Burn, Tricky Dicky, Burn

A few weeks ago, while nearly all of us were transfixed by the US presidential election, the Irish government tried to bury some bad news. It didn't get past me, though I was as transfixed as anyone.

So much so that I even stayed up to watch the vice-presidential debate, so that at 3.30 in the morning when I should have been dreaming of a threesome with Cameron Diaz and Denise Richards, Dick Cheney was looking me straight in the eye and telling me that if I didn't vote for him that Osama bin Laden would sneak into my bedroom and chop off my testicles and use them for table tennis balls. It was a bit late, I might have misheard him, but that was the general gist. Then John Edwards told me how his father, an unemployed mill worker learned to read by watching educational programmes on TV, and I nearly started crying.

What bad news was that again? Oh, yeah, the government are going to build two toxic waste incinerators that will set our recycling programme back years and give thousands of people cancer.

I kind of sensed this was going to happen. The Irish planning process is a bit like a Hollywood movie; the government put all sorts of obstacles in the ‘developers’ paths, so much so that it looks at times that they’ll never make it, but you know in the back of your mind that there’s only going to be one winner and it’s not the people who’s views are being spoiled, whose air is being polluted, whose walks are being closed off and whose house prices are being pushed down. It seems that An Bord Pleanala has rubber-stamped all fourteen applications for new motorways this year.

To see for myself how stacked the process is against the objectors, I visited the oral hearing just round the corner from where I’m writing this. (There’s no limits to my pursuit of journalistic truth.) Though there’s massive evidence that incineration is linked with cancer and birth defects and long-term pollution of ground water, the hearing decided that this was none of their business. Who’s business was it, then? The Environmental protection Agency, who are all government appointees. The ruling that environmental effects were not within their remit was a Kafkaesque one, as if planning laws don’t pertain to the environment then what do they pertain to?

The set-up at the hearing neatly symbolised the government’s attitude to those who dare to question their descisions. While the representatives of Indaver, the Belgian firm who want to burn our waste and pollute our air were given seats and tables around the chairman, while members of CHASE, the main group objecting were forced to sit with the crowd and make their way to the front one by one to make their depositions. Then it became more Keystone Kops than Kafka when they had to adjourn for three hours while they got the sound system working.

After that, two weeks of tortuous discussions as the objectors tried to include environmental arguments within the parameters of the hearing. This process was briefly enlightened when, in the middle of an appeal by CHASE’s lawyers to have environmentalist arguments heard which was being conducted in particularly arcane legalese, legendary Cork protester Pat “The Picket” Allen got up and shouted in his stentorian voice “How can you ban smoking and at the same time build an incinerator?” which showed that if he didn't grasp the complexity of some of the legal arguments being used to oppose the incinerator, at least, like the rest of us who live in the Cork area, he intuitively understands that it’s not a good idea.

Even after all that, the chairman of the hearing recommended that the incinerator not be built, he was overruled by the other thirteen members of an Bord Pleanala, which makes civic participation in the planning process seem like a pathetic illusion.

The next option for CHASE was to go to the High Court for a judicial review, which as the high court are all Fianna Fail appointees, they’d certainly have lost, at a cost of E1 million, then a supreme court hearing before reaching the promised land of the European court, where they might have got a decision in their favour. Unfortunately, it seems this isn't going to happen.

The government claim that science is on their side, and would like people to think that the likes of CHASE are ignorant luddites who are holding back progress. The scientific community is such a fractious, back-stabbing and generally bitchy one that anyone who claims to have them on their side is telling a big porky pie. It’s said that history repeats itself and that historians repeat each other, but if scientists repeat each other’s ideas it’s only in order to discredit them.

CHASE have brought over many scientists who’ve at the very least provided a reasonable doubt that the technology behind incineration is a safe one. For evidence that incineration isn't a safe technology, google the words “Russians poison Yushchenko” and see what happens. You’ll get some before and after shots of the Ukrainian Pro-Western leader. A few months ago he looked like a sprightlier, straighter Peter Mandelson, now his eyes are bloodshot, his skin is ruddy and his hair is receding. It looks like the Russians have used some chemical made by a mad scientist who rubs his cat while he waits for James Bond to arrive. In fact it appears that they’ve used dioxins, the very same chemical compounds that are generated by incineration.

The government use the term ‘incineration’ or the even more euphemistic, even Milosevician, ‘thermal treatment’ to describe what they want to do in Ringaskiddy and Co. Meath. What they actually want to do, in more literal terms, is bring toxic, domestic and industrial waste from all over the country and set them alight in those two plants, pumping the smoke into the atmosphere and burying the ash generated in landfill. This process creates new chemical compounds that, not surprisingly, this can create health problems for those who live in any sort of proximity.

Even some of the proponents of incineration admit that this method of waste management may be linked with the unusually high levels of birth defects and lung cancer in the areas around incinerators. (More details can be found at www.greenpeace.org.uk) However, they try to convince us that these were as a result of old-fashioned, mass-burn incineration and that new filter technology traps any dangerous compounds that are created. It’s a dangerous, bogus, argument, as only a virtually invisible speck of toxic dust needs to be inhaled before someone can fall victim to one of the many diseases with which dioxins are linked.

Even if you don't accept the health arguments, and not all scientists do, it seems, there’s the bigger waste management picture to be looked at. The government claim that they are pro-recycling and put out more annoying ads than you can shake a stick at to remind us of this. The incentive for local authorities to do so will be drastically reduced if there’s an incinerator, which needs a certain amount of waste to keep it going and will pay them to take waste off their hands so they can burn it.

They claim that this will generate enough heat to heat 20,000 houses but this is a bit like burning all your furniture in order to save money on coal. Some of the things being burned include petrochemical products like plastic and synthetics which are made from oil, which is clearly in short supply. Others, like drinks cans are made from aluminium, which there is plenty of, but it takes thirty times as much energy to mine and process aluminium as it does to recycle it.

They claim that building and running the incinerators will provide quite a few jobs. Not the country has an unemployment problem at the moment, but there’s up to a hundred times as many jobs in recycling.

They claim that the EU are insisting that all countries deal with their own toxic waste, an argument which would be more compelling if we were implementing Kyoto or if the likes of Fatty Harney didn't regard the prospect of EU tax harmonisation as an unacceptable loss of sovereignty. In any case the toxic waste incinerator will need seven times the amount of toxic waste Ireland currently produces to keep it going. Under the good Friday agreement we can take waste from Northern Ireland and therefore from the rest of the UK, so not for the first time in history the British will be effectively exporting disease to Ireland.

So who will save us from the governments lies and the diseases that they will create? Step forward, An Taisce, the heritage board which has been compared to the Gestapo by the new environment minister, which isn't a particularly encouraging development.

Personally I’d love if Dick Roche was right and An Taisce had the same arbitrary powers as the Nazi secret police. I’d love if they could have got the O’Connor brothers who turned the Old Head of Kinsale into a golf course into a darkened room and shone a bright light into their faces and told them that had vays of making zem talk and made them live entirely on granola and soya milk until they recanted. I’d love if they could burst into the offices of the National Roads Authority wearing long coats made from Hemp and made them watch Braveheart over and over again till they decided that building a motorway through the hill of Tara isn't a good idea.

An Taisce, sadly, have none of these powers, though, though Dick Roche will relish the fight with them anyway. It’s questionable what Commissar Ahern’s motives for appointing him were. Lately he seems to have regarded the position as an obstacle course for people on the way to bigger things. Now he seems to be throwing down the gauntlet to environmentalists, who he and Fatty Harney seem to think are holding the country back with their obstinate insistence that money isn't the only thing that matters.

I’ve got very little faith in any government or judicial body to stop the incinerators. I do have some faith in people power, and if even a fraction of the 23,000 objectors in the Cork Harbour area were willing to stand in front of the bulldozers in Ringaskiddy then the unthinkable might happen and Fianna Fail might admit that they’ve made a mistake. This tactic worked when the government tried to build a nuclear plant at Carinsore Point in the seventies and hopefully it’ll work again.

