Monday 29th November 2010

Be all that as it may, meanwhile:

'In other news…'

29^th November 2010

Monday: This is not a short story (although it may well become the fodder to write one):

***

He was running late as usual, as damn usual – ask his Missus – and so to stop for a hitchhiker was not going to help the deadline; his wife wanted to go to her knitting group at Caffissimo's tonight, and he wanted her to go, because it was soul food for the poor thing, overworked, underappreciated, and discounted regularly by certain close ones.

But to make the trip worthwhile, he needed to be back at maybe ten past seven at the latest. That was going to be a challenge, because it was Bob's afternoon out in Perth today, and he liked to make the most of it. Not helped by the party in full swing, with tables groaning under the weight of goodies, at Bob's Guildford house, with more social trainers and their bosses than you could poke a stick at milling about, most of whom he knew, and felt obliged to acknowledge and chat a tad with.

He had even joked as he walked into the main room "How did you know it was my birthday?" He reminisced at length with Maxine, rarely seen these days, as she had been promoted 16 months ago to some arcane position in the mysterious corridors of the DSC. A favourite supervisor of his for years over Bob and all of his outings with said rascal. All the while Bob was finishing his 3 o'clock smoke and having a private cup of tea in front of his TV some metres away. A tonne of food, one of Bob's reasons for living next down the scale from tobacco, and he was determined to have a cup of tea on his own…

And so we left for the train into Perth even later than otherwise, due to the obligatory socialising to be done with colleagues old and new.

What of the hitchhiker, did you ask? Yes, powering along Marshall Road, the wonderful Whiteman Park's four thousand hectares on his left, he may as well have been a thousand miles out of Perth. There on the left, a woman in her forties, under a lone tree a few feet off the tarmac, hand out for a lift. Bloody hot, at least 35 Celsius.

Probably 15 years since he last stopped for a hitchhiker, he felt a sudden twinge of concern for an older woman, alone, in this heat, stuck out here, needing a lift somewhere. Pulled over, after some thinking time, overshooting by a hundred feet, maybe two hundred.

While she was hoofing quickly up to the passenger side, he was hoisting about five bags of things from off the seat and the floor, not quite moving it all by the time she arrived, opening the door, and hopping in as he just got the the last of the paraphernalia onto the back seat.

She had a small bag in her hand and a very low cut blouse, a plain faced woman. As he began asking "Where do you need a lift to?" she said, having just sat in the seat, "I'm a hooker. I'm from Sydney and need money."

This took the man by mild surprise, not shock, likely because he hadn't processed it fully, but he quickly said, with the mildest of irritation well concealed, "I'm running late for work, and I thought you needed a lift somewhere."

Just exactly what was said in the ensuing moments and in what order is a bit jumbled in his mind, but he got to reiterate his need to keep moving, and she got to imply that she didn't need to go to any place in particular but to get money, and it by plying any of the various skills of an ancient trade.

And so she politely vacated the seat, and he wished her well. He genuinely did. Not angry about what she did for a living – he felt sorry for her for that – but now under more pressure time-wise and for no noble outcome, like helping a fellow human being in need of a lift on a hot day.

As he digested what had just happened while he drove on to the controlled riot at Bob's digs, it dawned on him that she likely misunderstood one thing he said in repetition, as she faced him sporting sizeable in-your-face white breasts half covered, "I'm off to take out my intellectually disabled friend, who will be wondering where I am," touching his forehead. She said something he could not recall, but putting the pieces together she likely inferred that he was saying that he himself was intellectually disabled.

No argument from his wife on that one…

***

And by the way, Bob took his time in the city, we called on Baby Inkletter at her place in Adelaide Terrace (first time in about 14 years or more since they last met), and I did'nt get back home till a quarter to eight. I convinced Janny to go nevertheless to her knitting group, but she refused to let me drive her and wait for her there.

Lateline: The (Leigh) Sales Graph: Former Prime Minister John Howard should feel grateful at how pleasantly he was treated by a professional Leigh Sales during her long interview tonight. He came across more reasonably than usual, certainly better than his self serving debacle with Tony Jones on Q&A to flog his autobiography Lazarus Rising.

Ms Sales asked a lot of good questions, and didn't tear him to shreds like Kerry O'Brien would likely have. This resulted in a better interview, because we mug public can suss out the pricks whether they're being treated nice or nasty.

