The New Me!
pjdillon@attglobal.net
The process of re-invention continues to gather momentum.
Not entirely satisfied with the way things have unfolded this past year – but with the whole brain malaria thing being somewhat of a mitigating factor – I’ve again put pen to paper, or rather index fingers to keyboard, long enough to retool my CV. It’s something I do every few months as a matter of course, or more frequently should the need arise, accenting certain characteristics while downplaying others in order to seduce employers. In other words, padding a bra for the boob-obsessed, or donning a sailor-suit for the nautically inclined: just show me the money.
It’s always a bit of an adventure, an opportunity to take stock, to review the personal ledger, to really center oneself in the cosmos by
looking squarely into the mirror and asking the age-old question: Just how much bullshit can I get away with?
In order to throw his hat into the ring for those fat ngo-esque contracts that are always floating about in the ether, in this latest incarnation the Grinch is reformatting himself as a “Contract Communications Consultant”.
Rolls off the tongue, no? I’m wondering how it would look should I decide to have cards made. And should I have the printing of my name raised and embossed or merely the new Triple C ?
It was one of the few memorable scenes in a dreary movie and forgettable book, American Psycho: the whole pathology of business cards and the game of one-upmanship the anal retentive billionaires play amongst themselves.
“It is very cool, Bateman,” Van Patten says guardedly, the jealous bastard, “but that’s nothing…” He pulls out this wallet and slaps a card next to an ashtray. “Look at this.”
We all lean over to inspect David’s card and Price quietly says, “That’s really nice.” A brief spasm of jealousy courses through me and I notice the elegance of the color and the classy type. I clench my fist as Van Patten says, smugly, “Eggshell with Romanian type…” He turns to me. “What do you think?”
“Nice,” I croak, but manage a nod, as the busboy brings us four fresh Bellinis.
“Jesus,” says Price, holding the card up to the light, ignoring the new drinks. “This is super, how’d a nitwit like you get so tasteful?”
I’m looking at Van Patten’s card and then at mine and cannot believe Price actually likes Van Patten’s better. Dizzy, I sip my drink and then take a deep breath.
“But wait,” says Price. “You ain’t seen nothing yet…” He pulls his out of an inside pocket and slowly, dramatically, turns it over for our inspection and says, “Mine.”
Even I have to admit it’s magnificent.
Suddenly, the restaurant seems far away, hushed, the noise distant, a meaningless hum compared to this card, and we all head Price’s words: “Raised lettering, pale, nimbus while…”
“Holy shit,” Van Patten exclaims. “I’ve never seen…”
“Nice, very nice, “ have to admit. “But wait, let’s see Montgomery’s”
Price pulls it out and though he’s acting nonchalant, I don’t’ see how he can ignore its subtle off-white coloring, its tasteful thickness. I’m unexpectedly depressed that I started this.
Yes, I too was unexpectedly depressed too, by the fact that I continued to read this awful crap till the end.
Anyway, just for the helluvvit, here’s a non-formatted copy of today’s new CV, fresh from the oven and soon to be posted on the databases of various head-hunter-type on-line organizations like Canadem, Ceci.ca and others.
See if YOU can spot the three blatant lies, six exaggerations and two misrepresentations! It’s fun for the whole family!
Da Grinch
Address: Somewhere in Jakarta
SKILLS Able to absorb, evaluate and condense large amounts of information into cogent, well-written and timely briefs.
Ability to work independently and effectively in both conflict and post-conflict environments.
Extensive frontline work experience in Central and Southeast Asia.
Advanced interviewing and editing skills honed over 15 years working as a journalist and editor.
Several years experience in managerial news positions in magazines and newspapers both in Indonesia and abroad.
Equipped and proficient with a broadcast-quality digital video camera (Sony PD-150), mics and peripherals, and a digital stills camera.
Comfortable working off both PC and Mac platforms.
WORK EXPERIENCE January 2003 – Present
Contract Communications Consultant
UNICEF, GTZ (German Technical Cooperation)
Duties: Development project monitoring and assessment, production of communications materials for both internal and external use, creation of a domestic mission statement, employee handbook, contracts etc.
April 1999 – Present
Jakarta-based freelance correspondent
Globe & Mail (Canada), USA Today, US News & World Report, The Scotsman, MSNBC, BSkyB (UK, Aus.), Cape Radio (S Africa) etc
Duties: Filing regular news and feature stories and analysis pieces for a wide range of daily newspapers and magazines, and voice files for radio.
February 2002 – August 2002
Bureau Chief
Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa)
Kabul, Afghanistan
Duties: Re-established dpa’s Kabul bureau, providing news coverage of Afghanistan. Trained local stringers and administration staff. Negotiated a cooperative news venture with the Afghan national media service.
October 2001 – February 2002
Managing Editor
Djakarta! City Life Magazine
Jakarta, Indonesia
Duties: Day-to-day management of the editorial and production staff of a dynamic, bilingual city life magazine. Developing a reporting structure within the office, an appreciation for deadlines and the desire to excel among local staff.
November 1988 – April 1999
Journalist/News Editor
Canada
Duties: General assignment reporter and, later, section editor. As news editor of a Vancouver-area newspaper for two years (1997-98), I was responsible for the daily operations of the newsroom, coordinating the summer internship program, and organizing seminars for news staff.
EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts – BA (Journalism)
Bachelor of Arts – BA (History)
Concordia University – Montreal, Canada, 1990
RELATED INFO I am fluently bilingual (English/French) and have an excellent working knowledge of Indonesian.
In addition to my regular commitments I am in the process of shooting a video documentary about funeral rituals in eastern Indonesia.
In October I completed my second book editing contract, an Equinox Publishing (Jakarta) 250-page, coffee table book entitled Celebrating Indonesia: Fifty Years Of the Ford Foundation In Indonesia. I also copy edited the best-selling book Jakarta Inside-Out (2002).
INTERESTS Reading, travel, motorcycles, Indonesian batik and ikat, Blogging
REFERENCES References can be provided upon request
Sunday, December 28, 2003
Friday, December 26, 2003
The Whole Story
pjdillon@attglobal.net
The clock is ticking down to midnight again.
We’re running 45 minutes or so to Christmas here in Indonesia and though he should be hunkered down in his best “zuker-rasserfrazz”-ing grinchy best, bolting oiled runners on his mental toboggan and looking for new and exciting ways to mis-represent himself, holiday 2003 finds him lethargic and squishy… against the odds the cantankerous green fellah has found love – in and of itself not a remarkable thing – and done something about it (other than legally actionable offences… no truth to those rumors, by the way) and PROPOSED to she-who-would-become-Grinchette. More remarkable yet, SHE SAID YES!
I’ve promised The Rabble all the gory details of the engagement, and given that my lean, green Queen is reclining now ahead of morning rituals of wrapping paper and sticky tape, there’s no time like the present.
I guess I’d known for a while that J is about as good at it gets: smart, curious, funny, sexy, resilient. And sweet on me, a big, blousy foreigner 12 years her senior. Go figure.
There were hints along the way, beginning I suppose on the very first evening we spent together, Valentines Day 2000 (queue insipid Oprah show soundtrack 'Awwwww's). One smooch and I told her: “We’re in trouble.” Kinda never left after that night.
In the summer of 2002, after I returned from Afghanistan, we took a few weeks in Canada. Parts of that trip are part of the Grinch's public diary, the stories we re-tell to friends and family: Yeti, The Goolies, Wyle E. and the wife-y. One of them is illuminating.
We were several hours east of Fredericton, New Brunswick, hammering along the T-Can on my trusty old CB900 beneath segregated skies: southern sunshine blues and whites hard up against the blackened bruises of a great northeasterly thunderstorm.
Over coffee at a last gasp diner I asked if she wanted to put on rain gear. With the following caveat: If we suit up, it will not rain. If we ride as is, it’ll pour.
We drove off in our regular gear and left the how’s and where’s of eastern Canadian meteorology to our betters. 20 minutes later the first rains hit, we pulled over soaked to change by the roadside and returned, soaked, to our journey. Within a quarter hour we were virtually alone on the highway, all the car traffic having pulled over, hazards flashing, chased off by the pounding rains. Tractor trailers passed us unimpressed as we doddled along at 60, then 80 and finally, as I gained confidence 100 km/h.
So it went, till we broke through the clouds outside historic old Fredericton, which beaded and twinkled like a beat-up finned Caddy fresh from the auto-wash. When we finally pulled up outside the tourism office there in search of a room, we were waterlogged and giddy: there are not many people I know who would have handled that situation the way J did, laughing and cracking jokes about a car-load of gap-toothed Newfies who passed us by with a thumbs-up cheer, and I guess, maybe, that’s when I was ready to acknowledge what had been nibbling away at the edges of my mind for some time: this gal was a keeper.
Fast forward 15 months and we’re on holiday in Australia. I’d thought to pop the question without much fanfare at some point during our trip but after a couple of weeks toodling about on the Sunshine Coast, the Blue Mountains, Sydney etc. there’d not been a good moment and I’d not had a chance to slip away and find a nice ring. I settled on doing it the last night in Sydney but it became clear that that Saturday night would be taken up with friends, a couple of rugby matches and various and sundry beers so I sided with the moment and put the engagement on hold. The irony of that decision is that the previous night in Montreal, my brother had proposed to his girlfriend, successfully by the way, so if you did the time-zone mathematics, we might both have had announcements within just a few hours of one-another!
Cussed him out on the phone when I found out and confided that I was prepping for the same thing.
Three weeks ago, under shadow of “It’s the holiday season, lets do a big dinner with friends” I started making calls and trying, without actually telling anyone what was going on, to coax folks into coming along to La Na Thai restaurant for dinner.
Brought my roomie Juliana into my confidence – needed a woman’s counsel - spoke to LNT’s owner who’s a friend, worked out a menu, got a discount on drinks and got the ball rolling: bevies at Cinnabar, which is sort of the unofficial press club, and then a short stroll over to the restaurant.
Excellent meal for 22, a bit of vino, good chatter and plenty of knots in this kid’s stomach. I’d worked on some sort of something that I wanted to say to my gal but all for naught. After diner I dragged her away from an animated conversation, into a quiet, secluded and candle-lit end of the restaurant.
Yammered and hummed and held her hand and said stuff about how long we’d been together (3yr, 9 mths), and how much I care and yadda-yadda-yadda and then everything telescoped and the big-ass box the wee ring I’d bought was burning a hole in my pocket so rather than just yammering on I dropped to one knee, popped the lid and the question.
Poor thing, she was shivering and, yes, it did take a couple of tries – three actually – to get a coherent answer outta her (“Are you sure you want to do this?” were the only words she spoke) before finally, “Yes.”
I put the too bit platinum and diamond affair on her finger, we had a snog and then walked back in to join our friends, who with the exception of the chain-smoking Juliana were blissfully unaware of what was going on. Again I stammered through an announcement of sorts – I guess it worked because all the girls cried – about how most of us are a long way from home and how we sorta become family in the absence of the same, etc etc, and we were done. I’d splurged on some decent champagne and the folks at LNT had very casually brought in the glasses whilst we were out, so we had a toast and, the deed was done.
It’s been ten days now. Never felt better or more sure of anything in my life. We’re in early days yet, only the most general plans but looking forward to finalizing the deal in late summer here in Indonesia and then again for good measure in Canada in the fall.
For all those folks who sent massages, SMSs, e-mails and good vibes, thanks and look forward to seeing you at one or the other of the nuptials.
It’s been a heck of a year. Ho-Ho-Ho.
pjdillon@attglobal.net
The clock is ticking down to midnight again.
We’re running 45 minutes or so to Christmas here in Indonesia and though he should be hunkered down in his best “zuker-rasserfrazz”-ing grinchy best, bolting oiled runners on his mental toboggan and looking for new and exciting ways to mis-represent himself, holiday 2003 finds him lethargic and squishy… against the odds the cantankerous green fellah has found love – in and of itself not a remarkable thing – and done something about it (other than legally actionable offences… no truth to those rumors, by the way) and PROPOSED to she-who-would-become-Grinchette. More remarkable yet, SHE SAID YES!
I’ve promised The Rabble all the gory details of the engagement, and given that my lean, green Queen is reclining now ahead of morning rituals of wrapping paper and sticky tape, there’s no time like the present.
I guess I’d known for a while that J is about as good at it gets: smart, curious, funny, sexy, resilient. And sweet on me, a big, blousy foreigner 12 years her senior. Go figure.
There were hints along the way, beginning I suppose on the very first evening we spent together, Valentines Day 2000 (queue insipid Oprah show soundtrack 'Awwwww's). One smooch and I told her: “We’re in trouble.” Kinda never left after that night.
In the summer of 2002, after I returned from Afghanistan, we took a few weeks in Canada. Parts of that trip are part of the Grinch's public diary, the stories we re-tell to friends and family: Yeti, The Goolies, Wyle E. and the wife-y. One of them is illuminating.
We were several hours east of Fredericton, New Brunswick, hammering along the T-Can on my trusty old CB900 beneath segregated skies: southern sunshine blues and whites hard up against the blackened bruises of a great northeasterly thunderstorm.
Over coffee at a last gasp diner I asked if she wanted to put on rain gear. With the following caveat: If we suit up, it will not rain. If we ride as is, it’ll pour.
We drove off in our regular gear and left the how’s and where’s of eastern Canadian meteorology to our betters. 20 minutes later the first rains hit, we pulled over soaked to change by the roadside and returned, soaked, to our journey. Within a quarter hour we were virtually alone on the highway, all the car traffic having pulled over, hazards flashing, chased off by the pounding rains. Tractor trailers passed us unimpressed as we doddled along at 60, then 80 and finally, as I gained confidence 100 km/h.
So it went, till we broke through the clouds outside historic old Fredericton, which beaded and twinkled like a beat-up finned Caddy fresh from the auto-wash. When we finally pulled up outside the tourism office there in search of a room, we were waterlogged and giddy: there are not many people I know who would have handled that situation the way J did, laughing and cracking jokes about a car-load of gap-toothed Newfies who passed us by with a thumbs-up cheer, and I guess, maybe, that’s when I was ready to acknowledge what had been nibbling away at the edges of my mind for some time: this gal was a keeper.
Fast forward 15 months and we’re on holiday in Australia. I’d thought to pop the question without much fanfare at some point during our trip but after a couple of weeks toodling about on the Sunshine Coast, the Blue Mountains, Sydney etc. there’d not been a good moment and I’d not had a chance to slip away and find a nice ring. I settled on doing it the last night in Sydney but it became clear that that Saturday night would be taken up with friends, a couple of rugby matches and various and sundry beers so I sided with the moment and put the engagement on hold. The irony of that decision is that the previous night in Montreal, my brother had proposed to his girlfriend, successfully by the way, so if you did the time-zone mathematics, we might both have had announcements within just a few hours of one-another!
Cussed him out on the phone when I found out and confided that I was prepping for the same thing.
Three weeks ago, under shadow of “It’s the holiday season, lets do a big dinner with friends” I started making calls and trying, without actually telling anyone what was going on, to coax folks into coming along to La Na Thai restaurant for dinner.
Brought my roomie Juliana into my confidence – needed a woman’s counsel - spoke to LNT’s owner who’s a friend, worked out a menu, got a discount on drinks and got the ball rolling: bevies at Cinnabar, which is sort of the unofficial press club, and then a short stroll over to the restaurant.
Excellent meal for 22, a bit of vino, good chatter and plenty of knots in this kid’s stomach. I’d worked on some sort of something that I wanted to say to my gal but all for naught. After diner I dragged her away from an animated conversation, into a quiet, secluded and candle-lit end of the restaurant.
Yammered and hummed and held her hand and said stuff about how long we’d been together (3yr, 9 mths), and how much I care and yadda-yadda-yadda and then everything telescoped and the big-ass box the wee ring I’d bought was burning a hole in my pocket so rather than just yammering on I dropped to one knee, popped the lid and the question.
Poor thing, she was shivering and, yes, it did take a couple of tries – three actually – to get a coherent answer outta her (“Are you sure you want to do this?” were the only words she spoke) before finally, “Yes.”
I put the too bit platinum and diamond affair on her finger, we had a snog and then walked back in to join our friends, who with the exception of the chain-smoking Juliana were blissfully unaware of what was going on. Again I stammered through an announcement of sorts – I guess it worked because all the girls cried – about how most of us are a long way from home and how we sorta become family in the absence of the same, etc etc, and we were done. I’d splurged on some decent champagne and the folks at LNT had very casually brought in the glasses whilst we were out, so we had a toast and, the deed was done.
It’s been ten days now. Never felt better or more sure of anything in my life. We’re in early days yet, only the most general plans but looking forward to finalizing the deal in late summer here in Indonesia and then again for good measure in Canada in the fall.
For all those folks who sent massages, SMSs, e-mails and good vibes, thanks and look forward to seeing you at one or the other of the nuptials.
