ADRIENSWORDS

“I don’t mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that’s how it comes out.”

Bill Hicks 1961-1994

I don’t have any heroes; pretty short on role models too. This is the curse/blessing that comes of belonging to the blank generation. Cynicism is so hard-wired it’s impossible to revere a fellow Earth bound organism and only just possible to believe in God or extraterrestrial benevolence if you submit to voluntary lobotomy.

But if I had heroes Bill Hicks would be one of them. Hicks was the most sacriligeous preacher, the most irresponsible social commentator, the noblest man to drag the human race’s nose in its own turds. Smell this you little shit. Whack and don’t do it again. There should be more like him, but sadly that’s extremely unlikely. How many people in the world could get up on a stage and demonstrate George Bush giving Satan head. How many would think of it? Bill Hicks the best kind of American. The avatar of the democratic chaotic genius of that country. Fuck my bullshit let’s hear the gospel of American defence policy according to St. Bill:

“We’re like Jack Palance in the movie Shane, throwing the pistol at the sheep herder’s feet:
‘Pick it up.’
‘I don’t wanna pick it up mister, you’ll shoot me.’
‘Pick up the gun.’
‘Mister, I don’t want no trouble, huh. I just came down town here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don’t even know what gingham is, but she goes through about 10 rolls a week of that stuff. I ain’t looking for no trouble, mister.’
‘Pick up the gun.”
[Boom, boom!!]
‘You all saw him. He had a gun.’”

There’s a lot of comics out there riling likewise (eg Jon Stewart). A lot of ‘em do a good job. Sadly Hicks died before George the second came to power. Sad for us not for him, he was pissed off enough at the first Gulf War. That at least had some kind of justification. Iraq made the first move but this…

I wonder what he’d say. What would his take on September 11, the War on (of) Terror be? Would he riff on conspiracy? I couldn’t say. His mind was his own. He had a knack of raving on like a soapbox jockey and pulling back with the most irreverent and disrectful quip. Take his barbs at the ‘pro-life’ movement:

“If you’re so pro-life and you’re so pro-child, then adopt one that’s already here, that’s very unwanted and very alone and needs someone to take care of it to get it out of a horrible situation. Okay? People say, ‘Why don’t you do that?’ And I say, ‘Because I hate fucking kids and couldn’t care less.’”

When he finally quit smoking this is the guy that said every cigarette looked “like it was made by God, rolled by Jesus and moistened shut with Claudia Schiffer’s pussy.” He was an old-fashioned antiestablishment libertarian. Libertarian these days, especially in the States tends to bring to mind some Republican suburbanite who supports your right to sniff cocaine and keep Mexican slave labour. Sure P.J. O’Rourke’s a funny guy but it just ain’t the same. And the left mostly just aren’t funny. They’re good at making George W. the dumb arsehole jokes but none of them would bring up Claudia Schiffer’s pussy.

He was one of the last people to speak unafraid of the consequences, the ratings, the opinion polls. Fuck all that. Bill didn’t just tell political jokes or make fun of religious dickheads. He was a philosopher; a psychadelic preacher. He had a vision that the human race could be more than just a skanky bunch of fat-arsed monkeys hell-bent on blowing each other to meat scraps.

“All our beliefs are being challenged now, and rightfully so – they’re stupid.”

No qualifications, none of the limitations that come with writing a ’serious’ book about the geo-political situation or the distribution of wealth. Not the half-arsed, completely mislead bigotry that spews out of talk back radio or the ‘readers’ comment section of a right-wing blog. That shit ain’t worth two cents, this was priceless.

The beauty of stand-up is it’s litmus test is to make people laugh. People laugh it works. Say anything you want. Of course to make people really laugh you’ve got to really piss a lot of people off. Bill was good at that. Born again types (showing how much they learned from Jesus) beat him up and broke his ribs, networks banned him, there’s even a rumour that Bush had something to do with his death. Who knows. Whatever, he’s badly missed. If you’ve never had the pleasure check out Sane Man or Rant in E-Minor and get the real religion.

And finally a reading from the gospel accordingly:

“By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they’ll take root. I don’t know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourself.

“Seriously, though. If you are, do. No, really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan’s little helpers, okay? Kill yourself. Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No, this is not a joke, if you’re going: “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked, and you are fucking us. Kill yourself, it’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself. Planting seeds.

“I know all the marketing people are going: ‘He’s doing a joke.’ There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too. ‘Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market, he’s very smart.’ Oh man. I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags! ‘Oh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. Lot of people are feeling that indignation, we’ve done research. Huge market. He’s doing a good thing.’

God damn it, I’m not doing that, you scumbags. Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet! “

AMEN

Today a conservative coloumnist, who shall go unnamed, made some bogus, simple-minded connection between Kim Jong-Il’s regime and some hypothetical student stereotypes he addressed as ‘you, yes you in the Che Guevara t-shirt’ .

Now Ernesto Guevara was probably not a saint. Cuba is a one party state and one party states - wherever they position themselves, whatever they say - tend to abuse the rights of their own people, indulge the ruling elites in disproportional luxury and swim in corruption. A one party system is like having a job you can never be fired from. No incentive exists to actively hold on to the position. It’s yours and taken for granted. But the wearing of Che t-shirts is most often not a display of support for Guevara, Cuba, Castro’s government or anything like it. I think it’s completely otherwise.

The ‘Che’ t-shirt phenomena is a simulacrum. It’s not ‘Che’ so much as this one specific image of him taken by Alberto Korda at a funeral. You don’t see people sporting other images of Che. No Che smoking cigar photos; no Che on the slab. Just this one cropped Korda photo endlessly replicated as a basic, bold-coloured print.

