fitting "jump-suit" or set of overalls; “they put diapers on him and then there is some handling with these handcuffs and foot chains, because first they put them on and then they are supposed to put him in overalls, so then they have to alternately unlock and relock them”.

xii. the man has his ears muffled, sometimes being made to wear a pair of "headphones"

xiii. finally a cloth bag is placed over the man's head, with no holes through which to breathe or detect light; they “put a blindfold on him and after that a hood that apparently reaches far down on his body” .

xiv. the man is typically forced aboard a waiting aeroplane, where he may be “placed on a stretcher, shackled”, or strapped to a mattress or seat, or “laid down on the floor of the plane and they bind him up in a very uncomfortable position that makes him hurt from moving”.

xv. in some cases the man is drugged and experiences little or nothing of the actual rendition flight; in other cases, factors such as the pain of the shackles or the refusal to drink water or use the toilet make the flight unbearable: “this was the hardest moment in my life”.

xvi. in most cases, the man has no notion of where he is going, nor the fate that awaits him upon arrival.

Marty, 2.7.1.85

Usually, what awaits them on arrival at that unknown destination is a secretive indefinite detention, profound isolation and torture.

Go.

Read the whole report It does not take long.

See for yourself the complicity of the colonies, the collusion of the client-states, set forth in calm judicious (though alas, not judicial) tones.

This is what solidarity looks like

2006-06-04T09:32:00.000+01:00

If ever they did, they need no longer doubt whom they are or where they stand. The members of Education sans Frontières -- and many others -- have made their choice.

Spring has come and gone. A long and anxious summer is beginning.

On May 19th 2006 (though I suspect most had made their promises earlier) they vowed to hide and shelter school-children and college students whom French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy had ordered to be rounded up and summarily deported in late June 2006. The basis of the planned deportations is the irregular status of the children's parents.

So now and through the coming weeks, all over France, families under threat of deportation will be meeting -- often for the first time -- with those who are going to shelter their children from the police and from the State. Plans are being laid. Spare rooms are being recurtained, attics and basements are being prepared. Indeed some are already in hiding.

Without doubt -- just as those who prepare to send their children into hiding with strangers must wonder 'Can I trust you?' -- those preparing shelter will find themselves considering their circumstances anew. "Whom among my friends and neighbours do I trust to not flap their mouth?" they must ask themselves. "Whom among my own child's friends knows how to keep silent?"

As they plan for contingencies (plans some will doubtless need as the imperative to recruit and organise volunteers necessitated public offers of shelter in some cases), they will be wondering about these questions in ways, perhaps, that they have not before. For it is one thing to trust one's neighbour with the house keys, to be confident that they will water the potplants and feed the cat while one is on vacation -- it is one thing even to trust them with one's own life. But it is something else to entrust another's. Some deep friendships will be forged this summer: inevitably, others will be broken.

So where do they stand then, these attic tidiers, these curtain purchasers, these basement redecorators?

With those who place water in dry places.
With Miep Gies.
With those who claim that these behaviours -- far from being heroic -- are merely the normal, civilised thing to do in the face of incivility.

As one put it, 'It is quite simple. They live in my road. Their kids go to the same school as my son. It's normal. It's the only thing to do.'"

The Tip of the Iceberg

2006-06-02T22:25:00.000+01:00

I stated recently that there are now about 200 million of us who live outside the borders of the nation-state where we – by mere random chance – happened to be born.

(Well, actually in an over-optimistic (not usually one of my faults) and over-populous feat of misreading and mathmatical ineptitude, I actually said 200 000 million, but I’ve corrected that now. Mea culpa.)

I’m one of that 200 million.

Primarily, I’d categorise myself as an economic migrant with regular status – at least that’s what I am in my head. Technically though, mine has been a case of hopping from one non-immigrant visa to the next, with some country hopping thrown in for good measure. I started out as a (non)migrant in the U.S.: once it became impossible to remain there legally I became a (non)migrant in the U.K. At least my current visa offers a tenuous path to residency.

Obviously, migration is like everything else: mixed motives go with the territory and my motives were no exception. A big part of it was wanting to keep on studying the thing I loved most – which it took me a good seven years of struggle and moral angst to finally abandon in favour of something that – well, I would say it lets me sleep at night, but that’s a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Part of it was curiousity – wanting to see the heart of the Evil Empire up close and personal (and yes, in the time and place from whence I come, the United States was without doubt the Evil Empire. N.Z. is a client state but that doesn’t mean the populace likes it too much.) Part of it was peer pressure: most of my close friends had left already. Part of it was that leaving was – in many ways at least – the path of least resistance. Which is a bit odd if you think about it, given that emigration is almost always an experience of profound dislocation – and it certainly did turn out to be so in my case. But nevertheless, filthy lucre was up there somewhere very near the top of the list – not in the sense of a desire to earn millions but certainly in the sense of not wanting to worry about electricity bills and not being able to afford a doctor any more – and for that reason I shall always class myself as an economic migrant first and foremost.

Anyway, personal digressions and self-indulgence aside, I thought it might be interesting – especially in light of the excellent work Man Eegee and Migra Matters are doing around migration in the U.S. context to find out a bit more about the other 199 999 999. Where do we live? Why did we migrate? And who are ‘we’ anyway?

Well fortunately, the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) have been doing some work on answering some of these questions. There’s a lot there to disagree with as well as to agree with (at least if you're like me and have somewhat un-nuanced views on borders and the desirability of opening them forthwith), but it’s well worth the read.

Mostly likely though, they underestimate the count of undocumented migrants, so really, it’s 199 999 999+ of us.

‘We’ – and it’s one of the very few ‘we’s’ to which I shall lay unequivocal claim – are non-nationals. But if we were a nation, we would be the fifth most populous on Earth depending on that undetermined (but valued!) number of us who are ‘irregular.’

Still, we are only about 3% of the world's population in total or perhaps a little more.

Migration has often been thought of as a young man’s game, but almost half of us are women.

We come from everywhere and we go everywhere: the “distinction that has been made between country of origin, transit and destination” has become increasingly difficult to sustain” (GCIM, 5). In other words, you cannot escape us.

49 million of us live in Asia. 16 million of us live in Africa. 6 million of us live in Latin America and the Caribbean. The rest of us, if only by process of elimination, live in North America, Europe (that’s me!), Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Australasia and Oceania (and doubtless other places too that are not so easily categorised).

A few of us (like me) are educationally, economically and racially privileged: most of us are not.

About 20 million of us are refugees and most of that subset of us lead desperate lives indeed.

An awful lot of us are economic migrants and an awful lot of us send money ‘home.’ In terms of developmental impact that’s hugely important. Although the extent to which we have a home is questionable. Notions of ‘home’ are – in my, and in the experience of those very few of us for whom I feel entitled to speak – among the very first things to become problematic. It might be more appropriate to say that a lot of us send money to people whom we love or care for.

It’s sad but true that some of us are trafficked. Some of us are forced migrants. But slamming the door in our faces is no solution to this.

Whoever we are and whereever we are, we did not surrender our humanity the day we crossed the border. All too often – though this would be true even if it had been only one of us – we crossed the border because it was the only way we had to preserve our humanity.

And here’s the important bit – we migrants are only the iceberg’s tip. Like most icebergs, 90% lies below the waterline. For after all, be you the most stay-at-home person from the most stay-at-home family – still, most likely you have migrant ancestors and relatives, distant or near, migrant friends and colleagues, close or casual. (Were we a nation, we would after all be the fifth most populous on Earth.) So even if you have not yet yourself ventured out into that wider world, it has nonetheless most likely ventured towards you, smiling, with welcoming hand extended. Mostly likely, you, too, are part of diaspora. The question that remains is whether you will choose to claim it.

Open the borders.
The world was never meant to be a prison.

"The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out “ J.R.R. Tolkien, (b. Bloemfontein, S.A., 1892, d. U.K., 1973).

On Consistencies

2006-05-31T23:29:00.000+01:00

For they surely cannot be called anomalies.
Atrocities. Yes. We can most certainly call them that.

There is a little tale that has came to light in the last six months. It’s not topical: most of the perpetrators and their victims are doubtless dead, more of the latter than the former, I suspect. But it sheds light on a different facet of the Greatest Generation– or at least the stiff-upper-lipped British version thereof – light which perhaps they would rather have kept concealed beneath a bushel. A pen which, all things considered, perhaps they would prefer not to have mislaid. For it concerns their conduct in that most justifiable of all wars – that perpetual thorn in the pacifist’s side. Oh not all of them of course. Just those few perennially rotten apples again. Strange how they do get about.

This little tale is probably not exceptional – many similar such may still lie like kittens in a creek, strangled and drowned at birth.

(For some reason as a teenager, the Katyn Forest massacres became so inextricably entangled in my mind with the phrase “Into the Woods” that for years afterwards I assumed that the Sondheim musical – although it predated by three whole years Gorbachev’s acknowledgement and apology for Stalin’s atrocities – was about the wholesale slaughter of Polish army officers. Except it wasn’t just Stalin’s atrocity, was it.)

Let’s pause for the high-kicking, all-singing, all-dancing chorus number now . . .

“It wasn’t their fault,
They weren’t to blame
They were all so young
It’s a crying shame!
It was just a job,
They had bills to pay
‘Twas the man at the top
At the end of the day.”

No? And I had my spangly costume all ready to go. It had medals on.

Perhaps you’d like to know what I’m talking about.

Last December, after 60 years of secrecy, it emerged that from 1945 until at least 1947 the British ran torture centres and camps in London, Bad Nenndorf and Güttersloh (this last was opened after the closure of Bad Nenndorf). As of last December, the Foreign Office was still refusing to release photographic evidence: this became available in April.

Follow the links. Read the articles carefully: you will see that the list of victims includes Holocaust survivors, German leftists – that political constituency so beloved by Hitler – and communists. Some were there because of clerical errors, other because they knew too much about Bad Nenndorf to be released. But none of them – whatever their deeds, whatever their state of innocence or guilt – should have been there because places like these should not exist. (And I’d be sceptical, moreover, of claims that these three institutions were the only ones of their kind. After all at the time the British were presiding over a Glorious Empire Upon Which the Sun Never Set – and as we all know, those take some special handling).

Do you feel a sense of déjà vu coming on? And perhaps again?

Good. Because these are not anomalies: they are consistencies. They are not bad apples, they are business as usual. They are what militaries do.

A Landfall in Barbados

2006-05-29T20:06:00.000+01:00

The 20ft. launch drifted for a long time.
Aimlessly, yes, but not without a destination, for the pull of those currents was strong.

It started from Praia, Cape Verde, bound for the Canary Islands.
There were about fifty people aboard, mostly from Senegal, Gambia and Guinea Bissau.
They had paid for their passage.
Probably they had been hoping to find work so that they could send money back to those they loved.
For a little while the launch had run under its own power.
For a little while after that, it had been towed by another boat.
But then a decision was evidently reached and it was cut to drift. (Possibly because of a storm? Possibly because the whole thing had just become an inconvenient and costly nuisance? Who knows.) The evidence for that ‘evidently’ is a towing cable cut by a machete.

One can imagine the sound as the launch suddenly loses momentum, hunkers down in the water.
Have you ever been on a boat when the engine cuts out suddenly?
Yes? Then – if you screen the engine thrum from your memory – you know what that part felt like. You need not imagine.
At that time, it is possible that everyone on board was still alive.
One can imagine the sound of realisation.

