Welcome to the kitchen. It is where a writer starts, first collecting hardy ingredients then proceeding to conjure up a literary feast. Here a series of Steyning's Rough and Incidental Wisdoms, showing where some of all that writing originates. Spontaneous stuff, called ejaculations by a friend of mine. Of a lucid canon. Personally, I describe them as mind squalls or else braindrops often going back some but in 'distilled' form sometimes ending up in my properly completed work. Some of them even falling under my real name: G. Quiorselfe, the Quiorselves an old Viking tribe, originally named the Kjorselbs. On my mother's side Gofa an Iroquoi given name, thus many admirers, under partial breath, apt to mutter: Damn, there he goes again! Hey, Gofa... Quiorselfe!!

-I'd like to develop a couple of characters based on how these disguise themselves to guarantee success, wide-open-smile wolf-in-sheepskin style. The Bill Clinton super relaxed, super nonchalant, super agreeable type hiding the conniving, burning-with-ambition killer type that he really is. Goofy smile and charm as a bullet. The other the super laconic, unconcerned seemingly self-confident, detached type but inside desperately worried, nervous, indecisive and unreliable. In the end people obsessed with themselves you wouldn't want your life to depend on. In both cases their body language deceiving even the relatively sophisticated beholder, faking trustworthiness to perfection. But people who'll drop you when the chips are down, denying everything, making it so you were the author of your own fate for which you're getting due punishment, with them doing only what they had to do, even tried helping you , taking responsibility for nothing... when those chips were really tipped by them. In the end making sure it was you letting them down... ensuring their untroubled sleep

- The 'Moe' character good for comedy. Extremely busy... acting busy, talking rushed about non-events as if he can hardly cope with what's going on, but we all know he's done fuck-all in years and sponging off family, doing absolutely nothing of substance

- Or the essentially humourless man. When in mixed company always checking if his wife laughs first, before bursting out himself. A camera would catch him. Uncanny team laughter, but some times awkward when their synchronization gets screwed up.

- Another one the 'Jake' character, the inability to entertain more than one friendship, to embrace more than one set of loyalties, the distinct narrowness of character, well developed otherwise. All the rest kept out with polite indifference.

That's them. But there's also this:

-My favourite newspaper: The Daily Harpoon

-The strange case of the cross-eyed hypnotist

-Did you Bangor Maine?

-Doo Wop comes natural...

-Shoarma you think?

-Tequila mockingbird

-I'm canaloni

-Ciao! Abyssinia!

-Fish & Chicks

-The candidate spoke motto

-It has been called the love of the faceless: it takes an evolved mind to feel a complete stranger's pain. Hence, goodness is awareness

-Once upon an actress...

-Free Radicals ought to be incarcerated

-It takes two to tangle, but only one to dangle

-Burton got a piece of Tayl(or)

-I don´t care for Conservatives, I don´t care for Liberals, my favourite party The Cirque du Soleil, la, la, la, là, la, la... (song)

-Crude little Stalin said gratefulness is for dogs, presumably putting them down anyway and just in case

-Bangkok sounds like a motel, she said. She should know, her motto: all's well that hangs well.

-Puss & Pooch: The Chinese eat doggy, the French eat pussy, la, la, la, lá, la, la...(song)

-Some people are remembered for what they wore, others for what they didn't

-Good moaning!

-Good Mourning!

-But why is being irrational so irresistible?

-Intellect is the ballpark, reason the game. Many have the facility, but cannot or will not play

-I don't mind God. I just don't care for the company He keeps

-The discoverer who named Greenland must have had a great sense of humour. For that matter why is Green Tea, red?

-A booby trap is not a brassière

-A nutcase not a jockstrap

-Sisyphus and his kid sister Pussyphus

-I'm a devotee of the Vietnamese philosopher Ho Shi Bang

-Who wrote most people are not very bright, especially experts

-And that he remains a man of the left, but not of the stupid left: people who, by some bizarre design, all too often force him right. (He resides in Caracas)

-Man's ingenuity is such that he'll irresponsibly push up his birth rates, imperil the social fabric of his habitat by additionally importing a passively hostile under-class better off trained elsewhere, then poison and pillage his planet before calling it the great growth and development that safeguard his pension funds: Not Brave New World this, but Stupid New Globe

- I propose tripppling the minimum wage, only for degrading work. Now that will change the structure of society, a rush back to rubbish jobs and less social strife.

-Some die by accident others of some disease, the rest of pointlessness

-When I was young I got some guacamole all over my ukulele, it was horrible, horrible

- A friend of mine's a gynecologist. Or as he's known in the trade Doctor Clitoris Causa

-On Hillary: she has quite a bit of pride, but not quite enough to live up to

-That word 'humane' bothers me. As if it comes from humans.

-Canadians are cold-fashioned but warm-hearted

-Canada's a small town (with all the beauty, the innocence and the narrowness that comes with it)

-Death's no big deal without life

-Swans sing before they die, though in certain instances it would be preferable they died before they sang.

-Empress Wu Hu of the Tang dynasty insisted her dignitaries, including all foreign ambassadors pay her and her fertility homage by performing respectful cunnilingus on her as she placed her exposed genitals on a special wooden elevation, set up for the occasion in the Imperial lobby. Ambassador number 22 one afternoon, from a country that shall go unnamed, and more of a cunning linguist than anything else, not surprisingly became unwell. He was forced to resign, receiving a discharge, though clearly not from her.

-My horse, an effete snob if ever there was one, constantly refers to his Oat Cuisine. As he is no camel, I named him Humphry. And if injured, I shall certainly take him to New Humpshire

-My dog's a bachelor. He's also a felon, recently acquitted under a flea bargain arrangement

-My friend Eddy the dwarf takes long, long walks only because he owns a very long dog

- It was a sad day when my woodpecker was diagnosed with termites

-Donald's the deepest duck I know. (Nick Auf der Maur)

-Where does 'beam-me-up' type of (de)materialization place things like good old biological birth?

-The Life and Times of  Claude Balloun (Nick Auf der Maur)

-The Life and Times of  Buster Price

-The Hungarian vamp Meri Whory-Zontal

-The Armenian philosopher Fallop Fallopian

-And his Azerbaijani sculptor friend Azzip Atirehgram

-Dizzy's Dead

-Waiting for Henry. Most people spend their life waiting for him. I didn't until I was in my early fifties. After my years of innocence. Innocence is dismissing him, the matter never entering the mind. Now it's: Is Henry coming, on his way? Where do I hide?

-The Labia Majora is not a lake in Italy

-My librarian's three weeks over due; she asked me to keep silent

-A Streetcar Named Oblivion

-The cruel will kill if you dare calling them this

-A cremation has nothing to do with putting icing on the cake

-The dinosaur population dwindled precipitously 75 millions years ago, after they started taking flying lessons

-Coitus Interruptus: Coitus, you bastard, you do this again, and I'll smack you!

-Time is Space

-I had my ties tubed when I was 46-- never wore one since

-The Revisionist Book of Fairy Tales

-(Journey To) The Spring Of Ignorance

-The Book of Woogie

-He rode his condom with elegance

-Mrs Wallis Simpson, otherwise known as the Duke box

-Anne Chovis & her friend Robert Dick

-Yup, but does God believe in the Vatican?

-The expression Unplugged has nothing to do with euthanasia

-Novels of fine frozen manners

-The dyslexic Lone Ranger: Ho Hi, Sliver!

-Featuring Peckery Greg

-Lohengrin is at the end of hole 3

-The Tannhäuser they built around it, will be completed next year

-I get the finger you don't like me

-A diphthong is not a nose dive

-Poirot was fingering the suspect, when the coppers arrived

-McDonna

-Sir Michael Aymeswell and may I say, Sir, I certainly hope so

-W.C.Fields: Mae West is a plumber's vision of Cleopatra

-Groucho: Women should be obscene, not heard

-Kafka: I have nothing in common with myself

-Newly Wets

-American Wet Press

-American Sex Press

-Americans Express

- North Dakota, South Dakota, Maxi Sota, Mini Sota

-Soft Carolina

-Wet Virginia

-Flatulence and scuba diving don't go together

-She made a move in the right erection

-I'll always love you more than yesterday, Tamara Knight!