It fits that the poster style was early rendered on the image by Andy Warhol, the artist who best represent the spirit of consumer culture. It’s the icon of romantic individualism, the personal ethos of the consumer culture. In this culture everyone desires to be an individual, to be special and unique. Ironically everyone attempts this by purchasing the same items thought generally to connote this quality. If you want to be a good looking rebel, a glamorous law unto oneself don’t actually be one. You’ll get arrested. Buy a Che t-shirt. It’s what you feel inside.

The original photograph is intense and stark. It brings to mind 1960s European art-house flicks full of existensial angst and rage. But this is rarely seen. The gaudy-coloured copy everyone’s familiar wth comes straight from 1960s ads for Coke. The only commentary the image makes about ’socialism’ is that it made money for everyone but the guy who took it. It’s only a political image in the sense that the Rolling Stones were a political band. Of course inside Cuba the photograph is something different a propoaganda symbol of the regime. Outside even amongst ‘revolutionary socialists’ it’s what Warhol made it.

And this goes double for the G20 protestors.

Anti-globalisation protesting is an oxymoron. The movement so-named is a phenomenon of the very processes it supposedly opposes. At it’s heart the movement is an amalgamation of various groups who for different reasons want to disrupt the corporate-governmental elites who ‘plan’ globalisation. It’s kind of a grass roots counter-call to the suits. I doubt if a significant percentage of anti-globalisation protestors know exactly what the agenda of G20 participants actually is. For the summiteers many, notably Tony Blair, respond in disbelief that they are doing exactly what the protestors demand should be done: ie ending poverty.

This is met all round with understandable skepticism. Corporations whose products are made in factory sweatshops staffed by persons who receive a fraction of the very low local cost of living don’t exactly seem likely to voluntarily improve the disgraceful conditions they’ve helped create. Developing nations like China who’s economic edge is exactly the capacity to keep labourers in such low-paid circumstances without pesky trade union activism are unlikely to rock the boat. ‘Developed’ countries like Australia who’s edge is their lucky lolly shop of natural resources added to the cultural capital of Anglo-Saxon nations won’t want to disrupt their populations’ artifically high standards of living. Ditto Indonesia and Canada respectively. The G20 is certainly more representative of the world, thus more inclusive, but it’s not like the poorer countries are getting a look-see. Apart from South-Africa there are no nations from that continent. Also no Peru, no Vietnam, no Fiji: no intention of letting the poor folks of the world in on the action.

The G20 is a club for G7 wannabees organizing better the getting rich process. Well what’s wrong with that? Nothing provided it’s open to the world in general and doesn’t result in the planet becoming a wasteland trash pile in record time. And this is what the G20 protestors have in common, not an objection to ‘globalisation’ per se rather an objection to riches at the expense of entrenched poverty, prosperity at the expense of future generations and free markets at the expense of free people.

G20 members are all defined as market economies regardless of their political systems which seem irrellevant. China and Saudi Arabia are definitely not democracies. Indonesia, Turkey and Russia all have dodgy human rights records. The rest of us would score pretty badly if you added economic elements to human rights: the Unted States’ large impoverished population, the indigenous people in Australia, the mass slums in Brazil.

Still in my opinion the stiching up of a global economic nexus will probably, long term, aid the process by which the entire human race can escape the shackles of short-brutish, disease ridden lives. The moral disposition of persons participating in this process is not as relevant as the placard wavers think. But the placard wavers are not as irrellevant as the suits think either.

The economy is not the entire story in the success of an civilization. Economic ‘prosperity’ if restricted to an elite few is not progress. The short, brutish life continues for most whilst the few enjoy comfort, good nutrition and the benefits of medical science. It’s a continuation of medieval society with airplanes and TV. And the placard wavers serve to deliver a message to the number-crunching lords; and to the rest of the world.

What message?

I met a girl on a train years in November of the year 2000. At the time September the 11th brought to mind the furious anti-globalisation protests that’d occured a few months earlier in Melbourne. There was a lot of bullshit, unecessary violence on both sides of the picket line. But this young woman hadn’t gone there to scream at Bill Gates or punch a cop. I asked her why she went. “To change those people’s reality”, she said. I think that’s the message. The world is not a conference room in a luxury hotel. It’s not filled with ample arses in tailor made suits. The world is out here.

And what you people in there do affects us out here, remember that.

The protestors are partbof the chaos inherent in the system. Che t-shirts here do not signify North Korea or Cuba or any other dictatorship because what they do signify is not allowed in such places. The Che t-shirts signify something beyond words although words like dissent, colour, chaos, freedom, kick, poetry and madness might be compatible. The irony of the simulacram is that it brings to heart so many things that Guevara was not himself and would never approve of. The Che icon is a symbol of capitalism andagainst it, one and the same time. It’s the emblem of a precious lack of order at the genius core of modern civilization

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
and I’m not sure about the former.”
-Albert Einstein

“My fellow Americans, I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever.
We will begin bombing in five minutes.”
-Ronald Reagen

The 80s are back!! The pastle jock/goth dichotomy is the dominant high school fashion code, mindless consumerism is the ‘rational’ compulsory lifestyle ‘choice’ and the world is about to blow itself up. Again.

I remember the 80s, I was in school. Mostly people ignored the ‘issues’. They drank West Coast Cooler, watched Hey Hey It’s Saturday Night and went to Westfield Shoppingtown Thursday nights to hang ‘round McDonalds.

Beneath our ultra-conformist, two-dimensional exteriors lay a deep distrust of all authority figures: parents, teachers, police, government, the United States etc. The whole 60s thing had discredited activism. Politics was a nerdy game losers played. Cool people didn’t read anything more sophisticated than a style mag’s table of contents; didn’t talk about anything deeper than a 12 inch single.

Like the generation following the Russian Decemberists: we didn’t like the system, but we didn’t think it we could beat it either. There wasn’t any point doing anything, so we didn’t. We preferred to think of the 60s as just a game show or a fashion riff to be played when the mall got boring. The 60s was just history’s biggest party. The 80s weren’t; that’s why we remember the 80s.