One of my main bugbears with John Howard began early on in his prime ministership, when it became apparent that he was as conniving a politician as the rest of them, while having portrayed for ages the illusion that he was a cut above, of a higher calibre concerning integrity and such. It quickly became obvious that he was yet another ordinary polly with whom you had to study the fine print, and that he was set apart mainly by ambition. Common as muck; sorry Howard lovers.

If he had not placed himself on an integrity pedestal, I would not be making such complaints. An ordinary politician is nothing inspiring, but there is something inspiring about an ordinary politician who does not pretend to be extraordinary.

I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' today: a powerful book, well worth the experience, and I adored the last paragraph, laced with insight and anticlimactic.

+paytontedwithlove+

BRIDGEPORT: "Tennis for two perhaps, but no nukes for any or all!" noted PL Inkletter. "He strived to rinse the pong from the little boy and fat man."

Be all that as it may, meanwhile:

'In other news…'

25^th October 2010

Monday: As I had got to bed so late – dawn – it was a late start for moi. I had a good excuse I think, having reworked overnight my draft of 'After the Rain' aka 'Man's Best Friends', a short story which I have to submit this coming weekend to have it considered for publication.

Convinced it was a swimming day with Bob, when I arrived at his place in Guildford, fashionably late, he informed me it was his city outing day. He is rarely wrong, so I rejigged my arrangements, and we were on the train about four o'clock heading for the Big Smoke.

He had a ball, for he so enjoys his Perth city outings with me. We did the usual things, and while I was sitting reading in the evening sun in Supreme Court Gardens as Bob planted himself on the grass some sixty feet away to eat his goodies, a full blood aboriginal man staggered over to talk with me. To overseas readers of this blog, full blood aboriginal folk in Perth city are rare sights, even in the entire South West, and I dare say, the South East of Australia.

I engaged him, and while his motive was clearly some small change to keep oiling his tonsils, poor fellow, he was soon fascinated by my questions and comments. We covered his blood clan out Warburton way in the desert, the rules and prohibitions of particular marriages, traditional music, bush tucker, Dreaming, and much more, with him giving me several – slurred – sentences in his tribal tongue.

And the intersection of coincidences struck me, for they happen uncannily so often in my life, with the fact that my short story I've been working on features a full blood aboriginal man I've named 'Gnamragan'.

Back home after 8, Janny was still entertaining The Dear Leader. I settled into the Player Recliner with tuck tuck and then had the pleasure of one Maine Coon who goes by the moniker 'Cadbury' going elastic upon my lap as I watched Aunty's lineup. Thus folk will cotton on to why I also now call that scrumptious piece of fluff that is my wife my Jayne Coon (Jayne is her real name).

Q&A was captivating, for Tony Jones had but one guest fronting his in-studio audience, former Prime Minister John Howard, and while it is unkind of those who say it was largely one continuous wank by Mr Howard, I can understand why they would say it. He was undoubtedly a successful Prime Minister, but he was not a great one. The three years out of office have evidently not yet added to his greatness quotient. He was merely successful.

I look for humility, willingness to admit errors, even serious ones, fallibility, exposure of warts within one's makeup, these kind of things as part of the features of a great person. Forgiveness of the hurtful failings of others, not taking oneself too seriously, aspirations higher than the sky grounded by pragmatism and balance, that kind of stuff. Neither for that matter was nor is former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd great: if from no other evidence, his resignation speech. Greatness is a very rare quality in politicians, in anyone for that matter. And I am not great either, far from it, but I recognise greatness when I encounter it.

Lateline: The (Leigh) Sales Graph: Wow Ms Sales brought us a fabulous interview with Barnaby Joyce tonight!

What an entertaining fellow this politician is. Never should he be let near a ministry, shadow or substantive, because he is a loose cannon who could keep an army of diplomats in overtime for a thousand years, but he is very useful as badly needed yeast in the political bowl.

Ms Sales obviously enjoyed herself, and it appeared she had dosed heavily on a dozen espressos before this interview, because she was on fire and shooting questions like a Gatling gun, but it worked, and Mr Joyce held his own. It's been many an interview since any ABC journalist got so many words in between a politician's ramblings.

To be fair to Mr Joyce, he expressed a great deal of wisdom, smattered as always with his unique brand of whackiness, more so than most politicians are prepared to or are capable of.