It’s been a heck of a year. Ho-Ho-Ho.
Thursday, December 11, 2003
Limp Bizkit Can Kiss My Chocolate Starfish*
An Open Letter to the Band.
I’m 38, so I guess I’m a bit older than the average Limp Bizkit fan.
I belong to a generation of east coast Canadian pool and half-pipe riders who idolized Alva, rolled on soft Kryptonics, extra-wide Trackers, on Wee Willie Winkle boards that were half the size of what the kids are using today. Maybe it’s those roots LB taps into, I dunno, but I like the band. Been listening to the music for a few years now. Not much into the politics of your business, all the behind the scenes BS, the tantrums, the fashion, the personality cults. Just the music.
My work as a foreign correspondent has taken me to some weird, wonderful and occasionally dangerous places. LB – and a host of others who make up my life’s soundtrack – cranked on the headphones, off my laptop (I rip from royality-paid, legal CDs) or blasting out of taxis has brought me through it all safe, if a bit mad. My Kabul driver loved Chocolate Starfish..., the tape I brought him back in the Spring on 2002 so we could chase the rocket attacks and drive-bys Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin’. He was happy to reach into my bag and swap between Janice for Beck, LB and Tom Waits. Anything after four years of the Taliban.
I’m writing today because I’m pissed.
I live in Jakarta, Indonesia. The country where Bali is located. That’s the resort island the gutless bitches hit last year with a car bomb that killed more than 200 people, most of them under 25s from Indonesia, Australia and Europe. Surfers. Skaters. Backpackers. Rugby players. Mums, dads and kids.
I got to know quite a few of the survivors. And the families of the dead. Knowing the mix of people at the Sari Club that night, I bet there were more than a few Bizkit fans there that night, or at least people who got sweaty listening, moving to it.
Unlike New York after 9/11 very, very few prominent Westerners (the same people who soak it up on the beaches, surf, get pissed for cheap, etc etc) have stepped up to help the people of Bali who were clobbered when their totally tourism-dependant economy tanked. It is one of the reasons why news a major act like LB would play Bali was such a huge boost. People who had never heard of the band were stepping up to say what wonderful people they must be to support the Balinese and by extension, all Indonesians.
This is a country of 220 million. While Bali is majority Hindu, 85 per cent of Indonesians are Moslem. Very laid back. Very friendly folks. Lots of young people here, struggling to forge an identity for themselves. Poor, disenfranchised, cynical about politics and business, struggling with sex and school and drugs and the street. Ignorant about the past, worried about the future and poorly served by their leaders. Just the kind of people we should be reaching out to in these crazy times.
And how appropriate that the plan called for the concert to be held in the very same amphitheatre where in October thousands gathered to mourn and celebrate the lives of the people killed in the Sari nightclub bombing a year earlier. It’s an amazing place, challenging acoustics, awesome views. A sell out was a certainty. For sure I would have been there with a bunch of other old men, teaching the scrawny chain-smoking Indo wannabe headbangers what a mosh pit is all about.
And then, literally days before the event, LB cancels. The reason we hear is because you’re concerned about security, but if the band had bothered to do even a bit of research they would have learned they were in more immediate danger on a Saturday night in Philly or Seattle than they’d ever be in Bali.
I should have known it was all show. Hard men, eh? Nothin’ but a bunch of gutless punk millionaire who folded when they could have stood up and done the right thing.
Way to go.
PD
Jakarta, Indonesia
pjdillon@attglobal.net
*This Blog was originally posted to the main bulletin board at www.limpbizkit.com. That's the place to go if you wanna add your voice.
An Open Letter to the Band.
I’m 38, so I guess I’m a bit older than the average Limp Bizkit fan.
I belong to a generation of east coast Canadian pool and half-pipe riders who idolized Alva, rolled on soft Kryptonics, extra-wide Trackers, on Wee Willie Winkle boards that were half the size of what the kids are using today. Maybe it’s those roots LB taps into, I dunno, but I like the band. Been listening to the music for a few years now. Not much into the politics of your business, all the behind the scenes BS, the tantrums, the fashion, the personality cults. Just the music.
My work as a foreign correspondent has taken me to some weird, wonderful and occasionally dangerous places. LB – and a host of others who make up my life’s soundtrack – cranked on the headphones, off my laptop (I rip from royality-paid, legal CDs) or blasting out of taxis has brought me through it all safe, if a bit mad. My Kabul driver loved Chocolate Starfish..., the tape I brought him back in the Spring on 2002 so we could chase the rocket attacks and drive-bys Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin’. He was happy to reach into my bag and swap between Janice for Beck, LB and Tom Waits. Anything after four years of the Taliban.
I’m writing today because I’m pissed.
I live in Jakarta, Indonesia. The country where Bali is located. That’s the resort island the gutless bitches hit last year with a car bomb that killed more than 200 people, most of them under 25s from Indonesia, Australia and Europe. Surfers. Skaters. Backpackers. Rugby players. Mums, dads and kids.
I got to know quite a few of the survivors. And the families of the dead. Knowing the mix of people at the Sari Club that night, I bet there were more than a few Bizkit fans there that night, or at least people who got sweaty listening, moving to it.
Unlike New York after 9/11 very, very few prominent Westerners (the same people who soak it up on the beaches, surf, get pissed for cheap, etc etc) have stepped up to help the people of Bali who were clobbered when their totally tourism-dependant economy tanked. It is one of the reasons why news a major act like LB would play Bali was such a huge boost. People who had never heard of the band were stepping up to say what wonderful people they must be to support the Balinese and by extension, all Indonesians.
This is a country of 220 million. While Bali is majority Hindu, 85 per cent of Indonesians are Moslem. Very laid back. Very friendly folks. Lots of young people here, struggling to forge an identity for themselves. Poor, disenfranchised, cynical about politics and business, struggling with sex and school and drugs and the street. Ignorant about the past, worried about the future and poorly served by their leaders. Just the kind of people we should be reaching out to in these crazy times.
And how appropriate that the plan called for the concert to be held in the very same amphitheatre where in October thousands gathered to mourn and celebrate the lives of the people killed in the Sari nightclub bombing a year earlier. It’s an amazing place, challenging acoustics, awesome views. A sell out was a certainty. For sure I would have been there with a bunch of other old men, teaching the scrawny chain-smoking Indo wannabe headbangers what a mosh pit is all about.
And then, literally days before the event, LB cancels. The reason we hear is because you’re concerned about security, but if the band had bothered to do even a bit of research they would have learned they were in more immediate danger on a Saturday night in Philly or Seattle than they’d ever be in Bali.
I should have known it was all show. Hard men, eh? Nothin’ but a bunch of gutless punk millionaire who folded when they could have stood up and done the right thing.
Way to go.
PD
Jakarta, Indonesia
pjdillon@attglobal.net
*This Blog was originally posted to the main bulletin board at www.limpbizkit.com. That's the place to go if you wanna add your voice.
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
Multiple Excuses & Macintosh Abuses
Ok, here we go again…
I seem to have cracked the code and have made the necessary changes but I’ll have to open a couple of more documents to be absolutely certain… Note To Self: Make sure formatting changes have stuck to the…
Oh shit, sorry, didn’t know you were there. Just tapping away here on my new… Okay, you’ve seen it now haven’t you. Okay, well just don’t judge me until I’ve had a chance to explain.
See, I’ve been busy these past months, there’s a perfectly normal explanation why I would write back in August that I was gonna do something interesting with the Blog over the next few weeks, doing the ‘ol Momento bit with my Canadian gambol, and even going ahead and starting the write the damn thing and then, Whoooosh, I vanish for, what is it now, close to three months?
The reason is because, see, I don’t give a rat’s ass.
I’ve been busy.
The sun was in my eyes.
The geckos ate my homework.
I shot a man in Starbucks just to watch him die.
I joined the French Foreign Legion.
I got sick.
I died (… bit farfetched perhaps but I got better in the end).
I’d rather watch ‘Croc marathons on NatGeo channel.
I was playing Civilization.
I was on a spiritual retreat in Andaluccia.
Indonesia banned the Internet.
Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso decided to put a statue of me inside the deer enclosure at Monas and I’ve been locked inside a bronze mold since August.
I got embarrassed about not having posted anything and couldn’t figure a tactful way of backing back into it so I just let it go and then it got worse because I was tormented about the fact that I was such a weak-assed bitch and so became so mentally constipated that I couldn’t pull the damn trigger and let rip on a decent Blog and just get on with it. And so with each passing day and each passing week it became harder and harder to take the first step and why oh why is this such a familiar feeling?
I got married to a nice girl, had three lovely kids and settled down on western Vancouver island to fish and grow dope.
Did a three year stay for fishing without a licence. With dynamite. Damn coppers.
I’ve been working on my car/bike/boat/axle-grind/tan.
I’ve been teaching.
I’ve been learning.
I wrote a song.
I wrote a play.
I wrote a book.
I wrote a letter to my aunt and uncle in Scotland (true).
I was ripping CDs onto my PC’s hard drive to be transferred to my MP3 player.
Are you lookin’ at me? Well, I don’t see anyone else…
I was playing with the cats.
I was breaking boards with my bare hands.
I was washing my hair. One at a time.
I stepped into a rift in the space-time continuum and so, “Hello, I must be going”.
So in a fit of Grinch-inspired genius I decided to create the environment within which I can start Blogging once again, which is to say that, “Yes, I finally went out and dropped $3000S on that 15” turbo-charged G4 Powerbook last week in Singapore and I’m reveling in its un/familiar lines.”
You see, I’m one of the original Apple-seeds, the binary equivalent of the Kiss Army: I got my first Mac shortly after the release of Destroyer, with its seminal God Of Thunder and Detroit Rock City. It got me through college and much later, university. The first reunion tour post-Peter Chris coincided with my purchase of the PB150, once state of the art.
Later, when money got particularly tight I sold out. I wrapped myself in flash, in a thing called the built-in CD-ROM, and oodles of disk space. Yes, I went PC.
It was a phase. I did what I had to do to put food on the table and money in my pocket. See, there were things you could do with PCs, they were compliant, eager to please. Less demanding. Cheaper. And it was good too. It hurt the first few times but you get used to it and start to enjoy yourself.
I’m not proud of my behavior but equally, I’m not embarrassed. I was a young man with issues. It wasn’t the only relationship to suffer: During those complicated, exhilarating years I experimented with Mazdas and Volvos, a Subaru or two and a saucy chromed up Yamaha.
But, in the end of course, you can’t escape who you are, what you are. You can grow up, move away, alter your name, explore a different OS, find a whole new life but in the end, you can’t deny what tug back to the familiar.
So, I’ve struck a deal with myself, one you’ll all have to get used to. I’ve gone back to Mac as my basic computer platform, but I’m going to continue to use a PC every now and then. It just feels right this way. More honest. Each has its advantages and I just think that if people were a little bit more open to different experiences, that the world would be a much better place.
All I’m asking is that you’ll accept me for who I am and that you’ll continue to check the blog and not be enslaved by what some magazines and closed-minded techno-geeks out there might think.
Ok, here we go again…
I seem to have cracked the code and have made the necessary changes but I’ll have to open a couple of more documents to be absolutely certain… Note To Self: Make sure formatting changes have stuck to the…
Oh shit, sorry, didn’t know you were there. Just tapping away here on my new… Okay, you’ve seen it now haven’t you. Okay, well just don’t judge me until I’ve had a chance to explain.
See, I’ve been busy these past months, there’s a perfectly normal explanation why I would write back in August that I was gonna do something interesting with the Blog over the next few weeks, doing the ‘ol Momento bit with my Canadian gambol, and even going ahead and starting the write the damn thing and then, Whoooosh, I vanish for, what is it now, close to three months?
The reason is because, see, I don’t give a rat’s ass.
I’ve been busy.
The sun was in my eyes.
The geckos ate my homework.
I shot a man in Starbucks just to watch him die.
I joined the French Foreign Legion.
I got sick.
I died (… bit farfetched perhaps but I got better in the end).
I’d rather watch ‘Croc marathons on NatGeo channel.
I was playing Civilization.
I was on a spiritual retreat in Andaluccia.
Indonesia banned the Internet.
Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso decided to put a statue of me inside the deer enclosure at Monas and I’ve been locked inside a bronze mold since August.
I got embarrassed about not having posted anything and couldn’t figure a tactful way of backing back into it so I just let it go and then it got worse because I was tormented about the fact that I was such a weak-assed bitch and so became so mentally constipated that I couldn’t pull the damn trigger and let rip on a decent Blog and just get on with it. And so with each passing day and each passing week it became harder and harder to take the first step and why oh why is this such a familiar feeling?
I got married to a nice girl, had three lovely kids and settled down on western Vancouver island to fish and grow dope.
Did a three year stay for fishing without a licence. With dynamite. Damn coppers.
I’ve been working on my car/bike/boat/axle-grind/tan.
I’ve been teaching.
I’ve been learning.
I wrote a song.
I wrote a play.
I wrote a book.
I wrote a letter to my aunt and uncle in Scotland (true).
I was ripping CDs onto my PC’s hard drive to be transferred to my MP3 player.
Are you lookin’ at me? Well, I don’t see anyone else…
I was playing with the cats.
I was breaking boards with my bare hands.
I was washing my hair. One at a time.
I stepped into a rift in the space-time continuum and so, “Hello, I must be going”.
So in a fit of Grinch-inspired genius I decided to create the environment within which I can start Blogging once again, which is to say that, “Yes, I finally went out and dropped $3000S on that 15” turbo-charged G4 Powerbook last week in Singapore and I’m reveling in its un/familiar lines.”
You see, I’m one of the original Apple-seeds, the binary equivalent of the Kiss Army: I got my first Mac shortly after the release of Destroyer, with its seminal God Of Thunder and Detroit Rock City. It got me through college and much later, university. The first reunion tour post-Peter Chris coincided with my purchase of the PB150, once state of the art.
Later, when money got particularly tight I sold out. I wrapped myself in flash, in a thing called the built-in CD-ROM, and oodles of disk space. Yes, I went PC.
It was a phase. I did what I had to do to put food on the table and money in my pocket. See, there were things you could do with PCs, they were compliant, eager to please. Less demanding. Cheaper. And it was good too. It hurt the first few times but you get used to it and start to enjoy yourself.
I’m not proud of my behavior but equally, I’m not embarrassed. I was a young man with issues. It wasn’t the only relationship to suffer: During those complicated, exhilarating years I experimented with Mazdas and Volvos, a Subaru or two and a saucy chromed up Yamaha.
But, in the end of course, you can’t escape who you are, what you are. You can grow up, move away, alter your name, explore a different OS, find a whole new life but in the end, you can’t deny what tug back to the familiar.
So, I’ve struck a deal with myself, one you’ll all have to get used to. I’ve gone back to Mac as my basic computer platform, but I’m going to continue to use a PC every now and then. It just feels right this way. More honest. Each has its advantages and I just think that if people were a little bit more open to different experiences, that the world would be a much better place.
All I’m asking is that you’ll accept me for who I am and that you’ll continue to check the blog and not be enslaved by what some magazines and closed-minded techno-geeks out there might think.
Tuesday, August 19, 2003
In the interest of testing the extent to which the parasites have affected my powers of reductive reasoning (if indeed such a thing exists), I have decided to dedicate the next batch of Blogs to Jules Verne. And Rambo. And John Glenn. And the dude who wrote Momento, and all the others out there who tried, with differing degrees of success, to turn back time.
So, in the terrible mirror image of exercises that might actually have occurred once upon a time in Brother Michael’s second floor, Grade Six classroom at Daniel O’Connell Elementary school on a fall morning in 1975, I give you:
Vacation Summer My On Did I What: Chapter Final The
Aug. 13.
The brain drugs weren’t quite as effective this time ‘round and my pineal gland was obviously not up to the task, so I’m kinda staggered and forgetful and dozy and strung-out all at the same time. No two hours of tennis under the hot sun followed by Welfare Wednesday pitchers of Molson at the Biltmore for this kid, or whatever the local version of the same might be.
And the phone’s ringing and buzzing off the friggin’ hook with ‘Welcome back’s and ‘How come every time you leave the city something big happens’.
And, there’s a series of increasingly hysterical SMSs from various (unidentified) clients that despite my tri-band-enabled, digi-picture-taking, Lynyrd Skynyrd-playing super-phone, failed to penetrate the blanket of smog and humidity hanging over the Lebanese net café on Boul. St. Laurent ten days ago.
Here’s one: Desk is wondering when you’ll have final body count. Any confirmation on the type of explosives? Pls check you email and call asap!!!
How can it be that some messages pinball their way ‘round the world: New York-to-satellite-to-Southeast Asia-to-satellite-to-Canadian exchange-to-satellite-to my phone, whilst others taking exactly the same route never make it? Maybe it’s Electronic Darwinism, sorta like the salmon or something: “Some’ll make it up over the Skookumchuck’s first set of class three rapids and others, well, they just won’t”. Cue: The Arrival Of The Bears.