-My sister had a fling with a plastic sturgeon

-There was a hold-up on 32d St. The Police asked a Jehovah's Witness what happened, but he hadn't seen anything

-My father was a struggling car thief from (one-street) Gibraltar

-Thus God created the Atheist***

-Pope Bogus XIV

-Sainthood is Rome's Hall of Fame, but without the batting averages and the stolen bases

-The actor Seymon Staynes will play agent 007, his publicist Victoria Feltham announced

-The only thing phenomenal about phenomenology is the ego of its proponents

-Richard the Turd

-Tell Me What All This Means, by I. Kan't

-Now from the Grand Ole Opry this ballad: My Gal's a Biker with Gas

-Vodka: Eau de Pologne

-A street walker in Alaska: a frostitute?

-Sharks are primal and stupid. Dolphins are affectionate, evolved and smart. Mammals returned to water with social intelligence. Sharks should watch & listen, have a salt drink with them.

-Some people are Sharks who are convinced the way to succeed is through hate at all cost. And sometimes they do win though they tend not to have friends or die old and by sleeping in.

-Claus from Below, Sole Below

-Preposterous and irrelevant: an organization calling a same gender union 'evil', while for generations criminally protecting its own representatives feasting on defenseless young boys and girls

-Who invented the discotheque? Why Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, of course!

-(Esther Williams & me): Is the Pope Catholic? Did Esther soak the curlies?

-St. Thomas Aquino's 5 proofs are very, very far removed from being proof the proofs are proof.

-Raven Wolfhowl lives!

-But Running Rabbit got murdered

-Tomorrow I'll rinse my hare

-Nurse to obese person at Emergency Admissions: Do you have elephantsurance?

-I'm all for lobal warming

-The astonishing thing about Ship of Fools is that in real life and shortly afterwards all the main actors died under similar circumstances or of the same condition as the characters they played. (Vivian Leigh a neurotic's death, Oskar Werner a sudden, seemingly unprovoked heart-attack, Michael Dunn a quick dwarf's demise, Simone Signoret a painful, lonely smoker's leave, Lee Marvin boozing himself all the way to a cardiac spat). It's a movie for the sadly disillusioned by the disillusioned. Still, they don't make them like this anymore, despite certain historical inaccuracies

-What few Shakespeare scholars know is that when he was young, Hamlet's nemesis Polonius holed out in a monastery where he secretly studied piano. In fact he only entered castle politics after Rome decided to throw him out and the real reason Hamlet slew him was hearing him play in a style that could only have been inspired by Beelzebub. And why the old guy was known as Elsinor's... Polonius Monk

-When I heard this guy say he was up every morning at the crack of Dawn, I had no idea she was his girlfriend

-Overheard a woman saying that when living in London her daughter went to nursery school with Prince William, and that he was a very naughty boy. I bet, I didn't even know he wanted to become a nurse...

-Well hidden despair is called optimism

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*** Archangel: " Lord, Bubble 8734&66^41891142125144049=//%xx5952 has burst!'

       God (irritably): " Damn! Don't constantly bother me with this. It's what Bubbles are for."

       Archangel: "But Lord, it makes the other Bubbles very nervous!"

       God: " Good! Keeps them on their toes."

       Archangel: " But is this all you have to offer them: Doom?"

       God: " And hot air. I love blowing bubbles. Then: Poof! Poof! Poof! Once even tried biting one coming up through the water of my bath. Now, DO you mind!"

        Archangel (exasperated): " But, M'Lud....! There are good Bubbles and bad Bubbles. Aren't you treating them all the same?!"

         God (impatiently): " 'But, but, but'... Listen, a Bubble is a Bubble, don't be a sop! As a matter of fact, they're 'bad' only when they get away....!"

         Archangel (distraught): "No matter what they think, what they do, what they say?"

         God: " Yeah, but don't tell them. They have it rough enough."

 

- Never say... I must be guilty because look how I'm punished!

- Say... You damn well prove what it is I'm guilty of!

 

 (on Richard H.)

-He drank

-first to luxuriate in,

-then to hold off life,

-followed by slowly

-shoving the whole show

-up his ass

 

- Letters are pebbles but words bricks, holding up beautiful structures and even music sometimes

                                             Just Married

Elmer Fudd's Siegfried and Bugs Bunny's Brühnhilde singing a Nibelungen segment together is nothing compared to a beaming Elmer Fudd (I'll kill that wabbit), or else Yosemite Sam, wearing a disheveled morning suit, standing on the steps of a Cathedral with the smirking rabbit dressed in a lovely white wedding gown, hanging on to their arm, munching on a large carrot: now that is parody of life and philosophy of the first hour. The only one missing, Alice in Wonderbra...

-The beautiful, what can only be described as irregular symmetry of Australian Aboriginese art, puts Western so called geometric Op art to shame

 

                                                    Art & Mother

Abstract art, Camus wrote, is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. And that's not true but there has been much abuse. So that I would at least add the word 'sometimes', as there's terrible but also much enchanting modern stuff out there.

If in Montreal, Amsterdam or Paris in contemporary art pantheons, arrogant or intimidated but either way straight--faced curators, hang huge completely black ‘toiles’ by some paint trickster, you might wish to call it ‘ils-se-foutent-de-ma-gueule-ou-quoi?’ art. I don’t care who they think they are and the joke respectively but not respectfully very much on each of them. That old Emperor’s-new-clothes yarn, actually, except pictorally. And if in London for instance the English wish to exalt a cow sawed in half, then placed in an aquarium and submerged in formaldehyde, as the mother of all artistic invention, let the poor dears be. But for Henry Moore they never did know how to shape or paint seductively. (Sorry Lucian, sorry Francis, too much pink charcuterie, while more than pleased to derail the Damien hearse)

But there are other modern works that have their ‘poids’ even though their simplicity and lack of artistry make one cringe when heralded by some as supreme artistic accomplishment. It is Pop art, more illustrative, more decorative than ‘serious’ art, that I’m aiming for. All that Warhol, Lichtenstein stuff and not scathingly so, except to say it works in combination with its environment only, not, in my opinion, when placed in a gallery on its own. For what I have noticed time and again is the strength of it only with people standing around it, or partially in front of it, with these very people, in my vision, an integral part of the spectacle, making their presence vital to the aesthetics of the scene. So that the opposite is also true: without the Pop art behind them, these people are mainly unremarkable and as such the whole of it making some sort of combined stage setting: magnificent design, great lighting, plus a handful of performers temporarily frozen in time.

And how do I arrive at this bizarre nonsense? It wasn't the first time I noticed that when people walked away a particular work I was viewing would suddenly lose its luster, unable, always in my eyes, to hold its own. And then I saw an ad by the Maastricht 07 Foire Internationale d’Art et d’Antiquités in the French Le Point magazine, and by Jove, I got it. It was a photograph, with two men wearing Borselino hats standing still between a Calder mobile and what looked like Lichtenstein Comics art to me, at least something very similar, and it became once again abundantly clear: take these two chaps away and you have nothing left, but also, take the art away and you have nothing left, with excuses to all perpetrators. And yet the combination of all elements having an absolutely stunning effect, an image which on its own could be painted as an oil off its very photograph, and proof in the pudding I dare say.

  

So that this is how now I grade art in what I see as my personal contemporary reference:

 Indisputable ‘Absolute’ Art, including Art Brut**

-Interesting or not so very ‘Installation' Art

-'Design' Art, best built, then photographed & printed up

-Lousy or not ‘Statement’ (Conceptual) Art

-Preposterous ‘Bluff’ Art

-And valid ‘Pop' or 'Entertainment’, sometimes shown as ‘Graffiti’ Art, on the condition the latter is surrounded and surrounds, thus perhaps better described as ‘Surround’ Art, situated in what might be seen as an inhabited room or street scape.

The difference in all these instances that in some cases I wished people would never leave, on other occasions that they had never come, and on still other occasions that I had stayed home... wif mi Mum.

Anthony Steyning

22-03-07                                     

** What does this man like? The answer: for instance, much thus by no means the entire body of New York Abstract Expressionism!

-'When women finger other women as man-haters, the implication is that they are lesbians' was the most unfortunate leader title of a recent Julie Burchill newspaper article I read not long ago. Unless deliberate of course and, given Ms Burchill's apparent sexual persuasion, an op-ed page editor having a little fun.

- The radio played nightmare music, repetitive electro crap, characterless electrocution stuff of the type used by people like the North Koreans as a brainwash and torture tool. It was Saturday night and apparently a good hour for this, though there were different times, warm and hopeful, hypnotic in more sensual ways. Days when lovers talked and people spoke, instead of looking straight through you, mouths most mute, eyes opaque. He no longer felt like going out, but staying home was hell as well. It was when he threw his radio against the wall and lit a cigarette.