So hopefully the only things that’ll be burned in Ringaskiddy will be effigies of Dick Roche, Red Ahern, Martin Cullen, Noel Dempsey, Fatty Harney, who as health minister should be opposed, and Michael McDowell because... well, he’s Michael McDowell.

Are Dubya & Condi gettin' it on?

Last week I predicted that after Condoleeza Rice was promoted to Secretary of State, either Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle would be her successor. Turns out it’s actually Tony Hadley, former lead singer with Spandau Ballet. I was wondering what became of him.

Meanwhile I’ve read so many gushing encomia to the talent and intelligence of Ms. Rice that I’m left wondering how such a nice, smart girl fell in with such ruffians as Rummy and Cheney.

But there’s also a gentle probing about Bush’s relationship with Condi. While all comment on her loyalty to the Bush family, the final paragraph of her profile in Sunday’s Tribune, for example read: “The unmarried Ms. Rice frequently spends weekends with the Bushes at Camp David.”

Hmmm. Do I detect the merest hint of a suggestion of an indication that the Camp David master bedroom is being utilised as a programme-related facility site for some interracial rumpy-pumpy? Is Laura being told that she looks a bit frazzled after her long journey and that she should lie down and take a few Ritalin while Condi tells Hubby how Pakistani militants are penetrating the Hindu Kush through the Khyber Pass? It’s certainly unlikely that Dubya asks the classically trained pianist to play the poignant andante from Beethoven’s 29th.

I’d love if Bush and Rice got caught making the beast with two backs. It would reveal him to be the hypocrite that he is and lead to a decimation of his evangelical support in midwestern swing states and possibly to riots in the secessionist south an to some of his more fanatical supporters committing suicide. Basically a good thing all round.

None of this is going to happen. But if Bush wasn't the worst thing to happen to the Western world since Hitler, I might have a modicum of sympathy for him. Having twins is a painful process which leaves many women desexualised and as the Bushes haven’t had any children since there’s every possibility that Laura is one of them. In any case it’s hard to imagine sex with her being that gratifying as she’d have that same glazed, vacant look on her face the whole way through. It’s easy to see how he could be beguiled by Rice, devouring up her discourse about world affairs with a greedy ear.

I was one of the people who thought the criticism of Bill Clinton and Diamond Joe Quimby was way over the top and that if women marry politicians they should expect status and wealth but hardly fidelity. In every other epoch leaders of large civilisations had large harems. Mamoulion the Bloodthirsty of Morocco was said to have fathered 900 children, though he wasn't a proponent of ‘Family Values’

It’s harder to see what’s in it for Condi, though of course it was someone in her position who once said that power was a great aphrodisiac. What, though, could she see in him apart from that? She’s a multitalented woman, and though she’s obviously much more intelligent than the president, but while she’s had to work hard for everything she’s achieved, while he’s a spoilt upper class brat who was born with a silver foot, I mean spoon, in his mouth. At an age when he was womanising, boozing and snorting coke, she was professor of international relations at Stanford. And she made the opposite journey through America to him, she from Alabama to the West Coast, he from Conneticut to Texas.

It’s true that many African-Americans have become successful, but most of them have done so by working for the man, whether by perpetuating negative stereotypes of themselves in hip-hop lyrics or spreading drugs through their own communities. But it’s disconcerting to see that one of their finest minds working for the Man, especially when the Man is George W Bush.

But there’s another way of looking at their putative affair. There’s a French movie which I’m sure Bush has never seen called Max mon Amour in which Max is a chimpanzee and his paramour is a Parisian Bourgeois woman. It’s obvious that the relationship is more about power than eroticism, as the chimp is never in a position to walk out on her and is dependent on her for food and shelter. The downside is that chimps can’t give good back rubs or tell women how nice their new dresses are, and their penises are only about two inches long.

It’s a little facile to suggest that just because George W Bush looks like a monkey that he has a small penis. There is a theory, though, that the reason most African males are poor in monetary terms is that they’ve never needed to prove that they’re men by accumulating wealth and status because they have enough manhood hanging from their groins. In contrast, if you read American Dynasty by Kevin Philips, you’ll learn, if you didn't know already that there’s nothing so low, so devious or so underhand that the Bush family wouldn't do it to acquire power and status. What is it that they’re compensating for? I’m not going to suggest that just because ‘Bush’ is the family surname, they’re all unsure of their masculinity. That would be just tacky.

Nevertheless, though Bush is president of the United States and could sack Rice any time he wanted I think most of the power in their relationship lies with her. Bush is surrounded by people who’ve been in Washington far longer than he and have a better idea how things work, and a far better understanding of the world around them. As Dubya ain’t much of a reader by all accounts, he relies primarily on Rice for information about how to deal with both Washington and the rest of the world.

Once again, what’s in for Condi? Well, she’s still young and some of the underlying demographics suggest that white people might be in a minority in the United States within a couple of decades. So if the old white ram really is tupping the black ewe Rice may be just biding her time, letting Dubya have his clumsy, flailing way with her and tossing him the odd banana while she mentally measures the White House curtains. In following him she may just be following herself.

After all, none of us are truly masters, nor can all masters be truly followed.

Damn Brits, coming over here, killing our foxes

On February 18th the “ancient”* “sport” of fox-hunting will be made illegal in the United Kingdom.

Whenever I hear the murder of small, defenceless animals described as a sport, I think of that Gary Larson joke where there’s two sign-up sheets outside the Coliseum, one for Christians and one for lions.

Incidentally, how long before the new Imperial power starts throwing Muslims to indigenous fauves, or making them go a few rounds with The Rock? Sorry, just thinking aloud. Like most outward-looking, progressive types, I think partly in French.

If fox hunting was really a sport, Rupert Murdoch would have tied up the rights to it years ago. In the pre-hunt build-up, the fox would tell Gary Newbon how he’s evaded the hounds for eleven straight hunts and confident of extending his unbeaten run; then the hounds would look straight at the camera and say that they would love it - LOVE IT - if they could catch him and rip his innards apart, before getting a message in their earpieces saying that actually they were going to kill him humanely with a single bite to the neck.

Proponents of hunting say it’s a relatively humane way to deal with what’s generally perceived as being a nuisance. It’s a dangerous road to go down, particularly as there’s quite a few people in places like Bermondsey who’d be only too happy to chase immigrants down with packs of dogs.

Others claim that it gives them a connection to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, though many must wonder why they don’t roast their prey over a spit or why Tesco don't have a ‘quality’ range of fox-burgers.

They claim that there will be a loss of 15,000 jobs for horse and dog breeders, people who knit their shiny uniforms and the private security people they employ to beat up hunt saboteurs. Almost all of them vote for the Tory party which deliberately put 3 million people on the dole in the early eighties.

They claim that they really love the countryside, though most of them are big landowners who destroy ancient hedgerows in order to maximise yields. It’s an example of doublethink that would Orwell or Richard Perle blush.

Many hunters are going to respect the will of the democratic majority and the rule of law. Prince Charles is going to keep on hunting right up till February 17th, after that he’s liable to discover that being detained at her majesty’s pleasure means something other than being asked to stay for another cup of tea by mumsie.

Others promise civil disturbance while some warn that secret, illicit hunts will take place. This is what happened when the fuzz clamped down on raves, though it’s harder to see the aristos squeezing all those horses and dogs into the back of a hiace.

Criminologists claim that hunts will be hard to police. Why? As far as I’m aware the cops have horses too. They’re usually used to police urban events like football games and political marches, but it’s hard to imagine them protesting that they don’t want to get their hooves dirty. Could it be that the boys in blue are more sympathetic to the hunters than they were to, say the miners?

Personally I hope Tony Blair is just as brutally heavy-handed in dealing with the hunters as Thatcher was with the miners. I hope there’s clashes from which the Hooray Henry’s emerge with blood gushing from their faces. I hope there’s police cordons round the houses of those who threaten to defy the ban, and that ramblers, who may bear the brunt of the wrath of the privileged, will get their own police escorts. I hope that in twenty years time the cops will justify their strong-arm tactics by saying that these were dirty men who had no respect for the rule of law. But I’m not holding my breath.