All said, always nice to get home. The airport is the same zoo as always and there’s no obvious sign that the government is any more vigilant than it was before I left. The bag check is cursory (none of YVR’s explosives-detecting magic wands here), the customs guy doesn’t even look at the form, there’s a mob at the arrival gates waving placards and pieces of 8 ½” x 11” office paper with kanji script written in black marker. The cigarette girls have disappeared, the one’s that greet your successful negotiating the immigration wolves with a free pack of kretek smokes, but that’s just as well as I gave it up five hours ago in Hong Kong. There are none of the soldiers or police that I expected along the Sukharno-Hatta concourse but there’s definitely a lot fewer of the ghost-cab drivers lounging around. Maybe the last blast outside the Korean fast food joint scared ‘em off (not likely) but whatever the reasons for once I don’t have to run the gauntlet to escape the stifling heat for the cool, polite confines of a Silver Bird.
Ask the unfamiliar driver how the things are in the city since I left. All he says is: “I lost five friends in the bomb. Young men with families. The oldest in his 50s.”
The next 40 minutes passed in silence.
The Rembang house is looking tidy if a bit overrun with flowers and bushes. Once the orchids start to go though, it’ll be very fine. J too is looks good enough to eat, standing glowing amid the few remaining thin, hard blossoms, and Ning comes out to welcome me back. Never steps foot out of the kitchen, mind you. I guess Nan is in school, and Juliana, at work.
Like I said, no rockin’ night tonight. Gotta sleep, eat a bit later, sleep some more and by Thursday I should be all right.
It is sometimes hard to believe that the world I spent the past couple of weeks in is really only 24 hours away at any time of the day or night. Seems a lifetime and five minutes.
So, in the terrible mirror image of exercises that might actually have occurred once upon a time in Brother Michael’s second floor, Grade Six classroom at Daniel O’Connell Elementary school on a fall morning in 1975, I give you:
Vacation Summer My On Did I What: Chapter Final The
Aug. 13.
The brain drugs weren’t quite as effective this time ‘round and my pineal gland was obviously not up to the task, so I’m kinda staggered and forgetful and dozy and strung-out all at the same time. No two hours of tennis under the hot sun followed by Welfare Wednesday pitchers of Molson at the Biltmore for this kid, or whatever the local version of the same might be.
And the phone’s ringing and buzzing off the friggin’ hook with ‘Welcome back’s and ‘How come every time you leave the city something big happens’.
And, there’s a series of increasingly hysterical SMSs from various (unidentified) clients that despite my tri-band-enabled, digi-picture-taking, Lynyrd Skynyrd-playing super-phone, failed to penetrate the blanket of smog and humidity hanging over the Lebanese net café on Boul. St. Laurent ten days ago.
Here’s one: Desk is wondering when you’ll have final body count. Any confirmation on the type of explosives? Pls check you email and call asap!!!
How can it be that some messages pinball their way ‘round the world: New York-to-satellite-to-Southeast Asia-to-satellite-to-Canadian exchange-to-satellite-to my phone, whilst others taking exactly the same route never make it? Maybe it’s Electronic Darwinism, sorta like the salmon or something: “Some’ll make it up over the Skookumchuck’s first set of class three rapids and others, well, they just won’t”. Cue: The Arrival Of The Bears.
All said, always nice to get home. The airport is the same zoo as always and there’s no obvious sign that the government is any more vigilant than it was before I left. The bag check is cursory (none of YVR’s explosives-detecting magic wands here), the customs guy doesn’t even look at the form, there’s a mob at the arrival gates waving placards and pieces of 8 ½” x 11” office paper with kanji script written in black marker. The cigarette girls have disappeared, the one’s that greet your successful negotiating the immigration wolves with a free pack of kretek smokes, but that’s just as well as I gave it up five hours ago in Hong Kong. There are none of the soldiers or police that I expected along the Sukharno-Hatta concourse but there’s definitely a lot fewer of the ghost-cab drivers lounging around. Maybe the last blast outside the Korean fast food joint scared ‘em off (not likely) but whatever the reasons for once I don’t have to run the gauntlet to escape the stifling heat for the cool, polite confines of a Silver Bird.
Ask the unfamiliar driver how the things are in the city since I left. All he says is: “I lost five friends in the bomb. Young men with families. The oldest in his 50s.”
The next 40 minutes passed in silence.
The Rembang house is looking tidy if a bit overrun with flowers and bushes. Once the orchids start to go though, it’ll be very fine. J too is looks good enough to eat, standing glowing amid the few remaining thin, hard blossoms, and Ning comes out to welcome me back. Never steps foot out of the kitchen, mind you. I guess Nan is in school, and Juliana, at work.
Like I said, no rockin’ night tonight. Gotta sleep, eat a bit later, sleep some more and by Thursday I should be all right.
It is sometimes hard to believe that the world I spent the past couple of weeks in is really only 24 hours away at any time of the day or night. Seems a lifetime and five minutes.
Monday, July 28, 2003
Twenty-five Thousand Kms and Five Minutes From Home
Ahh, the joys of international travel.
Left Jakarta Friday morning @ 7 am. Arrived in Vancouver 800 years later, Friday afternoon at 2:30pm. Go figure. As I flew over the international dateline I waiting for the feeling I was younger by a day but in vain. Lotta hogwash as far as I can figure.
Had a nightmare trip with Cathay last year; cold crappy food, surly service, wooden benches for seats, late leaving, late arriving etc etc. In other words, identical to business class in most if not all North American carriers.
Things went fairly smoothly between Jakarta-Hong Kong (except for the Sing stop no one bothered to mention to me). The new HK airport is vile and sterile which may work for Chinese people but leaves me flat. You’d think they could put a bit of greenery in there the beat the icy, morgue-like spaces that extend as far as you can see as you make the 20 minute journey from gate 80 to gate 4. And the signage was abysmal. No mention anywhere of a shuttle train between the two principal terminal! I thought it was me until I saw plenty other folks with that “look” gazing at banks of flight info and airport layouts in Kanji trying to figure out what was going on. Like a scene from that old Eastwood movie where he climbs into the cockpit of a prototype fighter jet he plans to steal only to discover all the instructions are written in Cyrillic.
And, dammit, after having humped my way over to the right terminal I discover the only pharmacy in the whole place is, you guessed it, back about 100 meters from where I landed. In the end, after 90 minutes on the ground, I made my gate a quarter of an hour before scheduled departure. Or so I thought.
This time ‘round we were only 45 minutes late pulling outta the HK terminal, riding seats designed by Mr. Chips and, horror-of-horrors, discovered my “Personal Entertainment System”, the three and a half inch screen recessed into the top of the seat in front of me, didn’t work. No movies or Donkey Kong for 14 hours!
Made the necessary scene with the flight supervisor (“bla bla bla foreign correspondent…bla bla bla.. fly across Asia regularly… bla bla bla) but unfortunately, every seat in the plane was full including those in business and first class so I was stuck with it. And a box of chocolates. And a promise that customer service would be in touch. Right.
So I slept the whole way. Or at least most of it. Popped a melatonin pill (all the rage among long-haul Asia-Pacific fliers the past few years: pineal gland produces the substance that has some vaguely defined impact on the body’s clock and supplementing it tricks your brain into thinking everything is a-ok) and wham, goodbye Hong Kong, hello coast mountains. Okay, fair to say I woke up every 20 minutes for eight hours but at least I slept. From sometime after the forgettable chicken pasta until the smell of runny plastic omelets and bitter coffee work me up 2:20 minutes before arriving in Van. Cool eh?
Didn’t have a chance to read most of the in-flight fare I picked up in Jak and Sing: August’s “Bike” magazine, the best rag of its type in the world, the new UK version of “Stuff”, the electronics mag that plays to my vain inner geek who needs things like the Archos AV340 ($700US) a multi-media jukebox with a high rez 3.8-inch-wide screen mounted on a body only slightly larger, housing a 40 gig disk that’ll carry 50 full-length movies, runs MPEG-4 video files to 25-frames-per-second, all bundled with something called the digital video recording module that allows you to record straight from TV (replacing the VCR). There’s a 3.3 megapixel digi-cam attachment that also shoots 320x240 pixel video (like my four-year-old Sony DSCR-50 still cam) and an MP3 player (though no info about how much storage space but presumably you’re saving onto the hard drive alongside the flix). Not bad, squeezing all that into a package that’ll almost fit in the palm of your hand.
Ate Time magazine in under 45 minutes, enjoying particularly the front-end essay about the declining fortunes of Hong Kong plane spotters since the closure of the old Kai Tak airport, the one with the runway that extended 300 meters into HK harbour. Only hole in an otherwise nicely written story? Not a single Chinese voice; foreigners only and, one suspects, Brits all.
And, I’ll have to wait till some other time to read Men’s Journal, which is as close as you can get to a mainstream gay magazine that pretends it’s not really a mainstream gay magazine by including three pages of pix of former Chili Pepper guitarist Dave Navarro’s workout regime and an article a few pages on about how thongs for men are the next big thing.
Anyway, it was a pretty painful trip and now I’m sitting in Rick and Stacy’s kitchen at 645 am having snoozed another eight hours away. They’re both looking great and young Ruby, now 15 months is scuttling about without a care in the world, highly interactive child after getting over 10 minutes of shyness. Looks lovely in the new, dark-blue batik dress Jay and I chose for her during my pre-departure oleh-oleh run in Pasar Raya, Blok M last week. Ruby has huge blue eyes and blond hair so the color really works. One down and three to go!
The house itself is really nice, up above Robson Park where we used to play tennis and soccer with views out to the North Shore mountains and east towards Abby. Nice big yard and room for flower gardens (there’s a big, fat robin sitting on the fence right now) and few if any junkies – except for the former crack-head United Church minister across the street who allows hypes to use his space to get off: sounds kind of unhealthy for anyone who is ‘recovering’ to create that kind of environment methinks.
They had a helluva time getting the place and have been rewarded with a lovely space.
Taxi dropped me off here at about 3 yesterday afternoon, two hours later I was on the court being taught a lesson in humility (I’ve not played much – once actually - since getting sick last year: my only lame excuse) followed by brews at the Biltmore Hotel with Rick n Dave. It was so beautiful yesterday, probably about 27C, a few clouds and a slight breeze: Vancouver at it’s ultimate best. Indy weekend here so the downtown is gonna be mad.
The Biltyw was my old stomping ground when I lived with Dee on E 10th back in 1993-94 (Holy shit, 10 years?) about five minutes and five short blocks from Rick’s place. The scene of the misguided marriage proposal to my old live-in love has fallen victim to the same city council cigarette Nazis as the rest of the bars and restaurants in the Lower Mainland, forcing them to build a glass enclosure for smokers where the entire bar sat whist we were there. Similar to the smoking rooms your find in most airports if slightly less vile.
Rick says the new Punjabi management have scared off all the Natives (The old biker owners couldn’t have cared less and probably actually encouraged the alcoholics as long as they had money in their pockets) so the place really doesn’t take off at night the way it used to, though I suspect the fact that its four days before the end of the month welfare cheque day might have put a dent in attendance too.
Today I’m off to take care of the storage locker, take a trip down memory lane before ousting a bunch of stuff. Dave’s daughter has left us her Ranger so hopefully we’ll be able to take care of it all in one go. Later, plan to hook up with Karen and maybe Darren for drinks. Gotta call Andrew and Mary, and see if Kev and Nicky are about as I’ve not heard back from them since I mailed and called last week. Sure hope they’re around.
Ahh, the joys of international travel.
Left Jakarta Friday morning @ 7 am. Arrived in Vancouver 800 years later, Friday afternoon at 2:30pm. Go figure. As I flew over the international dateline I waiting for the feeling I was younger by a day but in vain. Lotta hogwash as far as I can figure.
Had a nightmare trip with Cathay last year; cold crappy food, surly service, wooden benches for seats, late leaving, late arriving etc etc. In other words, identical to business class in most if not all North American carriers.
Things went fairly smoothly between Jakarta-Hong Kong (except for the Sing stop no one bothered to mention to me). The new HK airport is vile and sterile which may work for Chinese people but leaves me flat. You’d think they could put a bit of greenery in there the beat the icy, morgue-like spaces that extend as far as you can see as you make the 20 minute journey from gate 80 to gate 4. And the signage was abysmal. No mention anywhere of a shuttle train between the two principal terminal! I thought it was me until I saw plenty other folks with that “look” gazing at banks of flight info and airport layouts in Kanji trying to figure out what was going on. Like a scene from that old Eastwood movie where he climbs into the cockpit of a prototype fighter jet he plans to steal only to discover all the instructions are written in Cyrillic.
And, dammit, after having humped my way over to the right terminal I discover the only pharmacy in the whole place is, you guessed it, back about 100 meters from where I landed. In the end, after 90 minutes on the ground, I made my gate a quarter of an hour before scheduled departure. Or so I thought.
This time ‘round we were only 45 minutes late pulling outta the HK terminal, riding seats designed by Mr. Chips and, horror-of-horrors, discovered my “Personal Entertainment System”, the three and a half inch screen recessed into the top of the seat in front of me, didn’t work. No movies or Donkey Kong for 14 hours!
Made the necessary scene with the flight supervisor (“bla bla bla foreign correspondent…bla bla bla.. fly across Asia regularly… bla bla bla) but unfortunately, every seat in the plane was full including those in business and first class so I was stuck with it. And a box of chocolates. And a promise that customer service would be in touch. Right.
So I slept the whole way. Or at least most of it. Popped a melatonin pill (all the rage among long-haul Asia-Pacific fliers the past few years: pineal gland produces the substance that has some vaguely defined impact on the body’s clock and supplementing it tricks your brain into thinking everything is a-ok) and wham, goodbye Hong Kong, hello coast mountains. Okay, fair to say I woke up every 20 minutes for eight hours but at least I slept. From sometime after the forgettable chicken pasta until the smell of runny plastic omelets and bitter coffee work me up 2:20 minutes before arriving in Van. Cool eh?
Didn’t have a chance to read most of the in-flight fare I picked up in Jak and Sing: August’s “Bike” magazine, the best rag of its type in the world, the new UK version of “Stuff”, the electronics mag that plays to my vain inner geek who needs things like the Archos AV340 ($700US) a multi-media jukebox with a high rez 3.8-inch-wide screen mounted on a body only slightly larger, housing a 40 gig disk that’ll carry 50 full-length movies, runs MPEG-4 video files to 25-frames-per-second, all bundled with something called the digital video recording module that allows you to record straight from TV (replacing the VCR). There’s a 3.3 megapixel digi-cam attachment that also shoots 320x240 pixel video (like my four-year-old Sony DSCR-50 still cam) and an MP3 player (though no info about how much storage space but presumably you’re saving onto the hard drive alongside the flix). Not bad, squeezing all that into a package that’ll almost fit in the palm of your hand.
Ate Time magazine in under 45 minutes, enjoying particularly the front-end essay about the declining fortunes of Hong Kong plane spotters since the closure of the old Kai Tak airport, the one with the runway that extended 300 meters into HK harbour. Only hole in an otherwise nicely written story? Not a single Chinese voice; foreigners only and, one suspects, Brits all.
And, I’ll have to wait till some other time to read Men’s Journal, which is as close as you can get to a mainstream gay magazine that pretends it’s not really a mainstream gay magazine by including three pages of pix of former Chili Pepper guitarist Dave Navarro’s workout regime and an article a few pages on about how thongs for men are the next big thing.
Anyway, it was a pretty painful trip and now I’m sitting in Rick and Stacy’s kitchen at 645 am having snoozed another eight hours away. They’re both looking great and young Ruby, now 15 months is scuttling about without a care in the world, highly interactive child after getting over 10 minutes of shyness. Looks lovely in the new, dark-blue batik dress Jay and I chose for her during my pre-departure oleh-oleh run in Pasar Raya, Blok M last week. Ruby has huge blue eyes and blond hair so the color really works. One down and three to go!
The house itself is really nice, up above Robson Park where we used to play tennis and soccer with views out to the North Shore mountains and east towards Abby. Nice big yard and room for flower gardens (there’s a big, fat robin sitting on the fence right now) and few if any junkies – except for the former crack-head United Church minister across the street who allows hypes to use his space to get off: sounds kind of unhealthy for anyone who is ‘recovering’ to create that kind of environment methinks.
They had a helluva time getting the place and have been rewarded with a lovely space.
Taxi dropped me off here at about 3 yesterday afternoon, two hours later I was on the court being taught a lesson in humility (I’ve not played much – once actually - since getting sick last year: my only lame excuse) followed by brews at the Biltmore Hotel with Rick n Dave. It was so beautiful yesterday, probably about 27C, a few clouds and a slight breeze: Vancouver at it’s ultimate best. Indy weekend here so the downtown is gonna be mad.