By the end of January, no-one on board remained alive.
In late April it was sighted by a fishing boat in Barbados.
In late May, it hit the U.K. news.

Many of those who died are still to be identified. One, who left behind a note, was named Diaw Sounkar Diemi. Another, with family in Portugal, was named Bouba Cisse.

These fifty lives are only a small fraction of the thousand or so lives that have been lost so far on this particular clandestine migration route. They are an even smaller fraction – vanishingly small – of the 200 million of us who are first-generation emigrants, who do not live in the nation state where we happened, by random chance, to be born. And in terms of what we might consider the greater diaspora – that loose network of ancestors, descendants, friends, family, and acquaintances? Well that diaspora may even comprise the majority of the world’s population, in which case these fifty lives are a miniscule, insignificant fraction indeed.

But still far too large. Still far too many. Because their lives mattered every bit as much to them and those who knew them, as yours or mine to us and those who know us.

Open the borders.
The world was never meant to be a prison.

So you want to stop smoking?

2006-05-27T09:46:00.000+01:00

If you want to stop smoking, say that you are going to stop smoking.

Better yet: say that you have stopped smoking. That you have quit smoking and you are not going to smoke ever again. Not at the pub on a Friday night with your mates after a few beers. Not to calm your nerves before that big presentation that you are just scared shitless about delivering. Not when the kids have been driving you up the wall all day until you just want to scream the house down or worse.

(Actually, depending on your disposition, it may not be best to say that you’re not ever going to smoke again. You might be better off to say “I am not going to smoke – no matter what happens – and tomorrow, I’m going to make the same commitment.” Which form of commitment is best for you – that grand sweeping pronouncement or that series of small but doggedly constant steps – is not a matter of relative strength or weakness of will. It is a matter of self-awareness, most likely borne of trial and error. And which method is best (or indeed possible) may vary from one commitment to another. Anyway, let’s face it. Sometimes the differences may be more apparent than real. Just because you opt for that grand sweeping pronouncement option doesn’t mean you don’t end up repeating it to yourself every day)

But say it. Say it inside your head if that’s the only place you can. That’s certainly better than not saying it at all.

Usually though, if you want to stop smoking, it’s best to say so in front of other people – in particular, in front of people whom one knows and whose good opinion one values. And there at least a couple of reasons for that.

One is that your friends who smoke might refrain from offering you a ciggy at the pub on Friday night after you’re two sheets gone to the wind. If they’re really good friends, they might even refrain from smoking themselves while you’re around, fending off those nicotine cravings until they’ve seen you safely ciggyless to your front door after your night on the razzle. They do this because they want to see you become the person whom you want to be. They know what kind of person you want to become because you have told them clearly and unequivocably.

Another reason is that – even two sheets to the wind on a Friday night – your word might just hold you even when you don’t feel particularly like being held. Whether it’s damnable pride, not wanting to look a fool, not wanting to be someone who says one thing and does its opposite – whatever it is -- it might suffice to endure that moment of temptation until once again you want to stop smoking. Yes, it probably is a stopgap measure. Perhaps you could not sustain it forever, but sometimes a moment is enough. In the end, it is a rare motive that is not mixed.

We all know this and we all know that it applies to many things besides quitting smoking. For example, when we publicly promise ‘til death do us part’ (whether within the context of a marriage, a civil partnership, or a grand and glorious picnic festivity) we are not only calling on those who witness to help us keep that promise but also adding the weight of our word to the scales. We do this in order that, at some future point, if we might momentarily weigh our choices differently, our words will be among the things we weigh.

Publicly stating who we intend to be, even under an alias, is one of the most powerful things that we can do to make ourselves who we want to be, to keep ourselves honest. It is no failsafe (after all, what is?) but it is among the most valuable tools at our disposal.

Why is this knowledge – in so many other circumstances so deeply engrained – so often forgotten when it comes to our moral responsibilities in extremis?

Well, it’s a rare motive that isn’t mixed.

Part of it is an honest desire to avoid hubris. After all, so very many failed to hide fugitives, so many failed to resist, so many didn’t rock the boat, so many obeyed the orders, participated in atrocity. So many decided not to know. Why should we assume we shall choose better in their place? And why should we assume we shall choose better than those who are in extremis even now?

Another part of it, I suspect, is that such situations appears more suited to the ‘grand sweeping pronouncement’ than the ‘series of small but doggedly constant steps.’ That is perhaps because, in extremis, the choices most salient to our memories are those which are penultimate: the small and dogged steps that often precede them seem less central. We remember Sophie Scholl first and foremost for her courage at her trial and execution, not so much for her careful purchases of stamps and envelopes, never too many from a single shop. Yet these were inextricably linked.

Furthermore, just as we wish to avoid hubris by thinking we should do better in their place, so too we do not wish to compare ourselves with our heroes. We are not perfect. We are not blameless. We have derived material benefit from the oppression of others. We are among those culpable. How then shall we promise to match the peerless courage, the unfaltering and knowing steps of those who have resisted? Is this not the very height of arrogance? By what right do we, complicit and compromised as we doubtless are, even aspire to that?

We forget that Sophie Scholl began her long journey into resistance as an (albeit when young and only briefly) enthusiastic member of the HitlerMädchen.

Here is one more ingredient in this mixed motive.

By saying “we do not know what we should do – perhaps we should do no better, who are we to judge?” we hedge our bets. We ensure that even if we do refuse the fugitive shelter, that even if we do follow the orders, that even if we do diligently maintain that knowing unknowingness, that at least we shall not be hypocrites. At least we shall not be arrogant. At least we shall not stand accused of false pride. We shall salvage something of our character. After all, we made no promises. Thus we prepare our soft landing, thus we let ourselves down gently.

But if things come to that pretty pass and we fail, will hubris and arrogance really be chief among our regrets?

If there is someone that you want to become, lay claim to that.

If there is something you want to do, or want not to do, say so.

Promise it before people whose good opinion matters to you, whom you would hate to disappoint, whom you would hate to have think worse of you. Let your words stand among the things to be weighed: let them help you become that which you desire to be. Perhaps they shall be a tipping point: avail yourself of them.

For if they do not suffice, it will in any case become abundantly clear that there are failings far greater than hypocrisy.

On a quiet day

2006-05-23T21:46:00.000+01:00

Here, so close to the roar of the big machine it is sometimes difficult to hear.

But you might have sensed it in Piazza san Maggiore on May Day, there by the inscription for communists who resisted. Especially on this May Day past, when media monopolists are not quite so invincible after all.

Echoes sometimes travel across water. Stand on the shore today. Cup your hand to your ear like a seashell. Beyond the gull-cry, perhaps you will hear rumour of people done with shadows.

It was there in 1975, every step of that long road from Te Hapua to Wellington.

It is in France. Certainly Pierre Labeyrie would recognise that sound.

And albeit flawed and incomplete in its expression (let alone the execution), it is here too.

Another world is possible
On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Diaspora Days

2006-05-20T21:28:00.000+01:00

An acquaintance remembers people from her village selling their blood.

Another said -- a while ago -- that she's thinking of joining the police because it's been really hard finding work here. Her parents aren't keen though -- her brother did survive what a different set of police did to him in another time and place, but not unscathed. And there would be other complications too. I don't think she did join in the end and of that I'm glad.

A friend told of coming out from nightclubs rolling drunk as a teenager and stepping over the bodies of people sleeping in the street and his disgust for what he was then.

Someone I used to work with many years ago now -- far older than me -- recalled growing up amid the rubble of bombed out buildings.

Sitting in a pub chatting with an ex-colleague who has recently returned from Haj. "Can you believe the idiot?" she asks "The boss calls me into his office and says 'Oh I hope you aren't going to go all religious now."

On the way to go union organising, a friend and I compare notes about where we grew up. Two smoggy cities, one big, one little. Shared nostalgia for imagined countries irrevocably lost. If it makes it through June and July, hers is probably safe until September: after all from a marketing point of view, August is not a good month for introducing new product.

Talking about my all-too-brief stint backpacking (I'm happiest when travelling without purpose but with intent) -- and the way that it is possible to just submerge oneself into that transient society of hostelling Antipodeans (and at the same time also peculiar because they are on their big OE before they go back 'home' and their home is no longer yours) and to so quickly get used to drifting from place to place with what you have on your back (admittedly one of those things that you have on your back being an ATM card). "'Yes." he said "One does get used to things being different surprisingly quickly." But the person I'm sharing coffee with is remembering Kosovo.

A beloved friend -- more than a friend in fact, one of those rare people, fiercely brave, that you don't have to trust because you know. It's not that you know what she'll do exactly, but whatever she does is true. I haven't seen her for too long now. It's prohibitively difficult for me to get a visa to go and see her, even if I had the wherewithal. And if it's difficult for me, how much more so for her?

Like him, his parents were communists. He grew up with the knowledge that he should never discuss politics with his school friends.

It's not that we always left because we wanted to. Far from it. But it's true that if we had all stayed put, we'd never have met.

Walking by Moonlight

2006-05-18T20:50:00.000+01:00

Since I reached adulthood, night-time has always been my time. The time when - for better or worse - the city belongs to me. Whatever city I've happened to be living in.

It's rare for a woman to feel that kind of freedom. So I've been trying to puzzle out how I came to be that anomalous. And what that anomaly means and what it doesn't mean.

"Don't you walk home from there by yourself."
"If you're staying late, make sure you call for a cab."
"Do you really think you should go there alone?"
"Stick to the main paths if you go walking in that park by yourself, there's too many places where someone could grab you"
"You're brave, setting off by yourself like that! Aren't you scared of what might happen to you?"
"What do you think you're doing, letting her walk home in the dark by herself. You should have gone and picked her up."
"It's best not to go if you're not sure. Better safe than sorry."
"Will you be alright, going off by yourself like that?"
"It's her own fault, what did she think she was doing walking around on the streets at two in the morning?"
Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

I've never been on a `Take Back the Night' March. I don't need to: I took back the night when I was 18 and I've been taking it back ever since. Truth and falsehood, all in the same sentence.

When I was 18, I moved into my first flat - a four person, two-bedroom flat in a somewhat dodgy neighbourhood, with very dodgy plumbing, dodgy perpetual scaffolding and a dodgy landlord who gave new meaning to the word. I loved my life there. It was full of complications, tensions, drama, angst, moral dilemmas, intrigues and decadent parties (which in due course inevitably led to complications, tensions, drama angst, moral dilemmas - etc). I remember it as a time of exhilarating freedom: that year Spring held such promise. The sun was never warmer.

And I'll always be grateful to that flat because it taught me about the impossibility of following the rules about sensible women and freedom of movement.

Sensible women aren't supposed to walk around alone at night. If they have to walk somewhere, they arrange to go with friends, or catch a taxi, or drive, or get picked up. If they can't do that, they curtail their lives. They don't walk into town to meet a friend for coffee, or stay late to study at the library, or work late at the lab because they're so absorbed in what they're doing, or stay as late as they want to at that party, or pop down to the late night store to pick up fresh milk for the morning, since they realised they used the last of it in their coffee. They prune their lives to stay within the borders. Their every move is planned. They follow advice like this that

"The best advice about walking around late at night for females is don't bother - unless you are accompanied by friends."

