Beyond Time

I wrote a few days ago about how an entire generation is passing away around us. I was referring to the 'great generation', those who witnessed and served in the Second World War. But on Monday one of the last surviviors of the generation before that - those who survived the trenches, the 'Lost Generation', passed away. His name was Alfred Anderson, he was the last living witness of the Christmas Truce. Here is the news:

Christmas Day truce veteran dies, aged 109

In 1914 Alfred Anderson witnessed one of the first world war's most remarkable events

Gerard Seenan
Tuesday November 22, 2005

Guardian

The last soldier to have served during the first world war's Christmas truce in 1914 died peacefully in his sleep yesterday aged 109.

Alfred Anderson, who was also the oldest man in Scotland, died at a care home in Angus, bringing to an end a life which spanned three centuries and marking the end of a generation who were witness to one of the most remarkable events of the great war. Mr Anderson fought with the 5th Battalion the Black Watch and was the last surviving veteran to have served during the 1914 truce. There are now believed to be only eight survivors of the first world war left in Britain.

The former soldier was 18 when he was sent to the western front. Although he was stationed back from the frontlines when the truce broke out, he remembered the silence of temporary peace and shouting out "Merry Christmas" when he and his friends first heard it.

Announcing his death yesterday, the Rev Neil Gardner, minister at his church in Alyth, Perthshire, said: "He was Scotland's oldest man but he remained lucid almost until the end. He was a very gracious and unassuming man. He ... lived a truly remarkable life."

Shortly after dawn on Christmas Day 1914, the sound of Silent Night, or Stille Nacht, was heard from behind German lines. As the carol ended, a German soldier appeared in no-man's land. "Merry Christmas. We not shoot. You not shoot," he is reported to have said. It was the beginning of an unauthorised truce that would gradually spread across the 500-mile front, where more than a million men were stationed. Soldiers from both sides shook hands, sang carols and played football. In some parts the ceasefire lasted for weeks, but Mr Anderson heard gunfire by afternoon.

Lieutenant Colonel Roddy Riddell, regimental secretary of the Black Watch, said the death of Mr Anderson, whose funeral is expected to take place on Friday, was the "end of an epoch". In 1998, Mr Anderson was awarded France's highest honour, the Légion d'Honneur, for his services during the first world war. In interviews, he said he never forgot the trenches. "I saw so much horror," he told the Observer last year. "I lost so many friends."

Jack McConnell, Scotland's first minister, said the sacrifices that Mr Anderson and his generation of young Scottish men made and the horrors they endured must never be forgotten.

I find this information very moving and I think I understand why... but not entirely.

I've always been moved by the idea of people who live beyond time. Over the last five years many moments in art that I've found most profound, at a quite simple and deep level, were to do with this.

That sequence in Spielberg's AI where the android child and his robot teddy bear emerge thousands of years into the future, in a time where humans have ceased to exist and yet... The one memory that gives the child peace is a mundane & simple one: his human mother putting him to bed in a suburban home that was lost to dust thousands of years before.

The climax of 6 Feet Under, which travels deep into the future to see each character's death, including one who lives 102 years to 2085. Many are visited spiritually at the moment they expire by a loved one from the past - in other words, from our own present that seems so visceral and important now and soon will just be memory.

Finally, the chapter in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas called Sloosha's Crossing An' Everythin' After. Written in the manner of a primitive Huck Finn, it charts the life of a tribesman called Zach'ry, who lives far in a post-post-Apocalyptic future (we've gone so far, we've already had and survived apocalyptic wars which ensue from this time). Zach'ry represents a line of humans who've surpassed the age of exploration, the World Wars, this time, an advanced post-religious era many centuries after ours and then... Unknown to him, Zachary witnesses the last death of civilization's light. What he sees, is the end of human endeavour and there's nothing to follow it.

Everything dies and crumbles to dust. But it's not just the thought of weeds growing in the carcasses of skyscrapers - itself a deep, powerful image - it's the idea of people living so long, witnessing so much they themselves become remote islands in a sea of memory. The last remaining witnesses to civilizations past and forgotten. And there is something in the loneliness and historical depth of that that moves me intensely.

