Despicable
The new torture laws passed by the Senate will surely go down in history as one of the most heinous acts of legislation ever perpetrated by the United States. The 12 Democrats who voted in favor of the new law are bedwetters and don’t deserve their seats.

Carper – Delaware
Liberman (of course) – Connecticut
Lautenberg – New Jersey
Landrieu – Louisiana
Johnson – South Dakota
Menendez - New Jersey
Nelson – Florida
Nelson – Nebraska
Pryor – Arkansas
Rockefeller – West Virginia
Salazar – Colorado
Stabenow – Michigan

I’d vote for a Republican before I’d vote for any of these fools, but only Lieberman, Carper, Menendez, the Nelsons, and Stabenow are up for re-election in the mid-terms. Now that Lieberman’s running as an Independent, Connecticut has the chance to vote Democratic anyway, but it’d be a shame to lose the other four seats, when we need to gain six to re-take the Senate. Nevertheless, if you’re in favor of torture, you’re no friend to America.

Webtools
Every now and then something comes up on the internet that makes me think: Wow. Map My Run may not be flying car-cool, but it is a terrific tool. I’ve just had a go at mapping a couple of areas here in Sydney, one being the Parramatta Park Runners Club route, and I’m so impressed that I may spend altogether too much time planning out training runs. (If any of my job prospects come through – and they’d better do it soon – this could be a great resource for working out distances for lunch hour programs.) But the coolest feature of all is the Play feature, using Google Earth (which, if you haven’t downloaded it yet, you should), which tilts the map about a third or so and navigates along your plotted course, beginning to end, displaying the satellite images along the way. Genius.

Thirty Years Gone
Back at the Bicentennial I left behind that supposedly experientially iconic condition: High School. “Supposedly,” because it’s really only in certain boys’ lit and Hollywood output that it marks some magical coming-of-age transition, whereas real life isn’t often like that at all. Sure, some – and no small number – have high school as the end of schooling and thus their entry into adult life, but it’s reasonable to say that their passage will be more often fraught than not and of no less duration than for those going on to university and then moving into family and jobs and all such responsibility therein entailed. What’s still remarkable to me, however, is that anyone would bother me with an invitation to attend a reunion. The fact that I live now in Australia has nothing to do with my surprise, but that I had only a few friends, none of whom appear on the reunion committee list, and, if generally regarded at all, was probably generally regarded as a social waste of time, much as I saw my classmates, for that matter. Sure, they’re all “different” now, as am I, as the Counsellor pointed out in our email correspondence on the matter, but I’d contend that we’re also still likely to be very much the same people, carrying some of the same attitudes and behaviors we were forming then. High school was a trial, mostly, a torturous endurance test with just enough educational benefit to keep me from losing interest altogether. Once I left, I pretty much never saw or heard from any of the other 400+ classmates again, and have only ever occasionally wondered as to the fate of any of them. I’m certainly even less interested now. I have nothing in particular against the school I attended, the students, or even any of the teachers, or at least not much in that last category –some of them were at least trying to keep me and everyone else interested and were themselves fairly passionate about what they were teaching. Yes, there were some I’d rather not have had to contend with, but that’s true of people in my adult life since, so maybe it was good training. If nothing else, none of them left any scars as such, and the others left some worthwhile datum or another. And although I was graduated from one high school, my secondary education started at another institution, a boarding school I was asked to leave after one year, and they’re the ones with whom I credit the skills that carried me through a post-graduate tertiary degree. The study habits inculcated in me there, whether in rote-learning exercises or for more analytical applications, were trialled through more intensive testing than I’d spend the next three years having to contend with, and both the habits and the test-taking skills have proven their worth ever since. And while I never later met or even much thought of any of those classmates either, it’s less of a surprise, since they were drawn from a much broader geographic area than my graduating high school class, and if any of them successfully made it through the four years and the intended tertiary program thereafter, would have likely been spread even further yet (although not as far as this end of the earth). Few of them would have, and many would not be looking back there now, but whether the one school or the other, they can keep it.

Ministerial Mysteries
Does John Howard want to create a Ministry for Water? Maybe not yet; after all, while years of drought may mean we have a problem getting enough fresh water, there isn’t any problem with global warming, so the problem is sure to fix itself eventually.

But why be so cagey? Why is this such a bad idea? Water is a big issue here, and we’re likely to have to do something about it sooner rather than later. A ministry to see to the development of conservation and management on a federal level sounds like the kind of planning that would be worthwhile. Or should we wait until it’s time for a War on Water?

(Meanwhile, there had been some news reports that Bush was planning an announcement of a major turnaround on global warming policy, with speculation it was being done to disrupt a potential Gore candidacy in 2008. So what happened, did somebody convince him it would disrupt oil sales?)