And - and this is the tricky bit - they are supposed to act as though this curtailment of their freedom was acceptable. As though it did not cause them pain or diminishment.

My flat was a 20 minute walk from the town centre and about an hour by foot to the university. In Christchurch it's dark by 5:30 in winter. I had lectures that didn't end until then. And I had other things to do - pupils to be tutored, friends to hang out with, meetings to attend, parties to go to. And I had no money for taxis. I didn't want to prune my life of the things that made it precious to me. So I didn't.

Instead, I stopped being a sensible woman and slowly, tentatively -- and yes, fearfully - started getting to know the city by moonlight.

I learned which places stayed open late.
I discovered that you can see better under amber streetlights than white streetlights.
I learned how to look into shadows, how to hear what was going on around me.
I learned to combine attentiveness and reflection - to be simultaneously alert and lost in my own night-dream.
I found that less people are out walking on cold crisp nights when your breath hangs in the air.
I listened to the hum of the pylons out near the bypass and the scuffle of rabbits at its base.
I smelt the cold mist rising off the river, wrapping itself about me
I heard the wind in the pines in the park, made louder by darkness
I saw the moon riding the clouds.
I walked to the beginning of the Port Hills and smelled fresh roses by night.
I stopped to greet cats standing sentry on gateposts

And what began as simple defiance borne of necessity slowly became one of the richest pleasures of my life.

Near misses? Lucky escapes? Yes. A couple. Someone grabbed me in Cathedral Square once. But he was drunk. I wasn't. And there were still a fair number of people around. Much more frightening was the morning I opened the paper to find that someone had been sexually attacked in a park about twenty minutes after I'd walked that same route. But I'm one of those who believes the factoid that women are more likely to be assaulted by someone they know than by a stranger.

Sounds all rosy doesn't it? Just being strong and feisty and independent is obviously the solution! Women just need to follow my glorious example (shakes head and gets off high horse)

Alas, my beloved Samuel R. Delany pointed out the catch in his Tales of Neveryon (sadly missing its umlaut). It's one I'd suspected, though I'd not ever managed to articulate it until he did it for me.

"`Norema,' Madame Keyne said, when they had seated themselves behind the frayed drapery of a particularly glum red and black weave (and before they had let themselves become too annoyed that, after having been seated for five whole minutes, the waiter, who was joking with three men in the front, had not yet served them), `something intrigues me - if you'll allow me to harp on a subject. Now you hail from the Ulvayns. There, or so the stories that come to Kolhari would have it, we hear of nothing except the women who captain those fishing boats like men. We doubtless idealize your freedom, here in the midst of civilization's repressive toils. Nevertheless, I know that were we sitting outside, and some man did importune us, you would not be that bothered . . .?'
`Nor,' said Norema, `am I particularly annoyed by sitting here in our alcove.' Then she pulled her hands back into her lap and her serious expression for a moment became a frown. `I would be annoyed by the bothersome men; and I could ignore the simply trivial ones - which I suspect would be most of those that actually approached us, Madame Keyne.'
`But for you to ignore, for you to not be bothered, there must be one of two explanations. And, my dear, I am not sure which of them applies. Either you are so content, so superior to me as a woman, so sure of yourself - thanks to your far better upbringing in a far better land than this - that you truly are above such annoyances, such bothers: which means that art, economics, philosophy, and adventures are not in the least closed to you, but are things you can explore from behind the drapes of our alcove just as easily as you might explore them out in the sun and air. But the other explanation is this: to avoid being bothered, to avoid being annoyed, you have shut down one whole section of your mind, that most sensitive section, the section that responds to even the faintest ugliness precisely because it is what also responds to the faintest nuance of sensible or logical beauty - you must shut it down tight, board it up, and hide the key. And Norema, if this is what we must do to ourselves to "enjoy" our seat in the sun, then we sit in the shadow not as explorers after art or adventure, but as self-maimed cripples. For those store-chambers of the mind are not opened up and shut down so easily as all that - that is one of the things I have learned in fifty years."

Well, I'm not the first kind of woman.

I know about walking alone at night, through silent city streets, wandering out near the industrial estates where the rabbits are surprised to see anybody about, walking in despair through the dangerous parts of town until the numbness recedes a little, home from parties, under a full moon near the foot of the Port Hills, by the Huron River on a cold, clammy Spring night, past the `massage parlours' to Caffiends where coffee and friends await at 2a.m., through Hagley Park at midnight with a friend in full gothed-up glory assuring me with slightly nervous bravado that "We've nothing to worry about. The only people who walk through Hagley Park at night are people like us." I've seen Manchester's uneasy slumber, stumbled half-asleep to the station in Hyde to catch that pre-dawn bus so I can make my train.

Always - except for the third item on my little list (for in truth at those times I do not care) with that edge of fear. Sometimes slight, sometimes not so slight.

At night, the city belongs to me. There's truth in that. And I know about walking alone by moonlight in all kinds of places. But I don't know about walking alone and unafraid. And so Delany might well say that there are sections of my mind that I've boarded up tight and hidden the key. How else can you be enjoying a stroll by the river after dusk and simultaneously be staring into shadows?

And so, fifteen years on into my nocturnal peregrinations,

"I'm waiting for the night to fall
when everything is bearable
and there in the still
all that you feel is tranquillity."

Apologia

Tacky, tacky, tacky. That's what this excess of reposting old diaries is. My apologies. I'm still wrestling with the 'Instead of 'Let's Talk About Alex'' post, which has -- as I suspected it might after I spent that informative evening re-reading the cartoon diaries -- has inexorably become a 'goodbye' diary. To quote Gaiman once more, "Certain conclusions become inescapable." Despite my nature, I'm doing my best to keep from being vicious -- let's hope I don't completely fail, because although individuals are inescapably responsible for their actions, it is also true that (in the words of Dire Straits who surely stand falsely accused of being MOR) the dice were loaded from the start. Structure, like language, matters.

But I also have a different, giddier, excuse for this one. After 2 and 3/4 years of having no means to listen to music (except in that inadvertant 'it was on TMF' kind of way), I now have a CD player. Which means I can listen to Depeche Mode (which is the sort of appropos bit since I felt free to take Martin Gore's words in vain here). And Shriekback. And Sioushie and the Banshees . And Sisters of Mercy . And The The . All of whom -- if (as I strongly suspect) he has not yet got lying on the rack next to the Kiri Te Kanawa CDs -- my beloved honorary ancestor should promptly dispatch a descendant to the nearest decent second-hand CD shop with instructions to purchase. For make no mistake: these are among the Dunstables of our day, but unlike his, their ends are not those of Empire.

To which I shall add (with youthful arrogance) the remark that if one had read Delany, one would be unable to forget him. Therefore I surmise that one has not and therefore the descendent should also make a detour by the nearest decent bookstore. As should anyone else who hasn't read him yet.

A Shortish Story

2006-05-15T20:30:00.000+01:00

On Tuesday, at dusk, the eagles flew from the Coroner's Court. Unfurling their wings of stone, they launched themselves into the deep blue beyond. Commuters, impatiently awaiting their buses, did not believe their eyes.

On Wednesday it was the turn of the women. One calmly led a lion, against whose back she had reclined for the past century, out over the railings onto the roof, coaxing it as one might a reluctant cat. They disappeared from sight, though not from memory.

Nearer to ground, a woman armed with a sword - who had sat peaceably enough above the Court's main entrance, suddenly dropped her sword to the ground beneath. It clanged. Positioning herself carefully, she leapt to earth, cushioning her fall by rolling as fluidly and proficiently as any martial arts expert. She reclaimed her weapon and bystanders remarked that, animated, her expression bore a feral cast entirely removed from the placid countenance she had worn in her years of stillness. Rising to her feet, she smiled, baring her teeth at passers-by. She strode purposefully and smoothly into the city's heart, her sword held low and dangerous against the drapery of her full long skirts.

The gargoyles disappeared on a bleak and rainy Thursday. Wolf-headed, ram-horned, gratuitously grotesque, they had spouted water from the roofs of rainy Manchester's churches and cathedrals through Blitz and Bombs, but now they were gone to ground.

How did I know all this? Passers-by brought me the news as swiftly and surely as any official briefing or bowing courtier. And with my own two unyielding eyes I had seen a bare-breasted woman lead a lion through Piccadilly Gardens at four in the morning. They took the Oldham road.

On Friday the angels took to the air as one. From monuments and spires they rose and those who heard their song fell silent and for ever after sought to call to mind the memory of their singing. I saw them, wheeling overhead, circling higher, their song ever more distant.

All that time, from Wednesday to Friday, I sat, considering and deliberating, for I am perhaps less inclined to act precipitately than was my flesh-and-blood namesake. For if my crown weighed heavy in life, so much more so has it been a burden in my years of thought and stillness since. And I, alas, am no lithe sword-maiden. Nor do lions follow at my command.

But on Saturday, I could wait no longer. Early in the morning, before the shops opened - though truth be told the city was emptier than usual these past few days - I rose to my feet and considered how best to descend from my high and stony seat. A matter that required some thought for my figure is matronly not maidenly. Gracelessly - without visible witnesses at least - I clambered down at last, biting back curses at my cumbersome clothes. Then, to cancel out the indignity of my descent, I stood straight and formal before that high throne from which I had watched the years pass by. I took off my crown and left it there on the empty seat.

Then - as I had always known I would, despite all of my hard considerations and deliberations - I turned my back on Manchester and took the road to the South.

Even stupefied and subdued as it was by recent events, the world I now walked through was louder and noisier than that which had been known to my fleshly self. The skies, for once were silent - no contrails criss-crossed the sky. For though the angels had circled ever upwards and their song was now unheard on earth's surface, what mortal pilot would risk such a collision?

Yet the great lorries continued in rumbling convoys unceasing, lest the cities starve, collapsing inwards on the weight of human need. The truckers pretended not to see me as I walked by the side of the road. Eventually, just South of Stoke and weary of the noise and fumes, I left the M6 for smaller, less frequented roads. Requiring neither food nor sleep, I walked for days, ceaselessly under rain and sun alike.

In a field just out of Oxford, I came across a group of soldiers. They had dug trenches with their stony hands, deep enough to hide themselves in. Unchallenged, they had torn down the barbed wire fences that had kept the sheep from straying and strung them along their battlements, all twisted and snarled. The shadows stood sharply on the ground. They sat together, some fossicking in kit bags, others cleaning bayonets. A cigarette dangled from the mouth of one man but it was unlit. They waited and watched, gas masks kept close to hand. A stout middle-aged woman - even stony of heart and face as me - posed little threat and offered little interest. And so I passed them by unhindered, disregarded.

In these strange days of flesh and stone, we act as though we cannot see each other, as though pretence might serve as a defence.

From Oxford I took the River Isis East to Abingdon and beyond. I followed it all the way into London, which like a large and greedy pike, has gobbled up all of the surrounding towns. Past Richmond, Hampton Court and Kew, past derelict Battersea Power Station. I came at last to Westminster Bridge. Pushing my way through the throngs of tourists, I did not pause to look at the Houses of Parliament or visit Westminster Abbey. I went on to Trafalgar Square, where Nelson no longer surveys the City from his column.

Where has he gone, I wonder? Seeking another kiss from his Hardy? Down to the sea?
I do not know. Nor do I wish to seek him out.