Alfred Anderson's first memory was of soldiers from the Boer war holding him on their shoulders as they returned home. He fought in the trenches of a war that seems to have lost all meaning now, just the cruel and violent carnage of mud and iron. He saw the descent to the Second World War, death camps and atom bombs, the rise and fall of communism, moon landings, environmental ruin and he ended up now, marooned in our age so far from where he started and so far from that epochal moment of his and so many of his comrades' lives: when a German soldier walked uncertainly across No Mans land waving a white cloth one freezing day in 1914.

And now, Alfred's gone and we're alone. All we have left are the recorded memories, the documents and... We too will be slowly marooned as time moves on.

So RIP Alfred, and the others from your time: rest in peace. Wherever you are, we'll be joining you soon. And then, others will mourn what we have seen and known.

Proverbs 6: 16-19

'A Warning against Idleness & Falshood':

16	These six things doth the LORD hate; yea, seven are an abomination unto him:
17	a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood,
18	a heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief,
19	a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.

This is not 'The Onion'

It has been widely reported that socialite Paris Hilton was attacked by her pet monkey, Baby Luv, as she shopped for bras in Los Angeles.

Lives

Over the last few years, I found myself starting to read the obituary pages. We may not fully realise it yet, but an extraordinary generation is dying off around us and some of their lives are quite simply - beyond fiction.

But there are incredible lives that have been lived, containing amazing stories to be told whatever the generation. Epic journeys from one state of living to another, like the one this man took:

CP Ellis

A reformed white racist, he fought for black workers

Christopher Reed
Friday November 18, 2005

The remarkable journey of CP Ellis, who has died aged 78, took him from leadership within the Ku Klux Klan to lifelong friendship with an African-American activist and welfare mother, who once took a knife to him after hearing his racial obscenities.

His relationship with Ann Atwater, who attended his funeral, became the subject of a book and a documentary film, and was the favourite of all the interviews conducted by Studs Terkel. Terkel included his discussion with Ellis in two of his books, describing it as confirmation of his optimism about the human condition. "It showed we can change our minds," he said.

Article continues

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Ellis, who preferred to be known by his initials, southern style, summed up his experience in a pithy political pronouncement. "It finally came to me," he said, "that I had more in common with poor black people than I did with rich white ones."

Ellis was born into a poor family in the tobacco and textile town of Durham, North Carolina. His father was a mill worker - and a Ku Klux Klansman who hated blacks, Jews, Roman Catholics and liberals in that order, and taught his son to think the same way. Young Ellis failed at school and on the job market, mostly working as a janitor.

He had married while still young and fathered three children, the youngest of whom was born blind. Ellis found that no matter how hard he strived, he never had enough money to keep his family in a decent condition. "I worked my butt off and never seemed to break even," he told Terkel. "They say abide by the law, go to church, do right and live for the Lord, and everything will work out. It didn't work out. It kept gettin' worse. I began to get bitter."

Ellis concluded that his misery was the fault of Durham's black population, and he joined the KKK. He recalled his induction for Terkel. "I'll never forget the night when they put the white robe on me and the hood, and I was led down the hall and knelt before the illuminated cross. It was thrilling. Me, this poor little ol' boy, a nobody, felt like somebody."

He became the Exalted Grand Cyclops, or local leader, of the Durham klan and attended city council meetings armed. It was in 1968, at one of these gatherings, that Atwater tried to stab Ellis. They met again in 1971 when they were asked to join a discussion group on educational desegregation. Ellis took a machine gun with him.

To their mutual astonishment, the pair were voted co-chairmen of the meeting, which lasted for 10 days. They spent 12 hours of each day arguing, but gradually found that they agreed on many points. Ellis said he realised they had much in common: poverty, hard work and exploitation by others.

By the end of the session, Ellis had decided to leave the KKK and publicly tore up his membership card. Over the years he suffered insults and ostracism from former white friends, and struggled with alcoholism. But he found a job as an organiser of the mainly black women members of the International Union of Operating Engineers, which included janitors, and stayed there until retirement.

His friendship with Atwater continued, and they appeared together at meetings. Osha Gray Davidson's book about their story, Best of Enemies, appeared in 1996 and they were the subject of an award-winning documentary, An Unlikely Friendship, in 2002. Ellis is survived by three sons and a daughter.

· Claiborne Paul Ellis, union organiser, born January 8 1927; died November 3 2005

And then the Emperor Hid Pt.2

This is a good recap of all the GWB's having a drunken paranoid breakdown rumours over the last few months.