(Political aside: Terrible societies in which early on you get a single career choice: become executioner or victim, nothing else. Whereas historically we have fought for and opened up the beautiful space that exists between these two disgusting extremes)

-He has two sets of reality. One with all of us in it, and one all his own

-Does this mean he's a congenital liar?

-Yes, it's what it means!

-In the Herald Tribune the other day, either Doha, Abu Dhabi or Dubai authorities, I don't recall which, responding to the question why beside all those Philippino, British, Bengali and what have you nationalities, so very few fellow Arab immigrants made it to their prosperous shores, were quoted as saying: If you have an ideology, go back to your mothers. If you want to work, have ideas, or wish to invest, our door is wide open. The implication being that ideology's for losers. And my follow-up remark to that would be that given certain ideologies enjoy a measure of success, we must conclude that beside the losers there are some who do rather well by them. Namely, the users of those losers. Winners as users of losers. Pure sociological algebra this, the veracity inescapable. (No irony after all, that algebra was invented in the Middle East.) And proof that big ideas can be manipulated into big prisons. But mainly that Emirs, good Muslims, make one hell of a lot more sense than Imans.

(03/07)

(Today, three months later, I read Sheik Mohammad ben Rached Al-Maktoum wishes Dubai to be at the forefront of Middle-East society based on knowledge, when currently 40% of its women are illiterate and the Arab world as a whole publishes fewer books than Turkey on its own, plus that Western Europe and East Asia of course leave the area far behind in crafts and sciences. To this end the audacious Sheik's setting up a development fund of 10 billion dollars creating 80 millions jobs over 20 years in the entire region, instead of men sitting round compulsively beating their head on a surface and/or manufacture terror. Averroes and Avicenna refound! Wahabism and Salafism remaindered at last) (06/07)

- The philosophically inclined comedian Richard Jeni saying religious strife is about two guys killing each other over who has the best imaginary friend, strikes a wonderful chord with me. He also said that as far as he's concerned we're all on the Hindenburg, so no use jostling for a window seat. (Or write about how beautifully the proverbial deck chairs of the Titanic were arranged, for that matter)

 

                               Wages of Shame

 

My wife looked at a $ 300 pair of shoes by a famous brand manufacturer that she couldn't afford anyway, but curiosity getting the better of her. The shoes were made in China, nice try! Ever wonder why blue jeans, produced in the USA, which used to cost $ 60 and are now produced in Lotus Land because of ridiculously low... wages, exchange rates, transport cost and import tariffs but themselves of inferior quality and therefore shouldn't sell for more than $ 30, instead are sold for $ 150 (because of indexation, you see) without blushing?

 

The same phenomenon applied to toys, shirts, and thousands of other consumer products, fierce competition having forced companies to match that maneuver? Excuse me, fierce competition? Doesn’t fierce competition drive prices down? Or is there something else going on, brand names pimping, colluding in the leisurely sport of price gouging?

 

Fact: Majority shareholders approve and appoint corporate officers able to drive the price of shares up, by posting huge profits

 

Fact: You post huge profits by cutting cost but not reducing price

 

Fact: You reduce cost by slashing wages and benefits and outsource your labour

 

Fact: One way of doing this by closing down and re-opening divisions in low cost countries and an unprotected local work-force, plus a low currency rate, without passing on any of these benefits to the client.

 

Fact: The aim of your enterprise is no longer to serve a community and its own family of collaborators and supporters, in the process making a reasonable profit ensuring continuation, but to create a vehicle providing exorbitant incomes to the privileged few ‘rewarded’ for their stewardship having forged a parasitical symbiosis for themselves.

 

Fact: This is hijacking. There is not natural, organic market balance; assets get over-valued artificially and unnaturally for the temporary benefit of selfish soloists. 

 

Fact: ‘Strip-mining’ corporate officers’ share of the scam leads to personal benefits hundreds of times those of remaining senior workers, when the healthier ratio shouldn’t be more than 1: 20. Of course, Fund Managers also deal themselves in richly for paper gains of assets they direct.

 

Fact: The losers everyone else: Public overcharged

                                               Employees robbed and dismissed

                                            Suppliers and their employees constantly facing extinction

 

Fact: The irony is that the ‘Funds’ are mainly Pension funds, dabbing in hedge funds, but the bottom line, also well for remaining smaller stockholders, is that the themselves small-time employees from other sectors contributing to these Funds have no clue what’s going on and will not benefit greatly from these investments by the time they become entitled to them, as they've already been skimmed off by CEO’s and Fund Managers earning 50 million dollars a year in personal management fees, stock options, bonuses, outrageous salaries and more.

 

Fact: The solution is to regulate usurious reward and abuse of globalization that has become no more than a sophisticated form of corporate theft by collusion, benefiting the third world only nominally and mainly in its upper spheres, the same situation repeated by corporate subcontractors on the other side, hiring goons to keep working slobs in line i.e.organizing themselves in order to get a more equitable portion of the pie, but getting beat up instead..... (And these mostly are socialist countries, believe it or not, but this is a whole other issue!)

 

Fact: Charlie Rose, in awe of the CEO of General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt, having ‘turned GE around’, breathlessly asking him if he ever considered a political career, the man looking into the camera, probably thinking “Are you nuts?’, giving this reply in a mode dripping with phoney sincerity: Charlie, the only ambition in life I have is... protecting my shareholders!!!”. 

 

Ah, right…. And on the off chance... yourself? And  never mind your employees?

 

 -Levinas suggested that as matter of ethics one cannot live in a society without concern for the others.  I submit there are too many examples whereby in the short term one can get away with showing absolutely no such concern, but that in the long term a society does not survive unless it does so.

- People who hunt inferior celebrities night and day, photographing them in all manner of embarrassing private moments, including surreptitious shots of their genitals if they could, air and publish these under the sanctimonious headline 'What impact do these images have on our young? What kind of role models are they?'. My question is, who gleefully airs the images, who is role model to whom? Those celebreties or the anomymous, sleaze bag editors?

- Fearless, filled with an inordinate sense of pride, or merely completely insensitive and morally uncouth, thus only half a man? (Or as Bertold Brecht acidly put it, why be man if you can be a success? Though Gide exclaimed by the time he hits his fifties, only a real man has had syphilis and the Legion d'Honneur. But I'll tell you later who I have in mind, I don't wish to prejudge the outcome of his trial...) (or is it possible that with all his equanimity, his sang-froid, our man, the powerful, the self-made mogul, incredibly, exhibits all the traits of one who at his deepest level's completely devoid of self-esteem. That material success at least can emanate from profound feelings of worthlessness?) (See ICARUS ACCUSED, under Selected Poems)

-She was as tidy with the skies, as she was with her life. After two months of wintery near-darkness, she closed her curtains when a pale sun finally broke through low hanging clouds, so the armchair near her window wouldn't discolor with light bright. She didn't walk, she scurried, her apartment a flat, square hole. She turned on the radio, it was a quarter to four.

-Savage capitalism should be held in check to the same degree as savage socialism. Savage statism with a cancerous, preposterously unionized civil service that only cares about itself and gobbles up the bulk of GDP, needs the urgent extirpation of its tumor as a start. Then give excellent surviving cells a raise.

-Not surprisingly state parasites are always hyper nationalists. They never produced much in their cushy life, but how do they adore the flag making them get away with it. They never smile, faking anger to prove their heart-felt commitment and to scare off those who'll question them. All of it a disguise as they have nothing to complain about. What fine actors, what fine ruse, sad professionally divided nation, long live mediocrity!

                                 On Quebec

Driving up through New England and upper New York State on a visit recently, and hearing the locals refer to Montpeleer, Mr. Lefeaver or Mrs Thybaune or something like that, one has to wonder what would have happened to the isolated 'Habitants', the inhabitants of La Nouvelle France, if the old British Empire hadn't stood its ground and hung on to its Canadian territories. Ausable (rhymes with unable) River, clearly referring to Rivière au Sable, Sandy River, though Ticonderoga perhaps not to 'Ti Con de Roga, Little jerk from Roga, as it sounds too much like a Mohawk based rather than a bastardized French name.

Seriously though, I'm not a historian, but it seems clear Quebec would have become Kweebeck or something like it, just like Noo Orlins and surrounding Acadian states pretty quickly lost their 'cajun' cock's feathers, once the French were defeated or forced to sell out in the 18th century.