The world was close to nuclear war, the American president cracked jokes about it. But it was beyond our control so why bother. All the shots were called by old men. They’d had their jollies and looked forward to loss of bowel control. Us kids, green-haired and glue sniffing, needed WW3. A character building exercise I suppose. We’d thank them for it later.

That was the 80s, and the 80s are back with slight amendments.

Russia’s ‘democratic’ now. Not that things like freedom of speech have improved much, but Russian kids can hang at McDonalds too. Sure the U.S.A. and Russia still have tons of bombs, still strapped to missiles, still aimed at each other. But they aren’t really thinking of firing them.

So thank the lord there’s a new bogeyman: Islamic fundamentalism. Nothing like a mutual enemy to turn the nagging questions off. Yesterday North Korea, not Muslim but in business with same, exploded its first bomb. The world went ballistic. Blogs crammed full of charming little comments like “blow ‘em back to the stone age”.

The commentary whilst slamming NK for being a Stalinist oppressive state want everyone in the ‘free’ world to act like they live in a Stalinist oppressive state: no questions, no argument, no criticism. Just blind adherence to the U.S. regardless of its blunders, its abuses and its hypocrisy. Sure I’d rather live in a modern liberal democracy than in a starving military dictatorship run by a God-king in a bad pants suit. But sue me if I don’t actually want to live in a democracy and not a fascist sham pretending to be one.

North Korea has a bomb but as Mercutio said: ‘tis enough, ‘twill serve. Even small nukes kill big. Not to be outdone the U.S. is spending big on a new program of nukes: 6.5 billion in 2004 by itself. Seasonally adjusted of course Bush’s spending more money than the whole cold war. Smart nukes, nukes that drill holes in the ground first. Presumably the neutron bomb’s back on the drawing board. Wouldn’t want to destroy private property unnecessarily would we.

This is part of the Project For A New American Century, the neo-conservative think tank with its foreign policy hooks in the White House. The basic idea is that the yanks should stop being Mr Nice Guy (mission accomplished) and simply beat up everybody who challenges their authority. An empire by any other name would break your legs just as bad. When so many American voters are also adherents of the rapture its easy to push this insanity through the decrepit corpse of the American state.

Today for the first time in twenty years I had a look at the Bulletin for Atomic Scientistsdoomsday clock. Not quite as close as it was then but closer than it has been in a while. And the North Korea bomb hasn’t registered so next month it might be closer still. Things are different: I downloaded the clock from the net, didn’t have to go to the library. Also I found another version of the doomsday clock: the fundamentalist version.

The Armageddon clock features a longer range countdown with more factors featured: the establishment of Israel, the formation of the E.U., the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and cyclone activity increases. The Atomic scientists’ clock moves closer to and farther away from nuclear conflict depending on the geo-political situation. The Armageddon clock goes one way straight to the big ka-Boom.

They don’t mind though, looking forward to it actually. Going up in the Rapture they are.

This isn’t to say all American Christians are nuts. They aren’t. Hopefully it’s this type of Christianity, the type that y’know actually takes what Christ said into account that are predominant. Still considering the anti-democratic tactics of the conservatives, their cohorts in the Supreme Court and the surprisingly little fuss the whole thing’s caused; the so-called will of the people is probably irrelevant.

If this sounds a little childish, it is. The 80s are back. If everyone else’s going back I might as well. What use is being an adult anyway? I can’t exercise anything remotely like ‘citizenship’. It’s an irrelevant concept. Hanging on to it’s like dreaming about the middle ages on a nineteenth century steamship: a romantic reaction to modern inevitability.

I’ll just kick back in my wayfarers, crank the equalizer up, dance to some old time rock n’ roll: The Smiths and New Order and…

No!

I’m an intellectual! Sort of. I should be standing up, being counted, making sure the relevant agencies file my name, track my reading habits and Google searches. That’ll show ‘em. I’ll write an essay about how we’re all a princess, a brain, a freak, a jock and a criminal.

Nah!

Go hang down the Mall, get drunk on West Coast Cooler. Who cares if the North Koreans are Stalinist? They could be fascist-anarchists for all I care. It still wouldn’t change the fact: I don’t have a car!

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Over years I used to see A Clockwork Orange at arthouse cinemas. It was a midnight favourite. I saw it every time it was screened and everytime came away with the same revulsion. I hated it. And when it was rescreened I’d go see it again. Like a junkie not strong enough to shake the addiction. A fascination shot through with guilt.

I’d read the book of course. The intellectual distance between reader and text doesn’t exist in film. Cinema surrounds you. It’s galactic imagery and soundtrack flood the senses. A film enters your psyche at a sub-mental level like a dream. You can only think critically about it after the emotional effects have waned. So watching Alex inflict damage assaults you in a way that reading about it does not.

There are many much more violent pictures. The late 60s and early 70s period (to which A Clockwork Orange belongs featured a series of films which intentionally did away with the Hayes code era of prohibition on violence. How violent a picture is, is subjective. How to measure it? By the number of violent scenes? By the quantity of blood? By this criteria A Clockwork Orange would rank behind many a b-grade horror.

What sets it apart?

Most violent films have the good guy, the bad guy. The good guy deals out punishment, the bad guy starts it. That’s how it goes. The violence is morally authorized. You are allowed to enjoy watching Bruce Willis throw Alan Rickman off a tall building at the end of Die Hard because Rickman is a bad guy; a terrorist. He hijacked a Christmas party, threatened Bruce’s wife, he has it coming.

In an interview with Bernard Weinraub for the New York Times Kubrick said: “Alex is a character who by every logical and rational consideration should be completely unsympathetic, and possibly even abhorrent to the audience… yet in the same way that Richard III gradually undermines your disapproval of his evil ways, Alex does the same thing and draws the audience into his own vision of life. This is the phenomenon of the story that produced the most enjoyable and surprising artistic illumination in the minds of an audience.”