I have to say, reading all the above, the White house seems to resemble a cross between a Douglas Sirk movie and Dr Strangelove - whichever way you cut it: the bonkers satire and the bloviated melodrama remain.

The picture that emerges is quite dizzying: in the Oval Office GW knocks back the sauce like Robert Stack in Written on the Wind as Laura B pops valiums in the staff pantry to refreeze her Stepford Wife smile. Karl Rove gets blown by Jeff Gannon in the Lincoln Bedroom, and the Bush Twins do naked tequila limbos in front of repression-ravaged bodyguards in the Nixon Bowling Alley for Girls Gone Wild - Rose Garden Special, the Veep lurches at the nuke button - inbetween his 341st and 342nd heart attack, buzzed back to life by Pentagon-issue defibrillators - and Scott McLellan stands on the podium drenched in nervous sweat proclaiming milk, honey and business as usual.... Sweet weeping Jesus.

One thing you have to say about Clinton - a middle age guy getting a hummer from his impressionable intern is real life.

This shit? It's pure soap.

And by the way, the Nixon Bowling Alley is no joke:

And then the Emperor Hid

Oy-oy-oy-oy-fucking-oy.

Reports from the hard-Republican Washington Times say that embattled Bush has entered full paranoid emperor mode:

The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions.

I don't know about you but this just makes me think: Caligula, Nero, decline, fall.

When the most powerful man in the world retreats into the company of adoring and manipulative women in order to come to turns with his zeppelin-size father complex.... Jesus, forget Rome, switch to Greece: anyone say 'Oedipus'? Make that, Oedipus with a quart of Maker's Mark. Some primo blow. And God-knows-what medication Dr Feelgood - Dr Tubb I believe is the name - has him jacked on.

Read this for more detail. And shudder. I hate this White house as much, no - more, than the next man. But an emotional meltdown, chaos and power vacuum in the leadership of the most powerful nation on earth is a very very very bad thing. It only spells one thing: big trouble.

We're so lucky, huh? We have ringside seats to some very interesting times indeed.

Bush Drunk?

The stories have been out there for a while but... Judge for yourself.

The guy's certainly in a whole heap of pain, he's an ex-alcoholic (an untreated ex-alcoholic: it's his discovery of religion that he claims cured him of the sickness) and as his bizarre behaviour on September 11th showed: he doesn't handle pressure well.

New Choices

From todays Guardian interview with Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's old campaign manager and new communications guru:

"When I first started the Dean campaign there were something like 4,000 blogs worldwide," he claims. "There are now 20m and growing. It's an entirely new development - the arrival of the two-way printing press. We have had the one-way press around for centuries, but when you have a two-way press it means that people can actually have a conversation with each other on equal terms. Mobile technology, blogging technology, gives people the ability to connect with each other from the bottom up. It'll do for 21st-century politics what print did for the 18th."

...

"This new technology puts power in the hands of the average citizen. It's a qualitative difference, totally different from all previous democracies. In the Dean campaign, people realised, 'Wow! We can really connect and change the established way of doing things.' And they did. We began with 432 people nationwide. That grew to 650,000 and we raised more money than any other candidate in history. And it's not just presidential elections. Look at global warming. Is it going to be solved because the leaders do something? Or because hundreds of millions of people do something?"

...

What does that mean for the next presidential election, in 2008? "I think there's a good chance that a third person - a third party if you will - is going to emerge, with the power of blog behind them. It has to be from outside. The Democratic party crushed Dean from within. The party will never change from within. In the past you couldn't leave the party. Where were you going to get the money for an effective campaign? Howard Dean showed how - from bottom-up subscriptions of a few bucks. That says to me that very soon, somebody is going to step out of the two-party apparatus. I'm not talking about someone mega-rich such as Ross Perot. I'm talking about a credible party leader who steps out and says, 'You know, we don't need the traditional two parties any more.'"

So the age of the political machine is over? "Yes. The new machinery is in the hands of the people and it's blogging and it's mobile phones. There are those who say you can't change a political system that's as busted as ours. There are others who are realising that, because of blogs and the other new technologies, you can make a change. Democracy is in a lot of hurt right now and the only thing that's going to save it is getting people back into the process. These technologies are coming online just in the nick of time because this world is in a mess of trouble and it's not going to get solved unless we all connect with each other and start to work in common cause."