Instead I’m worrying that they may come over to my own fair isle and hunt our foxes. Foxes aren’t indigenous to Ireland, they were brought over for the absentee landlords to have something to chase. In the Penal era any landlord could buy the horse of a catholic for a fiver, which meant that the hunt became the preserve of the Anglo-Irish landlord class, which it still is today. During the famine horses were kept well fed on peasant’s tithes while the peasants themselves starved. Yet when someone in the green party pointed this out, Anglo-Irish know-it-all Kevin Myers spent a whole vitriolic column ridiculing him.

But it’s Britain that’s banning the hunt first with modern, forward-thinking Ireland left lagging behind. This poses the spectre of hordes of British lords with marbles in their mouths coming over here, while pregnant teenagers make the opposite journey. There’s a complex grey area dealing with foxes who want to have abortions, as well they might with the hunt season coming up and the prospect of being chased by a pack of salivating hounds.

My fears were somewhat assuaged by a report that there are unlikely to be that many Brits coming over here, but for all the wrong reasons. Apparently the existing hunts are all over-subscribed, and the remaining free land is being converted into golf courses. This either means the Anglo-Irish aristocracy is alive and well or our own upper classes want to ape the ways of our former colonial masters, which isn't a unique development by any means.

So, while the Brits go over to Norway and train their horses and dogs to hunt whales (The ones that play water polo should be particularly adept, boom boom) it’s time that we followed their governments lead and banned this barbaric practice. Hopefully it won’t take seven years as it did in Britain, but we don’t have a house of lords (Thanks be to Jaysus!) and this would be a perfect opportunity for Red Ahern to nail his working-class colours to the mast.

If hunting is made illegal I hope the police adopt the same approach to dealing with illegal hunters as they did to the students at the Reclaim the Streets parade.

But once again, I won’t be holding my breath.

*For evidence that fox-hunting isn't all that ancient, see here

Band Aid v PC Police

I'm old enough to have memories of 1984. It wasn't nearly as bad as George Orwell predicted, given recent events in America I think he may have been 20 years off.
Lots of things have changed since then. Back then I was a child for whom the torments of adolesence lay in the not-too-distant future. I was only vaguely aware how fucked-up Ireland was at the time and how many people born the decade before were forced to emigrate. Now I'm a world-weary adult who spends all his time ranting on the Internet.
Back then the Arab leader who was terrorising god-fearing westerners was Colonel Gadafi, while the yanks and brits were selling arms to Saddam Hussein, now it's the other way around. Back then only about 6 people had access to the Internet and the Commodore 64 was considered cutting edge.
Other things haven't changed that much. I had a big head of curly hair on me then, I still do now. I say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Back then there was a Bush in the White House, though GP was VP. His administration were spending lots of money on foreign wars, but they were doing in covertly in places like Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemela where both sets of antagonists were dark skinned so people didn't pay that much attention.
Back then people were starving in North-West Africa and western governments were doing shag-all about it, and a group of musicians called Band-Aid decided they needed to help. They put out a record and it topped the charts, with a popular boy band coming in at Number 2. The same thing is going to happen this Christmas.
The World that they're bringing the song into has changed a little, though. Back then people were thrilled that hedonistic popsters like Wham! and Duran Duran were doing something for the hungry people of the planet, and impressed by what seemed like the genuine passion in the Voice of Bono and others. Back then Britain was just emerging from a decade of strikes that had torn the country apart so a new generation were finding out for the first time that the rest of the world had far bigger problems than themselves.
Back then there were far fewer NGOs and developmental agencies and their influence over governments was minimal. Now, thousands of people from the west take a gap year to help with development in poorer countries. Of course, the question of 'development' is a wretched one as many people fairly legitamately equate the concept with westernisation. But that's another issue, the point is that many people in the West are trying to make the World a better place, today has the ear of Tony Blair (and what a big ear it is) and even George Bush's treasury secretary Paul O Neil spent 3 weeks in Africa with the u2 frontman before he got the Heave-Ho for being such a liberal pussy.
So NGOs arent going to be all that thrilled just because there's a new pop single making some money for starving people in Darfur.
What they've taken issue with is not the fact that Busted are included in the new version, it's that the lyrics are the same, even though they seem to argue that famine is not caused by unfair trade or privitisation, but is an act of God.
(I've never been happy about that phrase. When I read that my discman wasn't protected by Acts of God like fire, I had this image of God up in the clouds listening to JS Bach playing a harpischord parita thinking: Hmm what'll I do today? I know! I'll burn Seamus' discman!)
Which is a fair enough argument as far as it goes, except that a three minute pop song aimed at the mass market might not the best medium for conveying the complexities of African food distibrution. Try and imagine the boys from Busted singing "And the only water flowing is water which the locals are forced to pay for because the government were forced to privitise the supply as part of an IMF structural re-adjustment program and is probably contaminated because so much fertiliser is required to grow genetically modified crops which the goverment were also forced to accept" and you get the general idea.
Personally I don't think it's fair to pick on Band Aid, especially as Bob Geldof has done as much as anyone to highlight the problems of Sub-Saharan Africa. The Live Aid concerts did more than anything else to bring about a revolution in people's consciousness about the third world and raised a fair amount of money, though if you do the maths the average westerner only donated about 5p, which puts the €3 people were charging for some soggy crisps at Oxygen into perspective.
What's more the song is a minor classic of it's genre. People don't go changing the text of the Iliad because selling female slaves is now considered sexist. Why isn't the Band Aid song afforded similar respect?

We're Number 1??!!?

This week’s good news: I and just shy of four million of my compatriots now live in the best place in the world.

Lots of people think they live in the best place in the world..

Americans all think they live in the best place in the world, mainly because they’re told that repeatedly by their government, media and educational systems, and as few of them have passports they have no reason to disbelief them. One Floridan asked by a BBC reporter what gave Uncle Sam the right to go round bullying other countries replied “This is the Land of the Free!” as if that was some sort of self-evident, a priori truth.

But drat and darn it, buddy, if ya want to live in the real land of the free better sell you’re condo and pack your bags and move to the southern part of the Emerald Isle. Because an international survey of 110 countries indicates that the Republic of Ireland has become the best place to live in the World.

Huh?

I’m writing this in my flat in the Northside of Cork City on the sort of damp November day that used to provoke the remark, “Soft Day, Thank God.” You don't hear that so much now, as people living in the best place in the world are hardly going to offer orisons to the almighty just because they get some drizzle.

Across the road from me are two abandoned buildings in which trees are growing and pigeons nesting. I’d love to think that was part of some integrated biodiversity strategy but this patently isn't the case. Between these buildings is a dark, dirty narrow lane where teenagers gather to drink and smoke every Friday and Saturday, because there’s fuck all better for them to do. On my side of the street there’s a lane where a woman was raped on a dismal night about a year ago. At the end of the street is a bar where my old landlord was beaten up because he didn't furnish someone’s house properly. (Or so I heard)

So you’ll forgive me if there’s an element of scepticism in my tone. But I’ll try not to be too subjective.

Most of the other countries in the top ten are the usual suspects, most of which can offer at least one right or liberty that’s denied us. In all of them abortion is legal. In many of them people can by recreational drugs without the threat of imprisonment. In most the nightclubs stay open till 5 or 6, here we’ve got to start looking for a taxi at 2. In Sweden mothers get three years paid maternity leave, fathers get three months paternity. In Holland you can drink beer in the cinema and listen to the Concertgebouw for free every Wednesday afternoon, whereas her a symphonic recital will set you back at least E10. In Britain and Germany you can watch state-run, ad-free television and be free from relentless consumerism.

What he we got to offer in return? Apparently political freedom and stability, community and faith in our institutions.

Ya Wha?

I can’t argue with political stability, when Fianna Fail have been in power for all but 18 years of the state’s existence. Freedom is a thornier issue. If the people who compiled the survey were aware that Irish people who distribute fliers for protests, marches, etc., can be arrested for littering, or that people had been jailed for protesting against the use of Shannon Airport by the US military they might be reluctant to praise our political freedoms.