Before he’s caught by the cops Alex perpetrates four separate violent acts. Only one of which is ‘morally justified’. This is the second episode where Alex and his droogs confront another juvenile gang getting ready to gang rape a girl. Rescue has nothing to do with it. He fights because he wants to. Within minutes he’s getting set to rape someone else, famously ’singing in the rain’.

It’s fun.

The reason for the fascination and the revulsion: Alex likes violence. So do we. That’s it. But whatever social controls are instilled in most of us are absent in Alex. He enjoys violence; sexual and otherwise. There’s a complete absence of empathy. We usually watch violent movies without any moral uneasiness precisely because the story sets up a situation in which the hero is compelled to act violently for the greater good. This excuses us the bad feeling in enjoying bloodshed. A Clockwork Orange does not give us this out. Our hero’s all charm but no virtue. He’s cool, but he’s no good guy. He goes around will he nil he inflicting damage and we enjoy watching it. At the same time, aware that everything that’s happening is bad, we feel profoundly guilty. The paradox of A Clockwork Orange in respect to the standard violent movie is that it does not let our bloodlust off the hook. We can’t pretend it’s anything else.

First Alex perpetuates his crimes, then he’s caught and becomes the chaplain’s protégé. Then he submits to the Ludovico Treatment which renders him ‘good by being paradoxically compelled toward evil’. Every time he wants to hit someone he gets sick. And he’s released where, confronted by his former victims he is beaten and almost killed.

Humans are violent. The Darwinian point of view is prevalent here. Young primates are known across species to attack older males in packs; witness the beating of the drunk and the writer. This behaviour is sexually motivated; witness the corresponding rapes. Then there is the religious thing: free choice between heaven and hell. But religion itself is awash with violence, Alex reading the Bible is not inspired toward heaven. He’s ‘kept going’ by the gratuitous violence particularly of the Old Testament.

Think of the ‘dancing Jesuses’ sequence in Alex’s bedroom early in the film. A chorus line of post-crucifixion Christs dance to the second movement of Beethoven’s ninth inspiring Alex with ‘lovely pictures’ of death, disaster and mayhem. Many dislike this sequence: not it’s violence but its black humour and blasphemy. It’s simply a matter of attitude. Devout Catholics everywhere hang realistic statues of the crucifixion in their bedrooms, living rooms; in the rooms of their children. An horrific way to die on display. No-one objects as they might object to a similarly positioned depiction of death by electrocution or guillotine.

When Alex chooses to submit to the Ludovico Treatment he’s instilled with an aversion to anti-social behaviour by programmed association between witnessed violence and drug-induced illness. This, as the government minister responsible says, works. The chaplain objects that the ‘boy has no real choice’ and indeed he doesn’t. But I wonder if the religious spectrum of heavenly rewards for the virtuous and hellish punishment for the wicked is real moral choice. Is a life lived according to scriptural prescription truly good? Or is it just a long range form of self-interest; like a rich man who gives generously to charity and advertises the fact?

As Nietzsche and others have stated justice is an elaboration on vengeance. That recent innovation of human systems of punishment and crime control - rehabilitation - is perfectly realised in the Ludovico Treatment. Take violent offenders, condition them, they cease to be violent. But the punishment element is erased. Alex is released cured but not forgiven. He must face his victims: the drunk, his droogs, the writer who’s wife he raped. None of them hesitate to inflict violence on Alex and he is unable to defend himself. The treatment, supposedly advanced, brings us back to square one. Instead of an impersonal governmental apparatus designed to rationally determine guilt and distribute punishment, we simply set up a perpetrator to be the ideal target for revenge.

There is punishment in A Clockwork Orange. Alex’s one saving grace is his taste in music, particularly Beethoven. This is partially spoiled for him because one of the films he has to watch undergoing treatment is soundtracked by the ninth symphony’s fourth movement: The Ode to Joy. Delicious irony. Alex piteously and strenuously objects and the treatment’s supervisor Dr. Brodsky mutters “here’s the punishment element perhaps”.

This I think is the film’s larger message. Beethoven’s music is wild. He was the Rolling Stones of his day and his music is massively Dionysian. Many hate Wendy Carlos’s moog synthesizer recital of the work for the same reasons that people hate contemporary-set Shakespeare. I loved it. For the sci-fi scenery it was perfect. And, as the anti-modern Shakespeare purist dolts keep failing to realise, it makes the classics new to younger generations, perpetuating them.

But enough, Beethoven’s music is wild, dangerous. As is Alex. There is a link between the demonic impulses that lead Alex to destructive behaviour and those that create music like lovely, lovely Ludwig van’s. Is it possible to have one without the other? Imagine all great works of art and take the sex, violence, darkness out of them. Try to re-imagine them. What’s left? Disneyland?

The last chapter of Burgess’s book has Alex slowing down. He switches from Beethoven to easy listening, too tired to go out for the old ultra-violence. This chapter has been omitted in many editions of the book. Kubrick himself thought the author obliged to insert it by the publishers. However the last scene of A Clockwork Orange does in some ways go the same way.

Alex, appeased by the government with a good job (interesting comment on political ‘morality’ that) is presented with massive speakers blaring the ninth’s final bars. Alex imagines what many critics have mistakenly called a rape scene. The scene is not rape or even violent. It depicts Alex having sex with a girl (on top0. She’s definitely in control. A social circle resembling a wedding party look on and applaud. This scene seems to signify that Alex has been civilized after all. His sexual instincts are re-instated but they are socially adjusted. Perhaps Kubrick’s suggesting that old chestnut – marriage: the solution to male aggression.

A Clockwork Orange has been vilified, banned, condemned on artistic grounds and yet it survives. Easily one of Kubrick’s most popular pictures. Why? Scan the blogs and you’ll find it among many a favourite film listing, boys, girls both. Why? It’s well liked is why. We like it, we love it. It’s in our fibre, it’s part of who we are. That’s what it says: we love violence, by itself, for its own sake. Deal with it.