I came at last to Kensington Park, to the object of my long journey from the North. There, stretching out before me, I saw an amusement of Victorias, all assembled. A swelling sea of young idealised Victorias, old and stern Victorias, middle-aged Victorias like me, all of greater or lesser verisimilitude. All resplendent, all triumphal. And there, standing in our midst a bemused Albert, haplessly clutching his programme for the 1851 Exhibition. For ever since that first Wednesday when it was the turn of the women, Victorias had been congregating here. Those closest arrived first - others, stragglers from the North and from Scotland were still arriving.

Oh, but it was good to look on his face again. To see his smile. I had known of course, how it would be - what use is deliberating and considering from Wednesday to Friday unless it shows you some small shadow of the future? I had no doubt that within a month every Victoria in the land would be gathered here. And yet. I circulated through that crowd, in a slowly decaying orbit that centred on him.

He moved slowly, talking first to a beautiful young Victoria, then to an elderly dowager Victoria. His expressions, his attitude a stone simulacrum of the Albert I - we--remembered. So familiar, so long unseen.

And yet. Seeing him so unscathed, I found that I myself have changed in ways that I had not anticipated in all of my deliberations and considerations. For I have put down the crown and passed anonymously by the Queen's soldiers - and if in so doing they are no longer bound to me, so too I am no longer bound to them. And watching my old lost love, there in that Victorian park, as I moved slowly to the margins of that crowned crowd and left, I found myself filled with new longings, for the hills where I was quarried, for rivers and roadsides. And the memory of angel song.

Apologia
Reposted from BT (19/10/05). After work, I used to wait for my bus at the station just opposite the Coroner's Court. It does have eagles.

Another old diary: On self-censorship

2006-05-13T10:22:00.000+01:00

They are there a couple of days a month, outside the local shopping mall. Maybe it's more like a day a week. Conspicuous in their camouflage gear and close-cropped hair. With their ridiculous little tank, their tents, their guns and their glossy recruiting literature. All terribly neat and tidy.

Most people here do not talk to them. So they just stand there all day waiting around looking silly.
When I see them, my throat tightens.
When I walk past, I look at them closely, my expression inexpressive.
The clouds seem a little closer, the sun a little dimmer.
The day more grey.
When I first noticed them, I thought, "Good. Very thin pickings here.
Let them waste just as much time here as they like.
May they come in droves with their conspicuous camouflage gear and close-cropped hair, their ridiculous little tank, their tents, their guns and their glossy recruiting literature every day, and stand about, talking to nobody and looking silly. The more the merrier."

Even if my throat tightens, my face grows guarded and the day seems strangely grey. Given that the sun is shining and all.

But I was just very, very stupid.

The last time they were there, outside the local shopping mall, I realised at last why they were there. Most everyone else walking by knew already, I'm quite sure. One way. Or the other.

For despite the conspicuous camouflage gear, the close-cropped hair, the ridiculous little tank, the tents, the shiny, shiny guns and the glossy recruiting literature, they were not there for recruits.
Officially, yes. Sure.

But not in fact.

For even the most lax of superior officers must at some point notice that despite their regular appearance outside the local shopping mall in conspicuous camouflage, with the close-cropped hair, the ridiculous little tank, the tents, the shiny, shiny guns and the glossy recruiting literature, there is nary a new recruit in sight.

(And all of a sudden, from this new vantage point, the mysterious uniformity of their whiteness -- which had been a mystery to me -- snapped into place, like the last stubborn corner of an old Tupperware box)

They are There To Show a Presence.
Trooping the Colours.
Waving the Flag.
Showing the Sullen Natives (that's "them" and who knows, perhaps it will also be latecomer me) What's What.

Empires cast long shadows. Though many years have passed since its eclipse, the sun has not yet set on this one. Still, it seeks reflected glory.

The second week of Ramadan is beginning
and it would be fair to say that this has been a difficult year.
My acquaintances,
politely singled out for baggage checks,
tell of suspicious looks.
Their expressions speak of biting their tongues until they bleed, even though they do not say so.

Usually it's busy outside the shopping mall, today it's quiet.
Lots of people staying at home,
calling numbers that don't answer today.
Waiting.

But there they were.
Outside the local shopping mall,
in conspicuous camouflage and close-cropped hair, with their ridiculous little tank, their tents, their shiny, shiny guns, the glossy recruiting literature and nary a new recruit in sight.

They stand there all day, looking menacing.
When I see them, my throat tightens.
When I walk past, I stare coldly.
Those clouds look like thunder. The sun is grey.

Boarding the Ark

2006-05-09T23:07:00.000+01:00

Let me tell you a story.
Once, in a time and place that now seems as remote and unfathomable as any long-lost Atlantis, I trained as a medieval musicologist. A rigorous and thorough preparation for a life very different than mine. That's not the story. But that distant far-off place is where I learned this story, by reading the lines and what lies between them.

In a smallish town, many years ago, there lived a man called Noe. He had a wife and some married sons. There's no point in asking his wife's name - no-one remembers it. This town was perhaps a little licentious. On special occasions it's possible that it could even have been described as libidinous. Noe - most assuredly a virtuous man - certainly thought so. Often he could be seen moping about and grumbling into his beard about the `youth of today' and `sinks of iniquity.'

Evidently Noe wasn't alone in his opinions, for after a few years of moping he began building a sizeable boat. The town being fairly well inland, it would be fair to say that this attracted some local attention. Noe told all who asked - and many did - that God planned on flooding the entire Earth and drowning everyone, since the youth of today were simply not up to scratch, the whole place was a sink of iniquity and thoroughly libidinous to boot. Only he and his family were to be saved.

It's unclear whether Noe started out thinking that only he and his family were to be saved, or whether his sceptical reception from inquirers led him to this view.

His wife rolled her eyes and did her best to ignore the sounds of sawing and hammering. She did her best not to see the thick layer of wood-dust that settled on everything as fast as she could wipe it. She went about her business as usual, selling her goods in the market, meeting with her friends and sharing the news of the town. Perhaps she spent less time than usual at home, but in this she was alone within her family. For the sons had been roped into sawing and hammering, and the daughters-in-law were occupied with tending an ever-increasing menagerie whose yammering and clamouring threatened to outdo even the noise of construction.

And then the rains came. At first this was a welcome break in the dry season, a chance for the wells to be replenished, an omen of a good harvest free from drought. But they did not stop.

And Noe's wife looked at the ark and at her husband's barely disguised glee at the prospect of divine retribution.

The rains continued. People retreated to the highest ground within the town, to the rises, the hillocks, the roofs. All crowded together, people grew sick from strange illnesses and died, especially the very old and the very young.

Noe's boat began to float.

And here is where the story diverges. In the usual version, Noe's wife gets on board like a good little girl, leaving her friends, their children, her relatives and all to drown. On the ark, she floats for forty days and forty nights. Eventually one of my namesakes is released, disappears for a few days before flapping back with an olive branch.

But in some much later versions - plays enacted in England's wealthier market towns in the later middle ages - the tale is told a little bit differently.

In one, Noe's wife refuses to board the ark. Then, feeling the water at her feet, her courage fails her and she runs aboard.

In yet a different version, she and her friends are gathered before the ark. She refuses to board unless they too are saved. Noe forces her aboard and leaves her friends to drown.

At the time these plays were performed, Noe's wife was understood as a comic character - an example of the vice-filled, contrary wife. Her refusal to board the ark is meant to be funny. Whether through her own cowardice, or a lack of physical strength, her rebellion is so easily undone. But to me, peering at her this way and that through my mis-matched eyes, Noe's nameless wife does not seem so very funny.

For left to my own devices, virtue and vice should be assigned quite differently.

Afterword
This is another old diary, this time from BT. I've been thinking about Noah's wife a bit lately, so thought I'd repost it.

Let's talk about Alex

2006-05-07T16:25:00.000+01:00

There’s this woman.

Let’s call her Alex. It doesn’t matter too much if you want to think of that as short for Alexandra or Alexis. Feel free. Take your pick. Alex isn’t quite real anyway.

She’s not even one woman exactly, she’s more of an amalgalm. An idea/l. (Though not a post-modernist, I find that forward slash handy sometimes). She’s a stock character. A recurring trope. A family resemblance even. But a resemblance that exists out there with something in the world. Having resembled her, I should know.

Oddly enough, Alex is usually a woman. Mostly she’s straight and she’s almost always white. At least, I haven’t known any Alex’s that weren’t so far, though presumably they exist. Her age is indeterminate – she’s just kind of ageless, like the model in a really good cosmetics ad.

Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s . . .

Often she’s American, though I’ve also met Alex in the U.K. from time to time. That’s just because those are the only places I’ve lived since I first recognised Alex. I’m pretty sure she lives lots of other places too.

On the whole though, Alex’s femaleness, her sexuality, her whiteness, and her nationality strike me as salient (though not essential). To my rather callous and calculating mind, they hint at a particular (or perhaps a particularly ambiguous?) relation to power. Alex has something to lose.

But when I think of Alex abstracted from particular circumstances, she wears the face of the first Alex I recognised.

She’s about my age, with a freckled face that tans in summer. She has long straight brown hair and with casual grace she contrives to keep it flipped back out of her face. She’s no Barbie, those are practical clothes she’s wearing, old shorts and T-shirts, or long skirts and sandals. The kind of thing you garden in, or do yardwork. And you can tell from how she carries herself and how she speaks that she is practical, confident, creative and intelligent. A good person to have on your side.

Alex is really friendly. She’s got this warm, generous, nurturing nature that looks to see the best in people. She does cool and interesting stuff. She’s well-liked. And she’s usually so calm and reasonable and centred in a way that eludes me entirely, prone as I am to veering between grimness and giddiness. She’s well-meaning and she’s cares about politics. She really wants a better world. She’s progressive, she’s liberal, she might even be leftist, though that’s less likely. Those of us on the left tend to end up hard-hearted one way or another. And Alex isn’t.

I want to like Alex. I want to trust her. I really do. But I don’t dare.
Because Alex wants me dead.

Well, no, that’s not quite true. Not directly, anyway. She’s soft-hearted, remember? Wouldn’t hurt a fly, that’s Alex.

But she wants the death of people that I try to be loyal to, and when push comes to shove if she had her way and I did not fail, that would mean mine. Sooner or later. Probably later, given my cowardice, but even that has its limits.

No. It’s not even that, exactly. Though perhaps that’s a little closer. Circling in decreasing orbits, we must hit the mark in the true eventually no?

Third time lucky.

Alex is innocent and she wants to stay that way. She doesn’t want to be guilty and so she doesn’t want to know. If she knew, she’d have to change her life or feel guilt – and Alex doesn’t think that guilt is a productive emotion and she still has something left to lose. Those salient features, remember? That particular(ly ambiguous?) relationship to power.

It’s not fake innocence. It’s real. She really is innocent and she really wants to stay that way.

Alex wants to stay that way badly enough to falter before an argument’s dangerous conclusion, though agreeing its premises and each step of reasoning.
Badly enough to erase moral agency – that of others, but also in the end her own. (After all, if one is not a moral agent, one cannot be other than innocent).
Badly enough to lash out in defensive fury at anyone who challenges her innocence, her essential 'goodness.'
Badly enough to fall back into a familiar patriotic fervour.
Badly enough not to look too closely.
Badly enough to pretend not to see.
Badly enough to denounce.
Badly enough.