Community may be stronger here than in some countries, but the failure of many people to accept that the country is becoming more multicultural doesn’t bode well for the future.

Then there’s faith in institutions. Who are these people who plainly aren’t aware that faith in the police and judiciary is at an all time low after one keystone kops episode after another and that people are leaving the church in droves as they don't want to be lectured on morality by a group which contains so many paedophiles.

Is it the UN? Nope, we only came 10th in a similar survey that they did. Not bad, but there won’t be any flood of immigrants from Switzerland seeking a better way of life. (We still did better than the U.K., which is the important thing) Wasn't the OECD either. They rank us 2nd most unequal and worst in Health Care in the industrial world

It was actually the Economist.

Ah.

I read one quote from this august journal that things had gotten worse in every measurable way for Venezuelan peasants since Chavez came to power. Which is reasonable enough, because if anyone knows what it’s like to be a Venezuelan peasant, it’s a Comm graduate in an office in London.

This sort of thing leaves us highly sceptical about whether they actually visited all the countries they ‘surveyed’, though one night during the summer I came across a rowdy, foul-mouthed group arguing in Oxbridge accents about whether it was sustainable in the short-to-medium term for the ringit to be pegged to the dollar given the current volatile nature of the South-East Asian equities market before one of them vomited in an alley off Patrick street.

Economists tend to think in left-brained, black-and-white terms so the notion that quality of life is a relative, nebulous one might be alien to them, that one man’s right to party all night might diminish another’s to a good night’s sleep.

But there is one thing they understand pretty well, and that’s money. And it seems we have more of it than most countries in the world right now. As a result, things are certainly better than they were in 1848, when we were getting foreign aid from Amerindians and the city of Calcutta. What’s more we’ve become rich largely by following the Economist’s free market agenda, hence their kudos.

But hang on a minute. Who’s this ‘we’? I probably have more money than most people in the world, but as a struggling writer I’m a pauper by western standards. But on the other side of the scale property developers are raking in so much money that they can afford their own private airplanes.

Right wing economists argue that if one person becomes richer than everyone becomes richer, which is wildly counterintuitive, as if someone broke into my house and stole my TV, video, DVD player and stereo they’d get around E180 for them in Cash Converters while I’d have to fork out at least E350 to replace them. So everybody would become richer, except me.

They argue that a rising tide lifts all boats, which shows that none of them have ever been out in a currach off the Aran Islands.

The truth is that the countries which are growing fastest at the moment are the ones which offer the lowest wages and least job security. This was brought home to financial journalists themselves when Reuters outsourced their money pages to Bangalore.

Then there’s the fact that more money doesn’t necessarily make you happier, especially if it means that you have to work longer hours, spend more time travelling to work, have no time to cook food and have to rely on prepared food with all the nutritional problems this implies. This is what’s been happening in the US for the last two decades and similar trends are emerging here, though to be fair we do have a much better social security net than our American cousins.

Last year I visited some of the poorest countries in the world, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Nepal, and like many tourists I was struck by how much happier and more relaxed people seemed.

So when I read surveys like this that are based primarily on economic data, I’ll be taking them with a pinch of salt.

But at least we’re better than England. Ha Ha!

Mysticism in the Films of Martin Scorsese

Here's a piece I wrote about the mystical lietmotif in Martin Scorsese's movies.
It's also up on www.netribution.co.uk