A guy who’s far too well-dressed to work in information technology but nevertheless does, told me blogging was like filling a cup full of urine. Easy to do, hard to get anyone interested. He’s also too witty to work in IT. And he’s right I’ve been doing this over a week now and I’m not rich and famous yet. So what’s the point?

Well set aside twentieth century notions about status, wealth etc. Because the twenty-first century will be a different place. I’m not saying there won’t be any rich people or any famous people. There will. That won’t stop. But fame and wealth are not intrinsically connected to cultural activity. It’s a feature of contemporary customs which may become a thing of the past.

Shakespeare was never famous the way Dan Brown or Stephen King are today. Fame as we know it didn’t exist then. And the closest thing to it was reserved for political, military and religous figures. Elizabeth Tudor, Charles de Lorraine or Clement VIII may have been “famous” but Shakespeare?

Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, probably the first global human icon was a product of a complex intersection of stuff. Chaplin’s impoverished upbringing imparting a certain social perspective and sense of humour. Years in tough English music halls leading to “overnight success” as one of Mack Sennett’s players. The rushed grabbing of a few wardrobe items that became the Tramp look. And there was the early twentieth century with it’s economic upheavals, it’s terrible war and nightmarish political scenarios. It’s difficult for us to imagine how bad things looked to people who made their way through the world between 1914 and 1950. But they were universally attracted to Chaplin’s Tramp who was a new thing. A movie icon. The key to understanding the power of icons like the tramp is to understand how unprecedented they were.

Consider the Rolling Stones who emerged after the second world war. There was no such thing as a rock star before the Beatles and the Stones came along. Even previously massively successful recording stars like Crosby and Sinatra didn’t have the god-likeaura of these English guys who just wanted to play American music. I’m certain if you could go back in time and tell a fifeteen year old Keith Richards that he’d become rich beyond imagining for playing this back door music he’d think you were crackers.

But again there’s time and place. Sure Richards plays wicked guitar and the Stones are one of the best bands in the world. They click and it’s a pleasure to hear them play even when they’re awful. But time and place. The world had gone through decades of deprivation and grey faced discipline, bad food, shabby clothes and marching up and down the square. This was a new generation and it wanted to shake it’s arse. Such Dionysian gaisers after decades of repression make big waves in the cultural waterways. A whole pantheon of legendary figures appeared between 1950 and 1975. Often not doing all that much. James Dean’s immortallity rests on three pictures, a catalogue of foxy photos and one spectacular death!!

Now we’ve had sixty years of people wanting to be guitar gods and screen idols. And for exactly the same reason they used to work for Wall Street. Money and power. People are crawling over each other to be famous. And less and less do they have to do anything worthwhile to get there. A pimple treatment infomerical featuring a swag of the famously mediocre wearing extremely serious expressions as they discuss blemishes as if they were the Third World Debt. My favourite is Jessica Simpson the icon for what one can achieve if you swap dignity for fame. With that zap-eyed look of the media crazy she announces that she has cameras on her face twenty-four hours a day as if it’s a massive accomplishment.

And it is! She has been working at it her whole life. Her schtick is to do whatever various armies of publicists, journalists, choreographers, directors, photographers, producers, executives and stylists want her to. It is hard work I’m not being sarcastic. But there is absolutely nothing memorable about anything she does. It’s all fast food wrapping to be dispensed with likewise. The originality of Chaplin and Richards are gone. People are following a template that is less exciting then the career path of a chartered accountant.

Which brings me back to blogging and other related internet activity. Blogging is underground. People have to seek you out. There’s no money in it, there’s no recognition much. People do it for a variety of reasons. But they don’t do it for the same reasons that people go to Wall Street. It it a waste of time? Depends on your terms, but the phenomena at least is interesting. Even if the results are frequently not.

Wed Sep 20 2006

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist. I don’t believe aliens built the pyramids either. But Andrew Bolt’s tirade against “insane” academics who believe the United States goverment responsible for September 11 made me curious. For the uninitiated, Bolt is Melbourne’s resident right-wing mouthpiece. Andrew provided a link on his blog to a Brit newspaper’s URL and their piece on the subject. They shared Andrew’s point-of-view re. the immorality of even considering such a thing.

God bless the Internet brothers and sisters. Unsatisfied, I found these people for myself: Scholars for 9/11 Truth sounds like Lisa Simpson’s nerdy superfriends. To date I’ve only read one piece on the site: Steven Jones’s “Why Indeed Did the World Trade Centre Collapse”.

Interesting. Dr. Jones DOES NOT advocate any conspiracy. He simply posits 13 reasons why he thinks the official report - largely compiled by the National Institute of Science and Technology - is bogus. The 13 points are all based on evidence. I wouldn’t call it conclusive but I’ve still to read anything that brings it down.

A good try, published in eSKEPTIC on Sep 11’s 5th anniversary.9/11 Conspiracy Theories: the 9/11 truth Movement in Perspective, is Phil Mole’s. Mole’s article is not specifically aimed at Jones but at the 9/11 Truth Movement in general. The ‘movement’ is a convenient collective noun for a range of persons from those with unanswered questions like 9/11 relatives or Dr. Jones to (I suppose) utter nutbags. I can’t really say, I haven’t read them all. The 9/11 truth ‘movement’ will get you a million plus hits on Google. And I’m not much for conspiracy theories.

Mr. Moles article deals both with the Pentagon and WTC alternate theories. I’m only going to deal (briefly) with his attempts to debunk Dr. Jones’ hypothesis re the WTC collapse.

Mole states that the twin towers do not collapse straight down one floor on top of another but that the halves of the buildings above the impact points weaken and buckle first. That’s true. Jones doesn’t say otherwise. Mole acknowledges that the temperatures inside the towers on impact would not have exceeded 1000 degrees farenheit (when will Americans convert to metric, Bloody hell!) far short of the temparature required to melt steel. However it is hot enough to weaken steel by half. The structure then buckles and down it all comes. He goes on to say (like the NIST report) that the molten metal was probably aluminium.

