Watermelon Man

The Olympics will soon be over except for the last virtual fireworks display. Thank goodness. Oh, I'm not saying I don't enjoy parts of it. Will thrill to close finishes, gallant failures, great achievements, along  with everyone else. But Australian television coverage has become Americanised, in absence of a better term, to the extent that it is unrecognisable from what we used to get up to about 12 years ago. The flashiness, the human interest stories, the snappy editing, the tears, the drums, the set piece interviews, the slow motion shots of wobbly muscles, the rap music, the cute and cuddly Chinese in the street, the packaged highlights, the blatant nationalism, the narratives, all endlessly repeated. Increasingly the 1936 Olympic Games look like not just the inventors of the torch relay, but of massed flags and supermen. I assume that Channel Seven has purchased  a set number of events and they show those in rotation and fill in the spaces in between with this glossy fluff - fairy floss for the sports viewer. And of course all of it is only there to fill in the spaces between the massive advertising campaigns that are the real function of the Games.

But I digress. I suppose you saw the medal table? The narrative of course is that it is only the taking part that matters (the swimmers have now been trained to say "having fun") and that it is not whether you win or lose but how you  play the game. Then the media proceed to turn gold medal winners into heroes, lesser medal winners into losers, and those without medals as being non-people. And then there are the villains, the ones that the media loves to hate - Jana Rawlinson of course, Tamsyn Lewis, the girl who collapsed in the rowing eight, the one who swam too slowly in the relay. When they love you they worship at your feet, when they hate you nothing you do will be right. And constantly showing the medal table. Well, briefly at least, because we are not on top. Never have been, never will be. What to do? Ah ha, divide number of medals by size of population and hey  presto, a virtual medal table, Australia on top.

What nonsense. Why not divide number of medals by the per capita income? Or the number of international standard sports grounds? Or the amount of government subsidy to elite sport? Or by the level of carbon emissions per head of population? Where would we come then?

The media are turning us into a nation of bad sports. No Australian can lose without the excuse of a severe illness, a broken leg, a dying relative, a parochial foreign crowd, other countries spending more, strange foreign food, sub-standard facilities, biased umpires and referees, or, shudder, drug-taking by the winner. No competitor can win fairly or by being better or stronger or more determined. The narrative is that Australians will always win, other things being equal, because we have greater strength of character, more grit and determination. So if we lose the playing field could not possibly have been level. Do the athletes themselves go along with this invidious nonsense? I guess not yet, but it must be tempting.

London could save a lot of money in 4 years time. Just take all the footage from Beijing. Insert a few shots of cuddly Cockneys and London Bridge. Create a medal table headed by Britain and hey presto - a complete virtual games with plenty of space for advertisements. Would anyone notice?

When Obama and McCain took part in the forum at the Saddleback Church the other day it aroused considerable interest, but much of that interest centered on how well Obama had done in the face of a potentially hostile audience and whether McCain had heard the questions in advance. Adele Stan on HuffPo also looked specifically at how each candidate answered the question on "evil".

Look, maybe it's just me, but the first thing that occurred to me is how on earth does someone like Rick Warren get to question the two presidential candidates? And have their performances taken seriously as part of the presidential considerations?

And the second thing that occurred to me is the bizarre nature of the question "Does evil exist and, if so, should we ignore it, negotiate it with it, contain it or defeat it?" If I was asked such a question my first reaction would be to roll on the floor laughing. My second would be to ask whether I had been somehow transported back to the middle ages. And then I might respond to the question at some length.

I might ask Mr Warren what he meant by "evil", but I think I know the answer. John McCain's answer was revealing, referring immediately to Osama Bin Laden and then Islam generally, and Obama talked of god "erasing" evil from the world. This is the old war on terror in a new form. Terror isn't a group that can be defeated, it is simply a set of techniques used by many different groups over many hundreds of years in asymmetric power struggles. Evil isn't a group either, simply an adjective that is used, subjectively, to describe grades of behavior - bad, very bad, evil. How is Mr McCain going to defeat an adjective?

Another part of my answer would be to suggest that even trying to defeat the adjective raises some questions. Was it Will Smith who got into trouble a few months back for suggesting that Hitler didn't get up each morning planning how evil he could be, but got up thinking he was doing his best for his country? Smith got dumped on for this, but it is obviously simply a statement of fact. Stalin was the same, and Robert Mugabe undoubtedly sees himself as the saviour of his country.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, one man's evil is another man's patriotism. And looking more widely, behavior which many of us would now agree deserves the adjective beyond very bad, was in the past seen as perfectly normal. Slavery of course, torture, sending young children down mines and into factories, child brides, animal cruelty, imprisonment without trial, polygamy, genocide. You name it, some group has happily done it, and done it in the name of god quite often.