So that the British by drawing a firm line in the sand when it came to American independence, at the same time defeating the last French forces on the continent at Quebec City's Planes of Abraham by tolerating, not decimating, French culture, tacitly, not enthusiastically, saved French speaking Quebec. The Catholic Church doing the rest in its own inimitable, totalitarian way. So that even when later they were patronized by an indifferent English establishment, something it was traditionally good at in all its old colonial haunts, Quebecois should bear in mind these larger facts. They might have been serving in Iraq, in other words, as the National Guard unit from Montreal, had the Brits abandoned them. The American States united, the Dominion of Canada's provinces confederated and dominated by anglophone British loyalists, Quebec remaining more of a diocese than a province and as such somewhat belittled and ignored by the others, its 'chagrin' understable but not without those life-saving benefits. If it weren't for that very Canada, today there would be no Quebec.

Yes, ironically, despite the slights, Quebeckers owe their very preserved identity to otherwise uncaring Popes and English kings and their subsequent true liberation, to their own, more recent and everlasting credit, only at last to themselves. This by sending the clergy to hell and making the federalists eat humble pie, in the end out-classing and out-dueling them at and on every level. Respect regained, regained by strength, hard work and moral plus intellectual conquest, not by insipid nationalism having so little to do with real pride and so much with a sense of inferiority, laced as it is with fake anger, angst and violence.

Because real pride and self-confidence is not barricading yourself. Real savoir-faire and achievement is for a minority to quietly dominate a larger nation, becoming its Brahma's, the way Quebeckers of stature have done in Ottawa for years. The true masters of this society not the irritable, tight-arse FLQ's or the PQ's but the creative genius of people like Alphonse Desjardins, Armand Bombardier and Guy Laliberté, who have done more towards placing Quebec on the forefront of world achievement than any fanatical yet parasitical and mostly retrograde militant.

(Desjardins- international banking and real estate empire, Bombardier- from lowly snow-mobiles to worldwide subway and railway systems, to passenger jet-aircraft. Cirque de Soleil the magnificent entertainment brain-child of  the cool Monsieur Laliberté, conqueror of Las Vegas, Orlando, New York, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam and more.)

Conquest, preservation and identity therefore, my friends, cannot be based on smallness and fear. It can only be based on energy and passion of a different, a higher kind.

                                     

                               * * * * * * *

-There is every chance

-a body buried illicitly,

-having met its end

-less than fortuitously,

-encountered the sort of justice

-it once dished out

- Class system is when an insignificant front desk clerk at the Grand Hotel in Berlin, dressed like a diplomat, patronizes a bell hop who calls him Sir, but is twice his age.

- I told my daughters March forward, and Wipe backwards, but never simultaneously! Avanti Popoli!

- A good film director must be a hypnotist: haven't seen one since Hitch

-Looking back over the ages Jesus died for mankind, but must be pissed off with the waste of his gesture

                                       THE CORONER

This from the Madrid Coroner Garcia Andrade in an amazing Semanal Magazine interview: If a family is penniless, I perform my work for free. Take the Fonseca matter, his sister so terribly distraught and desperate to find the real cause of his death. The police denies knowing anything, yet he died in their custody. These people are black, need I say more! I detest racism, I despise prejudice, let all the Spanish in Guinea get killed just so people here in Spain know what it is like to be hated. Believe me, there is no real difference between any of us. And yes, we're all assassins if circumstances line up right.

The most illustrious corpses have passed through my hands. From Tyrone Power to Bing Crosby. I mostly see extreme stress, the agony of death on their faces, except, and I'll never forget it, Crosby's expression: it was a smile of total bliss.

I listen far more to what a cadaver tells me, than to what people have to say. I love life, it's only when constantly confronted with the downside, that one truly appreciates its utter magnificence. An additional second, a tantalizing inch the wrong way, I can see it alter one's universe completely, I can see it change one's fate permanently. Observing such things is the beauty of my job...

(december 2005)

                                THE NEW PARIAHS

DNA knowledge is a double edged sword, test taking damned if you do, damned if you don't. Certainly, medical advances based on cell idiosyncrasy will be huge but also a whole new field of degradation opens up. The stuff of future novels. Linguistic, pigment, gender, sexuality, age, handicap, political or religious condemnation old hat, the new kid on the block your DNA. The reason you'll be politely refused life and medical insurance, employment, marriage and having children. Brave new discrimination. Mark my word. (Spring 07)

- An Emperor friend of mine designed a new line of nudist wear

-Empress Erectas I (we'll talk later)

-On the news that Pinochet suffered a heart attack and his son saying 'He's in the hands of God now' comes the heart-felt observation ' Yeah, Pinochet & God: bosom buddies, blood brothers, like two hands folded on one belly...' (december 2006)

-Mugabe's moustache is slightly narrower than Hitler's. The simplistic understanding of state craft and stupid knee-jerk reactions to the unforeseen, meaning just about everything, of both megalos is evidence of small, square, dark minds additionally mirrored in the small, square, dark stain under their nose.

-Why is it that politically abject writers, idolaters of  Uncle Joe, of Slobodan, of Fidel and other murderers get rewarded with a seat in literary pantheons. Because they relate their utter, near criminal nonsense so beautifully?

-Free market economists, including very famous ones, depreciate any government action but are the first to complain the police and the ambulance are late when something goes wrong in their own backyard. (1929) A bit like high-principle pro-life supporters, clamoring for the death penalty or stopping stem-cell research but welcoming thousands going into mortal combat, the God Standard a double one, just like the former.

-I choked up when Kermit the Frog first sang It's Not Easy Being Green, thinking of all the world's disadvantaged colours.

- The more generous a people by nature, the least State intervention it requires or for that matter tolerates. The reverse is also true, as if people delegate decency. But how does one combat egotism, a deep personal indifference toward another, as a disturbing aspect of national character? (November 06)

-Societies intolerant of social drinking are doomed. So are those that consider car parks fields of honour, when entered with a Porsche.

                                        

                                 

                                DEMOCRATIC MANIFESTO

Right is the hand of action, therefore it dominates. Yet can the Right do anything without the guiding Left hand, let alone chop it off or tying it up? Of course not. On the contrary, the acting hand has to care for and defer to the guiding hand to avoid disaster. Some bodies may be Left-handed and very successful, but this is not the rule and in this case it must assiduously court and consult the Right hand, particularly as many tools and much machinery are designed for the other arm. What's certain is that a one-handed body is severely handicapped, quickly getting morose and impoverished, and as such a highly unattractive suitor. Which compromises strength and exacerbates political and economic progress. But the best of all scenarios remains the regular switching of hands: magnificent political ambidexterity!(summer 06)

-Many admirers of Blair forget that Blair could not be Blair, without Thatcher. That he is her son. Even Peter Mandelson admitting as much...

-History shows it's impossible for a people to prosper, if the art of compromise hasn't entered its culture. That compromise cannot and will not be a dishonour or considerate defeat, but represents the ultimate victory (feb07)

-Majority rule is great provided the majority does its homework, not outsource its conscience

- If regimes or movements stamp out all individuality, it is that they fear us greatly (dec06)

-True, some want power badly, but 'the' people couldn't care less. They often don't even care under what system they live, but there's one thing they demand: and that's justice. Not just criminal justice, but social justice, economic justice, justice in schooling and in health. If a regime is not seen as seriously attempting to deliver this, it is doomed. It could take 50 years, but it will go.

(Note to myself) In Quarter to Four, allude to French Writer Banier saying about his parents: They not only believed in nothing, they believed in nothing very, very strongly, on their merry road to nowhere nearly destroying me. Or if I'm to write a play about him, open up with him saying: " My parents had no children. I was twelve years old."

(Having nothing to do with anything: Very, very few scholars know this, but the  Bard had a Scottish housekeeper he was most fond of. With her enormous breasts, first nicking her, he nicknamed her... MacBoth.)

(Nothing to do: A wild boar comes perilously close to being a oxymoron.)

Q: I say, where did Camilla park her...?

R: Park her bowls? Why over there, right beside your throne, M'am!)