He does not mention that there was molten metal at the base of all three doomed WTC buildings for weeks. Dr. Jones does. He also counters the aluminium theory.

During and after the collapse a red to yellow hot liquid metal was observed. Indeed weeks after the event molten metal still glowed red-yellow beneath the rubble. Trouble is Aluminium does not glow red-yellow in daylight. It only glows a bit and looks silvery grey. Mole either ignores Jones on this point or didn’t read the article. Moreover Mole fails address Jones’other objections including NIST’s tweaking of computer models to make their hypothesis work, the fact that before Sep. 11 no skyscraper ever collapsed because of fire and the eyewitness accounts of several explosions in the buildings on that day.

I’m still not advocating any conspiracy theory. But a very good case has been made questioning the official story with no sufficient answers. Dr. Jones’s article by itself doesn’t prove US government calluding. It simply throws the standing story into disrepute and calls for further investigation. Of course it implies a collosal cover-up.

Why would the United states Government cover up the truth? And how could such a gigantic conspiracy be organised and kept secret? Good questions and very difficult to answer. But Dr. Jones’s article does present solid scientific doubts about the standing story and like him I think they deserve addressing. So far the only response has been hysterical cries of “nutcase”.

More on this later.this later.

Thur Sep 14 2006

Yesterday the left indulged one of it’s most cherished and useless rituals: the rally and march. The subject is the war on terror, war in Iraq, anti-terrorism legislation and the plight of “Jihad Jack” Thomas the Australian muslim who was prosecuted under said legislation and locked up for a good long while. According to Jack and his advocates it was a wrong place, wrong time scenario. He was in Afghanistan on September 11, 2001. I don’t know what Jack Thomas is into. He might be the nicest guy in the world, hell bent on blowing up the building I’m writing in or both! For all I know in these bullshit for news days he doesn’t exist. But that’s another story. What’s really up my nose this afternoon is how the left insists on outmoded and predictable tactics to “take a stand” accomplishing absolutely nothing.

It was a small crowd with enourmous flags. Amplified catalogues of injustice echoed off disinterested buildings; the left are addicted to loudspeakers. Within seconds the area was covered in Socialist Alliance posters - what would they do without photcopiers? . For such an innocuous event the police presence was substantial: six mounted cops, two paddy wagons and a bicycle squad. They almost outnumbered the crowd. Still I never saw a truncheon or a gun so it’s still democracy. I wondered if the cops came in with gas and truncheons swinging; how many of these people would’ve turned up?

Then the inevitable march to somewhere. The megaphone’d ringleader geared up the crowd with the usual cliches: the people united we’ll never be defeated; and that old classic: one two three four we don’t want no [insert appropriate adjective here] war. An hour or two of speeches and slogans outside some hapless building then to the pub to do the People’s Front of Judea routine.

Surely there’s something better.

At university I was involved in the ‘campaign’ against the reintroduction of tertiary fees. A meeting planning the usual protest-rally-march scenario with the usual list of factional egos giving the usual boring speeches. A few of us suggested that something else might be more effective. Most students had conflicting schedules and little time. A paltry rally would make the government’s case for them. And listening to speeches and shouting slogans is not most people’s idea of fun.

The point was to get on TV, create a media event. We suggested traffic disrupting street theatre to make a deft humourous point re. fees. Instead of the stereotypical screaming horde, there’d a succinct, well-crafted statement put across as a joke. A joke makes a political point more effectively than a slogan. The viewers would be more likely to understand our case and more receptive to it. Traffic would be disrupted intentionally, yes, to get on the tube you need drama. But it would be less disrupting than a march. And there would be fewer arrests. It was blown down without consideration. Many of the organisers were the aforementioned factional egos and loathe to miss out on their pathetic fifteen minutes of ‘fame’. And the suggestion required lateral thinking to understand, boldness to attempt and there was very little of either in the room.

The whole student ‘movement’ re. opposition to the reintroduction of fees was a farce. Many of the ‘movement’s’ leaders were in the ALP and didn’t want to rock their future careers by sabotaging government policy. They in fact supported the policy but refused to say so openly. Other parts of the leadership (myself included) were more interested in romantic leftist posturing than in dull political nitty-gritty. But it was the complete absence of any will to win that really made it a non-starter. The ingrained, unspoken conviction that we would not and could not prevail.

Of course others thought that we would win simply by simply turning up and starting a riot. We just needed, to cite Hunter S. Thompson, more of the speed that fuelled the sixties. Relying on some organic mass-movement pulsation to effect meaningful change is like relying on the Sunday horoscope to plot a course to Mars. It’s sloppy, wishful thinking and it won’t work.

Sloppy thinking is also one of the left’s cherished rituals. Consider the phrase: anti-globalisation movement. This commonly refers to a disparate set of groups and individuals who organise protests outside various economic/trade conferences. They think that globalisation and multi-national corporations are a modern evil and they fly all over the world and use the internet to say so.

Hello?

Granted the portrayal of the anti-globalistaion movement’s activities is a mainstream media caricature but I’ve yet to see a more sophisticated self-portrayal by the ‘movement’. They can’t even create a more accurate collective name for themselves. Even its more articulate advocates like Naomi Klein fail to provide constructive alternatives. No Logo is a well written, relevant description of global capitalism. Linking the logotypes of contemporary textiles back through the corporate matrix to virtually enslaved factory workers is a good start demonstrating things are fucked up. But so what. The feel-good ideas of Ms. Klein and the rest of the left re. the way the world should work are great as long as they don’t have to be tested in the real world. Progressive writers are abundant. What’s really needed are progressive industrialists.