And finally I suppose I could accept the premise of the question, and say to Mr Warren, "yes, I believe in the evil adjective Mr Warren, and here is my partial list of what I would apply it to: Killing doctors at abortion clinics; executing people including juveniles and the mentally incapacitated; promoting gun ownership; invading other countries for oil; torturing people in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; pumping CO2 into the air; causing animal extinctions; preventing women getting contraceptive advice; continuing to use cluster bombs and land mines; continued development of nuclear and biological weapons; the promotion of prejudice on the basis of sexuality or race or religion; support for right wing dictators; maintenance of gender inequality; lack of health care for the poor; promotion of huge wealth inequality. I pledge to fight against all those evil actions as President Mr Warren, are you with me?"

The Watermelon Blog is not just good, and not just very good, but excellent.

There I was, nearly having a near death experience the other day. Became intimately acquainted with intimations of mortality. They say there are no atheists on operating tables, but there I was, putting my trust in a competent surgeon and hundreds of years of science and medical technology rather than the spaghetti monster, and I seemed to get by alright. No bolt of lightning plunging the room into darkness or anything like that.

 But it got me thinking about thinking about death. A little while ago I had read one of those articles, the kind I must have read a thousand times, in which the punch line was "of course humans are the only animals that know about their own death" or words to that effect. But there, in a room that was a much less pleasant (and scarier) version of the Starship Enterprise bridge, I began to question this truism.

 Humans the only animals that know about their own death? How do we know that? Not elephants, or whales, or gorillas, or dolphins, or chimps, or bears, or pigs? Are we sure? Mourning (including dogs for their human owners) by birds and mammals for lost or dead young ones, lost friends, is a sure sign of awareness of death and its completeness. How do we know that the understanding of death as loss does not extend to the individual elephant or gorilla being aware that its time must come? Why would it not?

 No, I think this is yet another attempt by humans to assert their own superiority, their own separateness from the rest of the animal kingdom from which some are so reluctant to understand we evolved. At various times humans have been said to be different to animals (that is, all animals) because of tool-using, the presence of two brain hemispheres, the ability to feel pain, an opposable thumb, language use. None of these hold up after further study (even chickens, it has been found, have separate brain hemispheres) and so the religious among us now come down to just the knowledge that the bell tolls for all of us as proof of our superiority. More wishful thinking.

 In fact it seems to me that knowledge of death is more advanced among animal species. The behavior exhibited by many animal species when a member of their family group dies or is killed suggests that they know for a fact that death has a sting, that it is forever, and that the bones that are eventually all that remains of a once loved mother or baby are indeed all that remains.

 Religious humans, on the other hand, don't understand that they will die. They refuse to use the word die, but speak of someone "passing", of being "reunited" with previously dead family members, of being resurrected (whatever that might mean). We don't pass, by the way, we D.I.E, and we won't be seeing anyone over the other side - I'm sure the animals know that. So perhaps that is the ultimate difference between animals and humans. All animals know that death is final. Some humans fool themselves with talk of life after death. Needs a bit more evolution, old Homo sapiens, to start seeing the world as it really is - a matter of life and death. 

Whenever there is a court case involving violence towards a victim that the media likes, the journalists always want to know whether the criminal has shown remorse. It is part of the package of law reporting (did the victim cry; was the sentence too light - of course it was; did victim's family achieve closure; did the expression on the criminal's face change when the sentence was read out; will the lawyers appeal; did the criminal show remorse) from the corporate media.

 These days criminals, especially juvenile criminals, are often forced to confront their victims (the old lady whose purse was snatched, the shopkeeper whose window was broken, the family whose home was broken into) - we have ways of making you show remorse. And obviously the greater the crime the more remorse will be demanded. The boy who steals an apple might simply say sorry. A murderer might break down in tears. The owner of an oil tanker that destroys a coast might pay a huge compensation. A war criminal might beg forgiveness from the families of his victims.

 I don't know how effective any of that is in fighting crime, but I guess it makes the victims feel a little better and helps to fill a news bulletin with cheap shots of tears. If it is to make the victims feel better it has to seem like genuine remorse, and the cameras and microphones thrust into the face of the evil doer will make sure that the remorse can be examined and dissected.