Now in my opinion Mr Joyce's analysis of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan's social and economic effects was inspired, especially his example of the repercussions for life-time working pensioners who have fully paid for their houses in those towns, as was his comeback to Ms Sales on the National Broadband Network. His remark "…and I want a Maserati, it's just a case of whether I can afford it. I mean, there's no doubt that people would love, you know, broadband and we want to deliver broadband, but you gotta cut the suit to fit the wearer." Brilliant comeback, regardless of the nitty gritty of the actual affordability for our nation.

+paytontedwithlove+

HILL END: "Two sisters, a similar vein, Star of Hope, aureum buyers, stained glass…" PLInkletter rambled, "just picture it if you can, hi ho, silver!"

Be all that as it may, meanwhile:

'In other news…'

19^th October 2010

Tuesday: I chatted to cousin Vee in Broome today, to catch up with his health outcomes, and there is some encouraging news with a little weight gain.

Lateline: The (Leigh) Sales Graph: Ms Sales interviewed Prime Minister Julia Gillard, both in Canberra, and it was well worth watching for several reasons, least of all the fact that both women looked fabulous.

Leigh Sales asked, and kept asking, some challenging questions, of Prime Minister Julia Gillard, fragrantly and professionally, on Lateline

As an aside, we might have been witnessing the current Prime Minister being interviewed by a future Prime Minister. I've said it before. Ms Sales would have to summons up some (artificial) Inner Mongrel, because politicians, especially leaders, seem to need a higher IMQ (Inner Mongrel Quotient) than others. So that would be a bit sad, but if anyone could do it and keep her inner beauty, my money's on Ms Sales.

Now my first overall impression is that Ms Sales managed to tread that delicate line of remaining polite and professional, while asking and pursuing some lines that Ms Gillard would doubtless prefer not to have to be examined on in public. Rather than lose all balance and bludgeon the Prime Minister – do a Kerry O'Brien – Ms Sales achieved the difficult goal of remaining fragrant, helping her honoured interlocutor portray herself well also, while not shying away from Ms Gillard's discomfort zones.

This would not be easy to pull off, and Ms Sales did it very well.

The subject which was threatening the Prime Minister's comfort zones was Australia's military and civil involvement in Afghanistan, the subject being debated in Parliament for the first time today, thanks to the Howard Government's going all the way with GWB almost a decade ago without parliamentary examination first.

I am dismayed that both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott both assiduously avoid, assuming they even understand, some inexorable facts that plague the whole Afghanistan mission. To help illustrate what I mean, let's do a thought experiment:

Australia, all alone, militarily invaded a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan almost a decade ago, to remove that dangerous and barbaric leadership which gave safe haven to Al-Qaeda. The vast bulk of the population welcomed us, and still do. The people crave a liberal democracy, long denied them, wherein equality of the sexes would be the norm, as would freedom of religion.

Although the cost of the military and civil input is large, Australia is so well off that it is just small change, with little of importance back on home soil not being adequately funded for the maintenance and betterment of the nation. No health waiting lists, no-one sleeping on the streets, no environmental issues worsening, everything on the up and up.

And so our military command is running the show, neither answerable to any allies nor dependent upon them. The government of Afghanistan is corruption free, and their military is rapidly training up to world's best discipline and ethical standards, paralleling our own.

Afghanistan's neighbour Pakistan is squeaky clean, and fully cooperating with the effort to eliminate the refuge for violent fundamentalists across the shared mountainous border. No other nation is interested in helping insurgencies or locals to defeat us.

Need I continue the fairy tale?

A quick look now at what the actual case is:

Virtually half the population of Afghanistan consider the other half as inferiors, who have far less right to an education, health care, justice, freedoms of any kind.

Virtually all of the population subscribe to a religion that practices severe intolerance of religious freedom, and insists on the church being the state. Thus our soldiers and civil personnel are considered to be infidel, with the negative connotations that come with that.

The nation of Afghanistan, or should I say that collective of tribes, has no long hard fought and fruitful experience with the institutions of a liberal democracy, has no extensive modern infrastructures to speak of serving the government, health, environmental, energy, agricultural, and justice needs of its people. Might we not have to be there for fifty years, even with their wholehearted cooperation?