When Martin Scorsese made Kundun, a biopic of the early years of the Dalai Lama a few years ago, many commentators were puzzled. It seemed incongruous that the Roman Catholic ItalianAmerican chronicler of Manhattan’s Mean Streets would turn his attention to the erstwhile peaceful Buddhist enclave of Tibet. It was also argued by some that the movie became more “Western” in it’s second half as Tibet was violently invaded by China. To me, these views seem to betray a simplistic understanding of the dialectic between Occidental and Oriental theological systems that permeates much of this directors’ oeuvre.It has to be admitted, though, that, at least on the surface, Martin Scorsese’s movies are “Christian”. References to the Bible and images of the Virgin and the Crucifix are a major leitmotif in his films from Mean Streetson. Yet his characters worldviews and his own philosophical orientation often seem to owe more to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism. One significant way that this dialectic manifests itself is in the immanence of transcendence in his work. This concept is best demonstrated by contrasting it with the theological basis of more overtly Christian films. In films like The Exorcist, Oh God!, The Omen, Stigmata or Dead Souls, Christian Deities or manifestations of evil are anthropomorphised, much as they are in the Bible. In The Exorcist, God is not demonstrated to exist until the devil manifests himself by taking over the body of a young girl, just as in Bedazzled the first thing the Devil is asked is “Is there a God?” In Touch, a low-budget film starring Skeet Ulrich as a faith healer who bleeds in the same parts of his body where Jesus was wounded on the cross, it’s debated whether to put his shirt into the washing machine or not, as it seems an act of sacrilege to do so. To a Hindu or a Buddhist, brought up in the Pantheistic tradition of religious texts like the Upanishads, this would be anathema. While in Christian rituals, objects are only made holy through a process of consecration, for believers in Eastern religions, all things are innately spiritual. In the Upanishads, this philosophy is expressed thus: As the spokes are all held together in the hub of a wheel, just so in this soul of all things, all gods, all worlds, all beings, all divines, all vital powers, and all those individual selves are contained in that self. (Upanishads 9.2.5.15) It’s a philosophy shared by the Bhagavad Gita: A person who is established in self-realisation is called a yogi… He sees everything as being the same: whether it be pebbles, stones or gold. (6.8) It’s also common to Zen, and, it could be argued, Scorsese’s films. In Mean Streets, for example, God’s presence is manifest everywhere, not just in the religious imagery that permeates the New York Italian settings, but for example, in an amazing scene where the character played by Harvey Keitel lays down with his girlfriend in an imitation of the crucifix, then watches her get dressed in the morning sunlight. It’s important to realise, that while to a Christian this imagery might seem sacrilegious, to a believer in Tantric Buddhism, in which spirituality is affirmed through concupiscence, it could be considered an affirmation of their believes. The imagery of the woman’s naked body being caressed by the morning sun could be suggestive of Edenic, prelapsarian bliss to a Christian, but Morning, as Thoreau reminds us, is also extremely significant in the Vedas, the original Hindu texts. Long before western physicists realised that vision is dependent on reflection of particles of light, the composers of the Vedas credited Indra, the Sky-God with bringing all things into being. The one who has caused to be born the sun, the dawn, the one who is the waters leader, he is Indra. The equivalent in Western theology is the “let there be light” moment in the bible. There’s another appropriate moment in Mean Streets when a tiger appears, considered “a little William Blake” by it’s owner, but a threatening wild beast to the neurotic westerners played by Keitel and De Niro. Blake’s poetry also has a strong pantheistic element, particularly in the poem about a clod of earth that is imbued with human feelings. The pantheistic element in Scorsese’s movies reaches it’s apotheosis in Kundun, but it’s also evident in Raging Bull, in which long, lingering close-ups that seem to imbue mundane objects with sentience. In another way, it’s perceptible in Taxi Driver. Written at a relatively early stage in human civilisation, the Upanishads sought to achieve a Modus Vivendi between man and the environment which he was just beginning to dominate. One of the central tenets of these texts is that the self, atman, is at one with the universe, Brahman. Just as the soul inhabits the body, so the body interacts with the universe, which is an extension of the self. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle almost merges with the weapons which he carries on his person in a way that prefigures the Terminator and Tetsuo movies, but also echoes the Upanishads: He who dwells in the fire, and within the fire, whom the fire does not know,Whose body the fire is, and who pulls the fire from within, he is thyself, the puller within, the immortal. (Upanishads 9.3.7.5.) It’s interesting that one of the central metaphors in the Upanishads is that the soul is a driver and the body a chariot, and that in Somerset Maugham’s Hindu-influenced novel, The Razor’s Edge, the protagonist renounces all worldly things to become a Taxi driver. In that novel, the protagonist considers driving a taxi his dhamma. Dhamma is a concept in Indian philosophy which also sharply differentiates it from its Western equivalents. Western philosophy, from the Bible to the Koran to Immanuel Kant consists of a series of Moral absolutes, or as Kant would say, categorical imperatives. The Ten Commandments, the seven deadly sins all give a clear indication of how followers of Catholicism should lead their lives, a concept which Kevin Smith had a lot of fun with in Dogma. In Buddhism, the Eightfold path gives followers of this religion much more latitude. The fifth noble virtue, for example, is “right Livelihood”. Scholars have debated on what constitutes this and the other virtues, but it seems to me that the Buddha, coming from a tradition of Vedic Hinduism would have wanted his followers to find their own spiritual path. In the Upanishads, it is written:Actions that are blameless, these should be performed, not others. (1.4.11.3) In the Gita: Even a man of knowledge acts according to his own nature: for everyone follows the nature he has acquired. (3.33) Though Scorsese comes from a background of Catholicism, the most dogmatic of Christianreligions, his characters are often able to find their own Dhamma. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle epitomise this. Working partly within mainstream society (in the Gita we are encouraged to adapt to changing circumstances) he is able, through a programme of discipline similar to the Yogic principles enunciated in the Gita, to reach his own set of moral values and act upon them. In the Gita it’s also emphasised that we should not become attached to the fruits of our actions, this is perhaps why the child prostitute played by Jodie Foster is returned to her parents. Incidentally, one of the most famous speeches in the movie “some day a rain will come and wash all this filth away” has many echoes in Hinduism where water is the supreme spiritually cleansing force. One character even more eager to determine his own Dhamma is Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. On more than one occasion those around him tell him that he needs to make compromises in order to become the world middleweight champion but he insists on doing things “his own way”, no matter how disastrous the consequences. It could easily be argued that boxing is inimical to the principle of ahimsa, or non-violence, but Anjuna, the protagonist of the Gita, is also told that he must fight, this is his dhamma… No-one claims Hinduism and Buddhism are straightforward belief systems. Rupert Pupkin in King of Comedy takes the theme of dhamma in Scorsese’s work even further with his lack of willingness to accept that he has no talent. A comic character, he is easy to laugh at, but provides us with an insight into the egoism necessary to become a comedian, or indeed a film director; someone once said that only egomaniacs could enter this profession. Hinduism and particularly Buddhism are anti-ego religions, but in the gita it is written: The one who is indifferent or silent in censure or praise… that person is dear to me (Gita, 12.19) This could be the mantra that all of Scorsese’s main protagonists chant. If in Hinduism there is a divine force which permeates all things, in Buddhism the same force is hiddenbehind a wall, or to use the Buddha’s own term, a veil of illusion, or Maya. This concept is familiar to viewers of The Matrix, which draws on virtually every major religion, but it can also be found under the surface of Scorsese’s films. A popular conceit in cinema from Caligari to an obscure Japanese Manga film called Perfect Blue is that what is happening is not real, that there is an illusion within the illusion. I think Scorsese is a bit more subtle. When I watched Taxi Driver for the first time, it struck me that it was made in the same place at almost the same time as Woody Allen’s Manhattan. It occurred to me that Travis is a sort of of Dantean Virgil taking us below the glossy surface of Manhattan into it’s dark, stygian Mean Streets (if you will) But then Travis himself hides behind several walls of illusion. To the Cybil Shephard character he is a confused innocent, to the FBI agent he is genuinely interested in joining the force, to the Jodie Foster character he is a responsible father figure, to his colleagues, he is just another Taxi Driver. But the veils of illusion are peeled off before the film ends. This is also true of Goodfellas, where the Ray Liotta character is allowed to see how superficial the veil of affluence that rests on the surface of gangster families is. It’s also true of The House of Innocence, where the almost oppressive opulence conceals endless back-stabbing and conniving among Manhattans fin-du-siecle elite. Also, Casino, not Scorsese’s best movie by a country mile, we are shown the inner workings behind the gloss of a Vegas Casino, a place recognised as lacking any substance by Foucault, Baudrillard and others. Perhaps the most pervasive Buddhist theme in Scorsese’s work is the first two noble truths: 1. All life is Suffering2. The Cause of Suffering is Desire. Or, as the Gita would have it: One who abandons all desires and becomes free from longing… attains peace. (Gita 2.71) Observe, for example, his early short, The Big Shave. Thought at the time as being a metaphor for the war in Vietnam, this tale of a man who shaves his chin soclose he bleeds to death seems the enunciate a major leitmotif in Scorsese’s work. Though the prevailing current of his work is tragic, many of his protagonists reach some sort of equanimity by repressing their desires for superfluous things. If you watch his films of the 70’s in succession, there’s a kind of Growth from Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, who can never get out of the endless cycle of gambling and borrowing money, to Jake La Motta, who seems to learn that desire is the cause of his suffering and even to accept the principal of karma: “I’ve done a lot of bad things and maybe now I’m paying for them” Tragically for those around him, he only learns this after his desires, whetherto win the championship, believe in his wife’s fidelity, or be able to eat as much as he likes, alienate him violently from everyone he has ever loved. It’s only at the end, thrown out of his opulent house and forced to work as a piss-artist poet-comedian that he achieves any sort of equanimity. The same could also be said of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, who only ever settles down when he leaves a life of crime. Likewise, those Scorsese characters who try to escape, rather than overcome their fate, like Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t want to live her Anymore, find that they can run but not hide, or to quote the Gita: Just as one sun illuminates the whole world, similarly the creator illumines the entire creation. (Gita 13.34)
It’s worth recalling that when Martin Scorsese was making some of the movies in question he was suffering the effects of desire himself, the desire in question being to get extremely high on Coke. If his protagonists achieve a sort of equanimity that eluded him until later life, perhaps we can credit these movies with some element of catharsis. Remember also that the Buddha himself is said to have led a life of dissipation before attaining knowledge of the absolute.
I hope I’ve managed to establish that Kundun doesn’t represent a hiatus in Scorsese’s work, but if I’ve learnt one thing from the Gita it’s that one shouldn’t become attached to the fruits of one’s actions. Writing this essay has been a fascinating, cerebral, cathartic experience but now it’s time to finish.The translation of the Gita I used can be found at:http://www.yoga.com/roots/yoga/info/Geeta/geeta.html That for the Upanishads is at:http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/upan

Animals, ecology and The Matrix Reloaded

Here's a response to the 2nd Matrix movie I was inspired to pen when it first came out.