 But when it comes to the worst crime of all I find myself at a loss - how are the climate denialists going to show remorse? How can they be made to confront their victims when their victims are all the people of the world? And how late will the remorse come? And in what form? "I'm sorry, I didn't know", won't cut it I'm afraid.

 Let me be clear. I am not talking about the kind of apology that involves rationalisation of motives. "I didn't know" has not been a useful defense since Nuremberg. "I was paid by the energy companies to be a denialist" is a bit like the defense of the criminal who was asked why he robbed banks - "that's where the money is". "I was driven by an ideological belief in favor of neoconservative capitalism/against socialism" is probably the kind of defense Radovan Karadzic might mount, but murder in the defense of ideology is no virtue. "It would have been ok if we had won" might have been said by Hitler in the bunker underneath the ruined Berlin.

 No. I want a straightforward uncomplicated, unqualified admission of guilt from these people who have undoubtedly sentenced the world, including my grandchildren, to a society in which life is brutish nasty and short. A world in which the ecology is destroyed and civilisation ruined. A world indeed in which life may not survive at all.

 "Please forgive me, for I did not know what I was doing" is probably as close as we will get to remorse from denialists.

 And I can't.

 Forgive them. 

Remember Iraq? Small country, sandy deserts, imports wheat, has oil - most memorable for having been invaded 5 years ago by a group of countries who wanted the oil. America, Britain, and, oh yes, Australia. Summer 2003 and John and Tony and George were on the phone to each other arranging dates for the people of Iraq. Everybody knows it was for the oil now, although for many years governments of all three countries lied to their people about it, aided by the media who asked no questions and actually catapulted the propaganda. All coming back to you? Been very quiet about it, the media, lately. Number of Iraqi deaths seems to be "down" (I think it was only 400 or so last week for example), after an increase in US troops, an ethnic cleansing of many neighbourhoods, 2 million refugees, over a million deaths, and deals with some militia groups for a temporary cease fire. So SNAFU as the Americans used to say in World War 2, the last "good" war we were involved in with them.

 Meanwhile the building of permanent American military bases in the country continues apace. Funny, I was watching a TV program on architecture the other day and it noted how the Normans, after they invaded England (small country, grass, exported wheat, good land) immediately proceeded to build military bases (sorry, castles) around the country to make sure the natives didn't become restless while the Norman nobles stole all the land. Before that of course, on the same program, was an account of the Roman invasion of England, followed by, wait for it, the building of military bases. Just something you have to do when you invade a country with the intention of staying. Clauses written in fine print about how America will control Iraqi air space, and make all the decisions about threats to Iraq and invasions of other countries from Iraq. Wonder if the Normans had a contract like that.

 Oh, and I nearly forgot, the big American and British oil companies are demanding that they split up the Iraqi oil fields between them. Used to be owned by Iraq, the oil, but that's so old fashioned isn't it? Pretty much socialism, that, and we can't allow any vestiges of that economic system to survive anywhere.

 Do I sound bitter? I am, and so should we all be. How did we get dragged in to this? Well, not so much dragged as eagerly volunteered - "Please George, please George, pick me first". What was promised? Did it relate to the Free Trade Agreement? I thought we were better than that. Had learnt some lessons from Vietnam and the first Gulf War. Knew enough so that when some gung-ho American commander in chief tries to phone us we get a friend to answer and whisper "tell him I'm out". But no, we rush to answer the phone like any teenager hoping a potential date will call. It is as if we are in the movie "Grease" and we are the good young Australian girl who goes all starry eyed about the boy in the leather jacket from the wrong side of the tracks.

 So no more, please. Next time an American president and a bunch of corporate mates want to invade a country like, oh, I don't know, Iran (deserts, has oil) don't take the call. You know it will only lead to death and disaster, and we don't even have any of our own oil companies to take advantage. Nor a wheat board any more. Let's become the good girl again, be Sandy, not Rizzo, but this time stay back in Australia.

 Perhaps one day a musical will be made of that long ago summer of love-in with George and Tony and John. Tom Cruise, in Top Gun jacket could play George. And instead of "Grease" it could be called "Oil".

 Remember Iraq!

Hi there, trying out Vox after years of blogging on another site. I will transfer some of my recent posts here, but if you want to check out some 5 years of writing, pay a visit to the Watermelon Blog. If there is obvious interest here I will start cross-posting (sometimes I even angry-post) and gradually move more of my older posts over here too. Let me know what you think.