Season Well
Maybe it’s one of those cases where I just don’t remember from year to year, but this seems to be the earliest bush fire season start since I got to this country, and it’s certainly been one hot, dry Spring. Yesterday, out on the awning cleaning the front windows, there was a distinct scent of fire in the air, and not that barbeque cooking smell or the pleasant odor of a woodfire in winter. With a fresh El Niño forming in the Pacific, this could be a very difficult summer. And still everybody mocks Al Gore.

What’s that Smell?
Let’s see: Bush makes a speech at the UN. Chavez follows with a speech where he calls Bush the devil and says the podium smells like sulphur. Customs detains Venezuela’s foreign minister at JFK on his way out of town but doesn’t have an explanation. Cause and effect? You decide.

Our Duty
Of course a deal was made, look at the participants. On one side, President Torqumada , and on the other Senators Warner, Graham, and – of course – McCain. “We did our duty,” says Warner, but their duty consists of backing down to Bush. It’s McCain, in the end, who most infuriates me. Here’s a man who knows what being a POW is about and what can happen if your captors are not bound by quaint treaties, like the Geneva Conventions. And yet he’s happy – again – to sign off on allowing secret overseas prisons and the use of abusive interrogation techniques – torture, in fact. McCain signed off because the legislation, as he previously waffled over, turns the responsibility onto the CIA, keeping the military out of it. That doesn’t really cut it, John. Do you think anyone on the other side cares if their people are being tortured by spies versus soldiers, or that having a soldier in their care they would act differently than if they captured a CIA agent? I think we already know the answer to that. To say that secret detention and torture are less reprehensible when conducted by or under the aegis of the CIA makes the agency separate from the rest of the government, leaves them out from under the cover and the legal requirements of the Constitution, and puts every American at risk, as if things weren’t bad enough already. Either the CIA is part of the federal government or it isn’t. McCain is serving a very narrow class of American by caving in on Bush’s legislation and dog-whistling to the Bush constituency. It’s craven, immoderate, self-serving politics, and it’s no surprise at all.

Inexpert Opinion
Judge Richard Posner of the 11th Circuit, is a well-respected jurist and well-received public commentator on matters of law, and has now weighed in on the limits of power under the Constitution in the so-called War on Terror™ in his book, >Not a Suicide Pact. But the latest review of his position suggests he’d have been better sticking to matters of administrative law or the economic analysis of law, his area of expertise, and given the outline of his arguments, I’d have to agree. Somehow I always expect senior jurists to come down in favor of a robust support for civil liberties, despite Scalia et al., but I guess that’s unrealistic. Is it Nixon’s fate that so weighs on the judge that he can’t see the validity of limits on Executive power? I wouldn’t have pegged him for a bedwetter, but if he’s that scared, maybe he should retire so he can stay home.

Another Velvet Morning
The Velvet Underground are often touted as both the best and the worst thing to ever happen to rock ‘n’ roll. (It’s also frequently said that everyone who ever heard the Velvets immediately went on to start a band of their own, part of “best thing,” maybe.) They’re not included in this list, although some far better examples of “worst things” are. I have to agree with number 25: tribute albums, in particular, with the possible exception of I’m Your Fan, the Leonard Cohen tribute, that has the best version of “Hallelujah” you’ll ever hear (in your face, Rufus Wainwright). O.k., M., yes, the >Jeff Buckley version is very good. The rock poet entry will be somewhat controversial at home, too.

Apologies & Retractions
So the pope makes a speech in which he makes some fairly insulting comments about Islam in the course of quoting some medieval bigot and has to apologize for causing offense. It takes him awhile to do it, too, initially relying on spokesmen and then having to come out himself and say he’s sorry. It wasn’t much of an apology, and it didn’t do a lot to calm anyone down, but the Muslims burning him in effigy and issuing fatwas and the like are a minority and should really consider whether they care so very much about what the leader of somebody else’s religion has to say about theirs. Whether or not the pope was really trying to make a point about an open dialogue between Roman Catholic Christianity and Islam – and it sounds like a stretch to me – or was name-calling or whatever, God or Allah or whatever deity you worship doesn’t need nuns murdered or street marches or anything else to defend it. However, Cardinal Pell doesn’t have to make things worse for his boss by essentially retracting the apology. There is a modern history of mass violence among Muslims that isn’t paralleled in the global Christian community and that ought to be addressed. Islam, doesn’t have the structures in place to achieve a Reformation or to broadly adjust matters of doctrine, but that doesn’t make it less necessary to do so. The fact that this religion is such an integral part of the identities of its adherents culturally, the single defining element of the lives of millions upon millions who are otherwise entirely distinct from one another, and that Islam has essentially mired itself into a nearly unreformable static condition, in no small part by making Arabic the language of God, also seems to make Muslims rather sensitive to the interpretations of others, and those others might want to take that into account in making public pronouncements. We would all, indeed, do better with an open dialogue between the factions, but that doesn’t preclude being polite.