(Nothing doing: Lance Armstrong is finding himself in the incongruous position that while he hasn't been caught, now literally everybody he cycled with has admitted to taking performance drugs, including past and recent champions, but he still denies it. It seems one couldn't win the Tour de France UNLESS one took drugs.Without calling him a liar, the circumstantial question now arises that with all the others drugged up to the gills, how could he possibly have won? Not only was he the best of the normal riders but also stronger than all those who were on steroids? This is truly miraculous. Also, it seems the superhuman powers claimed by him after cancer treatment run parallel to testicular cancer being the by-product of (ab)using anabolic steroids. So which came first, the chicken or the egg? Fifty years of structured Tour de France cheating but since everybody did it, in the end it made no real difference, except for a racer's life expectancy. I think therefore we should leave Mr Armstrong in peace, truly in peace. Only, adopt his amnesia: all right he won EXCEPT that after World War II THERE WAS NO Tour France! It never existed, never took place! And thus THERE WAS NO Mr. ARMSTRONG. In the way that Stalin airbrushed faces of assassinated rivals from official photographs: they never lived, so how could they have disappeared? In so many words History revisited, with only Louis and Neil Armstrong allowed to live and be remembered. What a ride, n'est-ce pas?!)

(Sept. 2006)

Just when Iago started singing 'For he's a jolly Othello, he's a jolly Othello...!', Desdemona walked in

-Q (by waiter): Are you ready to order, Sir?

-A(man, indicating his wife): Ah, yes! Let´s see! She's no Spring chicken, and I'll have a club sandwich, please!

 

                                       Melancholy

-Life needs a sun and a 'live' vulcanic planet circling it. Between those hearths a third force gets played out and that is us. We're the flame in the pan, the wild dance of the universe, together with our friends the plants and all those other bizarre animals, a ball too crazy, too magnificent to end. Until the fires die, perhaps to spring up elsewhere in that long, long night... but with others getting slow-fried.

-Circumcision as an early form of oral hygiene, the Lewinsky dissertation

 

                                                  F.S. Fitzgerald

Most off-putting opening page of any heralded novel anywhere: The Great Gatsby. The rest beautiful, smooth sailing, a high American Soap: tux, chaise-longue and mantle piece de rigueur when (re)reading the work. Others please abstain.

 

                                       O Irony of Ironies

And when we'll have overcome all natural checks and balances, defeating all diseases, become near-immortal, we'll have committed collective suicide by making the planet unlivable because of our sheer number, in addition to the phenomenon of living three lifetimes in one, with three careers, three sets of houses, three cars, three flown holidays each year, three spouses and three kids with each one, tripppling the abuse of this battered heavenly body.

-Delusion is walking in the red light district, thinking you just got lucky.

 

                                                     ON TURKEY

That this country will join the European Union is a historical inevitability, more, it is a historical imperative. Timing represents the only remaining doubt. That it has managed to separate church and state and is already very close to achieving the western work ethic & will be forced to honour individual freedoms coupled with a fair judicial system, guarantees an enlightened Islamic base. The perfect future role model for surrounding Middle-East nations and a priceless contribution to world peace. The implications staggering, ignoring them anorexic politics.(summer 05)

 

                                      ON NATIONAL CONDUCT

-A peasant's defense when pressured by a big city sophisticate: Refuse.

-A lagging behind, insecure nation wishing to appear strong: Refuse

-Impose superficial self-importance: Obstruct

-Constantly say Black when the other says Blue to elicit applause, is tiresome smallness at heart

-Grandeur is meaningless self-delusion

-Gratuitous abruptness does nothing for stature

 

                                      ON PANAMA

The canal between the two great oceans to be widened and with Nicaragua threatening to dig another, I think some pretty sturdy ropes are required to hold those two continents in check. Lest the tectonic plates go on a rampage,  setting all of  South America adrift. (I worry a lot...)

 

                                     ON IRAN

                               

I too think in recent strife all fingers point to Iran. Al Queda will remain a deadly, 'romantic' gang, disturbing but never disrupting and always just that: a gang. But Iranian religious neo-cons think they've found themselves a niche from which to aggrandize themselves and at the same time shame their sizeable, young domestic opposition into complacency. They know they can't take on the world, a backward nation with barely 70 million souls on board cannot have such wet dreams. But the hawks smell they can eventually rightly or wrongly be seen as having the West retreat significantly from all Islamic territories and severely limit Israeli ambitions, which would guarantee their pre-eminence in the muslim world and have the long oppressed Chiites end up ruling the more numerous and traditionally more powerful Suunis. That final victory won't hold for two good reasons. Iranians are not Arabs and sooner than later deferring to them will cause unbearable chafing. The other reason is the final realization by the great developed nations that they can no longer build their societies around the availability of fossil fuels, if anything for compelling ecological reasons. Petroleum therefore becoming a commodity only as important as barley and soya. Plus Israel will come to realize it must be brotherly and buy itself into Palestinian graces, removing that thorn in the arse as a dynamo of all that misspent Islamic energy. But all of this will go on another decade or two.(summer 06)

-The US has no economic Left, never had one after Roosevelt. Its only social victory Civil Rights, but not lifting a finger afterwards. One drive through America will show its utter failings, the Democrats a big business party like any other. The UK had a Left, but it achieved its main goals and is now a force with finance and trade ideals. In France the Left won by having the Right take over its goals, in other words they lost the election and will continue to do so for lack of identity. Germany has a national unity coalition government. Left and Right have become misnomers, what we get now in the West are the Ins and the Outs, the only divide: management, craft and personal principle, as there no longer exists any real argument about social democracy, about restraining capitalism not killing it, about the nature of the beast, the tail not wagging it, about mutual respect and transparency and last but not least about the ultimate motivation of and thus need for class fluidity.

A small step towards eventual world racial, cultural, political, ecomonic and class dilution with the spiritual perhaps reduced to a strictly private, strictly personal preoccupation.

Still far, far off, like a pond, but there's a New World for you....

Dilution no delusion, carried out properly.

Vote for it!

 

                                         A. HITLER

The Loudest of Impotents leading the impotent, the Man Who Couldn't Learn according  to Thomas Mann, to which I would add The Thug Who Couldn´t Think, his voice the raucous, to outsiders ridiculous, stirring voice of revenge and glory, establishing the most lacerating paradigms of brutality, born out of fury with deep personal inadequacy evolving into an ideology of pure aberration: to many he was fearless, as it turned out he was merely sick, dickless and heartless.

(Everything to do: Fascism comprises the worst of two worlds: a bunker mentality, adherents xenophobic ally disinclined towards personal discovery and so spiritually repressed, plus possessing an unnatural, near religious and obsessive fantasy about the purported pre-eminence of own group origins. If succeeded by force it brings the lowest layer of society to the top, having seduced the dim by making them think they're smart while condoning the only thing that ever enters these minds: violence and abuse of power ostensibly making up for all the humiliation they have suffered at the hands of smarter folk. You see, really simple people don't know they're slow and usually remain exceedingly kind. It's the ones just above the bottom line we have to watch out for. Those who are dumb but unfortunately just smart enough to KNOW they're dumb. Those clean shaven heads who have looked round, taken note, compared and concluded, with just enough brains to be angry, that they just haven't got what it takes. Then go on rampages to demonstrate they do: ideal fodder for fascism anywhere. Luckily though, small men can never govern tall men for very long and most fascist regimes by definition have come to relatively fast, bad ends. A shelf life that stinks.)

(Bis: Hitler was a vegetarian. Disliking meat he made up for it by feasting on vast amounts of flesh)

 

                       On Economic Toying

The same people who tell people they don't save enough, constantly entice them to spend more to keep the economy going.

 

                         On Pakistani Politics

-I'm a reasonable person

-Therefore I'll reason with you

-Unless you happen to get killed by a good friend of mine

-Then I can't reason with you

-You'll agree this is extremely reasonable

 

                                        ON  ETA

I love freedom fighters who take up arms after the fight's essentially over. Like a couple of years before Franco's natural death, with a bad apple government on its last legs. Just when the well-willing are finally taking over, creating a true democracy with full autonomous rights for all ethnic minorities. Heroes nowhere to be found when Basques were truly oppressed, twenty years earlier, when the going was tough and rather more deadly. Suddenly attacking a wounded but healing brother, whom economically the Basques entirely depend upon. Brilliant stuff. And now on September 23/06 ETA declaring it will never lay down arms until full independence has been achieved, and acquired with their blood if necessary. Lovely 18th century rhetoric in the 21st century, at a time, in a successfully united Europe when nationhood begins to recede to the level of three dozen, you guessed it..., territories with full autonomous rights. The other detail, something they forgot to tell us, that this blood they spill, actually isn't theirs. It's someone else's. Belonging to innocent supermarket shoppers, tourists, journalists, or city councilors in cities having nothing to do with their heroic struggle, like Malaga, Seville, hubs of terror in the onslaught on Basques. People cut down with bombs or shot in the back of the head, never allowed to defend themselves. Now that's noble. That's real courage, isn't it? And what about vision? The one 70% of ordinary Basques would rather have nothing to with. For, how would you like to be governed for the second time... by a bunch of thugs?