It first appeared in www.24framespersecond.com

I've just seen The Matrix Reloaded in a restaruant in Kathmandu, while outside in the streets police beat up communist protesters and slightly further away peasants struggled to make a living by growing rice on the side of the Himalayas... but that's a whole different story.
With it's multiple allusions, it's almost sublime use of green, night vision filters, it's exhilarating action sequences and the presence of Monica Belluci, the movie did to my mind what many women in Thailand were offering to do to my other favourite organ (apologies to Woody Allen).
But one thing troubled me: Why was the Computer program The Merovingian, named for an early medieval Frankish dynasty. French? To me it seemed counterintuitive, not to mention racist. After all, the dominant French philosophy of the last century has been existentialism, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the sort of mechanistic determinism this character was positing. Before that, philosophers like Rousseau and St. Just surely have more in common with the rebels than with the matricians. Add to that the possible argument that the current French government is doing more to resist the seemingly inexorable march of the US military machine in the Middle East than anyone else and you've got a major paradox on your hands.
The way to resolve this paradox may be to remember that Descartes was also French. This philosopher's musings on whether we really exist or not are seen as the major influence on the epistemological world of The Matrix movies (1). But While Descartes is a huge influence on metaphysicians, to ethicists, particularly environmental ethicists, he is somewhat of a bugbear. In Al Gore's Earth in the Balance, for example, he was attacked with a venom which the author could never subject George W Bush. There are two basic reasons for this, firstly, his belief in mind/body dualism is seen as reaffirming the division between humans and the Earth that began with agriculture and is leading us, in the minds of environmentalists, on a course of destruction that will eventually make most metaphysical arguments seem academic, at least to rational people, but more of this later. Descartes is also the man who believed that animals were nothing more than machines, and it's this belief that seems apposite to the character of the Merovingian.
It's important to realize that Descartes was writing centuries before the existence of Darwin's theory of Evolution, which is accepted almost universally in Academia, and among intelligent people generally, if not in the mind of the US president (2). I'm therefore confident that if Descartes were alive today he'd probably be forced to reconsider his beliefs about other animals. It's a theory that's based upon the notion that human beings have a consciousness, which many philosophers believe must have come from some higher, transcendental power. Our Consciousness is often cited by meat-eaters as a justification for carnivorism . Animal rights advocates, point out however, that the scientific community can offer no precise definition of what consciousness is, when it first evolved, and even at what stage in a human's life it first develops, making that particular argument seem rather specious(3). Other philosophers argue that our consciousness is a by-product, or an epiphenomon of our intelligence, arguing that the belief that the existence of our consciousness is evidence of a human soul is akin to the belief of Amerindians that there were horses inside trains making them move. If this theory is accepted, then the belief that eating animals is justified seems extremely tenuous indeed.
As a vegan, I'm often confronted with various versions of this theory nonetheless, and even before the first Matrix movie was made, I used to ask my carnivorous interlocutors if manifestly more intelligent creatures would be justified in eating us. A similar argument is posited on one level by the two opening Matrix films. Presented with a world where humans are controlled by machines that are manifestly more intelligent than us, we are repelled, at least most of us are. It's a film that strives on one level to put us in the position that we put animals in at the moment. It's highly improbable that any animals have reached a high enough evolutionary stage to resist as Neo and Morpheus do, when I read that one animal behaviorist predicted that Dolphins would learn to speak within a generation (of Humans) I thought it was pretty ridiculous(4). But whether one believes that our ÒrightÓ to eat animals comes from a higher power or from our superior intelligence, the Matrix movies should force us to reconsider. It's often argued that, as farm animals know no other life other than the boring, mechanical existence that we force them into that they don't really suffer. It's always seemed an incredibly bogus argument to me, and does even more after watching the first two Matrix movies, in which we are asked to sympathize, obviously with the human characters, who are only ignorant of the real world because they are forced to live a machine-like existence by machines. Frighteningly, we're being increasingly forced to confront the possibility of cyborgism, in which the dystopian visions of the Terminator and Tetsuo movies become a reality. In this vision of the future, explored by James Pryor(5), mechanically enhanced humans would surely take our belief in own superiority over the rest of creation to it's logical conclusion, and enslave the less evolved Homo sapiens.
Pryor argues that living in the matrix represents an evolutionary leap and that Neo, Morpheus & co are "luddites", which seems to me to get the movie completely the wrong way around. While it's possible to argue that as evolution must have started at some point, it must also, logically, have a conclusion, and the idea that believing, falsely, that we're living in an anonymous American city in 1999 forever represents this apex seems a little preposterous. Anyway, evolution is by its nature a continuing process, whatever Marxists and Christians believe. It's even possible to argue that The Matrix dramatizes the moment in evolution when humans evolved a consciousness in the first place, as beautifully, if not as transparently, as Kubrick did in 2001. At the beginning of the first film, the characters are living lives that are repetitive and cyclical, almost machines in the way that Descartes imagines animals to be. Neo is often compared to Jesus, Buddha, and other historical figures that advanced our consciousness, but never to the "one" who developed it in the first place, though we'll never know at which point in evolution that happened.
But was there a "machine" against which this rebellion took place? There are those, led by James Lovelock, who believe that the Earth is a self regulating organism and can deal with any threat, whether external, like an asteroid, or internal, like humans, and that if we pose too much of a threat she ("Gaia" is usually seen as being female) can wipe us out, much as the machines are about to at the end of the second Matrix movie. In this view, the whole phenomenon of human consciousness is as much of a threat to the existence of the Earth as the presence of the rebels of Zion is to the machines in the Matrix movies, and that global warming, rising oceans, etc, are her way of dealing with us. It's an intriguing, if not fully convincing theory, but one which can throw a new night on the Matrix films, especially the second.
However, while hard-core evolutionists believe that evolution is as ineluctable for us as the optical modality is for Stephen Dedalus, the second Matrix movie posits evolution based on random fluctuations of the sort that quantum physicists describe. In the Gaia model human consciousness is just another aberration for the Earth to deal with, making all the choices that we make about the environment or anything else seem fairly academic. In The Matrix Reloaded the possibility that we're not really making choices at all is confronted, that God, Gaia, or whatever sort of higher power we choose to believe in is making the choices for us. As an active protestor against the war in Iraq, the notion that by rebelling one is really conforming is a troubling one to me. I may believe that I may have interpreted these movies in my own way and chosen to write this article, but I'll never really know for sure if this is the case. Watching The Matrix Reloaded won't give me answers but it's forced me to ask the questions again and that's something to be grateful for.
References:1. See Dreyfus, Stephen and Hubert, The Brave new World of the Matrix; www.whatisthematrix.com2. Hollywood, too, is producing pro-evolutionary movies like X-Men and Adaptation3. See Wise, Stephen M., Rattling the Cage: Towards legal rights for Animals4. Morris, Desmond, The Animal Contract5. WhatÕs so bad about living in the Matrix, www.whatisthematrix.com

Tears for Hassan

Even for those of us who think we've become immune to violence after seeing so much of it in cinemas and on the Daily News on TV will be shocked at the brutal murder of Margeret Hassan.
There will be those who will try to defend the action of the terrorists that commited this atrocity, arguing that she was carrying a passport of one of the countries that's reducing Fallugah to rubble, that many of the people who are detained in Guantanemo Bay were similarly merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.
To me this argument is frankly bollocks.
Margaret Hassan was a woman who gave her life to help the people of Iraq and killing her in this way is the work of people who care nothing for them but only for their own merciless interpretation of Isalm.
If Islam is really the one true religion (you won't find many of it's followers who're willing to countenence any other contingency) and Allah lets these scumbags into heaven then I may as well go on watching pornography and listening to loud music and not praying to Mecca five times a day because I'd rather burn in hell for all eternity than share any amount of virgin arab women with these cunts.
On the other hand, I wish the British media would spare me their tears. Last night on Sky News George Jones of the Telegraph told us that he thought this represented a new low. The Telegraph is the paper that constantly denies that the British government bear any responsibilty for either the Irish famine or the events of Bloody Sunday, at which their correspondent in Derry was heard to remark of the murdering British troops :"They shot well, didn't they?" So while they'll shed tears for the latest Irish woman to die as a result of descisions that the British Government has made, don't expect them to place any responsibilty on Tony Blair's shoulders.
Blair will shed tears for Hassan as well - He can turn on the waterworks the way Asian prostitutes tell fat middle aged germans how handsome they are. He'll ring her family and show up at a memorial service. But he won't admit that Mrs. Hassan probably wouldn't have died if he hadn't commited British troops to help George Bush's imperialist war in the Middle East.
It may well be that the US and British Governments may have believed their own propaganda that the Iraqi people would rise up against Saddam and that the only resistance they prepared for was the mythical WMD.
On the other hand, if the increasingly plausible theory that the US and British Forces deliberately left the borders open in order to draw terrorists from all over the Middle East to Iraq where they could face the might of the American and British military machine, then responsibility for her death lies firmly on Blair's shoulders.
As he did with the relatives of Ken Bigley, Blair will plead with relatives to see the bigger picture. But what bigger picture would that be? Blair has sacrificed hundreds of young men and women to help the Bush posse keep a stranglehold on Middle Eastern oil, but in return Bush pisses on his polite requests for action on global warming or an independent Palestinian state.
Unfortunately for any UK citizens who find themselves in Iraq or any other country in whose affairs George Bush decides to meddle, Blair hasn't got a reverse gear and his head will remain squarely between Monkey-Boy's buttocks for the next four and a bit years.
The best tribute Blair could pay to the life and work of Margaret Hassan would be to pull troops out of Iraq, although he should have done this before November 2nd as... Oh, don't get me started. The next best thing he could do would be to admit that the sanctions which hindered the work of Mrs. Hassan and all the other selfless aid workers in the area, and resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqis - way more than Saddam ever killed - were a catastrophic mistake.
But I won't be holding my breath.