I agree with pretty much all of this. Not because I'm a pie-in-the-sky idealist - although I do think there are alot more practicable solutions out there than we're made aware of, and that's a theme I'll be returning to in far greater detail - but because the basic foundation of Trippi's argument is correct: this is the first time since the printing press that the technology of mass communication has become so freely available. Before now, the machinery of mass communication was always a corporation, or a tycoon's game - making newspaper, TV or radio news content isn't necessarily very expensive - distributing it widely, is.

But that's changed with the internet, phone technology, things like blogs and other cheap, popular formats that no doubt are yet to be invented and that has to translate into how we effect politics.

There have always been large groups of politically active people who feel unrepresented and seek change, the rise of these technologies and the capability to raise finance in small amounts from large groups of people has to have an impact - a qualitative impact that affects the entire terrain rather than just the capabilities of one party or another.

That has to be reason to hope.

A Saudi Saying:

"My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."

Liquid Life

When an eighty year old East European intellectual with several major works to his name, a mind like a razorblade and a cheekily saturnine bearing that belies his age pipes up, I shut up and listen.

This chap, Zygmunt Bauman, is one of the most important living sociologists:

In a paper called Living in Utopia (the second of three Miliband Lectures he has just given in London), Bauman argues that our search for utopias was a dream of a world with no accidents and, thus, no fear. Utopias were, he says, like the greyhounds' rabbit - pursued, but never captured.

Even the dimmest undergraduate will notice that the age of catastrophe has not ended and that we are hardly living in a utopia. The emeritus professor of sociology at Leeds University, as befits a Polish-Jewish intellectual readily if unfairly written up as a gloomy sod, draws the glum inference that those 150 years of enlightenment effort - all the sweat, ingenious invention, engineering triumphs, medical advances - didn't really achieve the main job. Our fate is to be like Auden sitting in a dive on 52nd Street watching our ancestors' clever hopes expire and becoming uncertain and afraid.

"What in the 18th century seems to be a great leap forward was not. What happened in those years was just a detour. We've just returned to the starting point after all this tremendous investment in science and technology. The difference now is that we no longer trust the future or believe in progress, we are without the illusions that sustained the modern project. Have a grape."

Fascinating. And as for this, it's chillingly accurate and ruthlessly perceptive:

He argues: "Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis."

There is not just fear of a collective disaster, Bauman argues, but of personal disaster - the humiliating fear of falling among the worst off or otherwise ostracised. "That is the fear - that I will be thrown away from the party and that is in popular ideology - if you watch Big Brother and Lady Robinson." Lady Robinson? "The Weakest Link lady." Ah. "The Weakest Link is all about exclusion. In Big Brother the element of exclusion comes once a week, in The Weakest Link it is all the time."

Bauman's 2003 book Liquid Love tackles this issue of exclusion for us "liquid moderns", who have lost faith in the future, cannot commit to relationships and have few kinship ties. We incessantly have to use our skills, wits and dedication to create provisional bonds that are loose enough to stop suffocation, but tight enough to give a needed sense of security now that the traditional sources of solace (family, career, loving relationships) are less reliable than ever. Bauman finds his liquid modern hero working everywhere - jabbering into mobile phones, addictively texting, leaping from one chatroom to another. The liquid modern is forever at work, forever replacing quality of relationship with quantity - always panicking about being left behind or becoming obsolete.

The entire interview is here. Slow down your liquid life for ten minutes, use the time to read it.

...and another...

The one they call The Doctor writes in response to my Cheney screed... erm... I mean, learned disquisition upon the matter of the Vice President:

There is of course the other way to look at Cheney. Cheney the survivor. Cheney the main-chancer. Cheney, from my perspective, always thinks of one thing: How am I gonna get my next job?

Remember it was Cheney that set up his own job at Halliburton by lobbying hard during the first Bush administration for the Armed Forces to use more independent contracting. That move landed him the CEO gig at Halliburton, and allowed him to whiz around the country in corporate jets while the DEMs held the white house.

And, of course, even more famously, when put in charge of W's VP search committee, he set parameters that only he had and got the gig. Cheney had pulled a similar move in the Ford administration, becoming the youngest Chief of Staff in history.