The Biltyw was my old stomping ground when I lived with Dee on E 10th back in 1993-94 (Holy shit, 10 years?) about five minutes and five short blocks from Rick’s place. The scene of the misguided marriage proposal to my old live-in love has fallen victim to the same city council cigarette Nazis as the rest of the bars and restaurants in the Lower Mainland, forcing them to build a glass enclosure for smokers where the entire bar sat whist we were there. Similar to the smoking rooms your find in most airports if slightly less vile.
Rick says the new Punjabi management have scared off all the Natives (The old biker owners couldn’t have cared less and probably actually encouraged the alcoholics as long as they had money in their pockets) so the place really doesn’t take off at night the way it used to, though I suspect the fact that its four days before the end of the month welfare cheque day might have put a dent in attendance too.
Today I’m off to take care of the storage locker, take a trip down memory lane before ousting a bunch of stuff. Dave’s daughter has left us her Ranger so hopefully we’ll be able to take care of it all in one go. Later, plan to hook up with Karen and maybe Darren for drinks. Gotta call Andrew and Mary, and see if Kev and Nicky are about as I’ve not heard back from them since I mailed and called last week. Sure hope they’re around.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Wizards, ‘wobots and painting pederasts
pjdillon@attglobal.net
Here come the excuses…
See, it’s not on account of having nothing to say, because I’ve always got something to say. Just ask anyone.
And it’s not on account of having been out of Internet range because I’ve been humping my laptop around the country for the past few weeks. And there have been functioning land-lines. And both Attglobal and TelcomNet were accessible. And I had a phone chord. And my cell is dialed up for Net access.
No, this time the excuse for not blogging once in (Idunno, maybeitmittabeentwoweeks?) a while is weight. The awesome, fat, burdensome weight of words. And the bindings they come in.
Witness One for the Defence: J.K. Rowlings’ latest tome wherein, over the course of 766 pages, she shamelessly tortures a 15-year-old kid for the audience’s amusement. And mine. My lovely and talented roomie picked up the latest Potter offering the day it was released here in Jakarta proving she’s adept at right brain thinking (or taking advantage of what she describes as an “Act of God” or a “Cosmic Intersection”) by avoiding bookstores which were sold out three weeks before P-Day and hitting an office supply company of all places.
She finished it in two days. Took me about five. Liked the book. Some decent Corona Milk Bar-esque ultra-violence (especially at the end) though none of those annoying Hogwarts brats who should die, do. And, there’s a couple of decent paragraphs devoted to the mindless rage that courses through the veins of every mid-teen male at some point or other. Organic, adolescent ‘roid-rage. You really get a hate on for the dude’s evil aunt and uncle in the early going but inevitably it takes a turn for the schmaltz to earn its PG rating. And, there’s no sex.
Witness No. Two. See if this rings a bell: “I was driving my Lexus through a rustling wind. This is a car assembled in a work area that’s completely free of human presence. Not a spot of mortal sweat except, okay, for the guys who drive the product out of the plant – allow a little moisture where they grip the wheel. The system flows forever onward, automated to priestly nuance, every gliding movement back-referenced for prime performance. Hollow bodies coming in endless sequence. There’s nobody on the line with caffeine nerves or a history of clinical depression. Just the eerie weave of chromium alloys carried in interlocking arcs, block iron and asphalt sheeting, soaring ornaments or coachwork fitted and merged. Robots tightening bolts, programming drudges that do not dream of family dead.”
That’s right! Me! Yes, I wrote it! Pretty good eh?
Actually, no, I didn’t. But if I’d ever written about a robotic assembly line I’m sure I’d craft something equally, umm, what’s the word I’m looking for… uhhh..
… but anyway it would read just like this line from Don DeLillos’ 1997 epic Underworld which runs to better than 830 pages in hardcover. And I’m only four chapters in or about 20 per cent in and sinking fast. Beautifully crafted, slightly surreal look at one man’s life, a back-handed tribute to America and the lifelong pursuit of a fabled baseball. Loving it. Not much action, bar fights, car chases or slutty women but despite these obvious flaws DeLillo is unputdownable. I’ve heard this all before about the guy whose earlier offering included a novel about God falling out of heaven, drowning in the Atlantic Ocean and subsequently being towed into New York Harbour by tug boat.
Would have sliced through Underworld in maybe 10 nights – I usually hit the pulp in the hour before bed (and then range on till the wee hours, curled up in the pool of blanched white light of a fluorescent bedside lamp) but have been unable recently becaaaaauuuuseee… I’ve been distracted by the third piece of evidence rescued from atop the stack of magazines I devour like popcorn every week: Time, Newsweek, Tempo, Stuff, The Economist, and any other shiny bits of paper that catch my eye.
I give you (metaphorically) Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red. It’s staggering, dense and incredibly engaging. A murder mystery set early in the Istanbul of the first decades of the 16th century in the closeted world of the ‘miniaturist’, the men who illustrate the great books commissioned by the Sultan and powerful pashas, at a time when the fractures between the traditionalists and would-be modernists (those influenced by infidel Venetian perspective realism, threaten to destabilize the Sultan’s rule itself. Amazing stuff even if you’ve gotta reread the odd page or two to capture the essence of Pamuk’s words, packed into more than 500 wee-fonted pages of the soft-cover edition.
Writing in The Observer, Avkat Altinel concludes: “In this world of forgeries, where some might be in danger of losing their faith in literature, Pamuk is the real thing, and this book might well be one of the few recent works of fiction that will be remembered at the end of this century.”
A couple of tastefully written kill scenes that are unfortunately light on the Elmore James and heavy on the internal landscapes of the victim. No car chases, for obvious reasons but several long and colorful mentions of war-horses and horse racing; and a bit of sex, though mostly of the breathless closeted widow’s first experience with her new lover’s ‘rampant pole’ –variety and numerous passages wherein older men reminisce fondly over their relationship with an endless parade of young boys (I mean, these Turks are in no position to be imposing order on Afghanistan from what I’m reading).
So there you have it. That’s why I haven’t blogged ya since June: wizards, ‘wobots and painting pederasts. Oh, yeah, and Finding Nemo. Go and see it. A most excellent experience, dude.
pjdillon@attglobal.net
Here come the excuses…
See, it’s not on account of having nothing to say, because I’ve always got something to say. Just ask anyone.
And it’s not on account of having been out of Internet range because I’ve been humping my laptop around the country for the past few weeks. And there have been functioning land-lines. And both Attglobal and TelcomNet were accessible. And I had a phone chord. And my cell is dialed up for Net access.
No, this time the excuse for not blogging once in (Idunno, maybeitmittabeentwoweeks?) a while is weight. The awesome, fat, burdensome weight of words. And the bindings they come in.
Witness One for the Defence: J.K. Rowlings’ latest tome wherein, over the course of 766 pages, she shamelessly tortures a 15-year-old kid for the audience’s amusement. And mine. My lovely and talented roomie picked up the latest Potter offering the day it was released here in Jakarta proving she’s adept at right brain thinking (or taking advantage of what she describes as an “Act of God” or a “Cosmic Intersection”) by avoiding bookstores which were sold out three weeks before P-Day and hitting an office supply company of all places.
She finished it in two days. Took me about five. Liked the book. Some decent Corona Milk Bar-esque ultra-violence (especially at the end) though none of those annoying Hogwarts brats who should die, do. And, there’s a couple of decent paragraphs devoted to the mindless rage that courses through the veins of every mid-teen male at some point or other. Organic, adolescent ‘roid-rage. You really get a hate on for the dude’s evil aunt and uncle in the early going but inevitably it takes a turn for the schmaltz to earn its PG rating. And, there’s no sex.
Witness No. Two. See if this rings a bell: “I was driving my Lexus through a rustling wind. This is a car assembled in a work area that’s completely free of human presence. Not a spot of mortal sweat except, okay, for the guys who drive the product out of the plant – allow a little moisture where they grip the wheel. The system flows forever onward, automated to priestly nuance, every gliding movement back-referenced for prime performance. Hollow bodies coming in endless sequence. There’s nobody on the line with caffeine nerves or a history of clinical depression. Just the eerie weave of chromium alloys carried in interlocking arcs, block iron and asphalt sheeting, soaring ornaments or coachwork fitted and merged. Robots tightening bolts, programming drudges that do not dream of family dead.”
That’s right! Me! Yes, I wrote it! Pretty good eh?
Actually, no, I didn’t. But if I’d ever written about a robotic assembly line I’m sure I’d craft something equally, umm, what’s the word I’m looking for… uhhh..
… but anyway it would read just like this line from Don DeLillos’ 1997 epic Underworld which runs to better than 830 pages in hardcover. And I’m only four chapters in or about 20 per cent in and sinking fast. Beautifully crafted, slightly surreal look at one man’s life, a back-handed tribute to America and the lifelong pursuit of a fabled baseball. Loving it. Not much action, bar fights, car chases or slutty women but despite these obvious flaws DeLillo is unputdownable. I’ve heard this all before about the guy whose earlier offering included a novel about God falling out of heaven, drowning in the Atlantic Ocean and subsequently being towed into New York Harbour by tug boat.
Would have sliced through Underworld in maybe 10 nights – I usually hit the pulp in the hour before bed (and then range on till the wee hours, curled up in the pool of blanched white light of a fluorescent bedside lamp) but have been unable recently becaaaaauuuuseee… I’ve been distracted by the third piece of evidence rescued from atop the stack of magazines I devour like popcorn every week: Time, Newsweek, Tempo, Stuff, The Economist, and any other shiny bits of paper that catch my eye.
I give you (metaphorically) Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red. It’s staggering, dense and incredibly engaging. A murder mystery set early in the Istanbul of the first decades of the 16th century in the closeted world of the ‘miniaturist’, the men who illustrate the great books commissioned by the Sultan and powerful pashas, at a time when the fractures between the traditionalists and would-be modernists (those influenced by infidel Venetian perspective realism, threaten to destabilize the Sultan’s rule itself. Amazing stuff even if you’ve gotta reread the odd page or two to capture the essence of Pamuk’s words, packed into more than 500 wee-fonted pages of the soft-cover edition.
Writing in The Observer, Avkat Altinel concludes: “In this world of forgeries, where some might be in danger of losing their faith in literature, Pamuk is the real thing, and this book might well be one of the few recent works of fiction that will be remembered at the end of this century.”
A couple of tastefully written kill scenes that are unfortunately light on the Elmore James and heavy on the internal landscapes of the victim. No car chases, for obvious reasons but several long and colorful mentions of war-horses and horse racing; and a bit of sex, though mostly of the breathless closeted widow’s first experience with her new lover’s ‘rampant pole’ –variety and numerous passages wherein older men reminisce fondly over their relationship with an endless parade of young boys (I mean, these Turks are in no position to be imposing order on Afghanistan from what I’m reading).
So there you have it. That’s why I haven’t blogged ya since June: wizards, ‘wobots and painting pederasts. Oh, yeah, and Finding Nemo. Go and see it. A most excellent experience, dude.
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Miracle Of Birth No. 17,346,301,856... And Counting
pjdillon@attglobal.net
We’re all pretty excited about welcoming the newest member to the extended clan, my first nephew, eight pound, 10 ounce Cole, who stepped out last Friday afternoon, June 19.
He’s up and about and pretty much running the Ottawa household. His amazing mum is in great shape, dad is anchored to the radiator in the front room with the same length of string we used to prevent him floating off following the birth of Isabelle back in Dec. 2001. The grandparents are ecstatic and are threatening to move into the basement, and Netminders everywhere are warned to set their photo attachment filters to maximum in order to weed out the inevitable flurry of multiple meg files to be produced in coming weeks as the above mentioned shoot every waking moment of young Cole’s life.
Myself and the gal are even now conspiring to fly over sometime between now and mid-August. Crazy post-SASs deals to be found if you dig deep, including a tasty Cathay fare from Sing to Toronto for about $520 US. If it happens, and it remains a big IF, we’ll get the bike tuned up and go for a ten day tear about northern Ontario, maybe do some camping or something, as well as seeing family and friends on the east coast.
We’d like to hit the west coast as well, perhaps pick up Drew’s wee Yammy 650 for a quick run up the coast, look at a couple of properties I’ve been following on the Net (hey, a guy can dream, right?).
‘Course there’s been a whole lot of irregular behavior out there as well so I think some of our time will be spent tummy rubbing at least two other swellin’ bellies that we’re aware of at this time. A word of warning to breeder women heading for Vancouver: think Bottle Water. Stay away from the taps. I repeat, Stay away from the taps.
I’m off to Bandung for a couple of dry, cool mountain days, traipsing about Tanjungsari sub-district observing matters village-based early childhood development programs and generally making a pain of myself to any and all forced to decipher my garbled Bahasa Indonesia.
Back to Jak Sunday hopefully with time and energy to blog-on.
pjdillon@attglobal.net
We’re all pretty excited about welcoming the newest member to the extended clan, my first nephew, eight pound, 10 ounce Cole, who stepped out last Friday afternoon, June 19.
He’s up and about and pretty much running the Ottawa household. His amazing mum is in great shape, dad is anchored to the radiator in the front room with the same length of string we used to prevent him floating off following the birth of Isabelle back in Dec. 2001. The grandparents are ecstatic and are threatening to move into the basement, and Netminders everywhere are warned to set their photo attachment filters to maximum in order to weed out the inevitable flurry of multiple meg files to be produced in coming weeks as the above mentioned shoot every waking moment of young Cole’s life.
Myself and the gal are even now conspiring to fly over sometime between now and mid-August. Crazy post-SASs deals to be found if you dig deep, including a tasty Cathay fare from Sing to Toronto for about $520 US. If it happens, and it remains a big IF, we’ll get the bike tuned up and go for a ten day tear about northern Ontario, maybe do some camping or something, as well as seeing family and friends on the east coast.
We’d like to hit the west coast as well, perhaps pick up Drew’s wee Yammy 650 for a quick run up the coast, look at a couple of properties I’ve been following on the Net (hey, a guy can dream, right?).
‘Course there’s been a whole lot of irregular behavior out there as well so I think some of our time will be spent tummy rubbing at least two other swellin’ bellies that we’re aware of at this time. A word of warning to breeder women heading for Vancouver: think Bottle Water. Stay away from the taps. I repeat, Stay away from the taps.
I’m off to Bandung for a couple of dry, cool mountain days, traipsing about Tanjungsari sub-district observing matters village-based early childhood development programs and generally making a pain of myself to any and all forced to decipher my garbled Bahasa Indonesia.
Back to Jak Sunday hopefully with time and energy to blog-on.
Thursday, June 12, 2003
More Lessons From The Mostar Mash
ACTUALLY WRITTEN 02:00, 06-06-03
pjdillon@attglobal.net
These late night files have got to end!
Funny how three pints of Bintang and a glass of Chardonay will turn yer average, mild mannered typist into some sort of wordsmith in waiting… this is the way it use to be, light buzz, free association time… lets see where we end up tonight.
The voyage of discovery continues today with new music files, and continuing tale of the Grinch and his music box.
As the casual reader will be aware, I’m losing a small part of myself with the departure from the archipela-nation of my best man Sasa, he of the Yogyakarta, joint tattoo session of two weeks ago. I’m not gonna gloom and doom about that ‘cause there’s always tomorrow or tomorrow for that. Mentioned here only in the context of how sometimes the learning only comes when it gets to be late in the day and transit is bad and maybe you’re gonna have to leave early and you don’t really know for sure when you throw “See ya later” over your shoulder just how long “later” might turn out to be…
And so here’s the word. I’m sitting propped up in bed (alone, on account of my sweety being off in East Java doing the family thing for a couple of days) accompanied by the whirling of the AC and Dexter Gordon’s smooth-as-bubur ayam sax on the deck, and it is all very fine.
What do you learn from someone’s music collection? Better yet, what do you learn about your own constricted airs when thrown a stash of new music, of names you know but have never really listened to?
I wouldn’t be lingering amidst these silky airs this evening had Sasa not dropped off about 15 kgs of CDs to be blended and mulched and scored into my hard-drive and turned into a usable, ‘groovable playlist for Friday’s big “goin’ ‘way” party (more on that later: ed). See, ‘cause even though we’ve covered a lot of ground over a couple dozen long evenings, I had no idea of my man Sasa's musical tastes extended to so many variably variable terrains.
I’m looking at platters worth of Ella James and Shostakovich, Aretha and Vivaldi, oblique African jazz rhythms and Eric Clapton. Al DiMeola and Fiddler On The Roof. Leonard Bernstein and Leonard Cohen. And many sleeves-worth of Croatian pickings, running from urban Mostar electro-trance to military drinking songs, and other esoteric eccentricities.