Robocop acquitted

Bob Dylan wrote two songs in the early ‘60s. Actually, Bob Dylan wrote a lot of songs in the early ‘60s, but there’s two in particular I have in mind while writing this.

One is a plaintive dirge called Percy’s Song about a friend of his who crashes a car causing the deaths of our others. Though Dylan pleads with the judge, he ends up with a ninety-nine year sentence. Each verse in the song ends with the haunting refrain, ‘turn, turn to the rain and the wind’. Joan Baez does a beautiful version in Don’t Look Back.

The other is the angrier Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. Based on a newspaper story Zimmerman read, it concerns a black waitress killed inexplicably by a wealthy tobacco heir, who ends up with a six-month sentence. The most striking line is when the judge reminds us that ‘the ladder of law has no top and no bottom’ recounted by Bob in the rasping, sarcastic voice that never survived his motorcycle crash.

Those of us in whose minds Dylan’s lyrics blaze like burning coals can’t help but remember them as we read of the outcome of the Donal Corcoran case. Corcoran was the giant, cold-eyed garda who, by his own admission, used ‘excessive force’ when dealing with some students who were doing nothing more than dancing in the street at the Reclaim the Streets rally two years ago.

Nice of him to be so honest, you might think, though he was filmed bludgeoning three students over the head by both RTE and TV3, so he’s not in much of a position to deny it.

Instead his defence rested on notion that he was acting in self-defence. Which, as his victims were three teenage students and he’s a 6’4 inch hulk seems a bit specious to me. Especially as the gardai against protection against assault that the rest of us would only receive in some fantastic Platonic polis. As you probably know, there’s dozens of violent criminals roaming around the streets after walking on a suspended sentence while you can theoretically be put in jail just for telling a guard to go fuck himself.

So Corcoran could have just the students do their worst, which probably wouldn't have been all that bad, really, and watch them go down. Instead he gave them a lifeline by clubbing them over the head several times and then dragging them into a paddy wagon.

At least that’s what the evidence of eyewitnesses, press and TV photographers suggests. However the jury in the trial yesterday were warned not to be swayed by such evidence. Why ever not, one is left to wonder, particularly as they seem to have received no reciprocal warning not to take Corcoran’s word at face value. Instead they were asked to put themselves in the mind of the ‘alleged’ assailant.

This puzzled me somewhat, as I always thought they handed in their grey matter when they started their course at Templemore. Perhaps they asked Garda Corcoran to give them a few well-aimed strikes at their frontal lobes so they could get inside his disproportionately small head, to which he would have been only too happy to oblige, I would have thought.

What other explanation could there be for their willingness to believe that Corcoran genuinely believed that he was in danger and that he’s been racked with guilt these last two years? If you believe that... well, are you free for the two remaining trials?

It could also be, of course, that the idea that our brave boys in blue might lie to cover their asses might be a bit much for some people to take. We might be able to accept that the guards are a bit slow on the uptake and just that little bit stand-offish when it comes to dealing with serious criminals, but the idea that they might lie to us is a bit much. After all, if this were true, then they could get any of us that they’d taken a bit of a disliking to just by fabricating some evidence. That’s a terrifying thought, n’est ce pas?

That’s the sort of thing that might stop the clamour from the plain people of Ireland for more cops on the streets.

What motivates this clamour? We already have the second highest amount of cops in the OECD, per capita, so many that they can’t afford cop cars for them all and some of them have to make do with bikes.

I think it may be that many people believe that if there were more cops, there might be less serious crime, which on the face of it is a reasonable enough proposition.

The truth, of course, is that more police would lead to more immigrants and more users of recreational drugs being bullied, while the heroin dealers would still live in their mansions and thugs would roam the streets as usual.

It would lead to more police at events like Reclaim the streets, which in turn would lead to more violence.

But when someone tried to point this out on the Late, Late Show, he was shouted down by the mob, led by that blustering, incoherent demagogue, Eoghan Harris.

So when Michael McDowell orders 2000 more culchie-sized blue uniforms, he’ll be able to claim quite legitimately that he’s doing the will of the people.

But you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fear, bury the rag deep in your face, now’s the time for your tears.

After two desk-bound years, Corcoran has returned to his job as an ethnic liaison officer. Bad news for those of us who want a more multicultural society, but some succour for those who regret that there’s no Irish National party to vote for.

Powell retires

Big news from America is that Colon Powell’s resigned. Count her Sleazy Lies is going to get his job with either dog-faced neocon Paul Wolfowitz or Martin Boorman lookalike Richard Perle becoming new NSC chief.

I think Mars might be nice for the next four years.

Powell says he wants to spend more time with his family.

I don’t blame him; though, like any family, we have our differences, I’d rather hang around with them than with the likes of Bush, Cheney and Jack Straw.

But I pity the young relative who challenges the former secretary of state to a game of hide and seek.

We have preliminary indications that the pursuee is hiding in the broom closet under the stairs and a Special Forces team has been dispatched to the area. There may be some collateral damage but let the American people be assured that if the mop and bucket is knocked over then a team of our best young men will spend as long as it takes to clean up the damage.

However, satellite imagery seems to indicate that a young woman wearing a bright pink dress was seen rapidly running towards the rose bush in the garden. While the military are recommending that we saturate the area with defoliant, I favour winning the hearts and minds of our potential allies in the region. I propose an air drop of bones for the dog and a big fluffy ball for the cat.

Together I believe we can meet our objectives of living in an America where every former high-ranking government official can watch the Baseball in peace and quiet.

Food Labelling

I see that the British government are planning to have a system of traffic light-like labels on fattening foods. (Nothing gets past me)

Green-lighted stuff is stuff you can eat as much as you want of. I’d be wary of heeding this advice, as my science teacher once told me that a woman turned orange after eating too much carrots, which are generally considered a healthy choice.

But I can’t help noticing a classist condescension in this colour based warning system. It’s as if they think fat people are all illiterate peasants who are incapable of understanding the distinction between high-density and low-density lipoproteins, let alone the relative merits of Omega-3 and Omega-6 oils.

It’s a bit rich when you consider that one or two members of their cabinet could lose a pound or two themselves.

I foresee tortuous negotiations over the cabinet table where John Prescott argues in favour of green-lighting his favourite brand of pork pie. After all, the wife has enough to think about, especially at this time of year when the wind blows her hair around like god only knows what.

But then you consider some of the wheezes that the food industry has come up with over here.

Bord Bainne, or whatever it is they call themselves now, tell us that milk is only 2% fat. A simple experiment demonstrates why this is so. Open a milk bottle upside and notice how it splashes all over the place, and subsequently gets soaked up by a cloth, leaving only an invisible, stinky, residue. This proves that milk is actually 95% water. But 97% fat and water doesn’t make it seem quite so appealing.

Likewise, the people who make sugar tell us that that their tooth-rotting product is fat free. The people who make lard have yet to suggest that their product is sugar free, but are their really people too dumb to realise that excess calories whether in the form of fat or carbs make you fat?

Obviously there are, as sugar is a popular product and the people who make it have a few bob to spend on market research.

So maybe, though it hurts me to admit it, the Brits have the right idea.

Red Ahern?

So ten years after Bertie Ahern’s elevation to the leadership of Fianna Fail in which he promised to do everything he could to bring posterity (sic) to the country and seven years of he and Fatty Harney taking all the credit for the country’s rapid economic growth, he turns around and tells us that he’s actually a socialist.

Bertie’s long had his traditional Working Class Dublin supporters believing that he’s one of them and that it’s those nasty PDs and right-wingers in his own cabinet who make him do stuff like privatising Aer Lingus and giving huge tax breaks to racecourse owners. But Saturday’s interview in the Irish Times was the first that I’ve heard him, after reciting the usual litany of growth statistics, use the S-word to describe himself, hot on the heels of Seamus Brennan, who came out of the closet as a lefty when he was appointed Social Welfare minister.