Yup, Cheney's an idiot. Flunking out of Yale, especially in 1959, took real effort. But I think he knows he's an idiot, and therefore has focused on keeping and getting better jobs. Relying on the maxim: If you're in the room, you must belong there. Cheney gets in a lot of good rooms, and stays in most of them.

Which is, of course, entirely right. Cheney has shown an astonishing ability to better himself and gild his own pocket. Not entirely pleasant, but one wouldn't call a man an idiot for that. The reason why Cheney's a true idiot - a Neville Chamberlain, Louis XVI level idiot - is this: his actions have consistently damaged the same interests he so fanatically promotes: Republican governance, the stock value of the corporations he sits on, his most valued aide.

The consequences of his actions bring about the very things he wants to avoid.

And that is the mark of the idiot.

Postscript...

... to the post below.

Like manna from heaven this video clip neatly confirms my Cheney-is-full-of-shit- but-delivers-it-like-a-CEO theme.

Thing about arrogant bastards is... they get cocky. Like a bad curry, inflated with hubris. And sooner or later, it gets real easy to nail their lies to the fucking wall.

The Idiot

OK, let's discuss Dick Cheney.

Why?

He's been in the news lately what with his Chief of Stafff getting indicted on five counts of perjury, stories out of class about a rift with the Dubya - kind of like one of those movies where the ventriloquist's dummy turns on its master I guess - and his rather unseemly determination to have torture ratified by Congress.

But here's another thing you may not know about Cheney: he's a fucking idiot.

I mean literally, a fucking idiot. As in, he fucks - has two daughters - and he is an idiot. A five alarm shitstorm of a human being. A walking disaster engine who's never made a good call in his entire life. A fool. A putz. A dumkopft. A clown. In my country we say... Stupid twat.

You're surprised. I know you are. You see, like everyone else you thought that Dick Cheney, though evil, was a smart guy. Competent. Controlled. On it. The wise man in the WH. That way he speaks low, reeling off facts and figures, that kind of low-key corporate mandarin schtick he has down to a tee just reeks of mastery and knowledge. And also the fact that so many of the cyborg race we call news presenters go around saying how damn smart the guy is.

OK.

The moment when I first realized Cheney was a power tool was when I watched last year's vice Presidential debate. During that hour of fascinating TV - like a late Beckett play in which both participants were seated behind a table as if on a date, only visible Davros-style from the waist up they never once looked each other in the eye - Cheney did his schtick. He talked low, reeling off facts and figures, the odd dispassionate nugget of - utterly crazed - analysis like he was chairing a board to evaluate Halliburton's quarterly profits. Very impressive. You could see why he did so well on the corporate circuit. You could also see why he lost those corporations so much money. Because everything Cheney said was nonsense. Not the kind of you have to go look it up and check it nonsense but instantly demonstrable nonsense. The kind of stuff you wouldn't take into a high school debate because the smart, worthy class snot across the podium from you would have you sliced-and-diced in half a minute of rebuttals.

Cheney reminded me of that kid - we all know him - you were at school with. The one who ostentatiously read the Financial times in break, he had a portfolio of phantom stocks he was following, a row of fountain pens and ballpoints clipped into his shirt pocket and he was the kind of creepy unctious one who tried to strike up conversation with the parents - I mean, fathers - about City deregualtion while the rest of you were divebombing into the wave machine at 12th birthday parties.

Precocious, creepy, entirely full of shit: that was what the adult Dick Cheney made me think of.

But see, here's the thing: the way someone wishes to be seen - lowkey, hardnosed corporate hand - is just that. The way they want things to be. What matters is the demonstrable truth. And that can be measured very clearly and effectively by a man's actions and the consequences.

So let's measure Dick:

In 1959, Tom Stroock, a Republican politician-businessman in Casper, Wyoming, got Cheney, then a senior at Natrona County High School, a scholarship to Yale. "He spent his time partying with guys who loved football," recalls one college friend. "His idea was, you didn't need to master the material," says another. "He passed one psych course without attending class or studying, and he was proud of that. But there are some things you can't bluff." Cheney flunked Yale after one year.