I’ve been entertaining him with White Zombie, Zappa and BB King, for four years, unaware of the bass-line that’s been running through my buddy’s personal soundtrack all this time. And so, I’m learning again. Right now it's Dexter Gordon (a name I knew but never consciously heard), and the many others I’ve been sampling, tasting, and saving to my laptop these past few days.
So this is what Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond were up to at Carnegie Hall back in the fall of ’63? Sweetness!
……… and so the battle goes on. News and views: New York Times this morning announced both editor and ME are leaving after the whole scandal with the Jayson Wazzisname, the golden boy, the poster-child for in-house affirmative action (he’s black) who cooked half of the stories he wrote since October of last year. Another journo living real in a post-modern world. Gimme substance abuse and gimme Beltway snipers baby, and I’m good to go.
Always curious about the moral judgments passed at these moments. This young fellow deserved to get caned, no doubt. Bitch slapped? Oh yeah.
Funny thing though. Most of the people my age I know who’ve been operating at the international levels of the business say that while I was banging away in obscurity in Western Canada for so many years, they’ve been witnessing the gradual decay in the quality of international journalism, accuracy sacrificed for access, some sort of objective truth lost to higher in-house political ambitions (something I’ve seen personally, reporters torque-ing up stories from Indonesia because it is safe to do so and it moves your byline from inside Page 14 ). These friends with the majors are almost uniformly appalled by the extent to which their colleagues lie, cheat and bullshit their way through assignments.
Spoke with one friend who’s a “Face” with one of the networks recently who identified three on-air journalists most competent news consumers are familiar with that he said were notorious for filing stories that were not only not accurate, but were complete figments of their imagination. When pressed, he came up with specific examples. And, we’re not talking about the bald-faced lies Geraldo filed from Tora Bora, but more recent stories from Southeast and Central Asia that had no basis in fact.
More on this I’m sure in later editions. For now though the blood is starting to chill, Dexter’s mellowing me out and I’m gonna crash.
ACTUALLY WRITTEN 02:00, 06-06-03
pjdillon@attglobal.net
These late night files have got to end!
Funny how three pints of Bintang and a glass of Chardonay will turn yer average, mild mannered typist into some sort of wordsmith in waiting… this is the way it use to be, light buzz, free association time… lets see where we end up tonight.
The voyage of discovery continues today with new music files, and continuing tale of the Grinch and his music box.
As the casual reader will be aware, I’m losing a small part of myself with the departure from the archipela-nation of my best man Sasa, he of the Yogyakarta, joint tattoo session of two weeks ago. I’m not gonna gloom and doom about that ‘cause there’s always tomorrow or tomorrow for that. Mentioned here only in the context of how sometimes the learning only comes when it gets to be late in the day and transit is bad and maybe you’re gonna have to leave early and you don’t really know for sure when you throw “See ya later” over your shoulder just how long “later” might turn out to be…
And so here’s the word. I’m sitting propped up in bed (alone, on account of my sweety being off in East Java doing the family thing for a couple of days) accompanied by the whirling of the AC and Dexter Gordon’s smooth-as-bubur ayam sax on the deck, and it is all very fine.
What do you learn from someone’s music collection? Better yet, what do you learn about your own constricted airs when thrown a stash of new music, of names you know but have never really listened to?
I wouldn’t be lingering amidst these silky airs this evening had Sasa not dropped off about 15 kgs of CDs to be blended and mulched and scored into my hard-drive and turned into a usable, ‘groovable playlist for Friday’s big “goin’ ‘way” party (more on that later: ed). See, ‘cause even though we’ve covered a lot of ground over a couple dozen long evenings, I had no idea of my man Sasa's musical tastes extended to so many variably variable terrains.
I’m looking at platters worth of Ella James and Shostakovich, Aretha and Vivaldi, oblique African jazz rhythms and Eric Clapton. Al DiMeola and Fiddler On The Roof. Leonard Bernstein and Leonard Cohen. And many sleeves-worth of Croatian pickings, running from urban Mostar electro-trance to military drinking songs, and other esoteric eccentricities.
I’ve been entertaining him with White Zombie, Zappa and BB King, for four years, unaware of the bass-line that’s been running through my buddy’s personal soundtrack all this time. And so, I’m learning again. Right now it's Dexter Gordon (a name I knew but never consciously heard), and the many others I’ve been sampling, tasting, and saving to my laptop these past few days.
So this is what Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond were up to at Carnegie Hall back in the fall of ’63? Sweetness!
……… and so the battle goes on. News and views: New York Times this morning announced both editor and ME are leaving after the whole scandal with the Jayson Wazzisname, the golden boy, the poster-child for in-house affirmative action (he’s black) who cooked half of the stories he wrote since October of last year. Another journo living real in a post-modern world. Gimme substance abuse and gimme Beltway snipers baby, and I’m good to go.
Always curious about the moral judgments passed at these moments. This young fellow deserved to get caned, no doubt. Bitch slapped? Oh yeah.
Funny thing though. Most of the people my age I know who’ve been operating at the international levels of the business say that while I was banging away in obscurity in Western Canada for so many years, they’ve been witnessing the gradual decay in the quality of international journalism, accuracy sacrificed for access, some sort of objective truth lost to higher in-house political ambitions (something I’ve seen personally, reporters torque-ing up stories from Indonesia because it is safe to do so and it moves your byline from inside Page 14 ). These friends with the majors are almost uniformly appalled by the extent to which their colleagues lie, cheat and bullshit their way through assignments.
Spoke with one friend who’s a “Face” with one of the networks recently who identified three on-air journalists most competent news consumers are familiar with that he said were notorious for filing stories that were not only not accurate, but were complete figments of their imagination. When pressed, he came up with specific examples. And, we’re not talking about the bald-faced lies Geraldo filed from Tora Bora, but more recent stories from Southeast and Central Asia that had no basis in fact.
More on this I’m sure in later editions. For now though the blood is starting to chill, Dexter’s mellowing me out and I’m gonna crash.
Monday, June 02, 2003
Loathsome Palace Lizards Declare War
pjdillon@attglobal.net
I’m seized by these moments recently of absolute disgust and loathing. Mostly it’s directed at the conscienceless crooks, at the vile, populist whores in high office, and the zealots in the armed forces whose commanders (careerists with at least some sense of military history and the ‘code’ etc) for the most part seem to have learned absolutely nothing from the sacrifices of their forefathers on 10,000 battlefields across multiple millennia.
(I’m talking about Indonesia right now but feel free…)
I’m self-aware enough to fight the pull towards becoming one of those obnoxious and painful ex-pats who’ll bitch and moan 24/7 from the comfort of their plush bar stools or catered golf charity events, but this new, unnecessary war in Aceh is sooo pissing me off.
50,000 soldiers and half again as many police backed by attack aircraft, artillery, tanks and armored vehicles. A khaki-clad zealot in charge of operations, reporting to one of the more reprehensible characters the Indo military (TNI) has spat out in recent years, the point-man for the demolition of East Timor.
All talk is about “crushing” the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), something a nine-year-long military free fire zone (till 2000) failed to do. They did manage to kill something in the order of 7,000 civilians and rape 10,000 women (according to the toothless, widely ignored national human rights commission) during that period. That’s roughly two murders and three rapes a day, every day for almost a decade, in a province of about four million people.
The laugh-till-you-cry part of this is that the head of the Armed Forces reared up on both hind legs last week to say that it is unlikely they’ll be able to get rid of the GAM. And so you’re in there now for what reason…..?
This week he takes it one step further, telling Time magazine that, well, look, pretty much it’s okay to kill civilians and kids because, well, they might have guns. Perhaps we can get our brains around shooting a 12-year-old kid carrying an AK-47. But is it necessary to execute unarmed children (or adults for that matter) who have the temerity to run from a TNI patrol when they’ve been brought up on a steady diet of excesses by those same soldiers?
The West’s golden boy in the palace, security minister Yudhoyono has shown his true colors, his military pedigree; the spineless minister responsible for human rights fights a real guard action, attacking foreign journos who question his ability to deal with the inevitable raft of brutality charges that’ll emerge from Aceh; while right at the top of the shitpile, the feckless bitch who would be Queen (the same one who publicly swore two years ago that she’d never raise a hand to her ‘Acehnese children’; the one who had students arrested and charged for daring to walk on a poster of her face: “I thought I looked quite pretty in that picture” she comments later) refuses to meet foreign envoys appealing for calm and patience as the clock ticks towards the May 19 deadline for peace talks. Basically, she’s not been seen since the fighting began. Last month she emerged from her gilded burrow long enough to see the shadow of a problem (the trials of the Bali bombers) and scurried back again.
The other variety of reptile here is, as always, fairly predictable. The Yanks went to the wall trying to get a last minute deal to prevent this from happening and got nothing. Now that the killing has started of course they’ll line up behind the government while mouthing words like human rights. Post-Iraq Washington needs whatever reluctant support the Indonesians will give, and I’ve a strong feeling that the wily Javanese exacted a high cost for that support before April’s Monster Truck show north of Kuwait.
The British ambassador threw his weight behind the ‘national unity’ line Jakarta has been using to justify this latest abomination, and Alexander Downer, the Aussie foreign minister, when asked what he thinks about human rights abuses committed in Aceh says that he wishes GAM would stop doing them.
I want to meet that smarmy bastard one day. He’s too self-satisfied for his own good and there’s a few people I know lining up to know knock that look through the back of his mouth.
When you think about it, who’s got more to lose geopolitically, The States and it’s allies or Indonesia? It looks, at least on the surface, that the folks at Istana Merdeka have got Bush Younger and his posse over the preverbial barrel. Indeed they have for some time. It’ll be interesting to see how those administrations deal with Indonesia when it returns to a military dictatorship in a few years. Hell, the Army never really stopped running the friggin’ country.
How’s that for a gloomy prognosis.
I’m going to find something else to write about later this week. Like how I've become a Body Nazi, or stumbling across an elementary school radio tucked away in the lush base of the very Fuji-esque Slamet Mtn. Or how cool my new tattoo is. Or something. Tonight, I just needed to vent.
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Fat Boy and The Battle of Anaconda
pjdillon@attglobal.net
A few weeks back I was blogging on at the gross of numbers and passwords that inhabit our everyday lives. Phone numbers, government numbers, website password alphanumeric combinations, addresses, ages and the like.
Today I’ve another series of numbers, gross on to add to the list.
After much emmming and ahhhing I’ve finally started on a regular routine with a personal trainer, I’ll call him The Pope, lead Inquisitor at The Club of Pain.
I know the whole personal trainer things is so, like, 1988 but I’ve always lolly-gaggled a couple blocks behind the cutting edge, admiring the view, making leaf dams above the sewer grates and taking he piss out of $1,000 Armani’s, automatic transmission and anything remotely Hollywood. So, the 15-year lag is nothing exceptional: I’m still waiting to catch Philip Glass in concert…. ooops.
Of all the numbers I’m now faced with there’s a single that rises above the rest, it’s a number that reflects, for the first time accurately, what exactly has been going on in my life for the past six months. For you slower kids (leave those soggy leaves alone and pull up a stump) who might not have been keeping track, back in November I came down with a wicked double dose of malaria, falciparum and vivax together, that kinda threw me for a loop. I’ve not written about the experience yet (see para above if you’re still confused as to why) but my friends will tell you I’ve bored them to tears with the whole experience, one shared by 10 per cent of humankind annually, though perhaps only a select few hundred thousand get a double whammy.
Since my close encounter with the other side, for I have it on the doctor’s authority that I was one chat away from a free trip to the great concrete half-pipe in the sky, I’ve discovered a renewed taste for life (ahem) and have vigorously applied myself to enjoying it. Which is to say that I’ve done little else but eat since the MDs cleared me to go home back in mid-November and the results are there for all to see.
And so there are two new numbers: the first is 104 kgs (230 lbs for any American Neanderthals out there), my body weight as of 1 pm Monday. And I was no Slim Jim before.
My second new, and terrifying number is 28.8. Actually, it’s 28.8 per cent. Body fat. As in, almost a third of my body is fat. I am in fact a walking, talking, blogging deep-fried, chocolate-coated banana. I should go on tour.
I am John Earl Hughes (check Guinness Book Of World Records… or Ripley’s). In six short months I’ve gained four pant sizes and frankly, even getting into the parachutes I’m wearing now is getting to be a chore. I have actually developed gravity: small objects like Bic lighters, cocktail peanuts and crack vials actually rise up to circle my moon as a pass, tiny pathetic satellites about a malevolent planetary body that might devour them given half the chance.
On a more personal note, I’ve noticed that as the size of one’s gut grows so the relative size and menace of one’s unit appears to shrink. Though I’m not one to obsess about this kind of things (editor: too many hours between the ages of 13 and 24 doing that, methinks!), I have noted a recent medical story that as men age, they can expect to see up to a 30 percent loss in, ummm, real estate, south of the border. Now, I’m no mathematician (or real estate agent) but the combination of tectonic shifts creating vast new tracts of land and shrinking ‘points of interest’ is troubling to my inner dirty-old-man.
I’m not sure how exactly it happened. I eat rice, fish and veggies, admittedly with some real tasty deep-fried items like tempe and perkadel jagung, almost exclusively. I drink beer, enough to account for a bit of a gut, but not the Anaconda wrapped about my waist at the moment. I even get exercise, and was hitting the gym fairly regularly, working my way up to half a dozen three-minute rounds with the heavy bag and pushing railcars worth of weight around several times a week, particularly through February and March, before tailing off.
Maybe it’s because I eat everything on my plate. Maybe because I use as that plate a serving dish fit for a suckling pig… kidding… and Mom taught us to finish our meals on account of the poor starving kids in Africa (editor: sure doughboy, blame yer mother).
More likely it’s the combination of eating really big portions, a lack of commitment to cardio workouts over those forgiving Universal weight contraptions, quitting smoking after two decades on the pipe stirred into a body that’s 38 and running a bit slower than the earlier 16-year-old model that used to wolf down an entire of loaf of bread and half a kg of cheese at a sitting.
Whatever the reason (and if one more person suggests beer I’m gonna blow), it’s about to end. The Pope and I have gone to war with The Anaconda. It’s only Day Three but I’m pretty confident that an aggressive plan of attack, good intel about the snake’s plans and a commitment to keeping rice, deep-frieds and the like off the daily menu is going to make a different over the next few months.
I won’t blog you to death with my progress, this is not some friggin’ masculine version of Bridget Jones Diary, or an out-take from Details or Men’s Health (30 Days To Rock Hard Abs!!!) going on here, but I will on-pass the high points along the way.
Wish The Grinch luck.
pjdillon@attglobal.net
A few weeks back I was blogging on at the gross of numbers and passwords that inhabit our everyday lives. Phone numbers, government numbers, website password alphanumeric combinations, addresses, ages and the like.
Today I’ve another series of numbers, gross on to add to the list.
After much emmming and ahhhing I’ve finally started on a regular routine with a personal trainer, I’ll call him The Pope, lead Inquisitor at The Club of Pain.
I know the whole personal trainer things is so, like, 1988 but I’ve always lolly-gaggled a couple blocks behind the cutting edge, admiring the view, making leaf dams above the sewer grates and taking he piss out of $1,000 Armani’s, automatic transmission and anything remotely Hollywood. So, the 15-year lag is nothing exceptional: I’m still waiting to catch Philip Glass in concert…. ooops.
Of all the numbers I’m now faced with there’s a single that rises above the rest, it’s a number that reflects, for the first time accurately, what exactly has been going on in my life for the past six months. For you slower kids (leave those soggy leaves alone and pull up a stump) who might not have been keeping track, back in November I came down with a wicked double dose of malaria, falciparum and vivax together, that kinda threw me for a loop. I’ve not written about the experience yet (see para above if you’re still confused as to why) but my friends will tell you I’ve bored them to tears with the whole experience, one shared by 10 per cent of humankind annually, though perhaps only a select few hundred thousand get a double whammy.
Since my close encounter with the other side, for I have it on the doctor’s authority that I was one chat away from a free trip to the great concrete half-pipe in the sky, I’ve discovered a renewed taste for life (ahem) and have vigorously applied myself to enjoying it. Which is to say that I’ve done little else but eat since the MDs cleared me to go home back in mid-November and the results are there for all to see.
And so there are two new numbers: the first is 104 kgs (230 lbs for any American Neanderthals out there), my body weight as of 1 pm Monday. And I was no Slim Jim before.
My second new, and terrifying number is 28.8. Actually, it’s 28.8 per cent. Body fat. As in, almost a third of my body is fat. I am in fact a walking, talking, blogging deep-fried, chocolate-coated banana. I should go on tour.
I am John Earl Hughes (check Guinness Book Of World Records… or Ripley’s). In six short months I’ve gained four pant sizes and frankly, even getting into the parachutes I’m wearing now is getting to be a chore. I have actually developed gravity: small objects like Bic lighters, cocktail peanuts and crack vials actually rise up to circle my moon as a pass, tiny pathetic satellites about a malevolent planetary body that might devour them given half the chance.