-Nationalism has nothing to do with pride, everything with irrational fear and in the end self-hatred, cowardice and greed. You never conquer with bombs, you conquer with noble intent. Vanquishing and preserving with ideas and craft, not by bolting a door.

-Demain, 11.00 heures du matin. Rendez-vous chez mon condomier. La taille, il faut l'avoir.

-Last 007 flick: Aging Bond against the only crook who isn't incontinent, the fearsome Goldbladder.

(Nothing to do with anything: Very few scholars know this, but early in the 18th century Emily Brontë was the first to dedicate a full novel to an upcoming basketball player and his twin brothers, tentatively calling the work "Staggering Heights". She subsequently changed characters, plot and modified the title somewhat. Check it out!)

(Especially in the beginning, life gives one the illusion it's quite long, that one has lots of time. But in real terms it's ridiculously short, the body a plant starting to wither quite early.)

                                                

                                       On Clinton Politics

The dilemma if you're extremely ambitious is that you can't be candid anymore, for fear of causing alienating and loss of support. And if you can't be candid you won't be trusted anymore by most, so that the only thing left is to lie and deny, constantly misrepresenting facts. Getting away with this deemed genial by some in terms of getting elected, but governing a different matter, a matter of character alas, the lack of which a fatal flaw.

 

                                                  Yucatán

I've read several times now that when the Spaniards first landed in Mexico and ran into a bunch of locals they asked them what the name of their land was. The polite version has it that one of them responded in Mayan: "Yucatan", meaning "I don't understand what you're saying!" My theory is that a low-life, passing Mayan peasant probably didn't express himself quite as correctly, more likely exclaiming to a pal "Who are these weirdoes?" and then "What the fuck are they saying?" which indeed sounds something like "Yucatán!", Pancho Tecuatl, an old Mayan acquaintance of mine assures me. So that if you wished to be historically correct, next time you book a flight to Mérida, in Mexico, just ask "Any specials to What the Fuck are they Saying? in October?" and I'm certain the airline will be most impressed.

 

                  Some Thoughts On Heidegger & Friend

Anyone who's deliberately enigmatic has something serious to hide or is simply toying with us. In Heidegger's case his duplicity between (individual) pure thought equating being, our 'sein' and which by implication is of little practical consequence as it doesn't per sé lead to action and his love for (group) absolutism and purity, leading directly to a sense of superiority and very active nazi-like ideology, is scandalous and untenable both from a human as from a purely philosophical perspective.

For years he was fully supportive of National Socialism, misappropriating all of poor, mad old Nietzsche to suit his own twisted purpose, only getting cold feet after he saw everything getting out of hand and afterwards cleverly covering his tracks. Hence his stance of : never apologize, never admit, never acknowledge and hide behind verbose, obscure serenity as a cloak for denial and cowardice.

Businesses were burned down and destroyed, fellow professors fired and led away, entire families rounded up like criminals in plain day-light and marched to railway stations in every major city by armed men, to be sent to dark vacation camps in comfortable freight-cars. But Herr Doktor saw nothing, knew of nothing, only thinking what fine days those were. Eh? Gas Chambers? What gas chambers? Of course that was much later, but he had supported racist state thugs from day one, because, you see, they had such a compelling rationale. So how Hannah Arendt could have fallen in love with such a dishonest, anti-semitic embroiderer is a mystery, like Piglet falling in love with the butcher, unless she was just bagging a trophy, which is not to say she wasn't very talented but would have made her a cunning, little academic slut. A situation reminiscent of the young, tall, rather divine Ava Gardner's apparent and irresistible love for midgets, falling for the already famous Mickey Rooney, head over spiked heels no less. Or of young Simone de Beauvoir's predilection for celebrated wall-eyed toads. Though let me not go down that road, unable as anyone is to look into a young woman's impetuous heart. But again, even looking at his photograph: this man was ugly, inside out. Not something a smart, pretty Jewish thing would normally flip over. And it's very difficult to determine what he was contributing to humanity at any time, except give other academics incomprehensibly addicted to hero-worship... shiny little hard-ons.

(March 2006)

(Sorry about this, professional Heidegger (Heil-Digger) admirer. Yes, yes, you'll brusquely ostracize someone who's foolish enough to even attempt influencing your opinion, taking away your icon as it were. Pissed off like a kid whose bike's confiscated or worse. And why? Not merely that you've an acquired near chemical dependency on both, but that it was mildly suggested you weren't quite up to the critical task. And nobody can get away with that, right? So it isn't that someone else may or may not be spot on, that's completely immaterial, truth no longer being the objective as it was fixed long ago. It's just that with great difficulty you've acquired a certain station by adhering to the canon and now someone wants to rudely upset that comfortable apple cart. The fact the icon has an evident odour or that the bike may be faulty thus useless, matters absolutely not.)

(On the other hand, Heidegger finally not even supportive of National Socialism as such, but of ANY strong force in power, given that unhealthy deep-seeded ambition seemingly compelled him even more than the quest for knowledge and reason. Sucking up, it's called in the vernacular. Also striking Konrad Lorenz very badly).

(Nietzsche: Stuporman?)

(Nothing to do with anything: A Russian Oil & Gas biggie I met here in southern Spain told me his wife threatened him that if she ever caught him with another woman, she'd cut off his pipeline.)

 

                                       ON SHRIMPS

I heard the Radio Nacional de España refer on air to an old-style cello in a Monteverdi broadcast as de viola-da-gamba, which means large violin held between the legs in Italian, 'gamba' meaning 'leg' in Rome. Which wouldn't be particularly remarkable if 'gamba' didn't mean 'shrimp' in the announcer's own Spanish and he could easily have referred to a 'violoncelo' rather than a snooty 'viola-da-gamba' even if technically speaking these are not one hundred percent identical. It would have sounded one hell of lot better than a concert for a large violin with shrimps. Almost as dicey as an avocado-shrimp cocktail, going to book as a party given for lawyers with crustaceans.

 

                                      On Theologians

Real theologians wishing to live up to that name should study deities and divine rites world-wide, much like a specialized anthropologist, say somebody like Levi-Strauss. The minute someone goes to book as a Christian Theologian he's something else, he's sold, he suffers badly from monotheism, he's what in political terms is called an ideologue, an enforcer of the faith. In philosophical terms, anyone renouncing half of his also 'God-given' intelligence to a carefully constructed artificial truth the core of which he considers to be unquestionable, can't be taken seriously. Is Groupie of God not a better job description? Personally, I root for the Yankees.

(Nothing to do: Stan Getz, but Stella gets none.)

(Nothing to do: In recent history coastal nations seem to have been rather more peaceful than others, partially or wholly embraced as they are by open water, where citizens are more at ease with themselves, not feeling enclosed or easily threatened, but for one notable exception----Japan. This country has long been a different story, bellicose though unprovoked even while surrounded by an awful lot of water but producing Hirohito, that vile little Honshu throwback to glory of the gory kind. Or is it that our gods are in the heavens, keeping us in line by looking down, but theirs everywhere, especially underground and blind to what went on?)

-Mr .SPEAKER!

-Yes?

-MR. SPEAKER, THE PRESIDENT OF THE...

-Who?

-THE PRESIDENT OF THE...

-(Man, whoever came up with the constitutional amendment that the Speaker of the House must be---DEAF?!)

-MR .SPEAKER!

-Yeah?

-(Ah, never...) NEVER MIND, Sir!!

- (The Prez already sat down, did he!?)

(US State of the Union, January 2006)

 

                                                ON IRAQ

                                           (Collapsus on the Euphrates, but whose?)