Alex is nice enough. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She’s warm and nurturing and kind and those qualities are entirely genuine. She twinkles. But her innocence is a very dangerous thing.

Yon bonny road

2006-05-03T23:36:00.000+01:00

And see ye na yon bonny road,
That winds about the ferny brae?
That is the way to fair Elfland,
Where you and I this night maun gae.

But, Thomas, ye maun hauld your tongue,
Whatever you may hear or see;
For if ye speak word in Elfin land,
Ye'll ne'er win back to your ain countrie!"

Though occasionally a rhymer and often a doubter, my name is not Thomas.
But I did go to Elfinland. And I never won back to my own country. (Indeed in latter years I have come to suspect that I no longer know the way back: my country has become imaginary.)

You must judge for yourselves whether I have kept silence.

Elfinland and its kissing cousins Utopia and Dystopia are where I found politics. Of course they are not the only places, just as there is no one beginning. How could they have been? As a child my life stood frozen before the witching hour -- whether morning or dusk, it was always three minutes to midnight. In such circumstances, one finds politics, despair, or both.

One of the first places I found in Elfinland was the vast expanse of Middle Earth. A traveller embarks on a dangerous, hopeless journey, to renounce something that he can neither live with nor live without. His journey is long and wearisome, and in the end he fails in intent and would also have failed in deed -- except that earlier on, he'd once managed to get something right. And by God, Tolkien sticks to his guns. When push comes to shove, Frodo does not survive the Ring and its loss. Means and ends matter enormously in Middle-Earth -- and despite its processions of kings and nobles, the end sought is that of Empire. Finally, among other things, it's a powerful love story -- and I don't just mean Aragorn and Arwen. Why do you think it hurts so when Sam marries Elanor and Frodo goes West?

Now let us take ship with C. J. Cherryh, out towards the Beyond, to the claustrophobic confines of Downbelow Station embroiled in war. A closed system, lurching from one crisis to the next and never ever quite recovering its footing. Union on one side, Mazziani's 'Company Fleet' on the other: Downbelow Station stuck in the middle. And Signy Mallory of Norway -- callous, calculating and morally compromised to the hilt, yet in the end unable to abandon principle entirely, unable not to play the traitor.

If we venture further afield, light aeons past Union space, perhaps we would find ourselves on the fringes of the (anarchic? socialist?) Culture, Iain M. Bank's licentiously sprawling, permissive, promiscuous and at times whimsical civilisation. Depending on where you stand, its perfection is either profoundly Utopian or Dystopian. Either set after the beginning of history (in the Marxist sense) or long beyond its demise. For myself, I suspect the former, but can one believe its account of itself? Has not the pen been much in the Culture's hand?

Fall through two mirrors backwards and you might find yourself in Neveryon: a world that is a reflection, but then emphatically not a reflection of our pasts and presents. Although I had discovered Samuel Delany's short stories (and who could argue with a title like "We in some strange power's employ move on a vigorous line") and essays (read his introduction to Neil Gaiman's A Game of You) some time ago, it was not until last year that I discovered Neveryona.
As Nanette would say, go and read the whole thing.

One finds many things in Elfinland and its kin, but contrary to popular report, escape is not among them.

And as for winning back to your own country? Journey long enough: it will no longer be your own.

Questions We All Know the Answers To

2006-05-01T19:36:00.000+01:00

This is another repost of an old dkos diary, this one from February 2005. Apart from A Shortish Story and On Self-Censorship (which I think many of the Eegians may have read already) it's probably the last repost I'll do. The others tend to be either too topical or too recent. And I'm being lazy and should stop and write new things instead.

Questions we all know the answers to.

Sat Feb 05, 2005 at 03:33:23 PM PDT

Here are some of the examination questions police cadets in the Iraqi Security Forces have been asked by the Occupation, according to the Guardian

"Human rights can be taken away from a person
a) never, human rights are inalienable
b) if the government says so
c) if the accused has committed a serious crime
d) in time of war

In a democratic free society the role of police is to protect
a) the citizens
b) the leader
c) the state
d) the military

The police basic standard of conduct requires
a) all citizens to be treated with respect and dignity
b) information to be shared with the local community
c) special treatment for privileged persons and organisations
d) bribes to be collected for services

Now, I could proceed to a fairly obvious rant about the nature of hypocrisy, or to bitter laughter at the comic spectacle of the United States presenting itself as a defender of human rights. "Surely the intent must be self-parody?" I could ask in innocent tones, but in truth, I lived long enough in the U.S to know that the Kool Aid flows freely.

So take the hypocrisy and my bitter laughter as read. I find most of my laughter is bitter these days.

Instead, let me ask another set of questions. Do any of you seriously imagine that any cadets flunked these questions? Do you think that any of the responses flagged a potential torturer? Or that any cadet was so naive as to announce that the "police basic standard of conduct" requires "bribes to be collected for services"? That anybody responded that, "Human rights can be taken away from a person" "if the government says so?"

Didn't think so.

Then what was their purpose? What was the point of this laborious exercise?

Well, I have some ideas on this one.

Let me tell you a story.

When I first flew into the United States as an adult, I had to fill out a card. Now, I'd been very worried about this card from a practical and philosophical standpoint. I'd heard that you had to declare whether or not you'd ever been a member of a communist party. And I had been. I had no idea what I should put on the form -- if I said 'Yes' would I be admitted? If I said 'No' would they know I was lying? And if I said 'No,' what would that betrayal cost? By the time I left New Zealand, I had a fine and extensive collection of regrets, personal and political. I did not want lying about my past political involvement to be among them.

But the strange parody of communism that was the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union had collapsed. Gorbachev's socialism had been replaced by Yeltsin's capitalism. The Harvard B-School boys were in Moscow promoting the wonders of the unregulated free market, even as life expectancy plummeted like a stone. China was a valued U.S. trading partner. Tiananmen Square was quiet and orderly, though not peaceful, for what peace can there be without justice? More happily, Hungary had opened its borders. The Wall that David Bowie sang about ('And the guards, shot above our heads') had been pulled down and sold for souvenirs. As a result, the U.S. no longer cared whether you had communist sympathies or not, and I never had to decide how to answer that question. (And if you think from the foregoing paragraph that my relationship to communism is complicated, you'd be right)

Instead I checked the box stating that neither I, nor any family members had engaged in acts of genocide.

I stated that I hadn't used illegal drugs, or worked as a prostitute. From memory, I think I also declared that I was not seeking to enter the U.S. in order to overthrow the government by force.

And I wondered, does anyone ever check the `yes' box on these forms for any of the things that haven't already been externally verified?

Didn't think so. So what is its purpose?

Here's my take. Entering a country is a kind of ritual. You get off the plane, you show your passport at immigration control, you haul your luggage off the conveyor and take it through customs. There are clearly-defined steps, and also points of danger along the way. A rite of passage. And all-too-often that ritual is also about reinforcing hierarchies: the superiority of citizens over non-citizens; the power of the state and the powerlessness of the individual. The form I filled was part of that - a systematised kind of humiliation. Asking those questions was a way for the U.S. government to say, "You foreigners are dodgy, suspect and unwelcome. And just to make that absolutely crystal clear, we're going to ask you these stupid, insulting questions even though we know exactly what you will say."

For my money, the multiple choice exam questions asked of the cadets in the Iraqi Security Forces are the same kind of deal. A form of ritualised humiliation - albeit one far more subtle than the barbarities of Abu Ghraib - to which the colonised are subjected by their colonisers. It is a way for the occupiers to proclaim their superiority - moral and intellectual - over the occupied. After all, you don't ask questions like these of people you consider your equals.

Because these are questions that we all know the answers to.

Militaries make bad apples

2006-04-27T21:40:00.000+01:00

People enlist in the military for all kinds of reasons, because they think it will make them 'proper men' or 'proper women,' (whatever those may be) because they're 'patriotic' (aka nationalist), because they don't know what else to do with their lives, because they want to go to college and can't afford it any other way, because they want to travel, because they want to feel part of something bigger than they are. Lots of different reasons, not least of which is a failure to think about the consequences of their actions.

Militaries (and I don't care whether you're talking about the N.Z. military, the U.S. military or the Indian military because they have all committed war crimes) take those recruits and persuade them that because they have put on a uniform, deeds that were murder last week are virtuous and noble this week, so long as someone else says so.

I'm with Shelley:

"Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."

War is a fiction -- by that I don't mean that it is unreal, but that it depends on a kind of shared pretence, a shared delusion. We have to pretend that soldiers primarily fight other soldiers, when in fact , most casualties of twentieth and twenty-first century wars are civilian.

We believe that there's such a thing as a 'battlefield' where actually, there are cities, towns and farmland.

We believe that 'our' soldiers, unlike 'theirs' are good and noble and don't rape and murder civilians, yet we know that domestic abuse (which often involves sexual abuse and sometimes culminates in murder) occurs at a considerably higher rate in military families than in non-military families. (The most frequent figure I see quoted is that the rate is 5x higher)

War is a fiction. Most recruits have to be persuaded to believe in it. And as it happens, militaries (including the U.S. military) have been getting progressively better and better at persuading recruits that when they put on a uniform, killing becomes legitimate. Recruiting younger kids may help with this: I remember reading that the average age of soldiers in WWII was considerably higher and firing rates considerably lower. But training practices also have a lot to do with it. As CPT Pete Kilner, Instructor, U.S. Military Academy wrote in 2000

"American military leaders have been very successful in their task to create combat-effective units. In response to the War Department's World War II research that revealed that less than 25% of riflemen fired their weapons in combat, the military instituted training techniques--such as fire commands, battle drills, and realistic marksmanship ranges--that resulted in much improved combat firing rates. In the Korean War, 55% of the riflemen fired their weapons at the enemy, and by the Vietnam War that rate had increased to 90%."

He goes on to argue that observe that training tactics that drill recruits into acting reflexively instead of reflectively enables them to 'overcome' their reluctance to kill.

(Caveat: the article's main thrust concerns the fact that the success of this training regimen (and the higher firing rates in combat that result) causes increased levels of PTSD and that this can be countered by giving soldiers arguments that allow them to better justify to themselves what they have done. Sometimes words fail.)

But even as they undergo this brainwashing, there are many points at which they could refuse: others have done so, both in this war and in others. So I'm not willing to let soldiers off the hook, especially soldiers in an all-volunteer army.

I may feel sympathy for people who do young and stupid things, but I will not shed tears for soldiers. I will not 'remember their sacrifice', or buy poppies for ANZAC day, or mourn their deaths or attend their victory parades, or get a lump in my throat when I hear people say that 'They will not grow old as we that are left grow old.' I will not buy into the idea that they are defending me or protecting civilians, or defending freedom or any of that. I sure as hell don't thank them.

And the reason I won't do these things is that I'm no longer interested in sustaining the fictions and pretences of war. If a person killed someone on the street where I live, they would be called a murderer, whether or not they were dressed up in a pretty uniform or said 'but I was told to do it.' I don't see that the name should change, just because the killing didn't happen on the street where I live.

Afterword

Another old diary from dKos slightly edited. Being both rigid of mind and replete with arrogant moral certitude, my opinions on this haven't shfited much in the interim.

And going completely off on a tangent, I think 500 hits is coming up, which is kind of nice.