The Brazilian firm SEMCO: is a functioning industrial democracy. The normal management heirarchy has been replaced by a decentralised structure underwritten by profit-sharing, universal accountability and open finances. No matter what job you have at SEMCO you’re entitled to know the finances of the company and trained to understand them if you can’t. The process is open and free. Marks of privilege and staus are banned. No plush chairs or big offices. The CEO does his own photocopying. The result is a firm that has persisted and grown through highly volatile times with little bloodshed. It works because it’s better. And it’s not just easier on the factory floor but on executives as well.

The life of modern corporate executives although rich in privilege, status and power is stressful and tends to exclude other aspects of life. Much of the energy expended by those at the ‘top’ goes toward keeping their subordinates in line. Monitoring their work, auditing their time, kicking their butts etc. If you remove status privileges and link the prosperity of the company directly to the prosperity of every employee you remove the labour-management conflict saving a massive amount of energy. Energy that can be spent making the enterprise more competitive.

Semlar didn’t intend to make SEMCO a democracy when he inherited the business. He simply wanted to modernise it. The resulting stress made him think he had cancer. He began to delegate the burden and ended up creating a democratic company. By the time he finished he was able to take two months off each year.

But Semlar is not fashionable among the activist set. At a party I got into a pointless argument with a member of one of the left fringe groups. I forget which. It had to do with ‘revolution’. The dolt naturally thought ‘revolution’ was the next step up from the rally-protest-riot. So many people get on to the streets that parliament, the army, the banks and the cops crumble to dust and divine light breaks through the clouds announcing the dawn of Utopia.

I tried to explain to him that this is not what Marx meant by revolution. Strangely the fellow, a self-proclaimed marxist, hadn’t read a word. Don’t blame him it’s dull. But what Marx meant was a shift from one economic model to another i.e. from a feudal-agricultural economy to a capitalist-industrial one. Each shift is an improvement. And in fact according to the mature Marx, this kind of shift is the only one that matters. Political activity is sort of a skin on the top of the economic soup. Marches, rallies and riots are part of the system not a force for changing it.

I tried to explain SEMCO as a functional form of ’socialism’: economic democracy. He wasn’t interested. No reason. He simply refused to believe that a private enterprise could be a catylyst for social progress. Like Ned Flander’s TV set; most of his channels were blocked. At the end he just looked at me (with pity!) and said: all you’ve got are ideas, I’ve got an ideaology.

Sat Sep 23 2006

George Orwell, Eric Blair to his friends, inspired me to my vocation. Until I was twelve I was headed to the sciences. I wanted to be a physicist: astrophysics or atomic. I couldn’t decide. I’d read quite a bit of quality literature by that time. The short stories of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allen Poe which I still love. Mainly I liked science fiction. Stories that were drawn from real possibilities opened up by the discoveries of the twentieth century: space travel, time travel. It was to satisfy this taste that I picked up a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four whilst a very unhappy boarding school student.

It was the first time I learnt a book can change your life. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a complex book. It isn’t merely a criticism of totalitarianism. It’s a satire deriding the self-image both of the new order visions of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia but also of the Western democracies of it’s time. For Orwell there was very little separating them. The blind obedience to authority, the conveniently flexible memory, the demonising of enemies for doing exactly the same things one’s own army was doing.

Orwell started me on the path to becoming a writer.

After school I drifted into Campus politics and, for a while, I succumbed to ideology. I became a tape recording. It was not a natural disposition and it didn’t last long. I had a deep interest in social progress; in improving civilization to the extent that human lives would become more than just an exercise on the money machine. Naturall the ‘radical’ ideologies challenging the status quo interested me. Various political and artistic ‘isms’ that might carve a path to a better place to be.

This was the beginning of nineties and members of the 60s generation were everywhere ascending to authority. Change marked the culture. It was no longer just about football and beer. There were urbane people making sophisticated noises. Homosexuality became visible. Different points of view, different cultures were celebrated not concealed.

The downside came in the moral paranoia and secular puritanism collectively know as political correctness. Often this was just pure hatred expressed by the idiotic ranting of gramaphone minds. Common sense, good humour and courtesy were almost totally absent. Taste was not a matter of personal choice but an emblem of political and moral ’soundness’. Free thought was purged. I found myself unable to say what I wanted among many of my peers.

The mindset had little to do with anything relevant or meaningful. It sabotaged the possibility of change rather than promoting it. What profit in declaring the law an unsuitable career for a woman on feminist grounds! The ‘reason’ - the field’s pervasive stench of masculinity. Better to go and weave baskets instead. Don’t laugh this was actually promoted at a conference I attended.

More the use of a pseudo-technical, virtually unreadable jargon became compulsory. I remember doing my post-graduate thesis using a thesaurus. I’d constantly be on the look out for a more complicated and less clear way of saying simple things. This language disease is an epidemic in my generation. I don’t point the finger I succumbed myself. It’s use of scientific symbols and words to make itself sound important, radical or deep created plain ugliness passed on to subsequent generations. English classes now teach the construction of narratives and discourses as opposed to simply writing stories and essays.

French theorists are worshipped and taken literally when often they are using wild hyperbole. Roland Barthes, in response to the New Criticism, declares the death of the author. He means to direct literary criticism away from biography to more textual questions. But that doesn’t sound quite dramatic enough so: the author is dead!

And we’ve taken him literally to the extent that a colleague of mine commenced her PhD thesis by declaring her thesis was going to argue such and such. Theses don’t argue. The thesis is the argument. The argument is made by a human. This is common sense but common sense is banned in the contemporary humanities.

I did it too, I confess: thesaurus abuse. the police should interfere. I had abandoned Orwell. Never use a long word when a short one suffices. Is it possible to cut a word, do it. Simple rules for the creation of clear a beautiful prose. I had forgotten.

Nineteen Eighty-Four reveals the nature of freedom of thought. Oceanic society is oppressive because reality is controlled by the collective human will to simply ignore what is inconveniently ‘out there’. People disappear for political reasons, the correct response is simply to forget they ever existed. Winston Smith writes correctly that ‘freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4. If that is granted all else follows.” It is on this point that he suffers most greatly at the electric rack. O’Brian must make him see five where there are four.