Of course it's a toss up: the strongest political force on earth, is it really democracy or is it bad old nationalism? Either way, in Iraq it's neither. If the insurgents really only wanted the 'invader' to leave, all they would have to do is stop their cruel, mindless struggle. America and the rest of West asking no better: they'd be gone in a matter of months and paying for their oil on their way out, the way they pay everyone else in the world. Sadly, it's feeble fighters who prevent them from leaving, unable to reason, their impulsive strategic solution for everything... death.  Incapable it seems to shake nasty old brigandry, that come-down-from-the-hills-or-the-sands highway or caravan-attack mind-set. Their only real understanding of martialness the idea of bombing themselves to bliss, not knowing how intricate it is to strike in sustained concert, thus only to kill and to run, oh how they kill, oh how they can run, run like Olympic runners but usually going the wrong way and their nationalism fake nationalism. A pretext. A cover-up for return to cruel sectarian hegemony for which the Americans seem to serve tribal purpose of many stripes nicely. So that Bush or no Bush, beautiful Bush or bad Bush, it makes absolutely no difference to the struggle there at this point. In fact I suspect they're fighting under cover of deliberate chaos to settle internicine differences for which America serves as that unwitting front. The minute it will announce its intention to leave things will quiet down. Not because the hated 'invader' is going, but because the naked truth comes to the fore: the Iraqis are staying, life goes on, they have to put up with each other, there's nobody left to blame: YOU'RE FREE! GET IT! FREE! Insurgents not worthy of anyone's understanding or sympathy, they must and shall stop, pulled screaming and kicking into the XXI century. They've offered their own people nothing but indignity and enslavement to retrograde custom. Anyway, failing this Baghdad will become the capital of nothing, Kurds and southern Shiites splitting with the goodies. As for America, it did not fail. Yes, they are liberators, even if their motive was and remains self-serving, just like all of our own actions so often are at least partially self-serving. Its misfortune that having freed the nest from King Viper, it ended up discovering all vipers here are king. And the lesson to be learned: don't liberate 7th century people, they don't know what you're doing, going totally berserk. (And not only here, are Palestinians governable?) Like the Wild West with bombs, and without any moral frame work or individual compunction. Nobody wanting to say it, but failing in Iraq far too many vicious and depraved Iraqis, their inner moral compass apparently not invented yet. And by implication also failing all otherwise decent Arabs, the international majority, by their silence. And this silence, is it really the silence of the lambs, or might it be the silence of the rams? For killing market shoppers, students, poor job seekers trying to feed their families has nothing to do with castigating the hated yet envied West. And again, as for that awful America, it didn't colonize Japan or Germany or any nation whose government it defeated, only stamping out idiotic militarism once and for all, forcing nations to abandon habitual disgrace through spurious tradition to embrace modern liberal and social democratic values, if not perfect, infinitely more humane than anything else thus far. (Oct 2005 (The Japanese constitution was written and imposed by America, making this country a better place. Does this sound like a satanic plot?)

-The US should conduct Dale Carnegie style immersion courses in Baghdad, instilling Aristotelean, alleviating Blood pragmatism in hearts and minds down there

-O tempore, O Mores sighed Cicero about the violence of his times. The most enlightened Michel de Montaigne, an early humanist and sixteenth century near existentialist, complained bitterly about his days with their rampant fanaticism, institutionalized ignorance, massacres, assassinations, lies, concealments, jealousy, envy and more, saying he cruelly hated all cruelty. So that if present day Arabs seem particularly murderous, especially among themselves, it is due to arrested indigenous mores rather than religion per se. For so were King Lear, Richard III, Henry VIII, Philip II or Charles IX and other nobles, real or portrayed after life and all model Christians, weren't they? All's a matter of evolution and time, the difference also those modern explosives instead of arrows, daggers and spears, thus many more victims. And moral snobbery completely out of line, given the highly efficient manner in which so many Europeans slaughtered their fellow men in the twentieth century. But two or more horrible wrongs do not a right make. The West becoming more modern, prosperous and humane only once it liquidated the planners of evil and destruction within its own structures of power and pulpits, mere decades ago. Deliberatedly stalled evolution expressing itself in dimished social intelligence, taking otherwise intelligent people sometimes centuries to figure out that in the end brutality never, ever pays. Which is unforgiveably sad. But young Arabs in certain areas remaining desperate and volatile because the world hasn't been delivered to them. Everything forbidden, everything taken, incapable of freeing themselves, having absolutely nothing to look forward to. Those beautiful children we see on TV playing in the street, what happens to them, who teaches them, who steals their laughter? (Teachers as assassins of all expectation!) By the time they're sixteen, the faces of these kids already twisted with hate, all beauty gone! Bewildered, befuddled, they're promised bliss but nothing really good ever happens to them or those around. Later, always later. Misery begetting misery because of too many using the sceptre of religion to keep'm dumb and down, leaders and teachers themselves totally unequipped thus fearful of modernity and young people not knowing who or what to believe anymore. And then when an armed stranger walks through the door saying he wants to help, with a certain self-interest mind you, but still really wanting to help, they are so suspicious they know not what to do and stab him just in case. Out of endemic mistrust and in order to 'protect themselves'. Their only real hope, that very, very last promise, the hereafter, which some grab literally instead of rising above their own jailers. But that day will come, excoriating the violent and false prophet from within. When young Arabs will finally say, we don't want to live like this any more. We'll worship in private and to hell with ancestral primitivity, we want to live like young people all over and have hope and fun. So now here's some advice, if you want to explore, if you want to rise, have a career, a schooling, a trade, a vocation, to travel, to dream differently: don't blame outsiders  for taking it all away, that's the easy way out. For you're obviously on the wrong path by again and again doing something to the exclusion of something else. Attribute blame closer to home, beginning, to a degree, with yourself. Believe in God if it strengthens you, but Honour him with goodness and resolve. His task is not for you to seek or dish out death when He has given life. His task is for you to honour creation and emulate those who earn His admiration by helping Him finish His work on earth. Improving daily existence that is, instead of glorifying endless revenge and the wallowing in supposedly blessed dirt and dust: humility one thing, self-humiliation an other, my good lads.

-On the environment: have cars run on poppy seeds, coca and tobacco leaves: it saves everything. Failing that, have them run on used toilet paper.

- In the dark ages violent, neurotic religiosity reigned in Europe. Neurosis is the product of unnatural taboos and interdictions. Hysteric addiction to interdiction leading to self-destruction. It does to the spirit what anorexia does to the body. Not what God had in mind, presumably. And going as far as the madness of Teresa d'Avila or Hildegard von Bingen, des vierges folles, delusionally, deliriously and erotically fantasizing about having intercourse with Him.

-The problem with fundamentalists is that contrary to their OWN Creator they seem to have no respect for life, the dignity of it once His work here is complete. They have no notion of mundane issues like job creation, health care, hygiene, road repair, food supply and what have you, let alone education.What they offer is insanity. But religion, like revolution, eating its own young is nothing new. And we do know what happens to societies embracing this culture. Aztecs, folks like that. However, with modern immediacy I give it a couple of generations, not centuries, before sanity somehow regains its footing. It usually does.

 

                                    ON ANGER

It's also about rivalry. I'm not saying anger often doesn't have its legitimate reasons, but flaunting it enters tragically into a culture if  it becomes a social commodity. For young men who have nothing but a worn set of running shoes, a stained old polo shirt and a pair of jeans, no job, no education, no knowledge, no expectations, no girl-friend, no car, no place of their own, anger is more than a sentiment, it is their only possession, the only thing with which to show off. And more of it the only way to better their friends. Yes, man is a competitor, even when he has nothing, like who is the first to get to the square or the corner hang-out, once there who's the one who puts in the most useless hours, who bluffs or phantasizes more and above all who hates the most. Seeking and getting the admiration and a sense of accomplishment most humans crave, from a miserable environment.

I mean, what do you do with yourself, how the fuck do you keep busy every day, week, month after month, except by measuring yourself with nothing, still the only gram of dignity available to you. Your only victory. Ever.

Maybe

This not merely about manhood, this about humanhood. For needless to say there are female equivalents.

 

                                    ON SECURITY

The doctrine that one's own security is lodged in first assuring an adversary's security took Israel 60 years to learn and accept. Of course the matter was complicated by even more faulty Palestinian strategic diplomacy or anything coming close to meriting that description: one would think their 'efforts' might have been seriously reviewed by 'leaders' whose 'planning' had only disastrous national results to show for during the same period, but who proudly never wavered from practices of Somalian proportions, exacerbated by mindless internecine greed and cruel rivalry anywhere else in the world described as mindless self-destruction. Both sides making many great mistakes since the very beginning, in '48: but what if Israel had insisted on building a state for the recalcitrant Palestinians ?!

(November 2005)

Leading to this more recent notion following Sharon's descent into unrecoverable, deep coma, this week announced by the world press:

 

                                                   WHAT IF

 

Rehavia Ben Schach, I said at the Montifiori Club where he had invited me, you as a former ranking Israeli air-force officer knowing so much more than naive little old me, but why does Israel prefer to deal with 5 direct enemies... instead of 1?