Playing Happy Families

2006-04-25T20:16:00.000+01:00

Motherland. Fatherland. Homeland. Patriotism. The national family.

So much of the language that's used to incite patriotism/nationalism is rooted in ideals of home, in ideals of domesticity, in familial ideals. Hearth and homestead, familiarity, good food, comfort, cosiness. Citizens are encouraged to think of the nation as akin their mother or father and of other citizens as their siblings. Sometimes the metaphor is even more defined. The nation is the nourishing mother, the alma mater, the government is the providing father and preserver of her sexual virtue, the pater familias. The citizens are the children, who must be obedient, respectful and above all else, loyal to the family.

Comforting, no? Cosy? Egalitarian and all that, to think of your fellow citizens as your brothers and sisters?

No. It isn't. Not comforting, not cosy and sure as hell not egalitarian. I don't think so, anyway.

It strikes me that when the nation is imagined as a family, it's always a particular kind of family that's imagined. A `happy' family. No divorce or domestic violence here, folks. No custody fights or acrimonious property disputes. No deadbeat Dads skiving off on the child support payments. No sexual abuse to mar the cosiness, no lives of quiet desperation, no skeletons in the closet (or LGBT folk either for that matter), no `Mother's little helper' in the bathroom cupboard. A family where, although people might have their differences, their similarities are more pronounced. A homogeneous family - certainly not a trans-national family - because that would play merry hell with the metaphor. And it's a defensive family, which, though it might have its internal squabbles, will quickly unite to attack any interloper who dares participate in them.

Ah, yes, foreigners. I bet you wondered when I was going to get to them. Because it's not just about who is included when we play happy national families. It's also about who is excluded.

Where does the foreigner fit in this picture of the nation as family?

When they are within national borders, they are the short-term family guest, who will remain tactfully and discreetly silent, keeping their fucking piehole shut for the blessedly brief duration of their visit. They will observe the formalities, tell the nice polite lies, bite their tongue and ignore the desperate weeping from the upstairs bedroom. Good house guests. At best. More often they are the interloper, the unwanted guest, the cuckoo in the nest, the changling in the cradle, the thief in the night. Sometimes they are the `yellow peril,' the `thieving gypsies,' the `flood of immigrants,' the `undesirable element,' the `influx,' the `deluge,' the `horde,' the `false asylum seekers,' seeking to rip `us' off and steal `our' jobs.

Beyond the national borders, they are `them.' Those strangers who are outside the family, who must be defended against, who are exotic, unfathomable, and `not like us.' The barbarians at the gate, the uncivilised Malthusian masses, the threat to `our' society and `our' values. Whose bodies can be bombed, burned and buried with impunity, whose thousand lives are worth but one of `ours,' who are indistinguishable, nameless, faceless, moths at a candle flame.

The nation as family metaphor invites people to divide the world into `us' and `them.' From where I stand, that right there is a huge stroke against it.

But this rabbit hole goes deeper.

The family is a site of intimacy - not necessarily pleasant, happy, loving intimacy, but intimacy none-the-less. Family members usually know each other through long acquaintance. They may not like or love each other, but odds are they know each other's habits, their preferences, their dislikes, their small pleasures, their antipathies. They have learned to live in shared spaces. In most - though not all - cases, the family is a site of particular and private personal knowledge. At their best, families are sources of love, friendship and joy because they are based on mutual respect and private personal knowledge.

Nations are not sites of intimacy. Let me say this again because I think this is really important. Nations are not sites of intimacy. Even the little minnow-nations like Aotearoa/New Zealand are not sites of intimacy. N.Z. has a little under five million citizens and there are about four million people living there. Pretty small, no? But not a site of intimacy. Hell, even my first home-town was not a site of intimacy - I could and did walk around town all day many times without running into a single acquaintance or friend.

This matters because the `nation as family' metaphor is often invoked precisely because it conjures up familial bonds of affection, loyalty and justifiable partiality. Because the family is a site of intimacy, people are supposed to value the lives of family members above those of strangers. When you're offered the terrible choice between saving a family member and saving a stranger, you're supposed to save the family member and let the stranger die.

Within the logic of the nation as family metaphor, you are similarly supposed to save the person who has the same passport as you over the person of a different nationality.

But despite the metaphor, the nation is not your family.

You are not bound to a stranger by ties of affection, shared personal knowledge and personal history simply because you happen to have the same citizenship due to the merest accident of birth. But you could well be bound by real ties of affection, shared ideals, and shared personal knowledge to people who don't share your citizenship.

Afterword

Another one that I've reposted (in slightly edited form) from dKos, since I am a) a bit preoccupied with some other writing at the moment; b) riding high on my anti-patriotic horse and; c) thinking in a fit of mad egotism that it might not be such a bad idea to have some of the less topical stuff I did there on In Flight.

The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

2006-04-23T23:28:00.000+01:00

Apologia
Nanette has gently chastised me for having neglected In Flight for well -- over a month now, actually, she says looking a bit shamefaced. I have been doing some writing on a story which is possibly getting somewhere (my protagonists are now at the railway station even though they're not actually going to end up getting on the train because I have other plans in store for them), but otherwise I've been in a place of false starts and doubt.

So at the risk of being terribly divaesque, I thought I'd take Nanette's advice and repost a diary that I wrote earlier, albeit not the one she suggested (at least not right now). I wrote this about a year-and-a-half ago. It was my first diary on dKos, which I joined just after the 2004 election, and left during the Pie Wars. I've edited a little to clean up some particularly clumsy phrases, but haven't really touched the style or content. The former seems quite strange to me now, though if anything, I have become more convinced that patriotism is evil in the intervening time.
Anyway, enough already.

The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

Sun Nov 14, 2004 at 05:24:20 AM PDT
I am not a patriot. Soon after the towers fell -- I read Robert Jensen's essay, Saying Goodbye to Patriotism. It resonated like a church bell struck at close range. If you've not read it, you should.
I think the reason that the majority of U.S. voters decided to elect as their president a disingenuous, duplicitous, mass-murderer is because they are patriots. As patriots, they believe that the U.S. is the best nation on earth. There is nowhere else they would rather live. They wake up in the morning believing that to wake up American "is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune that can come to us on Earth" ( Kerry, concession speech, 3/11/04 )

They believe that democracy is an essentially U.S invention and that the U.S.'s system of government, with its 'checks and balances' is by far and away the best of the world. Not only that, but they believe the American people are the best -- the kindest, the bravest, the most morally upright, the most freedom-loving people on the earth. Because of these things the U.S. should lead the world. Who better to provide good strong leadership? As a democratic acquaintance of mine wrote "Hey, If there's going to be an empire, I can't think of anywhere I'd rather have in charge than the U.S." They are patriots and proud of it.

I am not a patriot. Partly I'm spared that fate because I don't know where I'd be a patriot for. Live long enough as a foreigner and your home becomes everywhere and nowhere. I lived as a foreigner in the States, now I am a foreigner in the U.K. When I visit the country where I grew up my accent marks me as a foreigner there too. Friendly people in the supermarket say 'Oh! Is this your first trip to New Zealand? How are you liking it so far?"

But the Americans that voted for Bush are patriots. And I think many of the Americans who voted for Kerry would also call themselves patriots. They'd subscribe to the idea that the U.S. flag is an emblem of freedom, that the U.S. is -- despite its problems -- the best country in the world.

I think the root problem with the U.S. is that liberals and the left have seldom challenged the idea that patriotism is a virtue. They've seldom stood up and said 'patriotism is evil to its core, and must be torn out, root and branch.' More often, they've tried to gather the mantle of patriotism around themselves. "Dissent is patriotic," they have said. "Asking questions is patriotic." "Protesting is patriotic."

Sometimes, I'm sure, they've done so to reach out across political divides -- "Look," they say, "we're not so scary. We're patriots too." But more often, I think the claims to patriotism are sincere. They want to think of themselves as patriots, they want to apply the term to their works. As patriots, they are genuinely angered by Republican attempts to monopolise the term.

One of the first 'grown-up' books I ever read as a child was Watership Down, which despite its reputation for fluffiness (it's got rabbits!) is an essentially political book. I made several false starts before I could read the whole way through. I'd make it to the end of the first chapter -- the one that begins with Cassandra observing that the house reeks of death and ends with Fiver paralysed in nameless fear before a vision of blood-covered fields. But for me -- when I finally screwed up my courage and made it past the first chapter -- the most frightening part of that book remains the part where Hazel's little band of refugee rabbits discover that a warren that has offered them shelter has an evil secret: it is snared and their hosts have betrayed them. As they plan to avenge themselves by driving out the other rabbits and seizing their warren, Fiver rages at them, gibbering and raving: "We shall help ourselves to a roof of bones, hung with shining wires! Help ourselves to misery and death!"

That's what I think about patriotism -- it's evil to the poisonous core of its rotten heart. Its roof is made of bones, it reeks of burning flesh. Why should those of us on the left help ourselves to that?

So what's so terrible about patriotism? Here is its lingua franca: "I love my country. It's the best in the world. Its people are the best in the world. Its democracy and values are the best in the world. Our brave men and women in uniform are the best in the world and they deserve my support."

Deeply embedded in this is a kind of calculus that says 'American lives matter more.' If bravery, kindness and the love of freedom are American values, then they are not simply human values -- they're American because Americans are kinder and braver and more freedom-loving than anyone else. And if Americans are the most freedom-loving, then their freedom is the most important, because after all, us foreigners don't love freedom as much. And since Americans are better, so too will be their democracy, their government and its decisions. Other countries should just fall into line and do what they say because they are not as good as America. After all, how did Kerry put it again? To wake up American "is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune that can come to us on Earth."

I know -- this is boring and repetitive. But I want to capture the tail-chasing nature of patriotism. Once you hold up that rose-tinted mirror of patriotism, you see only yourself, your nation, enlarged to take up the whole sky, reflected in its warm self-congratulatory glory. This mirror has a wondrous effect: every thing and everyone else is made invisible, marginal, not as important, a fly to be swatted, an annoyance to be eradicated. Patriotism takes you to the place where Americans will vote for a mass-murderer because his most recent mass murder wasn't primarily of Americans. Over 100 000 Iraqi civilians are dead, murdered on Bush's orders. If Bush had ordered 100 000 American citizens to be burned, buried alive, blown up and tortured, would he have been elected? But Iraqi lives aren't as important as American lives. They don't count.

And that's what patriotism does. It draws a line between people and says 'On this side of the line, people's lives, works, and ideas matter. On this other side, they do not.'

I am not a patriot. But I have heard its siren song. 'Sleep!' it cries, 'sink comfortably into torpor. Turn off your mind, your cold ruthless conscience, find surcease from despair, rest from rage, let your hard heart melt and heal. Let your head nod in agreement, look into our mirror and you won't have to see evil any more. Follow, and you won't be lonely, you will sing in sweet harmony instead of in your own out-of-tune discordant voice. Obey and you will no longer stand at bay, wondering where you will find strength to endure. We'll make you cosy and safe." I've heard that siren song, promoting 'unity,' 'coming together' and the 'healing of wounds.''Do the easy thing' it says 'Give in. Collude. Immerse yourself in our folksy, gosh shucksiness, find yourself in the homeland, remake yourself in our image'

But I am not a patriot. I will not set up house in that hall of bones.

[I wrote this on the evening of November 3rd. I've tidied up and edited/altered a little since then, but if you think my tone is angry here, it's because I'm angry.]