On a more personal note, I’ve noticed that as the size of one’s gut grows so the relative size and menace of one’s unit appears to shrink. Though I’m not one to obsess about this kind of things (editor: too many hours between the ages of 13 and 24 doing that, methinks!), I have noted a recent medical story that as men age, they can expect to see up to a 30 percent loss in, ummm, real estate, south of the border. Now, I’m no mathematician (or real estate agent) but the combination of tectonic shifts creating vast new tracts of land and shrinking ‘points of interest’ is troubling to my inner dirty-old-man.
I’m not sure how exactly it happened. I eat rice, fish and veggies, admittedly with some real tasty deep-fried items like tempe and perkadel jagung, almost exclusively. I drink beer, enough to account for a bit of a gut, but not the Anaconda wrapped about my waist at the moment. I even get exercise, and was hitting the gym fairly regularly, working my way up to half a dozen three-minute rounds with the heavy bag and pushing railcars worth of weight around several times a week, particularly through February and March, before tailing off.
Maybe it’s because I eat everything on my plate. Maybe because I use as that plate a serving dish fit for a suckling pig… kidding… and Mom taught us to finish our meals on account of the poor starving kids in Africa (editor: sure doughboy, blame yer mother).
More likely it’s the combination of eating really big portions, a lack of commitment to cardio workouts over those forgiving Universal weight contraptions, quitting smoking after two decades on the pipe stirred into a body that’s 38 and running a bit slower than the earlier 16-year-old model that used to wolf down an entire of loaf of bread and half a kg of cheese at a sitting.
Whatever the reason (and if one more person suggests beer I’m gonna blow), it’s about to end. The Pope and I have gone to war with The Anaconda. It’s only Day Three but I’m pretty confident that an aggressive plan of attack, good intel about the snake’s plans and a commitment to keeping rice, deep-frieds and the like off the daily menu is going to make a different over the next few months.
I won’t blog you to death with my progress, this is not some friggin’ masculine version of Bridget Jones Diary, or an out-take from Details or Men’s Health (30 Days To Rock Hard Abs!!!) going on here, but I will on-pass the high points along the way.
Wish The Grinch luck.
Saturday, May 17, 2003
Blogged Up On The Island Of The Gods
pjdillon@attglobal.net
Something went badly wrong last week while I was in Bali writing about the opening day of the Amrozi trial, the first of 33 conspirators believed responsible for the Sari Club bomb back on Oct. 12 of last year.
I actually blogged a couple of the stories I wrote, the first for The Globe & Mail and the second, for USA Today. For some reason, neither ended up sticking. Weird because my word-flow is usually sticky enough to adhere to even the most smooth and inhospitable of surfaces. So, in the interests of the public record, and to prove that I actually do work occasionally, here we go again.
NOTE: These are the versions scalped from their papers’ respective web sites. Each has been updated with a brief wire service update, a function of the papers both going to the printers before I’ve woken on this side of the Pacific.
The Globe story, which ran the day after the trial (13-05) is otherwise exactly the same as what I filed, while roughly 200 words have been shorn from the USA Today copy (12-05), mostly street interviews with local residents and tourists, as I’d been requested to do.
They begin below.
Bombing trial begins in Bali
By PAUL DILLON
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, May 13, 2003 - Page A15
DENPASAR, INDONESIA -- Two walls of Sisa DeJesus's office, which rests at the edge of a picture-postcard Balinese rice paddy, are covered with the painful memories of the children she works with, the youngest victims of the world's worst terrorist strike since Sept. 11, 2001.
In style, many of the paintings are indistinguishable from the crude products of kindergarten-aged children everywhere -- except that these are the horrific imaginings of youngsters whose parents were killed when Islamic militants detonated a massive car bomb outside a packed nightclub on the resort of Kuta's seedy Legian strip last Oct. 12.
"This little girl Dinda's mother was driving past the Sari Club to pick up her husband at the hotel where he worked when the bomb went off," says Ms. DeJesus, a transplanted New York native, pointing toward a painting that features a wild, airy web of brown spatter tightening to a densely packed riot of red and black at its base. "She told us it's a picture of Mommy's motorbike. She's three years old."
Yesterday marked the opening of the first trial in the Kuta bombing, at a special courtroom in nearby Denpasar, less than two kilometres from the office where Ms. DeJesus works. The court was packed with spectators and guarded by snipers and bomb-sniffing dogs as a police convoy brought the first suspect, Amrozi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, to answer administrative questions from a five-judge panel.
The short proceedings completed, the trial was adjourned until next Monday. But it was a far more significant event for the hundreds of spectators, most of whom watched on two large television screens set up outside the courthouse.
"Let's just kill him. He killed our friends after all," said Wayan Sumerta, a 35-year-old Balinese driver.
Elsewhere, streets were deserted as Balinese watched live on television, a people transfixed by the memories of last October's carnage, in which 202 people died, more than 350 were injured and the island's reputation as a peaceful tourist idyll was forever changed.
Today, there is little evidence that anything untoward happened at the intersection of Jalan Legian and Poppies Lane II, where the bombs went off. Buildings damaged by the blast are being rebuilt or renovated, and a solid green fence separates pedestrian traffic from the empty lot that once held the Sari Club.
There's talk of a memorial of some sort, but the the Kuta strip has slipped back into its seedy persona, a mix of bars and restaurants, high-end surf shops, low-rent T-shirt hawkers ("Osama don't Surf" is a big seller), beggars, hookers and drug dealers.
A middle-aged Balinese man in mirrored shades leaning against a van across the street from the Sari lot is fairly representative of the area's full-time street population. "Hey boss, you wanna buy some hashish, some good hashish?" he says by way of an opening line. "You want transport? You wanna buy a T-shirt? Marijuana?"
Yet the bombing's effects continue to reverberate in Bali, which has long been dependent on tourism. The hotel industry has been ravaged, with some hotels recording single-digit occupancy. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their livelihoods.
"This bomb before and now SARS has destroyed the economy of Bali," said a Balinese bartender who gives his name as Willi. "For so many years, we were able to look forward to a regular paycheque -- so we had plenty of kids, bought motorbikes and cars and DVD machines. Now no one has any money and we try to sell our stuff to buy food."
It would have been worse but for the loyalty shown by a small core group of repeat visitors, such as Terry McNish and his family, Australians who have been visiting Bali on vacation for years.
"Look, if something is going to happen, mate, it's going to happen. But you can't live your life looking over your shoulder all the time," he said.
END
Bali bombing trial starts Monday
By Paul Dillon, special for USA TODAY
DENPASAR, Indonesia — Ayu Prihana-Dewi was six hours into a busy Saturday night shift as a cashier at the bustling Sari Club when a massive explosion blew out the front of the sprawling nightspot, tossing her across the room.
Terrorists had struck the softest of targets, a Bali nightclub packed with hundreds of vacationers. More than 200 people died, and 350 were injured in the attack Oct. 12. Among the dead: more than 80 Australians, 38 Indonesians and seven Americans.
Today, the first of 33 suspects in the Sari Club bombing will be tried. On the eve of the trial, the last of Prihana-Dewi's physical scars — third-degree burns on her left forearm — have finally healed. Mentally, too, the 22-year-old claims to be making a full recovery, though the prospect of attending the trials makes her shiver.
"For the first few months, if I'd met these terrorist people, I would have killed them," says Prihana-Dewi, who now works with an aid group assisting the families of Balinese victims of the blast. "I've come to understand that the law is there for a reason, so I'm happy to see the trials start."
Indonesian prosecutors will read out a 33-page indictment today against Amrozi bin Nushasim, a small town mechanic from East Java suspected of buying the vehicle and materials used to build the bomb and transporting them to Bali. The trial is expected to last almost five months. It is the long-awaited first phase of criminal proceedings against the 33 men, including two of Amrozi's brothers, suspected of belonging to Jemaah Islamiyah, a group dedicated to creating a pan-Islamic state comprising the Philippines, the Malaysian peninsula and Indonesia.
Several suspects have reportedly confessed to their role in the bombing and said they carried out the operation to avenge the deaths of Muslims elsewhere in the world.
The attack on the Sari Club forced a reluctant Indonesia, the world's most-populous Muslim nation, into the fight against Islamic extremism. Despite a history of religious tolerance and suspicion of fundamentalist preachers, the sprawling and politically unstable archipelago comprising more than 18,000 islands is seen as the ideal base of operations for regional terror groups — some linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
The Indonesian security agency, with assistance from law enforcement agencies in Australia and the USA, rapidly identified and arrested dozens of alleged members of Jemaah Islamiyah. They included most but not all of the principal suspects in the Bali bombing.
Western analysts say Jemaah Islamiyah's ability to operate has been degraded, but it is still in operation. "I think they retain some capacity to network. But it's become very difficult to plan a major strike of the kind we saw in Bali, which involved many meetings in many different places, because now, almost inevitably, one of these meetings is going to be infiltrated," says Sidney Jones of International Crisis Group.
Jemaah Islamiyah's retreat has done little to help Bali. It is dependent on tourism, and the plummeting numbers of visitors has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Indonesia also is struggling with separatist movements. In Aceh, the northernmost province in Sumatra, the government says it will crush a 27-year rebellion despite a 5-month-old Swiss-brokered cease-fire.
Indonesia's military has been pouring troops into the area. It vows to renew fighting if the rebels refuse to meet government demands to put down their weapons and accept autonomy by today.
END
pjdillon@attglobal.net
Something went badly wrong last week while I was in Bali writing about the opening day of the Amrozi trial, the first of 33 conspirators believed responsible for the Sari Club bomb back on Oct. 12 of last year.
I actually blogged a couple of the stories I wrote, the first for The Globe & Mail and the second, for USA Today. For some reason, neither ended up sticking. Weird because my word-flow is usually sticky enough to adhere to even the most smooth and inhospitable of surfaces. So, in the interests of the public record, and to prove that I actually do work occasionally, here we go again.
NOTE: These are the versions scalped from their papers’ respective web sites. Each has been updated with a brief wire service update, a function of the papers both going to the printers before I’ve woken on this side of the Pacific.
The Globe story, which ran the day after the trial (13-05) is otherwise exactly the same as what I filed, while roughly 200 words have been shorn from the USA Today copy (12-05), mostly street interviews with local residents and tourists, as I’d been requested to do.
They begin below.
Bombing trial begins in Bali
By PAUL DILLON
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, May 13, 2003 - Page A15
DENPASAR, INDONESIA -- Two walls of Sisa DeJesus's office, which rests at the edge of a picture-postcard Balinese rice paddy, are covered with the painful memories of the children she works with, the youngest victims of the world's worst terrorist strike since Sept. 11, 2001.
In style, many of the paintings are indistinguishable from the crude products of kindergarten-aged children everywhere -- except that these are the horrific imaginings of youngsters whose parents were killed when Islamic militants detonated a massive car bomb outside a packed nightclub on the resort of Kuta's seedy Legian strip last Oct. 12.
"This little girl Dinda's mother was driving past the Sari Club to pick up her husband at the hotel where he worked when the bomb went off," says Ms. DeJesus, a transplanted New York native, pointing toward a painting that features a wild, airy web of brown spatter tightening to a densely packed riot of red and black at its base. "She told us it's a picture of Mommy's motorbike. She's three years old."
Yesterday marked the opening of the first trial in the Kuta bombing, at a special courtroom in nearby Denpasar, less than two kilometres from the office where Ms. DeJesus works. The court was packed with spectators and guarded by snipers and bomb-sniffing dogs as a police convoy brought the first suspect, Amrozi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, to answer administrative questions from a five-judge panel.
The short proceedings completed, the trial was adjourned until next Monday. But it was a far more significant event for the hundreds of spectators, most of whom watched on two large television screens set up outside the courthouse.
"Let's just kill him. He killed our friends after all," said Wayan Sumerta, a 35-year-old Balinese driver.
Elsewhere, streets were deserted as Balinese watched live on television, a people transfixed by the memories of last October's carnage, in which 202 people died, more than 350 were injured and the island's reputation as a peaceful tourist idyll was forever changed.
Today, there is little evidence that anything untoward happened at the intersection of Jalan Legian and Poppies Lane II, where the bombs went off. Buildings damaged by the blast are being rebuilt or renovated, and a solid green fence separates pedestrian traffic from the empty lot that once held the Sari Club.
There's talk of a memorial of some sort, but the the Kuta strip has slipped back into its seedy persona, a mix of bars and restaurants, high-end surf shops, low-rent T-shirt hawkers ("Osama don't Surf" is a big seller), beggars, hookers and drug dealers.
A middle-aged Balinese man in mirrored shades leaning against a van across the street from the Sari lot is fairly representative of the area's full-time street population. "Hey boss, you wanna buy some hashish, some good hashish?" he says by way of an opening line. "You want transport? You wanna buy a T-shirt? Marijuana?"
Yet the bombing's effects continue to reverberate in Bali, which has long been dependent on tourism. The hotel industry has been ravaged, with some hotels recording single-digit occupancy. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their livelihoods.
"This bomb before and now SARS has destroyed the economy of Bali," said a Balinese bartender who gives his name as Willi. "For so many years, we were able to look forward to a regular paycheque -- so we had plenty of kids, bought motorbikes and cars and DVD machines. Now no one has any money and we try to sell our stuff to buy food."
It would have been worse but for the loyalty shown by a small core group of repeat visitors, such as Terry McNish and his family, Australians who have been visiting Bali on vacation for years.
"Look, if something is going to happen, mate, it's going to happen. But you can't live your life looking over your shoulder all the time," he said.
END
Bali bombing trial starts Monday
By Paul Dillon, special for USA TODAY
DENPASAR, Indonesia — Ayu Prihana-Dewi was six hours into a busy Saturday night shift as a cashier at the bustling Sari Club when a massive explosion blew out the front of the sprawling nightspot, tossing her across the room.
Terrorists had struck the softest of targets, a Bali nightclub packed with hundreds of vacationers. More than 200 people died, and 350 were injured in the attack Oct. 12. Among the dead: more than 80 Australians, 38 Indonesians and seven Americans.
Today, the first of 33 suspects in the Sari Club bombing will be tried. On the eve of the trial, the last of Prihana-Dewi's physical scars — third-degree burns on her left forearm — have finally healed. Mentally, too, the 22-year-old claims to be making a full recovery, though the prospect of attending the trials makes her shiver.
"For the first few months, if I'd met these terrorist people, I would have killed them," says Prihana-Dewi, who now works with an aid group assisting the families of Balinese victims of the blast. "I've come to understand that the law is there for a reason, so I'm happy to see the trials start."
Indonesian prosecutors will read out a 33-page indictment today against Amrozi bin Nushasim, a small town mechanic from East Java suspected of buying the vehicle and materials used to build the bomb and transporting them to Bali. The trial is expected to last almost five months. It is the long-awaited first phase of criminal proceedings against the 33 men, including two of Amrozi's brothers, suspected of belonging to Jemaah Islamiyah, a group dedicated to creating a pan-Islamic state comprising the Philippines, the Malaysian peninsula and Indonesia.
Several suspects have reportedly confessed to their role in the bombing and said they carried out the operation to avenge the deaths of Muslims elsewhere in the world.
The attack on the Sari Club forced a reluctant Indonesia, the world's most-populous Muslim nation, into the fight against Islamic extremism. Despite a history of religious tolerance and suspicion of fundamentalist preachers, the sprawling and politically unstable archipelago comprising more than 18,000 islands is seen as the ideal base of operations for regional terror groups — some linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
The Indonesian security agency, with assistance from law enforcement agencies in Australia and the USA, rapidly identified and arrested dozens of alleged members of Jemaah Islamiyah. They included most but not all of the principal suspects in the Bali bombing.
Western analysts say Jemaah Islamiyah's ability to operate has been degraded, but it is still in operation. "I think they retain some capacity to network. But it's become very difficult to plan a major strike of the kind we saw in Bali, which involved many meetings in many different places, because now, almost inevitably, one of these meetings is going to be infiltrated," says Sidney Jones of International Crisis Group.
Jemaah Islamiyah's retreat has done little to help Bali. It is dependent on tourism, and the plummeting numbers of visitors has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Indonesia also is struggling with separatist movements. In Aceh, the northernmost province in Sumatra, the government says it will crush a 27-year rebellion despite a 5-month-old Swiss-brokered cease-fire.
Indonesia's military has been pouring troops into the area. It vows to renew fighting if the rebels refuse to meet government demands to put down their weapons and accept autonomy by today.
END
Monday, April 28, 2003
The Numbers Game And A Bombing Shame
email: pjdillon@attglobal.net
They say you’ll lose it of you don’t use it but despite a two week hiatus the blog lives and I’ve still managed to remember the login codes. That alone is no small feat burdened as I am with all manner of personal and business codes locked away in my malaria enfeebled brain.