Then Vietnam came and the draft. Although he would later show great willingness to send other people into combat, Cheney himself was not so keen. He enrolled in Casper
Community College; then he went to the University of Wyoming. That kept
him out of the draft until August 7th, 1964, when Congress initiated conscription in the armed forces. Three weeks later, Cheney married Lynne Vincent, his high school girlfriend, earning him another deferment. On October 26th, 1965, the Selective Service announced
that childless married men no longer would be exempted from having to
fight for their country. : so nine months and two days later, the first of
Cheney's two daughters, Elizabeth, was born. Between 1963 and 1966, Cheney received five deferments by which point he was 26 and no longer eligible for the draft. Nice.

In 1974, Cheney was an assistant to the then White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld. They pushed President Ford to fire Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, ditch Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger too. Rumsfeld got secretary of defense, Cheney became chief of staff to the president. As the 1976 election approached, Rumsfeld and Cheney used the influence they'd wrested for themselves to persuade Ford to scuttle the Salt II treaty on nuclear-arms control. The move helped Ford stave off Reagan's challenge for the party's nomination -- but it delivered the GOP to the New Right. In the presidential election, Jimmy Carter defeated Ford by 2 million votes. In the aftermath of the defeat, Robert Novack wrote [see how these names keep recurring? It's like a Groundhog Day of sleaze & treachery] - "White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney . . . is blamed by Ford insiders for a succession of campaign blunders." Ford said that listening to Cheney's advice was "the biggest political mistake of my life."

In 1978, Cheney became a Congressman. Over the next decade, his voting record would suck big ones. Noted, even in the Reagan era, for being especially unpleasant - Cheney gave the kind of votes you just don't have to do unless you're a real jerk: In 1986, he was one of only twenty-one members of the House to oppose the Safe Drinking Water Act. He fought
efforts to clean up hazardous waste and backed tax breaks for energy corporations. He repeatedly voted against funding for the Veterans Administration. He opposed extending the Civil Rights Act. He opposed the release of Nelson Mandela from jail in South Africa. And he voted for cop-killer bullets.

Sweet.

In 1988 Cheney became Secretary of Defence. He pushed to turn many military duties over to private companies and began moving "defense intellectuals" with no military
experience into key posts at the Pentagon.

Convinced that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a complex ruse on behalf of the Soviets, he urged the 1st President Bush not to believe it.

Turning his attention to combat issues in the 1st Gulf War, he made tactical suggestions: "Having figured out that General Schwarkopf was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being "as bad as it could possibly be... But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn't die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney's staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait." In 1992, Cheney's undersecreatry, Paul Wolfowitz turned out a forty-page report titled "Defense Planning Guidance," arguing that historic allies should be demoted to the status of U.S. satellites, and that the modernization of India and China should be treated as a threat, as should the democratization of Russia. It was nothing less than a blueprint for worldwide
domination, and Cheney loved it. He maneuvered to have the president adopt it as doctrine, but the elder Bush, recognizing that the proposals were not only foolish but dangerous, rejected them.

After Bill Clinton became President, Cheney was made CEO of Halliburton where his principal action was his acquisition of a subsidiary called Dresser Industries. Dresser struck lucrative deals with Saddam Hussein; Halliburton did business with Muammar el-Qaddafi
and the ayatollahs of Iran. By the time Cheney left in 2000,
Halliburton's stock was near an all-time high of fifty-four dollars a
share. Then it turned out that Dresser had saddled Halliburton with
asbestos lawsuits that could cost the company millions, and the stock
plummeted to barely ten dollars a share. Even with the bounce
Halliburton stock has received from the war, an investor who put
$100,000 into the company just before Cheney became vice president would
have less than $60,000 today. Cheney continues to receive $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton.

In 2000, Cheney became Vice President. In Spring 2001 he was especially appointed by the President to lead the Federal anti-Terrorism iniative: on September 11th America endured the worst terrorist attack in its history.

Cheney then became the driving force for war with Iraq. In March 2002, he visited nine Arab and Muslim countries six months after the 9/11 attacks to triumphantly enlist them in the cause of "taking out" Saddam Hussein. Not a single country Cheney visited provided troops -- including staunch American allies in Jordan and Turkey -- and almost all refused to let their territory be used for the attack.

Cheney's office became the powerhouse for the White House Iraq Group, constructing and shaping the case for war. It's now under Federal Investigation. Decisions emanating from Cheney's office have damaged the President so badly, they've placed his entire political programme in mortal danger. Which maybe why the rumours they're no longer speaking to each other are true.