The allies running the combination of operations known as Operation Enduring Freedom and International Security Assistance Force are mostly undeclared bankrupts, most especially the USA followed by Britain, no less than the two powers doing the lion's share. The Netherlands has withdrawn, having been largely based in Uruzgan Province; Canada is leaving by July next year, Kandahar Province being their main base.

The amount of things that have to keep working cooperatively to pull the whole show off eventually are myriad.

Imagine that Australia succeeds brilliantly in Uruzgan Province, bringing the region into the 21^st century against the odds, taking billions of our dollars to do it, and a lot more lives and health of our soldiers. Then the national government implodes, is taken over by rabid fundamentalists again, the allies dump their commitments throughout the rest of the country… How long will Uruzgan Province last as a bastion of a liberal democracy in the making, doing Australia proud?

All of our efforts, every drop of Australian blood and every cent of Australian money, depend for their lasting success upon the wholehearted commitment from a hotchpotch of lily-livered confused thinking bankrupt nations, rapidly losing the support of their voters. It does not bode well does it?

As awful as it is to consider, it may well be better to cut our losses, and leave a sinking ship before our bodies melt into jelly on the sea floor along with the whole battleship. 21 Australian lives and mission UNaccomplished may be far better than hundreds more Australian lives and mission NEVERaccomplished.

Does it make sense to join with an ally when it does something ill-thought through? John Howard leapt in with Bush and Blair because we are allies. Gillard used the same reasoning tonight under Ms Sales' questioning. Yes we're allies, but no we don't have to be stupid. The peanut gallery in charge of the United States at the time of the 9/11 atrocity demonstrated an appalling grasp of global dynamics, and only made a bad situation far worse. Why keep justifying to ourselves that we haven't been a part of that stupidity?

Faced with two paths, the less stupid and the more stupid, how stupid is it to keep choosing the more stupid?

It was clear to me from Leigh Sales' questions that the journalist is far from convinced of the arguments that the leaderships of the Labor and Coalition parties are mounting for continuing the mission in Afghanistan. Our leaders need to be kept in the frying pan of scrutiny.

Prime Minister Gillard said, in answer to a very clear and simple series of excellent questions from Ms Sales, "Our mission, of course, is to make sure Afghanistan doesn't become a safe haven for terrorists." Well, how impossible, given the mindset of the populace as well as the fundamentalist sewer across the inhospitable and porous border with Pakistan, and even if it was possible, how redundant, given the globalisation of terrorist opportunity, assisted mightily by the internet; how many British have died at the hands of British terrorists this decade?

The PM also highlighted her own lack of understanding or honesty with the Australian citizenry – or was it a flagging of her gullibility? – when in answer to Ms Sales' characteristically precise question: "But to what standard (government provision of services), I guess I'm wanting to know?

"Because in looking to benchmarks you need things that can be measured and there's a big difference between the sort of elections we have here, for example, and the sort of elections you have in Afghanistan.

"So I'm wondering where in that continuum you would think that that's a functional government?"

Julia Gillard: "Leigh, in part this is for the Afghan national people to determine.

"We are not there nation building in that sense. The Afghan people have to do that nation building themselves."

Here is the immense risk: the determination that the 'Afghan national people' reach will be far from satisfactory from our national interest position, nowhere near commensurate with our sacrifices of life, health, and finances, even very harmful to us.

Imagine the advantages we could be leaving in the shape of a trained military and civil infrastructure to the next bunch of fanatics to hold the reins of power in Afghanistan! Even if 'moderates' rule Afghanistan, how much of our hard-earned and hard-sacrificed will assist women, children, civil society, and how much will further hard-line Islam? 

And let me be clear: I would dearly like to be wrong, and see the fruition of the allied efforts with a rapid achievement of a peaceful self-governing society in a stable and developing Afghanistan, with a consequent orderly and soon wind-down of all military engagement by all concerned. The nation would obviously be Islamic flavoured, but how about a moderate flavour? And let it then hold its head high a part of the United Nations of peaceable forward-striving collective of humanity.

A great interview conducted most skillfully by Ms Sales, and most politically astutely by a weasel-worded Ms Gillard. This quality of interview is so valuable, to alert the thinkers among the Australian people of the spin that infects and directs our national policy, and also for posterity when a higher quality of history-motivated citizenry will be able to study just how mealymouthed our politics was.

+paytontedwithlove+