It’s pretty amazing how numeric life has become, even for someone who prides himself on keeping a pretty slim data shadow.
There’s logon names and password protection for both my outlook email and the yahoo address, for the three servers I use, the three internet back accounts I access as well as close to a dozen members websites of different shapes and sizes (most mercifully recognizing me when I dial up a page), which are password protected and have assigned random logon numbers, frequently alpha-numeric combinations running to 16 characters. Add to this the various POP questions and software queries I’m posed if I call for system support.
There’s several bank accounts in three different countries each with unique quick codes and account names and numbers, and two automated phone banking systems they require codes and PINs, not to mention the bank ATM cards themselves with their unique PINs.
Like most people, I’ve got a passport (unlike most, two of them) and a citizenship card all of which feature numbers, and of course there’s the granddaddy of ‘em all, my social insurance number, too. I know my lapsed Medicare card number and driver’s license and if pushed, I might cough up a B.C. video store membership number from five years ago.
I’ve got an address here in Jakarta, an occasional mailing address in Vancouver and a second in Quebec all of which are heavily memory dependant. There’s the birth dates of four other family members and countless friends to remember (though if you asked them they’d probably say that I’m not much for remembering those special dates), and of course perhaps 20 or thirty phone numbers rattling round my head at any one time.
So it is no small miracle that every year when I confront my locker at Yaletown Storage in downtown Vancouver I somehow manage to come up with the right three digits to pop the lock, though I couldn’t tell you what they are right this moment. I have to be there, standing in front of the white painted particleboard door on the third floor and I can just reach into thin air and pull it out.
I’ve go the number thing on my mind because I’ve just today replaced a lost cell phone (Nokia 6310 and all its saved numbers etc) with quite a smart new model, the Ericsson T-68i, which pretty much does everything you’d want a phone to do nowadays, part digital calendar, part phonebook but with Bluetooth and perpetual Internet access should you be so inclined (I’m not). I’ll play games, wake you up in the morning, remind you to wish Mom a happy birthday and pick up the dry cleaning (not one of my problems, living as I do in a world of cotton and lycra and more cotton), and with the right attachment, I’ll take wee tiny (3 cm x 2 cm) utterly useless digi-pix which you can (theoretically) send immediately via your wireless Web connection directly to the cell phones of family and friends who I suppose have been living their own lives of quiet desperation and will immediately send a picture back showing their shock and awe at what you’ve send them.
One cool thing it does offer if I can figure out how to make it work, is a synchronization function that’ll speak to my Outlook Express contact list and calendar and swap data both ways so that I should be able to load most of my PC contacts onto the phone’s address book without having to key every friggin one. Right now it’s all theory but I’ll be mucking about with it and will report faithfully on progress made.
It has been busy the past couple of weeks. Among the highlights, I’ve started a new writing gig with a UN agency. I’m going to be unnaturally coy about this job as it is shaping up to be quite interesting and I don’t want to blow it. Suffice to say at this time that I was in central Java for a coupla three days last week talking to child prostitutes and the street workers who deal with them. Unlike N America or W Europe this kind of outreach is quite new and not particularly sophisticated but if all they do is provide a safe space for the kids to hang out in for a few hours every day then that’s a heck of a lot more than what they’d otherwise have. I’ll write more about the project I’m involved with in coming weeks but for the moment I’ll leave it at that.
The trial began last week Wednesday of Abu Bakar Bashir, the guy US intelligence says is the head of JI, the group suspected of pulling off the Bali bombing last Oct. 12. That same day cops arrested more than a dozen more guys they suspect of planning terrorist hits in Indonesia, seizing weapons and ammo, chemicals and detonators. Two days later, a bomb went off outside the UN building in downtown Jakarta and Sunday morning a similar pipe bomb device detonated at the airport injuring 11 people. People are on edge at the moment and there’s fear in the streets for the first time in many months.
J and I traveled to Bandung, W Java, on Easter weekend for our friend and colleague Chris Brummit’s wedding. Simple Moslem service though there was nothing simple about the bride’s opulent kabaya, a very Javanese sarong, blouse and diaphanous vest combination topped with a pretty extraordinary gold headpiece. Several friends had flown in from Bangkok so it was a bit of a homecoming.
On the Thursday before the wedding I went to the groom’s wake, uuuuhhh, I mean, stag, which began at the city’s quasi foreign correspondent’s club, the sort of mauve-painted, dimly lit place that would have been trendy in New York. About 10 years ago.
Then we made for the dingy dangdut lane three minutes from my house for 90 minutes of heavily made-up women screeching to high amp Indian-influenced pop tunes. It’s an okay experience once in a while not something I’d do on a regular basis. Say, once a year or so. Later we booked out to 1001, which is sorta high-end entertainment center offering everything from live karaoke in a hall full of respectable Chinese businessmen and their wives, to skeletal Latvian whores on the backend of long careers, and hard-faced, 18-year-old Javanese hookers who line up kike cattle to be selected to act as ‘companions’ in the smaller karaoke rooms on the second floor. It’s all so predictable and dingy, everything depressing and cheap about Asia crammed into a space the size of my living room.
There’s another coming up, that of Linsay Murdoch, the Sydney Morning Herald’s guy in Jakarta, and the city’s poor version of Hunter Thompson. His excesses are legendary and that he is getting married at all came as a bit of a shock, frankly. It starts at 3 pm. I’m worried.
Finally, I'm going to sign off on a conflicted note. Apparently the five guys who killed my friend Harry Burton from Reuters on the dusty road to Sarobi back in Nov 2001 have been captured in southeastern Afghanistan. I guess I should be happy but really it leaves me cold. I've looked in the eyes of killers before, there's nothing new there. In many ways they're exactly like you and I. But I am curious what it feels like to be able to exact revenge. How would it feel to take one of those guys and cut his throat, to feel the tip of the blade as it pushed through the tightened muscles of the neck, how he'd bounce and struggle and what looks would be, captured on the faces of the four who remained. I'm sure they've seen that look themselves. They say it's a hard thing to do the first time but that it gets easier. I wonder.
email: pjdillon@attglobal.net
They say you’ll lose it of you don’t use it but despite a two week hiatus the blog lives and I’ve still managed to remember the login codes. That alone is no small feat burdened as I am with all manner of personal and business codes locked away in my malaria enfeebled brain.
It’s pretty amazing how numeric life has become, even for someone who prides himself on keeping a pretty slim data shadow.
There’s logon names and password protection for both my outlook email and the yahoo address, for the three servers I use, the three internet back accounts I access as well as close to a dozen members websites of different shapes and sizes (most mercifully recognizing me when I dial up a page), which are password protected and have assigned random logon numbers, frequently alpha-numeric combinations running to 16 characters. Add to this the various POP questions and software queries I’m posed if I call for system support.
There’s several bank accounts in three different countries each with unique quick codes and account names and numbers, and two automated phone banking systems they require codes and PINs, not to mention the bank ATM cards themselves with their unique PINs.
Like most people, I’ve got a passport (unlike most, two of them) and a citizenship card all of which feature numbers, and of course there’s the granddaddy of ‘em all, my social insurance number, too. I know my lapsed Medicare card number and driver’s license and if pushed, I might cough up a B.C. video store membership number from five years ago.
I’ve got an address here in Jakarta, an occasional mailing address in Vancouver and a second in Quebec all of which are heavily memory dependant. There’s the birth dates of four other family members and countless friends to remember (though if you asked them they’d probably say that I’m not much for remembering those special dates), and of course perhaps 20 or thirty phone numbers rattling round my head at any one time.
So it is no small miracle that every year when I confront my locker at Yaletown Storage in downtown Vancouver I somehow manage to come up with the right three digits to pop the lock, though I couldn’t tell you what they are right this moment. I have to be there, standing in front of the white painted particleboard door on the third floor and I can just reach into thin air and pull it out.
I’ve go the number thing on my mind because I’ve just today replaced a lost cell phone (Nokia 6310 and all its saved numbers etc) with quite a smart new model, the Ericsson T-68i, which pretty much does everything you’d want a phone to do nowadays, part digital calendar, part phonebook but with Bluetooth and perpetual Internet access should you be so inclined (I’m not). I’ll play games, wake you up in the morning, remind you to wish Mom a happy birthday and pick up the dry cleaning (not one of my problems, living as I do in a world of cotton and lycra and more cotton), and with the right attachment, I’ll take wee tiny (3 cm x 2 cm) utterly useless digi-pix which you can (theoretically) send immediately via your wireless Web connection directly to the cell phones of family and friends who I suppose have been living their own lives of quiet desperation and will immediately send a picture back showing their shock and awe at what you’ve send them.
One cool thing it does offer if I can figure out how to make it work, is a synchronization function that’ll speak to my Outlook Express contact list and calendar and swap data both ways so that I should be able to load most of my PC contacts onto the phone’s address book without having to key every friggin one. Right now it’s all theory but I’ll be mucking about with it and will report faithfully on progress made.
It has been busy the past couple of weeks. Among the highlights, I’ve started a new writing gig with a UN agency. I’m going to be unnaturally coy about this job as it is shaping up to be quite interesting and I don’t want to blow it. Suffice to say at this time that I was in central Java for a coupla three days last week talking to child prostitutes and the street workers who deal with them. Unlike N America or W Europe this kind of outreach is quite new and not particularly sophisticated but if all they do is provide a safe space for the kids to hang out in for a few hours every day then that’s a heck of a lot more than what they’d otherwise have. I’ll write more about the project I’m involved with in coming weeks but for the moment I’ll leave it at that.
The trial began last week Wednesday of Abu Bakar Bashir, the guy US intelligence says is the head of JI, the group suspected of pulling off the Bali bombing last Oct. 12. That same day cops arrested more than a dozen more guys they suspect of planning terrorist hits in Indonesia, seizing weapons and ammo, chemicals and detonators. Two days later, a bomb went off outside the UN building in downtown Jakarta and Sunday morning a similar pipe bomb device detonated at the airport injuring 11 people. People are on edge at the moment and there’s fear in the streets for the first time in many months.
J and I traveled to Bandung, W Java, on Easter weekend for our friend and colleague Chris Brummit’s wedding. Simple Moslem service though there was nothing simple about the bride’s opulent kabaya, a very Javanese sarong, blouse and diaphanous vest combination topped with a pretty extraordinary gold headpiece. Several friends had flown in from Bangkok so it was a bit of a homecoming.
On the Thursday before the wedding I went to the groom’s wake, uuuuhhh, I mean, stag, which began at the city’s quasi foreign correspondent’s club, the sort of mauve-painted, dimly lit place that would have been trendy in New York. About 10 years ago.
Then we made for the dingy dangdut lane three minutes from my house for 90 minutes of heavily made-up women screeching to high amp Indian-influenced pop tunes. It’s an okay experience once in a while not something I’d do on a regular basis. Say, once a year or so. Later we booked out to 1001, which is sorta high-end entertainment center offering everything from live karaoke in a hall full of respectable Chinese businessmen and their wives, to skeletal Latvian whores on the backend of long careers, and hard-faced, 18-year-old Javanese hookers who line up kike cattle to be selected to act as ‘companions’ in the smaller karaoke rooms on the second floor. It’s all so predictable and dingy, everything depressing and cheap about Asia crammed into a space the size of my living room.
There’s another coming up, that of Linsay Murdoch, the Sydney Morning Herald’s guy in Jakarta, and the city’s poor version of Hunter Thompson. His excesses are legendary and that he is getting married at all came as a bit of a shock, frankly. It starts at 3 pm. I’m worried.
Finally, I'm going to sign off on a conflicted note. Apparently the five guys who killed my friend Harry Burton from Reuters on the dusty road to Sarobi back in Nov 2001 have been captured in southeastern Afghanistan. I guess I should be happy but really it leaves me cold. I've looked in the eyes of killers before, there's nothing new there. In many ways they're exactly like you and I. But I am curious what it feels like to be able to exact revenge. How would it feel to take one of those guys and cut his throat, to feel the tip of the blade as it pushed through the tightened muscles of the neck, how he'd bounce and struggle and what looks would be, captured on the faces of the four who remained. I'm sure they've seen that look themselves. They say it's a hard thing to do the first time but that it gets easier. I wonder.
Monday, April 14, 2003
Time For A Cut
I dispute the idea that things, time in particular, speed up as you get older.
Actually, what happens is that you slow down and everything else remains fairly constant – even in a so-called Information Age – so that relative to where you stand, the pace appears to quicken.
It’s an applied aspect of Newtonian physics. I remember a series of well-intentioned science teachers trying to explain Time in a similar manner, how things are perceived differently depending on where (or when?) you’re standing: at a fixed point in space (‘till the brighter bulbs at the front of the class sussed out the quandary that posed); from aboard a craft moving at variable velocities along a random path; or whilst sitting in a tavern with a cold pitcher of Molson watching Hockey Night In Canada on the CBC with your buddies on a planet spinning through the void on a predictable journey about a stellar body.
‘Course, my understanding of these things was troublesome at best. Despite attempts too numerous to mention to interest me in science and arithmetic, my mental mathematical development effectively ended with those bland tales of trains leaving stations in different cities at different speeds heading for the same destination.
These problems I solved, eagerly, by imaging the drunk, red-nosed CPR switcher asleep in his snow-bound shack, propane heater cranked to high, failing to change the tracks at the right hour, setting off a chain reaction that lead inevitably to the two trains colliding somewhere in the heart of the Big City killing all aboard – including characters who looked a lot like those math and science teachers, neighborhood goons and the fat Greek depanneur-owner with the hairy mole on the left side of her mouth and flesh-colored, ankle-high nylons who made life miserable for nimble-fingered, impecunious adolescents with a taste for Mars bars and chocolate chunks. We went to Blue Windows instead and repaid the gaunt, French-Canadian owner’s friendliness by robbing him blind, and pasting the pages of his selection of porn magazines together with the remnants of melted Caramilk bars… always wondered what the guys who bought those magazines thought when they got ‘em home to discover the pages around Miss October kinda glued together.
He was a great guy even though his teeth were pretty gross. Me and John Duggan used to go down there, age eight or nine, and buy a copy of Penthouse and a couple packs of smokes (Players, unfiltered if memory serves) for his Dad. The clerk looked at us kinda funny, but when John said they were for his father, and here’s five bucks, he’d pack ‘em up for the walk back up Rue Notre Dame de Grace.
I always worried that he’d catch me thieving and think I was a bad kid. We didn’t care about the ethics of shoplifting. We were kids. Every kid lifts stuff, its like a genetic thing. I just didn’t want him to tell me to stay out because Blue Windows (it had blue windows) was one of the places I could heat up (and read comics for free) while delivering the afternoon paper. That’ s no small attraction when it’s minus 20, 4:30 in the afternoon and you’ve gotta go back and deal with Radu, that vile, loud-mouthed depot manager, and pick-up the second half of a 60-paper run, a Wednesday maybe when the Montreal Star classifieds were fat, a dozen inserts had to be stuffed and the newsprint ran to 180 pages.
He never figured it out though and one day at Blue Windows there was another French guy behind the counter. A short time later the place was renovated, the chocolate bar stand was moved atop the cashier’s counter and the days of unlimited gob-stoppers came to an end.
All of which is a long way from the haircut I got today at the little salon down the lane from my house, but there’s a reason for the segue. ‘Cause my hair grows like a weed – if my hair were a mollusk it’d be a freakin’ Zebra Mussel – and there’s no real explanation for it because as we all now know, things only appear to speed up as we age.
It’s not like I feed it magic tonics or imbue it with special petroleum products or even work out, but for speed, 500cc world champ Valentino Rossi and ski-droid Herman (Da Herminator) Maier ain’t got nothing on my hair. We’re talking about sitting back and watching the hair grow. We’re talking freakin’ Rapunzella is definitely in the house.
And no, my head is not shrinking.
I’ve gotten in the habit of going for the ‘ol Number 1, the GI look, appropriate given my navy Seal training – I too like to snooze on flat rocks when I’m not checking out the tusks on babe in the corner of belly-bopping by concession stands.
Until recently I thought the whole No. I thing was a special code distributed to the International Brotherhood of Barbers or something. I figured they did the special head-shaving session at the same time the guys learned the secret barber’s handshake. I say this because it doesn’t matter where you go, what country your in, everyone knows what a No. 1 is.
In a sense, it’s the great equalizer, Utopian even. Whether it’s a guy with a pair of scissors, a lawn chair and a mirror nailed into a tree in a Central Jakarta park full of (not at all inviting) concrete children’s slides or a Chez Michel’s kinda-place where there’s a cover charge, a dress-code and an ATM, cutters have one thing in common: no matter what you want done, regardless of how much you pay or whether you bring a picture in to show the him/her/himher, the cutter/Hair Lifestyle Consultant will do exactly what they want to do and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.