So - Dick Cheney, helluva guy.

As this man pointed out in a wonderful article that I've unapologetically pillaged for the above - "The ever-canny Ronald Reagan was the only Republican president since Eisenhower who managed to serve two full terms. He is also the only one not to have appointed Dick Cheney to office." That was written before the election but I have to say it's by no means clear to me that Dubya's got the spleen to make it through the wheels-popping-off-in-a-shitstorm-of-your-own-making that the next three years will unquestionably be - so the record's still out there.

Dick Cheney may well prove to be the guy who deep-sixed every single Republican administration he was part of.

So please, as time moves on and more news comes out, re-evaluate Vice President Cheney. No decision he made that's turned out well. No financial deal he assisted that hasn't turned to shit. No administration he's been part of that has not capsized. The guy's walking bad news. A mobile error factory. A corpulent waddling fool, so corrupt even his own body is rebelling against him (something like 9 heart attacks and an aneurysm on each knee - something of a medical rarity: but rumour has it, he bears a large penis). He has hideous decision-making capabilities and an instinct that reeks. A smarmy, blundering clod turned into a world powerhouse clusterfuck.

Like I said:

Guy's a fucking idiot.

Pure Technique

Went to see an film last night called The Beat that my Heart Skipped. French, by a writer/director called Jacques Audiard - it's excellent. Remake of an old Toback/Keitel film from the 70s which I've never managed to sit through - though Toback's version of The Gambler from the same time with James Caan, directed by Karel Reisz, dealing with identical issues is brilliant. The Beat that my Heart Skipped's about a rough young property enforcer, motherless, enduring a difficult relationship with his harsh, manipulative father who tries to find redemption through rediscovering a long-supressed gift at piano playing.

Audiard's one of my favourite directors shooting right now. 56, comes from a film family, did his time writing screenplays inside the French film industry, first started directing about ten years ago with the experimental hit-man film Regarde les hommes tomber. Since then he made three more - A Self Made Hero, Read my Lips and Beat my Heart Skipped - all beautifully made and told. His work's distinctive in the detail of the characters, stunningly intense performances - Kassovitz, Cassel, Emanuelle Devos and Romain Duris are the finest actors of their generation and all have given what must rank among their very finest performances for Audiard - clever yet also elliptical story structures and a kind of close, freeform cinematography style that somehow feels perfectly designed.

Beat that My Heart Skipped sticks with the pattern: it's style is pure intensity. Audiard bears the confidence of deep experience. He begins scenes deep in the action and leaves them well before resolution. He consistently guides the story into directions we do not expect because what we expect is a 3-Act, McKee, lego-block programme that's been insidiously programmed into our mental DNA. Relationships do not deliver the solace they promise, connections are unresolved, vengeances established then only partially delivered, redemptive paths laid out that have no conclusion.

He breaks every rule you will be taught is sacrosanct and he does it with complete confidence and utter success. Why? Becuase Audiard's an artist of consumate technique. And by technique I don't mean that characterless efficiency which the term suggests, but technique as philosophy, state of mind. I mean technique the way Hitchcock referred to it: as a psychologiucal state that guides your every move. Because once you master technique, it becomes instinct and an artist's instinct is everything he or she has. Audiard doesn't short-circuit the entire throughline of his story because he wants to be conceptual, or because he wants to be clever - he does it because it feels right. And he's good enough to make it work. Instinctually, he knows he can do it. It's the arrogance of pure mastery: every great artist has it. That's the definition of great art - certain people were arrogant enough and good enough to break rules everyone else said couldn't be touched.

It's Picasso deconstructing the nude to a geometric hailstorm.

It's Eisenstein cutting out of time.

It's Hunter Thompson seeing Las Vegas.

It's Caravaggio leaving swathes of his Resurrection of Lazarusunfinished with the barest ghostlike sketches of people - because he's good enough. Other artists couldn't pull it off. Caravaggio can. He's a better fucking draughtsman than any of them - a few strokes, some pigment & it'll work. He knows it. Caravaggio was a psychotic drunkard with some kind of personality disorder and he was on the run from the police. He didn't sit down and think Lazarus through with an instruction book at his lap and an assistant advising him - he painted that thing the way he knew it needed to be painted. And he knew - always knew - that it would blow everything else out of the water.

