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Musing on Sydney's news
5 may 2005 (05/05/05)
Hope with a new Pope? Nope.
Have you seen that image that's going around the net at the moment? Pope John Paul II is lying "in state" in red and white robes, while George Dubya Jnr is standing at the front looking on with Dubya Snr and Mrs Dubya. Dubya Jnr's caption says, "Mommy, what happened to Santa Claus"?
Somehow it manages to be tasteless, pithily relevant and cute all at once.
A statement of sorts
I have to apologise for the long hiatus between articles. About a year ago I wrote an article about someone who I thought was highly dodgy, highlighting his hypocrisy, duplicity and various other fancy words ending with a "y". To cut a long story short this person hassled me to the point where my credibility at work could have been placed at risk.
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Well, that learnt me, good and proppa. How could I have gotten myself into such a pickle - all for the sake of my silly hobby website? After all, the whole point of this site has been to give people pleasure (or if you ask one of my friends, "mild amusement") and inform them of things, not to get embroiled in politics and legalities. Mind you, If the Sydney Morning Herald's #%&^*! editor had the decency to publish my letters, none of this would ever have happened. I'd started out wanting to paint pretty landscapes and ended having to paint the outside of Mullawa Prison (metaphorically speaking, ahem). So I went back to being a happy little rat, gleefully taking my chance to jump off our sinking political ship and removed the entire "Media Meditation" section of the site. Instead I returned to weird art, as weird artists tend to do. |
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So why, you may (or may not) ask, am I writing again, now under the moniker of "Rants and Rambles"? (although hidden in the relative safety of the About Me page), with a few elected items salvaged from the previous cull?
Well, there was at least one good thing about my old articles - they documented what was going on at the time, if in a silly way.
However, this time around I have promised myself that there will be no more poison pen criticism of my old targets - political hypocrites, business cheats, religious loonies and litigious losers. Ok, maybe just a little ...
A summary (and some of early 2005)
Anyway, we all know that Pope John Paul II died recently and Cardinal Ratkiller has miraculously become Pope Benedict the Somethingth. Of course Pope Benny Dick was one of the cardinals that Pope PJ II had installed in his branch stacking exercise. This means that the policy of the Catholic Church remains the same: keep people in the third world dying of AIDS through lack of protection, keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and maintain gay apartheid policies.
Of course they will make the occasional limp statement about war and other trivia, just so people think they actually care about something other than what resides between between people's legs and how they use it.
Ironically, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, former Premier of Queensland and keen advocate of Pope PJ's policies died soon afterwards. Both men lived to a ripe old age which tends to lend weight to the old adage - only the good die young.
So, what happened in 2004 that I missed during my prolonged hiatus? More war, of course. Lots of the usual carry-on and rearguard rhetoric from the Coalition of the Willies in Iraq and the insane fundamentalists swarming in from Syria.
Last year San Francisco started issuing gay marriage licenses but they were soon overturned by Dubya's loony religious right mates. Nothing protects the institution of marriage as much as preventing people from getting married, eh?
There was also a big Aboriginal riot in Redfern after a kid was impaled after falling off his bike while trying to escape the police. It's one of those sad cases where everyone was in the wrong (which does tend to be a common state of play in this life).
Astronomers found out that there was an area of Mars that had once been drenched in water. Meanwhile, Sydney - and most of NSW - found that being drenched in water was one thing that was definitely not happening. The meagre rainfall that did fall continued to dterminedly avoid the water catchment area. The government has decided desalination is the best solution, presumably because they think that public will consider the more economical and environmentally-friendly option of recycling waste water to be too yukky.
Silly old Kofi Annan got himself in trouble for giving a lucrative Iraq rebuilding contract - Oil for Food - to his son. Hang around with politicians for long enough and ...
Talking of corruption, poor old Rene Rivkin, who was having more legal hassles after his imprisonment, killed himself a few days ago.
Normally, I'm not all that sympathetic towards dodgy high flyers. However, unlike most of them, Rene didn't suffer from anti-social personality disorder; he was bipolar. In our materialistic neck of the woods no-one cuts you any slack when you say there's something wrong with you, unless it's physical and visible. Needless to say, our continued neglect of the mentally ill continued with gay abandon.
China, the world's New Economic Powerhouse, kept trying to bully Taiwan into being subsumed into its totalitarian structure. Then they started bullying everyone else into not recognising Taiwan as a nation. Naturally, Australia went along with China. Money talks. Human rights walk.
Alas, 2004 had more than its fair share of ugliness and disasters ...
As usual, Israel and Palestine continued their merry dance of death. Then Yasser Arafat died and things settled down between them - a teensy bit. So now, at least, there's a bit of tomato sauce (and a slice of gherkin) on that little sh** sandwich.
Five British prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were released while the Aussie detainees were kept in the slammer - and to think we thought we were the best at toadying up the the Yanks! We may beat the Poms at cricket, but they bowled us out for a duck this time.
It's funny, I was chatting with an American friend about the way we toady up to the Yanks and, as a result, our language and culture is becoming Americanised. I had trouble working out why we are now have to write our dates the wrong way around as the Yanks do.
Nor did it it make any sense to adopt the American verb endings of "ize" instead of "ise". Does it make sense to have, for example, realize-realizing-realization-realism? Why not realizm, if that's how they want to play it? Besides, It makes a mockery of Scrabble's 10-point score apportionment for the letter "Z" (pronounced, "zed").
