Courage and Support
I feel so inferior
to Pussy Riot, Julian Assange, Jafar Panahi,
and all those who publicise and challenge
the Chinese cadres’ information control,
the callousness of India
the Brazilian state’s crimes
against the environment and indigenous peoples,
and every
other abuse by the mighty and arrogant.
Those who resist and defy
bullying by governments,
corporations, religious organisations,
and other authoritarians
who are firmly convinced
of their entitlement to privilege
deserve all the support
that anybody else
can give them,
however little good that may do.
Spooky
Shortly after the US
started killing eight-year-old girls
and other people in Baghdad
for no legitimate reason,
I went to the US
to start the process
of renouncing my American citizenship,
having also held Kiwi citizenship
for yonks.
Figuring that making a point
requires doing something to make it,
I informed the media,
and TV3 sent
along a crew.
After they interviewed me on camera
outside the office building housing the consulate,
a man approached us and requested,
in the sort of bland American voice and accent
a spokesman for Monsanto would have,
that it would be best if the camera didn’t show the building
due to the
threat of terrorism.
The TV3 reporter asked him who he was and
what gave him the right to order us around.
He purred softly that he just helped out at the consulate
with security and stuff like that.
The reporter told him that,
in this country at least,
we have freedom of speech and press,
and he turned
and left.
He’d been wearing neutral-coloured trousers
and a bland business shirt with no tie,
and within seconds I would have been unable to describe him,
his face had
been so ordinary and bland.
I’d been
face-to-face with a real-life spook.
The camera operator panned up to show the building.
Horrors
And so another horror committed
by humans
had flitted across our screens,
replacing or eclipsing the
previous horror,
depending on the degree
to which we can identify with
the victims’
location, culture, ethnicity,
prosperity,
and so on.
People have inflicted more
horrors
on other people since the last
lead-story grabber,
albeit in less sexy places,
and rest assured that more
notorious horrors
will supplant the most recent
one
in our attention span
as they occur.
After all, we live in a time of horrors.
I rather suspect, however,
that all times have been times of horrors,
as far back as
we care or dare to look.
I don’t think that the problem
is the times in which we live,
but that it’s people, particularly assholes,
who are living in these times,
as our species did in such times
before instant worldwide video
and six-hour news cycles,
as when English-speakers committed genocide
on the native North Americans and Australians,
or when the biblical Israelites
did so to the Canaanites and Amalekites
in obedience to the One God.
The
Right Honourable
One thing
that nearly all people
who have enjoyed
what our culture defines as
success,
and those who aspire to emulate
them,
seem to agree upon
is that honour is contemptible.
Internet Petitions
People all over the place
lie all the time, of course,
and many delight in justifying,
at least to themselves,
the domination and cruelty and
destruction
in which they wallow
with arrogantly disingenuous
hogwash
as a matter of habit,
as a matter of policy
– it’s just a part of who they
are,
like being football club
supporters
or connoisseurs of cheese.
It’s a daunting task,
challenging
their bullshit prescriptions
and machinations
in any meaningful way.
The really powerful ones
can afford high-priced deniers,
who finance media
dissemblance
and produce consequent surveys
revealing
that most people don’t give a
shit
about the meaningful
survival
of anybody or anything,
even – in the long term –
of themselves or their progeny.
Those of us who view this
nastiness
from inside emotional bunkers
– resulting from our being
shell-shocked and
conflict-averse –
can only wonder if internet
petitions
really have any effect.
Fils
de Baron Samedi
After reading something
about the Haiti
I tried to imagine what it
would have been like
to have lived though that
and I couldn’t
because my mind wouldn’t let
me.
Power Imbalances
Close to the last time I talked
with an arrogant-dickhead uni lecturer
who used to pretend
to be my friend,
he and his then-current sycophant
were going on about some bullshit theory
advocating world government
based on somehow
them getting everyone else
in every culture
to adopt their values.
I noted that in my experience and scholarship,
the only value I’d found to be the same in all cultures
is that nobody likes to be bullied,
and somehow it got around to the sycophant
telling me that when I resisted bullies,
such as by not buying from companies
that bully others,
that I was
bullying them.
I grew up with two born bullies in the same house
who naturally saw me,
the littlest one there,
as a natural target,
so I have this
thing about bullies and bullying.
It’s important, for instance,
always to stand up to them,
and when that’s impossible,
it’s better to escape than to back down.
That’s the main reason why,
when I had the chance and the ability,
I became involved in a small way
with helping
refugees, the world’s most bullied people.
I wonder if the sycophant
would put his sophistry to the test
and argue that the refugees
were bullying their former torturers
by fleeing, and depriving them
of the joy of torturing.
Reverse power imbalances, indeed.
Graft As A Fatal Addiction
Functionaries such as he is
have always done things this
way,
so he does them this way, too,
even though it’s obvious
that everything is collapsing
around him,
that his corruption
is hurrying that collapse
along,
and that doing things this way
can’t last;
he keeps selling out to the
highest bidder,
and any other bidders willing
to front up
with the cash –
cash that won’t buy him jack
shit
when everything to buy is gone
and no place remains to which
he can flee.
Terrible Terrorising
I noticed that one of the
unconvicted Syrians
released after twelve years of
illegal incarceration
and probably torture at Guantanamo
for being a terrorist
said upon his arrival in Montevideo
that his priorities were:
(a) reuniting with his family,
(b) opening a restaurant, and
(c) supporting the Uruguayan national
football team.
I’m terrified.
Personal
Versus Principle
During the early part of this century
I was highly active in the Green Party,
serving in many capacities
at the provincial
and even
national levels.
After the 2005 election,
the party’s national
power elite
treated me with grave disrespect
and I cut back to just
chipping in ten bucks a month
and letterboxing
as much as the local coordinator
wanted me to.
Then a local party poobah,
whom I’d never met,
went beyond disrespect
to disdain,
behaving toward me as if
I were less
than shit.
I was inclined
to end my association,
but the Green Party
remains the most sane and humane
counterweight to
reckless, egocentric, and greedy
right-wing
fuckwit power freaks.
Personal
dignity or duty to others?
I cut back to five bucks a month
and letterboxing the minimum amount.