No structured thought, no cleverness - just a kind of rage & boredom with what everyone else is doing and telling you to do, an urge to freedom, pure instinctive mastery. And the knowledge you've got it down.

Not saying Audiard's in Caravaggio's league - but he's good. Better than most other people claiming to tell stories with cameras these days. And he shoots with pure technique - state of mind, a way of thought. An artist's effortless response to the world around them.

Roll Out the Hydrino Device!

Some of you may have perused this blog, seen an inordinate amount of posts concerning the neo-con death cult, religious hypocrites, political cowards, other such creatures of the crepuscular half-night and imagined that I take a somewhat... 'glass half empty' view of humanity.

Not true, my droogies.

I love humanity with its you-just-can't-make-it-up complexities and all its wonderful density. And I stand in awe of a race in which the capability to wipe ourselves clean out co-exists so plainly with the noble hope of continuous betterment.

The relentless urge to improve ourselves.

That's why I love stories about technology. Stories like this one which say things like this:

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.

It seems that despite breaking all the rules of quantum physics the Doctor may just nailed the big one. Fantastic! It hasn't been proved yet, but world-respected sustainable energy scientists don't say things like this for fun:

"All of us who are not quantum physicists are looking at Dr Mills's data and we find it very compelling," said Prof Maas. "Dr Booker and I have both put our professional reputations on the line as far as that goes."

So roll out the Hydrino device! Let's beta test that mother till we're blue in the face - and see where we are then. And then there are stories like this, which also have an uncanny way of making me feel all soft and fuzzy inside like lots of kittens playing together in one giant cute machine. China has hired Britain's biggest architecture firm to design 5 brand new cities - each one three quarters the size of Manhattan - which will be entirely self-sustaining:

The Dongtan development, on an island in the mouth of the Yangtze river near Shanghai, aims to build a city three-quarters the size of Manhattan by 2040. The first phase will accommodate some 50,000 people. It is on target to be open by the time of the Shanghai Expo trade fair in 2010.

Up to four more eco-cities will be built, though exact locations have not yet been revealed. Experts believe that the real challenge will be to build them in China's interior, in regions that have been polluted by heavy industry and depopulated by the movement of millions of Chinese people to the booming Pacific coast.

Head said: 'It is part of a new awareness of the environment by the Chinese government. They realise that with their growing population and economy they have to overcome the problems of environmental pollution and resource depletion.'

The eco-cities are intended to be self-sufficient in energy, water and most food products, with the aim of zero emissions of greenhouse gases in transport systems.

Head said: 'It is no gimmick. It is being led at the highest levels of the Chinese government. They are very committed to developing a new paradigm of economic development.'

This is the future, my friends - and we all have the capability to make it happen... We just have to stop the theo-cons and their Islamopsycho bed-mates from calling down the rapture first.

See, I just couldn't let it lie.

Mr Popularity

What I love about this graphic is not just the fact that George Bush has achieved in a single year what Dick Nixon could only do in two: become the most reviled President in modern history. No, it's the fact that Clinton's finest hour in the eyes of the American people was... When he accidently bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

And don't think the sons of Han won't remember, when it's time to cash in their T-Bills.

Brittany in Autumn

Tip

This is a very cool site.

Check out EXCERPTS FROM VH1’S UPCOMING “I LOVE THE AUGHTIES, PART ONE” which is grimly familiar, and very funny indeed.

Could be me...

This Administration engaged in actions that both harmed our national security and are morally repugnant.

... but it isn't.

16th Century all over Again

If Samuelo Alito is approved by the Senate, then the USA will five Catholic males on the Supreme Court. As this blog points out -

When exactly did the Vatican take over the United States legal system?

Leave women where they belong - madly reproducing and in the kitchen - build a sacristry in every school and as for gays... Fuggeddaboutit! Just crack out the Inquisition hoodies and Ignatius Loyola miniature rings and - let's party like it's 1599.

Talking of that - didn't the Pilgrim Fathers head out across the Atlantic to get away from just this kind of Counter Reformation bullshit?

Caribbean Occult Again

Dance tall Jenny gal
Walk tall mama o
The dead come to greet you
Water long like the dead, gal
Water long mama o
Look how the spirits look on her there
O the dead greet her
See who greets the dead
They all come tall to greet her