And so, my affection for Number 1. Or, as was the case today, Number 2. It’s basically a head shave and how can you possibly mess up a head shave? Imagine my disappointment when I learned during my last visit that the number designation actually referred to the size of the universal attachments barbers slip onto their clippers.
Damn, another colorful conspiracy theory bites the dust. I do look fabulous, mind.
I dispute the idea that things, time in particular, speed up as you get older.
Actually, what happens is that you slow down and everything else remains fairly constant – even in a so-called Information Age – so that relative to where you stand, the pace appears to quicken.
It’s an applied aspect of Newtonian physics. I remember a series of well-intentioned science teachers trying to explain Time in a similar manner, how things are perceived differently depending on where (or when?) you’re standing: at a fixed point in space (‘till the brighter bulbs at the front of the class sussed out the quandary that posed); from aboard a craft moving at variable velocities along a random path; or whilst sitting in a tavern with a cold pitcher of Molson watching Hockey Night In Canada on the CBC with your buddies on a planet spinning through the void on a predictable journey about a stellar body.
‘Course, my understanding of these things was troublesome at best. Despite attempts too numerous to mention to interest me in science and arithmetic, my mental mathematical development effectively ended with those bland tales of trains leaving stations in different cities at different speeds heading for the same destination.
These problems I solved, eagerly, by imaging the drunk, red-nosed CPR switcher asleep in his snow-bound shack, propane heater cranked to high, failing to change the tracks at the right hour, setting off a chain reaction that lead inevitably to the two trains colliding somewhere in the heart of the Big City killing all aboard – including characters who looked a lot like those math and science teachers, neighborhood goons and the fat Greek depanneur-owner with the hairy mole on the left side of her mouth and flesh-colored, ankle-high nylons who made life miserable for nimble-fingered, impecunious adolescents with a taste for Mars bars and chocolate chunks. We went to Blue Windows instead and repaid the gaunt, French-Canadian owner’s friendliness by robbing him blind, and pasting the pages of his selection of porn magazines together with the remnants of melted Caramilk bars… always wondered what the guys who bought those magazines thought when they got ‘em home to discover the pages around Miss October kinda glued together.
He was a great guy even though his teeth were pretty gross. Me and John Duggan used to go down there, age eight or nine, and buy a copy of Penthouse and a couple packs of smokes (Players, unfiltered if memory serves) for his Dad. The clerk looked at us kinda funny, but when John said they were for his father, and here’s five bucks, he’d pack ‘em up for the walk back up Rue Notre Dame de Grace.
I always worried that he’d catch me thieving and think I was a bad kid. We didn’t care about the ethics of shoplifting. We were kids. Every kid lifts stuff, its like a genetic thing. I just didn’t want him to tell me to stay out because Blue Windows (it had blue windows) was one of the places I could heat up (and read comics for free) while delivering the afternoon paper. That’ s no small attraction when it’s minus 20, 4:30 in the afternoon and you’ve gotta go back and deal with Radu, that vile, loud-mouthed depot manager, and pick-up the second half of a 60-paper run, a Wednesday maybe when the Montreal Star classifieds were fat, a dozen inserts had to be stuffed and the newsprint ran to 180 pages.
He never figured it out though and one day at Blue Windows there was another French guy behind the counter. A short time later the place was renovated, the chocolate bar stand was moved atop the cashier’s counter and the days of unlimited gob-stoppers came to an end.
All of which is a long way from the haircut I got today at the little salon down the lane from my house, but there’s a reason for the segue. ‘Cause my hair grows like a weed – if my hair were a mollusk it’d be a freakin’ Zebra Mussel – and there’s no real explanation for it because as we all now know, things only appear to speed up as we age.
It’s not like I feed it magic tonics or imbue it with special petroleum products or even work out, but for speed, 500cc world champ Valentino Rossi and ski-droid Herman (Da Herminator) Maier ain’t got nothing on my hair. We’re talking about sitting back and watching the hair grow. We’re talking freakin’ Rapunzella is definitely in the house.
And no, my head is not shrinking.
I’ve gotten in the habit of going for the ‘ol Number 1, the GI look, appropriate given my navy Seal training – I too like to snooze on flat rocks when I’m not checking out the tusks on babe in the corner of belly-bopping by concession stands.
Until recently I thought the whole No. I thing was a special code distributed to the International Brotherhood of Barbers or something. I figured they did the special head-shaving session at the same time the guys learned the secret barber’s handshake. I say this because it doesn’t matter where you go, what country your in, everyone knows what a No. 1 is.
In a sense, it’s the great equalizer, Utopian even. Whether it’s a guy with a pair of scissors, a lawn chair and a mirror nailed into a tree in a Central Jakarta park full of (not at all inviting) concrete children’s slides or a Chez Michel’s kinda-place where there’s a cover charge, a dress-code and an ATM, cutters have one thing in common: no matter what you want done, regardless of how much you pay or whether you bring a picture in to show the him/her/himher, the cutter/Hair Lifestyle Consultant will do exactly what they want to do and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.
And so, my affection for Number 1. Or, as was the case today, Number 2. It’s basically a head shave and how can you possibly mess up a head shave? Imagine my disappointment when I learned during my last visit that the number designation actually referred to the size of the universal attachments barbers slip onto their clippers.
Damn, another colorful conspiracy theory bites the dust. I do look fabulous, mind.
Sunday, April 13, 2003
It's The Vision Thing, Stupid
The following are excerpts from speeches given by British and American military commanders to their troops on the eve of the war.
“if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory. We got to liberate, not to conquer. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own.
Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country. If there are casualties of war, then remember when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.
You will be shunned unless you conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there.”
Lt. Col. Tim Collins
OIC Irish Guards
“When the president says ‘Go’, look out – it’s hammer time.”
Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating
(followed by Queen song We Will Rock You, played at high volume.)
The following are excerpts from speeches given by British and American military commanders to their troops on the eve of the war.
“if you are ferocious in battle remember to be magnanimous in victory. We got to liberate, not to conquer. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own.
Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country. If there are casualties of war, then remember when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.
You will be shunned unless you conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there.”
Lt. Col. Tim Collins
OIC Irish Guards
“When the president says ‘Go’, look out – it’s hammer time.”
Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating
(followed by Queen song We Will Rock You, played at high volume.)
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
New Trick For An Ol Dawg And Hounds At The Gate
It has been a long time since someone has come through town that I knew from the other life. The one that ended back in the spring of ‘99.
A function of distance I guess, of the fact that when one uninitiated contemplates Asia whist living somewhere beneath the fat grey nimbus in Vancouver, one’s mind does not turn immediately to Indonesia despite its physical size and robust population and tumultuous recent history.
Monkey, my best and longest, came last year for a X-country bike trip that took him and Wolf – who’d been here the year before and ended up marooned on the far side across Java with a collapsed ocean kayak and 100kms of snake-, panther- and croc-infested jungle between him and civilization – across 1,100 kms of Java, knocking off volcano climbs along the way.
Those hours together were slashed by the Afghan campaign and my sojourns to C Asia and so it has been 18 months since anyone somewhat close flung open the gates here on Jl. Rembang.
Marsh and I worked together at a Vancouver-area paper, The Surrey Leader, for three and half years. He’s an understated fellow who rarely rises to the bait and could be counted upon during editorial meetings to interject some semblance reality into proceedings whilst others, myself in particular, searched for the Grand Conspiracy Theory, or got caught up in some minor wrangle with the competition over issues that I’d be embarrassed to admit to now.
We shared many hastily hacked butts and putrid cups of coffee together with the enforcement guys from the Liquor Licensing Board, the shivering junkies visiting the third floor offices of Legal Aid and posses of pale teenage skells forced by court order to attend the youth outreach classes downstairs, all of whom loitered about the rear doors of our building on King George Highway. We had a few pub nights, watched a bit of hockey and even got it together towards the end, to play some tennis after work.
That was kinda where it began and ended, though. He lived single in the ‘burbs and I had a gal in the city and so we didn’t become what I would call close.
I am really pleased to say though that I was about the other morning – wee hours – when the call went out to my former boss with the word that, guess what, Marsh’s not coming back to work. Ever.
I remember the day I cut those ties. It was the final act in a painful, year-long peel, the extrication, the salvaging of soul and sanity from the smoldering ruins of one life and the beginning of a new one. If they experienced the agony, the act of shedding that skin would, through some evolutionary necessity, cause snakes to molt but once in their lives. Or not at all.
And of course that was the danger my friend faced until sometime around 4 am Jakarta, April 5, 2003: To fail to renew. To lack the imagination, the will or the courage to walk away from the familiar at a time in his life when it was still possible to do it. Like me at that time: no wife, no debt, no obligations and a toolbox containing the basic kit needed to survive in the real world.
I don’t know who was happier about finalizing his decision! And so if your business takes you to Hanoi, where he’ll be based, and you’ve need for competence and fluency then drop him a line at marshinasia@yahoo.com
And meantime, there’s the shitty Iraq thing. Watched a couple of Marines being interviewed this afternoon on FOX (All War, All The Time) on the driveway of Saddam’s main palace. The younger of the two, a Captain I believe, said he planned to step into one of Saddam’s bathrooms, crack up his “gold faucets and take my first hot shower in 20 or 30 days.”
After the predictable backslapping and slavering over the reliability and power of US armor, they whipped out a Georgia State University Bulldogs (football team) flag (mistaken by a FOX commentator for the Third Infantry’s colors) barked and pumped their fists in the air.
Thankfully (?) they said they didn’t plan to fly the Stars and Stripes over the palace – ‘because we’re here to liberate Iraq, not conquer it’ – but it was never established whether of not we can look forward to a NCAA College Football flag snapping in the wind a stone’s throw from the Euphrates River. Maybe the World Wrestling Federation would be more appropriate.
I’d laugh if the news this evening over beers hadn’t been that News Corp photographer John Feder, a friend from E. Timor days, and a print colleague from the same agency have been missing for several days, and two other journos are believed killed in an Iraqi counter-attack.
It has been a long time since someone has come through town that I knew from the other life. The one that ended back in the spring of ‘99.
A function of distance I guess, of the fact that when one uninitiated contemplates Asia whist living somewhere beneath the fat grey nimbus in Vancouver, one’s mind does not turn immediately to Indonesia despite its physical size and robust population and tumultuous recent history.
Monkey, my best and longest, came last year for a X-country bike trip that took him and Wolf – who’d been here the year before and ended up marooned on the far side across Java with a collapsed ocean kayak and 100kms of snake-, panther- and croc-infested jungle between him and civilization – across 1,100 kms of Java, knocking off volcano climbs along the way.
Those hours together were slashed by the Afghan campaign and my sojourns to C Asia and so it has been 18 months since anyone somewhat close flung open the gates here on Jl. Rembang.
Marsh and I worked together at a Vancouver-area paper, The Surrey Leader, for three and half years. He’s an understated fellow who rarely rises to the bait and could be counted upon during editorial meetings to interject some semblance reality into proceedings whilst others, myself in particular, searched for the Grand Conspiracy Theory, or got caught up in some minor wrangle with the competition over issues that I’d be embarrassed to admit to now.
We shared many hastily hacked butts and putrid cups of coffee together with the enforcement guys from the Liquor Licensing Board, the shivering junkies visiting the third floor offices of Legal Aid and posses of pale teenage skells forced by court order to attend the youth outreach classes downstairs, all of whom loitered about the rear doors of our building on King George Highway. We had a few pub nights, watched a bit of hockey and even got it together towards the end, to play some tennis after work.
That was kinda where it began and ended, though. He lived single in the ‘burbs and I had a gal in the city and so we didn’t become what I would call close.
I am really pleased to say though that I was about the other morning – wee hours – when the call went out to my former boss with the word that, guess what, Marsh’s not coming back to work. Ever.
I remember the day I cut those ties. It was the final act in a painful, year-long peel, the extrication, the salvaging of soul and sanity from the smoldering ruins of one life and the beginning of a new one. If they experienced the agony, the act of shedding that skin would, through some evolutionary necessity, cause snakes to molt but once in their lives. Or not at all.
And of course that was the danger my friend faced until sometime around 4 am Jakarta, April 5, 2003: To fail to renew. To lack the imagination, the will or the courage to walk away from the familiar at a time in his life when it was still possible to do it. Like me at that time: no wife, no debt, no obligations and a toolbox containing the basic kit needed to survive in the real world.
I don’t know who was happier about finalizing his decision! And so if your business takes you to Hanoi, where he’ll be based, and you’ve need for competence and fluency then drop him a line at marshinasia@yahoo.com
And meantime, there’s the shitty Iraq thing. Watched a couple of Marines being interviewed this afternoon on FOX (All War, All The Time) on the driveway of Saddam’s main palace. The younger of the two, a Captain I believe, said he planned to step into one of Saddam’s bathrooms, crack up his “gold faucets and take my first hot shower in 20 or 30 days.”
After the predictable backslapping and slavering over the reliability and power of US armor, they whipped out a Georgia State University Bulldogs (football team) flag (mistaken by a FOX commentator for the Third Infantry’s colors) barked and pumped their fists in the air.
Thankfully (?) they said they didn’t plan to fly the Stars and Stripes over the palace – ‘because we’re here to liberate Iraq, not conquer it’ – but it was never established whether of not we can look forward to a NCAA College Football flag snapping in the wind a stone’s throw from the Euphrates River. Maybe the World Wrestling Federation would be more appropriate.
I’d laugh if the news this evening over beers hadn’t been that News Corp photographer John Feder, a friend from E. Timor days, and a print colleague from the same agency have been missing for several days, and two other journos are believed killed in an Iraqi counter-attack.
The Reason Why
The Nation [US]
April 4, 2003
by George McGovern
>
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
(in the Crimean War)
Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness.
Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.
He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly.
This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)
The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address.
War profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America.
Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others.
My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration.
For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--will now have to
be demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.
During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a divider."
As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united the entire world against him."
In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether you like it or not."
This is a good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, he sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will.
In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.
As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at war's end.
Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening days of the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew.
I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction
Now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional
American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes against me.
So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.
We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our
troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap—two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.
During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential
campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment
of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young
men do the dying."
That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.
I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by
Our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had
done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.
The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people.
We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?
It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass
destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it
be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United
States?
Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the
Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must
result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen."
Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated."
The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to
defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never
comtemplated."
> I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.
The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my
fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was
first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates,
the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian
Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city
of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have
stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear
of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of
civilization.
But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.
>
The Nation [US]
April 4, 2003
by George McGovern
>
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
(in the Crimean War)
Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness.
Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.
He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly.
This President and his advisers know well how to get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging the ordinary American at home. The same families who are exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)
The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower warned in his great farewell address.
War profits are booming, as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging another war against the well-being of America.
Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism, the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or two others.
My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of American diplomacy during the Bush Administration.
For this he has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by changing the name of french fries on the house dining room menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue of Liberty--a gift from France--will now have to
be demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What a cruel blow to romance.
During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter, not a divider."
As one critic put it, "He's got that right. He's united the entire world against him."
In his brusque, go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that has done us no harm, whether you like it or not."
This is a good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
The President frequently confides to individuals and friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God guided him into an invasion of Iraq, he sent a different message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and bombardment of Iraq is against God's will.
In all due respect, I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our President.
As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot. My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures should survive and which should die. It did not simplify matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at war's end.
Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend, Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening days of the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant hunter I knew.
I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter and destruction
Now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now being developed for additional
American invasions of other lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the 80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes against me.
So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken America's good name and influence in world affairs.
We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have always supported our
troops, and I have always believed we had the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam, albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap—two great men whom we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's guerrilla forces.
During the long years of my opposition to that war, including a presidential
campaign dedicated to ending the American involvement, I said in a moment
of disgust: "I'm sick and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young
men do the dying."
That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of our bravest young men died, and many times that number were crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its schools, churches, markets and hospitals.
I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the American people by
Our policy-makers as a mission of freedom and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless, ill-conceived invasion of another country that had
done us no harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that assumption.
The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11, have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and nearly all of the world's people.
We will, of course, win the war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of his nation?
It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few weapons of mass
destruction, which we and eight other countries have long held. But can it
be assumed that he would insure his incineration by attacking the United
States?
Can it be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by hotheads recommending that we atomize the
Soviet Union and China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass of evil must
result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen."
Or again, consider the words of Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that was never threatened and probably never contemplated."
The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised to
defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never threatened and probably never
comtemplated."
> I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to Harper's, for giving me opportunities to write about these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.
The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many of us. In my
fourth-grade geography class under a superb teacher, Miss Wagner, I was
first introduced to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates,
the kayaks plying the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian
Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the ancient city
of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent. This was the first class in elementary school that fired my imagination. Those wondrous images have
stayed with me for more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear
of America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the cradle of
civilization.
But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will survive this war after it has joined the historical march of folly that is man's inhumanity to man.
>
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