On the Republic of Silence

2006-03-18T23:14:00.000Z

I must begin with an apology: in this country I do not have a copy of The Republic of Silence to hand. Therefore I write from memory and since for me the reading of a text is inextricably bound up with who and where I was at the time of reading - there may be less of Sartre here and more of my recollection and interpretation of Sartre than is desirable. Nevertheless.

In a 1944 essay entitled The Republic of Silence Sartre begins: "We were never more free than during the German Occupation." A strange way to begin, no? What does he mean? As everyone knows - and certainly as everyone living in proximity to the particular time and place from whence he wrote - the German Occupation was a time of profound unfreedom.

Everything - the coercive power of the state, its far-reaching institutions, of the military - all authority and law was ranged against Resistance. And yet, he said, "We were never more free."
Under Occupation, Sartre claims, all of our actions become invested with moral significance. Under that overwhelming pressure, beneath that imperial weight, against that empirical measure, all that is trivial is stripped away. We do or we do not.

"Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues" he writes, "every word took on the value of a declaration of principles."

Over and over again under Occupation, one is invited to surrender, to yield up mind and body, to collude in oppression, even to collaborate with one's oppressors in one's own oppression. To connive. To betray. To submit to the conquest of the mind and to do this not once, not twice, but constantly until treachery is the very air we breathe. To accept the oppressor's account of oneself as truth - is that not the very meaning of the colonisation of the mind?

Language mattered. Not for consequential reasons - not because x might lead to y, or because perhaps just perhaps the right words (or the right frame even) might somehow undo Occupation. Language (and not only language) matters because responsibility endures where hope does not. And to my mind it is this - the endurance of responsibility beyond hope - that is the source of the freedom which Sartre speaks of.

Well we are all Occupied now. And beneath this assault there is little enough cause for hope. No knights in shining armour riding to the rescue, no gun-slinging heroes of the wild west, no grand-standing high-minded politicians to lead us to the Promised Land. No justice. Just us.

Outnumbered.

Overwhelmed.

Occupied.

And like as not, whatever we choose will not suffice.

So welcome to your freedom.

It cannot be removed from you: no torture can excise it, no luxury can exorcise it, no justification can excuse it.
It is wholly and irrevocably yours.

What will you do with it?

Mitigating Circumstances

2006-03-12T19:06:00.000Z

I'm really not one of the 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' mob. Honestly. I'm far more interested in restorative justice and rehabilitation than revenge.

And I agree wholeheartedly that the prison population here in the 51st State is larger than it should be and that -- by and large -- prisons aren't doing terribly well at the whole rehabilitation business.

But one can think all this and still find ironic the arguments of the Sentencing Guidelines Council (SGC) that sentences for rape and domestic violence should be reduced. It strikes me as particularly dubious that part of the rationale for reducing sentences for rape appears to be to bring them 'into line' with proposals for "other violent crimes like robbery."

Yes, that's right folks. Robbery. Can we say 'Women are not property, so rape is not like robbery' three times fast? It's a bit of a tongue-twister, but I'm sure we'll all get there eventually. Take your time.

And that's not the worst of it.

Courts will be advised to "take into account mitigating circumstances" such as "sexual familiarity" between rapist and victim before the attack. Because everyone knows that if you said 'yes' once, well that holds good forever. And you can't possibly say 'yes' to smooching in the corner at a party without having also consented to -- well, pretty much anything and everything really. Robbery for starters. Oh sorry -- I meant rape. See how easy it is to confuse the two?

The SGC also has domestic violence in its sights. Apparently men convicted of domestic violence "could escape jail terms if they convince the courts they are capable of changing." Can't you just see it? One, two, three, let's all sing together now:

Some people say that I'm a bad guy..
They may be right, they may be right.
But it's not as if I don't try..
I just fuck up, try as I might

But I can change, I can change!
I can learn to keep my promises, I swear it!
I'll open up my heart and I will share it..

I've always felt a guilty sense of affection for that Southpark movie.

By the time men make it to court for domestic violence, they've usually become a pretty dab hand at persuading the person they've been beating that 'they can change.' They have the patter down. So expect an all-singing all-dancing and high-kicking in spangly costumes chorus of this one.

So -- I hear you say to yourself. If this comes in will it mean that mean fewer women will try and bring charges or rape or domestic violence? Yep. That'd be my guess.

The thing that's ironic about it is that the existing prison system doesn't do a great job at rehabilitation: what it does sometimes do is give the victims an opportunity to regroup and (often) relocate. So there is a huge need for rehabilitative work and for restorative justice to ensure that, when perpetrators are released, they are less likely to just go and rape and/or beat again. And, yes, to be effective, much of that work probably does need to take place in open prisons and/or in community settings. Fine.

But surely that can be done without allowing into the sentencing guidelines the dizzying array of self-pitying apologies and excuses that have novelty value in court only because the people there haven't heard it all before?

"I didn't mean to -- I just lost control. I'll never do it again."

Ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

We come in peace. Shoot to kill

2006-03-08T20:41:00.000Z

“We come in peace, shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill;
we come in peace, shoot to kill; Scotty, beam me up!”

I hated ‘Star-Trekkin’ Across the Universe.” Thoroughly despised it from the cutesy apostrophe in the song-title to the Klingons on the starboard bow. I’d turn the radio to anything else – even the New Kids on the Block anything, which is pretty much drilling through the bottom of the barrel of the anything barrel, especially when you’re approximately 13 and doing your damndest to avoid anything that even hints at ‘girliness’ – rather than listen to its horribly, bouncy, repetitive, predictable, awfulness.

My, that was a long sentence. I see that the intervening years have not yet lessened the strength of my feelings on this subject. Suffice it to say that I’m not thrilled to have this song running through my head tonight.

But it’s there for a reason.

All of the obvious ones that go without saying.
And another, also obvious, which I’m nonetheless going to say something about.

The Guardian today reported that the Association of Chief Police Officers are defending their 'shoot to kill without warning' policy, the first victim of whom was Jean Charles de Menezes. They don't call it a 'shoot to kill without warning' policy: it has been christened 'shoot to incapacitate.' In the same way that 'civilian casualties' are known as 'collateral damage.'

Only going forward and things are getting worse.

I know people up here in the North who do not go down to London any more.
I'd imagine that makes things difficult for them. Job-related events they don't attend. Friends they don't visit.

But London is a ways off and they'd have to take luggage onto the train.
"Carrying a backpack while an 'Asian' male from the North."

They do the math: x2(suspicious looks) + 4x(trying to look reassuringly instead of angrily at the people giving the suspicious looks) + c(small but not non-existent chance of getting shot) = 0 trips down South.

It's a mix of fear and anger and enough of it has rubbed off that even I, shielded by my female gender and white skin, feel its trace when I venture onto the Underground or into a railway station.

It's not that what happened on July 7 wasn't frightening.
It's that what happened on July 22 was so very much more so.

"Other people decide about it"

2006-03-06T21:53:00.001Z

This is the story of Innocent Nkung. Unlike one of my earlier experiments, it is not fiction.
I wish it were, though.

For now, Innocent Nkung lives in the next town over from the town where I live now. I've never met him, but have had occasion to learn a little about him. He's a few years older than me, but not many. He and I have two things in common: we are both foreigners and we have both studied philosophy. There, however, the similarities end.

I have other places where -- if push came to shove -- I could live. Other places where my right to work, to be a political creature, to subsist and indeed to do more than that, are acknowledged. And to a considerable extent (certainly far greater than when I lived in the U.S.), I have those same rights here.

Innocent Nkung does not. There is no place in the world where he has these rights -- or rather he has no place in the world where these rights have been respected. He fled to the United Kingdom seeking asylum and the Home Office turned him down: he is at risk of immediate deportation.

A human rights activist in the D.R.C. from 1992 onwards, Innocent Nkung had been arrested many times. The Independent Race and Refugee News Network states that on his most recent arrest in January 2005 he was "given the 'option' of a 15-year jail term or 'volunteering' for Secret Service Training. After he refused to kill others as part of this 'training', he was incarcerated in the notorious Buluwo prison, where he was raped, beaten and tortured. "

He escaped and fled to the United Kingdom in May 2005; his case for asylum was declined in December of the same year. Reading between the lines, it seems that he was turned down because he was unable to prove that he was raped and tortured in prison. Alas, those responsible for his incarceration in the D.R.C. had carelessly failed to supply him with certified copies in triplicate, detailing, for the official record, the treatment he had received at their hands.

Here is what he said about his life two months ago:

"If I call what I and others in the D.R.C. have been through as physical torture, I realise there is another torture in England - a mental one and it is greater than the first one: I can't sleep because there are a lot of thoughts in my head and feelings - nightmares and flashbacks. I am very depressed and unable to do things. I think about my children, parents, brothers and sisters that I didn't see since 1995. My children need to be cared for and I can't do my father's job if I am in jail or dead.

'My life doesn't belong to me anymore and other people decide about it. I don't know what is going to happen in my life, I don't know where I am going to live, I don't know what I am going to eat. Everything is in the Home Office people's hands."

If you wish, you can sign a petition in support of Innocent Nkung's asylum claim.

And perhaps like me, you will also ponder why it is that the U.K. doesn't want this man, who had the unyielding moral integrity to choose imprisonment, torture and rape over becoming a killer, within its borders.

Volcanic Terrain

2006-03-04T02:08:00.000Z

Recently I was back in Erewhon for a little while.
Being part of the Ring of Fire, Erewhon specialises in geological excitement. Earthquakes and volcanos come with the territory. And in places the crust of the planet wears thin.

Since I'm currently in 'learning the wonders of modern technology' mode and simultaneously in 'lacking the energy to think seriously' mode, I thought I'd resort to that tried and true standby: 'hey come and look at my holiday photos.'

So without further ado -- this is a huge volcano crater. It's actually in the South Island, out on Banks Penisular, near Akaroa. Unlike the volcanos in the North Island, this one has been dormant for a long, long time. The spiky-looking tree that figures so prominently is called ti kouka or more commonly, 'cabbage tree.' Here's a closer look.

This one's in full flower. Like many things from Erewhon, cabbage trees have emigrated. In particular, cabbage trees grow vigorously in the North of England where they are optimistically called "palms" in order to convey the strong impression that Manchester is in fact a warm and balmy sub-tropical paradise -- any snow that you see on the ground is therefore merely a figment of your imagination.

But for real geological excitement (and for real palms for that matter) you have to head up into the North Island.

Coming from the South, I'd always been under the parochial impression that it had the more spectacular landscape. Yes -- the North had warmer weather and proper cities that are actually inhabited, but the South had Alps, glaciers, Sounds, fjords, plains, psychotic mountain parrots and a whole lot of emptiness.

Parochial impressions are usually mistaken.

This is Waimangu valley ("Wai" means water and "mangu" means black). On June 10th 1886, this whole area was covered in thick ash when Mt. Tarawera ("burnt peak") erupted, burying the village of Te Wairoa and destroying the Pink and White Terraces. Everything that you see here has either grown back or returned since. The valley is of considerable interest to ecologists because it's a rare example of an ecosystem regenerating essentially from scratch.

And one is left in no doubt that further eruptions are a question of 'when' not 'if.'

The mist visible here on the water's surface is not the remnant of an early morning fog: it is steam. Standing on the track above, one could both feel the heat from it and see that, in places, the water was actually boiling.