Freedom in other words comes from believing what own senses regardless of what others think: ergo the empirical method. But the Left has taken cultural relativism way past the point of useful application Truth is held to be a completely human construct. Even scientific knowledge is a human construct. The implication is that chemical, biological, physical facts are actually culturally dependant. They are customary. There is no world outside the human mind.

Of course this is complete horseshit.

What Orwell understood so well is that the problem with the Left is that it does not have enough regard for certain ‘bourgeois’ traits. For example: freedom of speech, multi-party democracy, freedom of association, the right to privacy, the seperation of the judiciary, legislature, executive and law enforcement aspects of government.

These attributes of capitalist society represent real and important advances in human society. Why? Because they limit the power of the authorities over the individual. Indeed they ensure that authority itself must succumb to higher authority. It is a structure that allows people to think and speak freely and the benefits are enormous.

The Left often neither respects nor understands these things. I remember recently seeing a tiresome ’speaker’s forum’. The ringleader was a woman railing at the government. She spoke of free speech and democracy as precious things threatened. Afterwards a man started to give a badly thought out case for Intelligent Design. He couldn’t be heard above the shrill, screaming of the former speaker effectively drowning him out. Funny, she’d just cited Voltaire: I don’t agree with what you say but I’ll fight for your right to say it. Fight? She could even shut up and listen like a civilized person.

The Right is in ascendency all over these days. Social welfare and public services rolled back for laissez-faire capitalism. Newspapers and media are stuffed with pompous Tory populism disguising itself as the thought of the common people. The Left is discredited and marginallised.

Sure there are fine Left-wing writers but they continue to plug into a select section of the Intelligensia without being heard by a wider public. Time was the Left knew how to talk to Joe Sixpack. Those times they changed. Meantime we have media polls asking ordinary people if they think torture might be okay in certian circumstances. How long will it be before we go back to the world that preceeded the Enlightenment?

Our world resembles Oceania more than we think it does. Institutions like the US National Security Agency monitor billions of daily communication, the internet provides the individual with a cheap method of global self-expression, but it also provides various institutions with a lot of information on the individual. The endless War on Terror bears a certain resemblance to Oceania’s constant war? True, we haven’t Newspeak or thoughtcrime. But obfuscation is the politician’s standard tactic. And so many opinions and very few facts make it quite difficult to find the truth out about anything. How does one examine the veracity of a standard edition of the morning paper?

I don’t know. What I do know is that democratic institutions must be defended and strengthened and that the left must do this. To do this the hysterical, fist waving march and rally addict must recede and give way to a more conscientous, civilized and intelligent figure. A figure like the tall, thin man in corduroy who once declared: the enemy is the gramaphone mind.

Wed Sep 13 2006

First thing in the morning five years, one day ago; I remember. My flatmate was giggling nervously against the usual background of morning TV bullshit. The bullshit was normal but the giggling wasn’t. My eyes focused halfway thru my first caffeine fix on the smouldering twin towers. The coffee ran cold. The normal TV bullshit wasn’t the normal TV bullshit, not today.

Like a chain smoker expects lung cancer to show up; I knew it was coming. But I wasn’t expecting it that morning. Not then. That’s the first thing I thought NOT NOW!! There’s a cowboy in the White House and a toady in the Lodge. But who better to pick a fight with than people who’ll start one without thinking twice or even once.

The next thing I thought (callously) was at least they didn’t get any of the really important buildings. They didn’t get the Chrysler building, they didn’t get the Empire State. That was cold, but I have to admit it. The effects of TV brothers and sisters, you see death and disaster every day and the experience makes it somehow unreal. I was thinking of the architecture.

Then I began to think about the real people getting killed. And all the real people who were about to get killed. And most of them just doing whatever it was they do. In New York, in Afghanistan, in Iraq still. Ordinary people who have no control over events losing limbs, and loved ones, their lives because of decisions taken by shady persons unknown.

I worked with three Muslim women at the time. No-one said anything disparaging that day. Not to them, they were well-liked. But the next day two of them were late because of abuse suffered at the tram stop. The third, Turkish, didn’t wear a headscarf ’til then. She favoured the modern style. But after that she wore one every day. Solidarity, if muslims were to be abused she’d take it on the chin like the rest of them. Something still not understood these days.

Now the country’s awash with anti-muslim this and that. All maintained under a facade of “Australian values”. But what we really mean is choose: “us or them”. It’s almost as if the failure of muslims to overtly support everything America’s done in the middle-east is an active declaration of support for terrorism. The middle ground has fallen away like an earthquake chasm. People have to cling to one side or the other, flinging stones across.

And what’s the result? An invasion of Afghanistan resulting in that country reverting (again) to medieval fragments. An endless, increasingly complicated insurgency war in Iraq for some reason. Sure Hussein’s a bastard but he wasn’t involved in 9/11. And we were doing business with him til recently. If we want to spread democracy why don’t we start with Burma? They have an elected leader who’s now in her second decade under house arrest. They want democracy. Or why don’t we improve our own democracies, lead by example?

Sadly not. Instead our democratic rights have been rolled back in the name of preserving our democratic rights. And the hypocrisy which so infuriates the rests of the world has been amplified. We simply refuse to admit any culbability in this our new world scenario. This is the test brothers and sisters. Democracy - use it or we lose it.

I remember many hushed and extremely diplomatic private conversations that day. People dancing around their own opinions. Trying to say the right thing. Walking to the pub a friend and I heard someone say: “yeah. I’m glad America got it!” on the phone. We laughed. Cold again but we couldn’t help it. No-one had said it but everyone was thinking it.

Now all I can do is light a candle. A useless tribute to the hundred thousands plus who’ve perished. And all those still to come. AMEN

Tuesday Sep 12 2006