Dennis Leary said ...

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

The next big thing?

My comment in response to an article by Jane Caro in New Matilda

I think I see the point that Jane is making but I look at it slightly differently. I don't agree "the next big thing" is "out there, dogging us like a ghost". To me, that powerful metaphor implies that the big thing exists independently of human though and action, almost as if it’s waiting to ambush and/or transform us.

Just because Michael Apted didn't pick up on aspects of social reality in 1963 doesn't mean that those realities weren't foreseen and worked for by others at that time and before it.

For example, wasn't Virginnia Woolf one of those who foresaw and agitated for what Michael Apted couldn't quite see when she gave her talks that became A Room Of One's Own? That which Michael Apted couldn't see didn't sneak up on everyone. It was formed by conscious and deliberate social action that could only be driven by one force: women.

What's the next big thing? It's what we make it. By "we" I mean people who organise to act for social change (which I want to be progressive but others want to be otherwise ... let's not forget George W Bush).

And what might that mean? Dunno, but the playwright Arthur Miller helpfully suggested the direction in which we need to move when he wrote: “And yet one cannot stand forever on the shore; at some point, filled with indecision, scepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere”.

Whatever is coming will come because we produce the conditions out of which it emerges.

Of course there's a link to Iraq

In response to the leading article in New Matilda, 20th July 2005, I submitted this:

You make some interesting observations but miss the point. Tony Blair, George Bush and John Howard were anything but empty or vacuuous after the London bombings. Their well thought out, carefully crafted and precisely worded responses framed and defined analysis in the so-called Western world. Comments by Coalition of the Willing leaders post 7th July have been persistent and orchestrated, giving us an illuminating exercise in the management of public opinion. One message and one message only had to be sent out to be swallowed whole: evil stalks the world in the form of ‘distorted parodies’ of Islam, which guides us to the view that no shred of what motivated the bombers could be comprehensible to people of good faith. Any other message allows the possibility that analysis might be required of what drove those young men to carry out ghastly and wholly wrong acts. Tony Blair in particular (but George Bush too and little Johnnie when he really needs to) can provide us with political rhetoric of the very highest order (that's not a criticism by the way). If you doubt that just witness Mr Blair’s speech in the European Parliament or his defence of the Iraq war almost anywhere at almost any time. That they haven't done so in response to those horrible events in London is not an accident. It's not because their not up to it, quite the reverse: it's because we're all being massaged away from any examination of cause, however deluded the bombers might have been and managed away from the very idea that there might be a cause; away from consideration of other world views (regardless of how utterly opposed to them one might be); beyond analysis, questioning and/or complexity. Allow any of those tools into the discourse and the moral certainties of good versus evil don't fit quite as well. Worryingly, it ends up with the contemptible "astonishment" of the British Foreign Secretary that as dangerously revolutionary an agency as Chatham House could suggest events in Iraq and Afghanistan contribute in some unquantifiable way to the background of events in Madrid and London. Tragically it leads an otherwise thoughtful man like Kim Beazley to talk about eliminating human filth. Have mercy on such nihilism Lord.

tracks

Photo by Susi

nothing worse than being a liberal, allegedly

Piers Akerman wrote the following (about "small l liberals") in Sydney's Daily Telegraph :

“They cannot get their little heads around the reality that though the Koran does contain some verses of great poetry on tolerance and respect, it also contains a plethora of extremely virulent exhortatory suras condemning nonbelievers, apostates, Christians and Jews, to violent deaths and unending misery in the hereafter.”

So I sent these thoughts to Piers

How should a bleeding-heart liberal like me view a Holy Book that proclaims the righteousness of destroying “every living thing” (Genesis 7:4); condones brutality against servants (Genesis 16:6-9); rejoices in the extermination of whole cities (Genesis 19:24); rewards a murderer (Exodus 2:12); kills the entire first born generation of a nation as a tool to liberate the oppressed (Exodus 12:29); punishes with death children that hit or curse their parents (Exodus 21: 15 and 17); condemns to death anyone who defiles or works on the Sabbath (Exodus 31: 14 and 15); and provokes the violent death (by sword) of 3,000 people for worshipping God in an unorthodox manner (Exodus 32: 27 – 28)?

That’s just the first and second Holy Books in this anthology of Holy writings. How should this small l liberal respond to the adherents of that Faith, Piers? Maybe I should tell them that we have no room at this Inn for the likes of them? Maybe I should turn away from them or cast them out into the wilderness? Maybe I should force them to do as the Romans do? Maybe I should behead them or crucify them? Better not try the latter, it’ll just turn their leader into a martyr!

Charles Rennie MacIntosh (the designer) once wrote: there is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist. How very clever of you to compose such a stylish, clever but morally bankrupt distortion of the Holy Book of Islam and of its adherents (of which I am not one). Me? I’m a multiculturalist and a small l liberal. As we do, I wholly respect your right to hold to and express your illiberal and profoundly depressing views. I’ll do my best, in my small, private and infuriatingly liberal way, to resist your nihilism and poverty of thought because that too is what us small l liberals do.

the louse's view: War Of The Worlds

Excellent B-Movie let down only by the final scene. Terrifically scary use of sound and very disturbing clanky monsters. Tom Cruise deserves credit for playing a man so scared he'll do anything to escape capture/save his daughter. I quite like the idea as well that he doesn't just pick up a gun and start leading the resistance. He reacts all the time and quite often reacts badly. For Hollywood's No 1 earner to behave so unheroically at times is rather commendable in my book. It's blokey as anything, of course, which is also a flaw. Loved the anti-ET homage with the Martians and the child's bicycle. Well worth the ticket price.

as posted to Guardian Unlimited Film pages

the louse's view: Revenge Of The Sith

With the exception of the one decent joke of the entire prequel series (when Yoda arrives to confront the Chancellor) it's an almost irredeemably bad film. Story (in which tragedy is reduced to a post-pubescent hissy fit), dialogue (younglings?????), action (chase, chase, light sabres, chase), direction (as in lack of), CGI (as in way too much of), acting (as in wooden with the exception of Ian McDairmid). Here's the worst thing: the original movie was fun, evocative, good versus evil, cowboys and Indians in space and we were pleased it worked for the makers, who got rich but deserved their luck but all of the prequels have been tedious, derivative, pompous, manipulative and exploitative. ROTS is the zenith of the new paradigm: very, very bad.

as posted to Gaurdian Unlimted Film pages

A Bargain At Half The Price, He Said

Like the stitches of an ancient overcoat
straining against the weight of years,
the rags of hand-me-down inheritance,
ill-fitting at the best of times, are threadbare,
relics of some long-forgotten afternoon
of half-remembered, once upon a time
adventurers who turned up, now and then,
like proverbial pennies, which none who stayed
would spend despite their abject poverty
of domesticity and duty to the myths
they wove around the prudent part of valour
to protect cheap fabric, cut more cautiously.
Their better fit would never be in doubt
but I have worn his old greatcoat near-out.