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Well, it seems to me that by tolerating a Palestinian state, you get the other 4 off your backs straight away. Isn’t it a lot easier to control daily murder and mayhem by holding a country that has everything to lose, accountable? I think the problem is that right now Palestinians feel they couldn't have less, that they have nothing to lose and because of this gain all that neighborly solidarity. ”

 

“Anthony, there are things you don’t know!”

 

 “I mean, two recent wars won and nothing to show for!”

 

“What do you mean, nothing to show for?”

"Well generally speaking, winning a war means winning the peace and that my friend has proven to be extremely elusive. You're in deeper than you ever were before...!"

"Maybe from your perspective..."

“Not just my perspective: for all the world to see. I mean, why win those wars and lose the big battle? Take the issue of the Golan Heights, with modern-day missiles what’s the point of keeping them? Permanently annexing them for ‘security’ reasons, to many nothing but calculated expansionism. Why not negotiate their own penalty with the Syrians, forcing them to take some responsibility for having attacked you and keeping a punitive slice of land with their reluctant agreement, only then them getting back any of the rest, this way at least nominally eliminating one more enemy. Let's be honest, what security would you really have compromised? Isn't gained the better word? You guys are smart… it worked very well with Egypt and the Negev, didn’t it?

 

“Anthony, you don’t understand. There are things I don’t even know or understand!  Besides, Syrians are no Egyptians. ”

"Pretend they are, for heaven's sake! Stop out-guessing yourselves!!"

All right, I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the way my discussion went more then twenty years ago. Of course my friend referred to severe internal divisions in Israel, already then, before Rabin’s death. But this conversation really took place, sometime in the early eighties. With a high El Al official whom I had befriended and it occurred after yet another serious crisis in his homeland, I honestly don’t remember which. Now 2 decades later it has finally become formal Israeli policy to acquiesce in the formation of a Palestinian state, where to draw the borders still up in the air as a lot of living and growing and developing has been going on during 60 years, at least on its side. So as it turns out, in my innocence, but as a free-thinking world-citizen, I wasn’t all that far off the mark. And it also means that ordinary folk can voice an opinion, especially as those involved in a serious conflict sometimes no longer see the forest for the trees.

 

So now this for more innocence that hopefully will get proven right, not later than 20 years from now: what if instead of obstinate confrontation with an impossibly irrational adversary, Israel would have created not a Marshall Plan but say a ‘Moses’ or a 'Moshe' Plan for a former Ottoman Empire back-water, whose only taste of modernity let alone statehood had come from a very brief period of League of Nations’ mandated British rule? America did it for Germany, why not Israel for Palestine?  A state ready to move into, like a beautiful, pre-fab house. The idea whereby one rewards nominal rule of rights and the establishment of new guiding institutions, a territory but not full territorial control, to a population kept from violence and frustration with something they’ve never EVER had: a constitution, a final political entity and... WEALTH. Stick and lot’s of carrot, in this case in order to safeguard Israel’s own internationally sponsored existence in what would otherwise surely become a hopelessly hostile environment. Nothing like a Palestinian resettlement reeking of 'please go away, we're back here now!', not even anything like 'here's a cheque, kindly go live somewhere else!' but a 'we were given a rebirth and we're making damn sure that you're having one, too!'. In other words Israel's greatest victory and service to itself, making the Palestinian 'right-to-return' argument a wholly academic one through a nominal state created for an adversary against its own will perhaps, out there in the open, before the settlements, with precise borders, but so effective, so alluring, including security, the framework of vital institutions, modern buildings and a civil service taught rigorously that pervasive graft guarantees pervasive poverty, hence adequate schools and schooling, medical services, roads & public transport, start up industries, JOBS and SALARIES, plus the prospect that if it behaved maturely and responsibly in a couple of generations it would be the finest, wealthiest truly independent Arab trading nation on the Mediterranean, barring Lebanon. The only threat with which to blind its neighbors the one of wealth perhaps i.e. its style of living, its competing exports, its creativity, its subsequent miracles with desert and coast. In other words a house ready to move into, might do the trick. A political turn-key operation if ever there was one.

 

A place where Palestinian mothers would not have to worry where their sons hung out all of their useless days and nights, still resentful of the intruders, the new Jews, not caring to know why they came back elbowing them out, yet look, look, moving them, those displaced Palestinians into Gaza and large surrounding desert, yes, yes… but wait... that's not all... slowly turning that very place into a large near-paradise. Out of a profound understanding that hate’s the sure road to all lasting grief, and altruism even though more practical than sincere perhaps, the ONLY way ahead. Investing a good slice of the billions upon billions received to develop and defend itself, in such a way that it would hardly have to defend itself at all. And money to spare to get its own social house in order with the constant arrival of unqualified and often even somewhat backward Jewish immigrants. 

 

This starting in 1948, as a doctrine of Tourism not one of almost predictable Terrorism, never mind the holiness of it all, this earth still great enough to offer access and exclusive use to each other’s shrines, but much more concretely… a doctrine of all wealth shared. There's no reason Jerusalem couldn't be two Vatican-type states-in-one, sovereign yet fully integrated with the two 'solitudes' surrounding them. What's lacking is imagination, though not apparently tragic intransigence. What's lacking is generosity.

 

Of course there would still have been strife, and hot, shallower heads trying to prevail. But in the long run nobody would have doubted this ultimate accommodation, the ultimate wisdom of making it so and ….of accepting it so. Practical wisdom of the highest order on both sides of the divide: no self-righteousness, no humiliations, no programmed suicides, in fact all contrary misery and cruelty becoming completely…. unthinkable.

 

Too bad it didn’t happen that way.

 

Not quite.

 

Or should I say... Not yet?

(April 2006)

-Added In September 2006: after the altercation with Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, I read the Israeli Premier Mr Olmert promises to invest billions in Northern Israel, creating 'a veritable Paradise'. This announcement, I take it, for domestic consumption after having been severely criticized for Israel's questionable military results there. Not a word about the horrendous destruction inflicted upon non-Hezbollah targets victimizing Lebanese with whom he has no bones to pick. In fact, people he'll desperately need in future. Would his announcement not have carried far more weight if 'Paradise' would have included Southern Lebanon. Taking wind out of the sails of Hezbollah's handing out of wads of dollar (!) bills, compensating citizens for their disastrous 'divine victory'. I think that again a golden opportunity was missed by an Israeli government to radically rebuild its imagine in the region and to change the long term direction of its foreign policy.

             

-In general: but can enlightenment be handed on a plate, and unenlightenend people be governed unable as they seem to govern private conduct? In other words, is it wise to bank on a civil society to emerge from factional, out-of-control semi-religious mob vigilantism? And when are people going to understand that only civil conduct leads to prosperity, power and any other ideal they wish to pursue strategically? Still, long term, the answer lies in nobody refusing wealth, begging the additional question of  where are the mothers, who are the tutors when the hand of providence extends?

 

(As for supposed Israeli invincibility, it has thus far been favored having to fight non-Aristotleans**. It can otherwise be said that 60 years of what can only be described as a badgering 'No Give' approach has been a total policy failure, with conditions likely to get worse- ever worse- with each decade because of the slow growing sophistication of its adversaries and of the intrinsic lack of altruism this overall policy contained and continues to contain. I don't know if it has it within itself, but unless Israel plans for another 60 years or more of this it must start conquering hearts, at the very first opportunity and as the newest kid on the block in contemporary terms, make grand, meaningful, unilateral and lasting gestures to young Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general, indoctrinating them in what a terrific neighbor it is. One they simply can't afford to lose. Wouldn't that be something?! And many educated Israelis, including Amos Oz, think this way. As for the Arabs, what is it in their nature that cannot abide compromise and restraint? Wisdom in other words: slow, intelligent, subtle action to obtain goals, enhancing vital interests. Why literally kill everything, including one's own hopes and desires, with intemperate, derisory 'force' and 'sacrifice', when a child can figure out merely brutal men can never beat determined, liberated and thus always stronger ones who have world support.)

** (Man is Mortal, Jimmy is a Man, hence Jimmy is Mortal. Ignoring the absolute truth and consequential conclusion of Aristotlian thought is a risky business. Purely moral considerations aside, this is an example of how not to arrive at certain conclusions through thought patterns still widely put to practice: Man is weakened by brutal mortal Pain, Inflicting brutal mortal Pain on the Enemy is Possible, hence Inflicting absolute, brutal mortal Pain must be the single most convincing method to Crush the Enemy.

With some unf