What next? Will Michael McDowell tell us how he sits up late reading Das Kapital or will Fatty Harney shave off her Thatcheresque quiff and protest in a saffron robe sitting in the lotus position chanting ‘Om’ outside the Chinese embassy? Will Noel O Flynn become chairman of the Irish-Congolese society?

Before they decide that this is the way the zeitgeist is heading, it might be worthwhile to examine what Bertie thinks he’s done to turn this country into a socialist utopia.

Is it the savage social welfare cuts that have saved the money necessary to cut taxes for foreign multibillionaires like Bill Gates? Is it that house prices have escalated so rapidly that many young families can’t afford to buy their own house while property developers buy their own private airplanes? Is it that some wealthy Dublin families import nannies from Mongolia and the Philippines while elderly working class women are denied home help? Is it that we’ve become the most unequal industrialised democracy, unless you’re naive enough to the think the US is still a democracy?

No, apparently it’s that we can all visit the Botanical gardens in the Phoenix Park for free. That’s if we live in Dublin of course, though if we live in Tullamore we’re quite free to examine the weeds that grow between the footpath and the road to our heart’s contents, whether we’re an unemployed single mother or executive managing director of Intel Ireland.

Presumably it’s because we all share privileges like these that we all have to pay an equal amount for things like bin charges or a TV licence, or face prison, as one poor woman found out the hard way. After all, with equal rights come equal responsibilities.

By now you’ll have realised that I think Bertie’s support for the notion that he’s a socialist is a little tenuous. In act, the notion of a commons pre-dates the likes of Marx and Engels by some way, originating in English feudal times. As you probably know, the relationship between lord and peasant was a reciprocal one, peasants paying a tithe in return for protection, which basically meant that they’d have to pay their lord and not one of the lord’s enemies, and there was a common area which they’d be allowed frequent and walkways which were protected by the Magna Carta, though at the end of the day they’d still have to return to their dark damp draughty cottages. Pretty fair deal all round, then.

The idea evolved when that well-known anarcho-syndicalist collective known as Victorian Britain built edifices like Crystal Palace which the hoi-polloi were allowed visit for free, though in these less enlightened times a season ticket for Selhurst Park costs upwards of £400.

The ‘bots’ as Bertie calls them in his loveable North Dublin way are a bequest from our benign imperial overlords, so it’s a bit rich for Bertie to take the credit. So what has this Fianna Fail government done to improve public access?

I’m tempted to use some rude words that might have some shock value, but I’ll just say precious little. While one of the few worthwhile things the New Labour government in Britain has done is to protect ramblers rights, a piece of legislation that the Bertie Bunch have no intention of copying. Though Bord Failte trade heavily on the country’s green image, we actually have less space given over to national parks than most European countries.

We do have lots of Golf courses, though. More per capita than anywhere else in the world, there’s even more of them than there are children’s playgrounds. The lovely Nick Faldo is planning to build one, and if the experience of the Old Head of Kinsale is anything to go by, he can start selling brochures.

This peninsula, which can be seen pretty clearly on a good map of Ireland, was one of the best places in the country for fishing and rock climbing before it was bought by the O’Connor brothers and turned into a golf course, into which members of the public were denied access. When this was challenged legally the Fianna Fail-dominated High Court actually ruled in the O’Connor brothers favour. So anytime a right-of-way protest is organised, our brave boys in blue, who consider many inner city areas no-go areas, will be there in force. The O’Connors can afford their own security, of course, but it’s a nice little earner for the guards all the same.

Of Course, anyone can still walk down to the Old Head, provided, of course, they pay E200 for a round, which is no more than those American millionaires have to pay. So Bertie can look up at the picture of Padraig Pearse or go down to the statue of James Connolly and assure them that their deaths weren’t in vain, as a socialist nirvana has surely been achieved.

Bomb Idaho

There are lands filled with gun-toting religious fanatics who live in compounds where they sit around talking about nothing else except their extremist view of the world and how they want to destroy the American government forever and set up a new one based on their own ideas of how a society should be run. They’ve already launched several attacks on the United States which have left their people living in fear.

I speak, of course, of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. These sparsely populated, remote, and generally out-of-the-way American states have been a refuge for Americans with a particularly extreme view of the American constitution which considers any attempt to restrict gun ownership as an assault on their civil liberties but don't hold much truck with the whole all-men-are-created-equal-thing.

Many off them keep their vast arsenals off ammo because they think the United Nations wants to take over the US (I’d Love if that were true) but many of them want to go on the offensive against namby-pamby liberal types like George W Bush and John Ashcroft who they believe are turning their country into a pluralist multi-cultural one. Again, ILITWT. The Oklahoma city bombing was one such incident, the anthrax attacks that followed were probably also.

Of course, this doesn’t make them terrorists. Oh No. Oh no, no, no no nooooooo. After the World Trade Centre was brought crashing to the ground by two highjacked airplanes (What day was that again?) one typically well-thought out American article argued that the reason that Britain and Spain were the countries most eager to help America were that they had their own experiences with ‘murderous terrorism’.

Never mind that Timothy McVeigh killed almost as many people as my drunken, monkey-faced compatriots killed in bombings in England over the last 40 years - more than ETA did in their entire history - that still didn't make him or any of his ilk a terrorist. After the Oklahoma city bombing, people assumed that Arabs were to blame, therefore the incident, logically enough was labelled a ‘terrorist’ attack. When it was found out that the perpetrators were ‘home-grown’ they suddenly morphed into ‘extremists’ or ‘radicals’.

I love that term ‘home-grown’. It seems to imply that if you settle people in a remote area where they won’t meet any foreigners and give them lots of guns, they turn into terrorists, they same way weeds grow on soil that’s upturned and then ignored.

But terrorists is what they are, even if McVeigh was befriended by Gore Vidal while the people who didn't have anything to do with 9/11 but were arrested anyway are forced to listen to Barney the Dinosaur music all day, in spite of the amendment that forbids cruel and unusual punishment.

So why aren’t the Bush junta taking the war on terror to these states? It’s probably a good thing that they haven’t, as since they responded by an attack by predominantly Saudi terrorists by attacking Iraq, the war on extremism would probably take them to Washington State, where they’ have to face wealthy masterminds like Bill Gates, not to mention young leaders with fanatical followings like Eddie Vedder.

The reason they haven’t, though, is certainly not because Dick Cheney comes from Wyoming himself, after all he gave $42million to the Taliban to compensate for loss of earnings from opium production in June 2001. It’s that many on the right of the Republican party sympathise with the radicalist compounds and their gospel of self-sufficiency, which is an unholy myth as most of the big ranch-owners in the area are totally dependent on federal subsidies. So next time there’s an anthrax attack, the CIA will find some way to link it to Bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout.

The good news is that these states are slowly depopulating themselves. Mostly they were settled in the first place by people who were heading for the coast in wagon trains but got fed up. In fact Wyoming is actually an old Cherokee term meaning “Oh, fuck, I can’t be arsed.” The land is pretty poor as far as agriculture is concerned and the only thing that makes farming there economically viable is the fact that Americans are all lard-asses who eat far more than they need to.

So most of the sane people are heading to the coasts and as they do, supermarkets will pull out and the radicals will have nowhere to stock up on oreos so they’ll have to move to places like Seattle, where they’ll be introduced to Starbucks de-caff lattes and arthouse movies and eventually become liberals who read the Guardian via their firefox browser on an iMac that uses linux.

Meantime the states they leave could become one giant nature park where the deer and antelope run free, where the entire permanent human population will consist of park rangers and naturalists who tend to vote democrat for all sorts of reasons.

This won’t happen overnight, though, so there’s plenty of scope for anthrax attacks in the meantime. But anyone who loses a friend or family member to this deadly form of biological warfare will at least have the consolation that they weren't killed by terrorists, who all live in places like Fallujah which brave American soldiers are bravely destroying.