Anyway, my American friend pointed out that if we weren't so desperate trying to get their greenbacks into our economy we wouldn't be getting so "Americanized" [sic]. He's right. We're like slimy cousins, toadying up to a rich relative to get a cut of his will, but then moaning about how he's using his money to wield control over us.
Eventually the Yanks did release Monju Habib, but David Hicks remains the President's Guest of Dishonour.
Speaking of which, Dubya was re-elected in a dumb-slide, mainly because he promised to enshrine gay apartheid in the American constitution. Go figure (whoops!). Sure, it helped that his opponent, John Kerry, had clearly been to the same surgeon who performed Simon Crean's charisectomy. Osama Bin Laden contributed, releasing a threatening video soon before the election. I expect he was desperate to make sure his old sparring partner stuck around for a hile longer. Let's face it, how much fun would Muslim extremism be without Dubya?
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Not even the bunfight about prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq could bring Dubya down. A photo of a small female Yankee soldier holding a leash did the rounds of the world's press. The other other end of the leash was tied around a prostate Iraqi prisoner's neck. Perhaps we should make it compulsory for everyone to watch Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket so everyone understands why American Marines have such a bad reputation? To quite Sam Vaknin: "Torture is the ultimate act of perverted intimacy. The torturer invades the victim's body, pervades his psyche, and possesses his mind. Deprived of contact with others and starved for human interactions, the prey bonds with the predator ... It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering". |
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Meanwhile an employee of search behemoth, Google, was sacked for talking about his employment in his blog. Just as well the USA went to Iraq to spread freedom, eh?
On the other hand, America's enemies in the middle east worked tirelessly to outdo them in the human rights abuse, comfortably winning that disgraceful race with their new tactic of releasing videos of their thugs beheading Western civilian workers in Iraq. It was strange the way the personalisation and sadism of those acts made one feel more disgusted with them than the soldiers who bombed thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. I felt it too, despite what my logic told me.
On a brighter note, our very own (well, Tasmanian) Mary Donaldson married the Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark in Copenhagen. She looked very nice at the wedding. And he, as always, looked ... gorgeous!
Another hot sort, Tony Blair, was hit with a purple flour bomb in the House of Commons during question time. Funny, isn't it? Little Johnny and Dubya send troops off to war against the wishes of the majority of people and get voted back with increased majorities. Tony Blair does the same and loses heaps of seats in the Pommy election just gone, even though the British Opposition would have been even more gung ho about the war.
It just goes to show that it doesn't pay for a leopard to suddenly ditch their spots in favour of stripes. It's the same reason why America's transsexual extreme right-wing writer, Ann Counter, is so reviled for saying that she's pro-marriage (for normal people only). The moral of the story is, if you are a leopard and want respect, stick to spots.
Oh yes, Saddam Hussain was captured and gaoled *yawwwn*. One amoral politician down, a mere twenty three thousand seven hundred and forty eight to go ...
Chechen rebels took over 1,000 children hostage and in the end over thirty were killed and many more injured and traumatised. They want independence from Russia. Not that they needed it since they'd clearly already achieved independence from humanity.
A humongous hurricane in Florida wreaked havoc. Another big storm trashed the Caribbean islands. Just after Christmas a monstrous tsunami killed hundred of thousands of people in Indonesia. The the photos of the carnage in Aceh made Dante's visions of Hell look like a five star hotel.
While on the subject of Indonesia, there's been a spate of Aussies being thrown into prison there. First there was poor old Shapelle Corby, who apparently carried a big load of pot through Indonesia's customs in her sports bag. Taking pot into Indonesia seems as logical as selling off Aussie dollars for Indonesian baht, and then going back to Australia to sell them. Despite the illogic of it all, things don't look good for her.
Still, you can't expect justice in this world. Occasionally it happens and it's a nice surprise when it does, but that's as good as it gets.
Soon afterwards Indonesian police caught nine more Aussies in a joint sting with the AFP, this time trying to smuggle the stuff out (which at least makes sense). Apparently they will face the death penalty. We're clever, aren't we? Instead of catching the drug mules in Australia and then paying the squillions needed to keep them in gaol, we get our northern neighbours to kill them - at their expense. Apparently we were pretty "clever" (ie. seditious) in our dealings with East Timor and the oil fields too.
From Timor we pan out to Titan, Jupiter's largest moon. The Cassini space probe took some photos of Titan. While it lacks the exotic interest of Magrathea (the planet where they built planets in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which, in my view, wasn't half as good as the book), the whole episode still makes me marvel at our technological (if not philosophical) progress, given that less than 100 years ago we didn't even have television, and the things they called television just 50 years ago looked, and operated, like storage boxes.
Artistic depiction of Titan. Yes, it appears to be brown.
Talking of old things, Ronald Reagan finally died (see above comments re: Pope JP II and Joh Bjelke-Petersen).
Christopher "Superman" Reeve died too. He became an even bigger super hero after becoming a quadriplegic, lobbying around the world for disabled people. It just goes to show that every now and then someone who is actually decent manages to catch the attention of our ghoulish media.
So that probably summarises a fair few of the big things that have happened since I discontinued Media meditation ... oh gee, I almost forgot a doozy ... I finally sold my old Rogers drum kit at a garage sale!
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