Further down the track, one crosses boiling streams making their way out to Lake Rotomahana.

The thing I found extraordinary
was the way that the plants grew right down to the water's edge.

Then there are the miniature geysers. All of four inches high, but thoroughly determined. The vivid green of the water is probably the result of mineral salts, but I've not a clue which specific ones they'd be.

Walking through this valley, one can't fail to notice that one is walking atop a thin crust -- like a waterboatman on a still pond. Where the path runs near the stream (or where, at one memorable point, a tiny geyser is forming in the middle of the path itself), one can touch a hand to the ground and observe that it is much warmer to the touch than could be explained merely by the effect of a sunny day.

To be continued.

An experiment

2006-03-04T00:19:00.000Z

Dear Reader,

Let me tell you a tale. It begins innocently enough. I was stationed in one of those seemingly endless, dull stretches of the early 21st – you know the kind? Nothing much of anything new was happening and too much of everything else. Scouring the bookshops. Forget stolen glimpses at Jane Austen’s notebooks – it’s still the bookshops where all the real work happens. I was in Oldham, one of those small hilly Northern towns that peers so anxiously down into Manchester’s smoggy fastness. It was uncannily like home. In the right light that poisonous fog was not so very dissimilar from the silvery mist in which my home city swathes itself from time to time. And its sunsets. Which is what I mean by innocently enough. Anywhere else, I think my training would have held. In some less familiar or more volatile corner of the world – in D.D.R before the Wall fell, or D.R.C before New Congo rose to greatness – I’d never have done it. Confession? Justification? Hard to tell.

Here’s what happened. The real deal. Straight from the horse’s mouth.

I was walking down Union St. in my ghost-like way, glancing at the real-estate agents. Noting that the property boom hadn’t yet found its way to this pocket of the North. It would, of course – barely two years later, yuppies would be moving into the refurbished mills. Cafes serving exotic and piquant Mediterranean specialities would be springing up like mushrooms. But right then, you could still buy a quasi-semi-detached two-bed terrace in Oldham, with a little front garden and a paved rear yard for £82, 250. No chain. Vacant possession. Ideal for a first-time buyer or young family.

That ad in the window has frozen itself into my memory. If I close my eyes I can still conjure it before me, an ad, in a Ryder & Dutton window on a grey and clammy Oldham day. That last split second of peace before a flash of peacock blue caught my eye.

I turned, caught by that flash of colour. A little girl, maybe five, in a bright shalwar kameez racing out of the estate agents, looking over her shoulder as she tore across the narrow pavement. Straight into a lorry’s path. I didn’t think. I just grabbed her as she went flying by and knocked her down. A blaring of horns and not half a second later, her mother and father were there, terror giving way to frantic relief as they realised their daughter was still alive on the pavement not dead beneath a lorry. The girl began to cry and her mother knelt down to gather her up, hugs interspersed with a fierce scolding. “Nazia Akhtar! Don’t you ever run out into the street like that again! Thank God you tripped. What do they teach you? Always look! Always, always look!” Her Dad standing frozen, ashen grey, like he’d seen a ghost. Which he hadn’t.

I dare say I looked much the same.

Unnoticed, I walked away, turned the corner, and promptly threw up. You’re really not supposed to do that sort of thing, especially in public, but in the broader scheme of things it seemed trivial. No-one saw anyway, I think. And then, filled with a sick horror that no amount of upchucking in the gutter could expurgate, I went home – or rather, back to the ground floor flat, messy and book-lined that marked both my fragile fingerhold on the 21st and my livelihood.

Once inside, I moved with a deliberation that belied sheer panic. Methodically, I washed myself thoroughly until I was clean again. And I prayed. All day. I prayed for forgiveness, for mercy, for a future and the courage to face it. At last I rose, stiff, numb and exhausted.

I set and opened the Gate. And moved through it to find out my fate.

My turn to be frozen with relief. Edward came to greet me “Hello love,” he said, “ I was just taking Fazal to soccer.” He must have seen my face then because he stopped short of kissing me hello. “What’s wrong?” he said, “You look like you’ve been through the wars. Did you finish your shift?”

“No,” I said. “I couldn’t.” I shook my head, trying to clear it of a strange fogginess.

For the first time ever, I’d cut a shift short. That was OK. You’re allowed to pull out early every once in a while – the Authority knows the loneliness of our work and makes allowances. Edward called Emma to ask her if she minded running Fazal to soccer with her two. He sat me down and poured me a glass of iced water. “What happened?” he asked. I’d been looking forward to that posting. “I thought I had made a terrible mistake” I said, “But everything is alright now.”

And indeed the world seemed in all wises and respects the same as it had been when I left for work. He hugged me. “Do you need to report it?” he asked quietly.

“No” I said – “No – it’s OK. I’ll go back in a few days. I just need a rest. I got confused.”

And I did wonder, sitting there, sipping my drink, still stiff, whether I’d imagined it –whether I’d really pulled that girl back from the brink, or just been a ghostly witness to a lucky escape. Could she have tripped at just the right time?

But in my heart, I knew that she had not – my shin was bruised where her sharp little shoes had hit me, and I could remember the feel of her smooth dark hair. But my world was still there, unchanged, unscathed. The next day, once I’d slept, I got on the computer and went looking for Nazia. I wasn’t very hopeful – pre-Conflagration data is so patchy and Akhtar a common name in Oldham at that time, but it was worth a try. And there she was. Nazia Akhtar. Not much, but enough to sketch her life.

The little girl in her peacock blue shalwar kameez had lived in Oldham all her life. She got married just out of school, at seventeen. She went to university in Manchester and completed her degree four years later, having taken a year off to care for her new-born daughter. She became an English teacher at one of the local sixth-form colleges and was a steward for a while in a teacher’s union.

She survived the Conflagration. Her husband and daughter did not. The first Census held after those terrible years listed her as a widow, living alone. She never remarried, but some years later fostered two children – a brother and sister. Orphaned. She died just before her fifty-fourth birthday of a heart condition common among survivors.

There you are. Nazia Akhtar’s life in 150 words. And I must admit that I wondered whether I wouldn’t have preferred to be knocked down by a lorry – to never have lived my life – than to lose Edward and Fazal as she did her husband and child. I’m not sure I did Nazia any favours.

Citing exhaustion, I stayed home a few more days. The bruise on my leg healed. I watched for signs, for hints of the world’s ending. I saw none.

And so, I put it down to ‘one of those things’ and thanking God, I returned to work. Back to my patient dredging of the past. To the careful memorising of forgotten text. I never stopped thinking about it exactly, but I put it from the front of my mind. I did not go looking for Nazia and I did not report it.

It must have been about five years later that I was stationed in London. Tower Hamlets – later, but earlier -- Nazia Akhtar wasn’t born yet. I was stationed that time with a good friend, so life was less lonely than usual. She had bought some wine over. I don’t usually drink much at all, but we were celebrating an exciting find, the rediscovery of a lost book. Tomorrow the serious work of committing it to memory would begin, but for now work could wait.

Both of us drank more than we intended and stayed up later than we intended, high in my bird’s nest of a flat. And when our jubilant conversation grew quieter, Yasmin told me a strange story about the time she once hauled a middle-aged woman out of a swimming pool and gave her mouth-to-mouth until she coughed up the water and breathed again. Her own horrified remembrance. How terrifying it was to open the Gate after that, not knowing what she would find. She wept and not only from the wine. And realised from my face that I was not entirely surprised.

How many such mistakes?

And as late-night confidences yielded to sober discussion, we decided to act. Gradually – as befits the prudence and restraint of a Reader – we began experimenting to see what was and what was not mutable about our past.

Theoretically, of course, we had been taught that ‘what’s done stays done.’ When Gates were first developed innumerable efforts were made. Agents were dispatched to despatch the architects of the Conflagration. To stop the Rwandan genocide. To undo the Holocaust. To unmake all of those sad litanies of atrocity. All failed. The Gate shut down. Agents were lost or arrived thousands of miles and years from their intended destinations. Only once it became clear that the past was a done deal – that our traffic was limited to what a human brain could bring through the Gate – only then did they become the preserve of the Readers.

But now it had turned out to be not so simple after all. For in our slow and tiresome minimalist meddling – which did not run to assassination attempts – we found that we were not quite as ghost-like as we had supposed. Casual interaction had never been a problem: dressed inconspicuously one fades unnoticed from the memory of the busy shop assistant, from the harried bus driver.

Observed, attended, by many eyes we were powerless – that is true. But unobserved, things proved otherwise. “Attention fixes events. Not occurrences,” we concluded. And help is sometimes possible where harm is not.

Our experimental conspiracy has lasted five years of now-time – maybe 10 of lived-time. Fazal is at university now and Edward has some grey in his hair. It makes him look distinguished, I think. The gap in years that was between us when we married is all but gone now and I suspect I shall change my job after a few more stints. I wouldn’t want to overtake him by too much. And the world has not ended in all of this.

But dear Reader, our conspiracy ends now, with these words. This morning as I walked to the market, someone pushed into me and I tripped. I was very lucky – I’d almost stepped out into a bus. Unlike long-lost long-dead Nazia, I have a hunch what hit me and a hint of things to come.

And I mean to tell the world.
For I have seen a future tense and caught a glimpse of the past perfect.

Begin from the beginning.

2006-03-01T21:35:00.000Z

But one never can.
Once upon a time. . .
In the beginning was the. . .
No. I'm just not much good at Gospels. Even John's.
Time to cut my losses, pick an arbitrary starting point and settle for a continuation.

An Arbitrary Starting Point

The detritus of a union meeting. A pile of votes being counted by two foreigners out the back. I was one. An acquaintance, for whom I had considerable respect, but whom I would not then have presumed to call a friend, was the other. He was furious and it seemed to me that desolation was inseparable from that rage.

I said "What can I do?"

It was not a whim but it was unplanned. I had not gone to that meeting with the intention of saying anything of the kind. He would have had every right and more to spit at me, because the offer should have been made months before and it shouldn't have been an offer. We both knew it.

But demonstrating a rare gift for patience in the face of provocation, he refrained. And I became part of a fight that was intense, wonderful, exhausting, enraging, embittering and desolate.

Looking back, I've slowly come to realise that that moment was a central event in my life. Not the central event, any more than there is a beginning. But before that meeting it was still possible to walk away, to continue my long-planned long-range trajectory undeflected. The day after, it was not quite as possible and in those following, it became gradually, inexorably less so. A balance of opposing forces subtly disturbed.

It's one of a very few decisions which I have no need to regret. But it would be deceptive not to acknowledge having become less trusting, more wary, more weary and far less sociable than the person who made that decision.

I'm not sure, however, that this is a bad thing. But I digress.

Let me tell you a little about that respected acquaintance who has long since become a rare friend. We don't speak that often now, living in different countries, but in March he often comes to mind.

He is obstinant, stubborn, fiercely confrontational and famously uncompromising. Blunt, angry, demanding, argumentative and completely lacking in small talk. A bull-headed, mule-footed gadfly. Uncomfortable.
Those are his good traits.

Not to mention ruthlessly honest. Curious. Eloquent. Principled. Patient beyond reason or endurance. Brave. And possessed of that rare combination of generosity and great-heartedness which is grace.

I would not want to lose his trust.