Visa Vie
Why opposition leader, Kim Beazley, has proposed a visa issuance signing statement should be incomprehensible, but really only highlights that under his leadership, many of the differences between the ALP and the Liberals have been eroded, unfortunately by making the ALP more rightwing than left-. While it is entirely reasonable to require entrants to this (or any other) country to agree to abide by its laws, it’s a different matter to have them explicitly sign up to abide by its “values.” How do you define these? What is “mateship” or “a fair go”? What other values are to be included? Values aren’t the same as ethics, morals, or laws. They’re more aspirational. If the ALP can legislate the conditions of “a fair go,” then fair enough, I suppose, but I still think it’s silly, at best, and another failed attempt by Mr. Beazley to co-opt the dog-whistle politics of the PM to benefit his own party, one that’s supposedly more committed than Mr. Howard’s is to precisely such values as he wants immigrants to sign up for, even if such signing statements serve an opposite principle. (Besides, there are clear indications we don’t value our values as much as we used to, anyway.)

Peter Pays Paul?
If the FA-18 radar upgrade doesn’t work, then spending AU$200 million on it certainly should be stopped, but I wonder if the money won’t just go for the controversial Joint Strike Fighter program, a defense-budget blow-out itself, and what will become of the Hornets if they can't go into a "hot zone" as is?

I was talking to M.’s elderly cousin, Don, on the phone last week, and he mentioned watching some of the programming that’s been on about the events of September 2001, and his voice was full of anger. He didn’t rant about Muslims or “them” or anything like that, but he was working his way to it, building up a head of steam, and I had to cut him off. We hadn’t watched any of it, didn’t go to United 93, won’t go to the Oliver Stone movie, and didn’t watch last night’s Part 1 of the Disney neo-con exploitation of that day’s death and destruction. It’s still too close. It may always be so.

Everyone is asking now, do you feel safer? Is the world different? For me, the answer to both questions is, no. But that’s too simple. I don’t feel I’m in any more danger, not to death or injury in a terrorist attack, than I ever was. The world is just as dangerous as it was in 2000 or in pretty nearly all the years I’ve been alive, and the U.S. going to war in Iraq hasn’t made any difference there, unless it’s been to have inflamed who started out aggrieved over injustices, perceived and real, inflicted by a system the U.S. has long since come to represent, a system of exploitation and dehumanisation on behalf of profit.

It doesn’t matter how true any of it may be, but it does matter how much people believe it. Hearts and minds – right? Well, that’s part of it, anyway.

The main thing, right now, is that today, five years on, the biggest change is the world is in us, Americans, Australians, British, etc.: the West. There are a lot more of us a lot more aware than before of the rest of the world, and that ought to be a good thing. It’s unfortunate, then, that so many of us have simply bought into the hateful rhetoric and cowardly principles being sold to promote more death and destructions. Clash of civilizations? Give me a break. Threat to the free world, the freedom-loving world, that democratic way of life? Please. The only threat we face to the progress of freedom in the world is the ease with which a few of our own leaders are willing to subvert the principles by which we live for just another day’s political leverage, just another percentage point of profit.

Today, my greatest fears aren’t from terrorism, but of more Diebold voting machines, more cronyism and more Swift-boat politics. My greatest fears come true when governments act to undo the good work of previous administrations or when they lie, promote lies, or just cover up the truth and hope they’ll get away with it.

It hurt a lot when the towers came down, and I’ll never forget what I saw, what I could smell in the air for days afterward. But it didn’t make me hate anyone and it didn’t make me want to foster hate in others and it didn’t make me afraid. And the only thing that’s really made me angry is everything done since to exploit that day.

Crikey
What else can you say upon hearing that Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, is dead? I guess he was always going to go out this way, killed by a wild creature he got too close to, although stabbed through the heart sounds more like street crime than something that would happen swimming with stingrays. (Growing up on the south shore of Long Island, we always heard about stingrays and were told to be careful about where we stepped to avoid getting a painful slash on our foot or leg, but clearly these are stingrays of a different order.) He did a lot of good work in conservation and for the protection of endangered species and may have been a somewhat cringe-inducing face of Australia to the rest of the world, but endearing just the same, for his enthusiasm and sincerity.

The Long, Hot Summer
There’ve been indications that this past winter may have been colder than last year’s, and, meanwhile, back in the northern hemisphere, the same period had extended periods of excessive heat. So when I hear warnings of a fresh El Niño and a subsequent extension of the current drought, which has been persisting for a few years now, already, and which has led to Sydney tapping deep reserves and other regions’ water systems, I have to start thinking about what I can do to decrease my own utilisation. This is a puzzler. We live in an apartment block, and our water rates won’t decrease just because I use grey water on the plants (not to mention that even during the height of summer, with two of us, there’ll be more than enough to keep the few plants well irrigated for the duration). It’s more of a moral imperative, than practical application. I’d like to have a rainwater tank, perhaps especially because we live in the city, so all our runoff heads pretty much straight into the harbour, rather than being caught in the catchments or otherwise feeding into and replenishing the ground water. Of course, it doesn’t do much good even in the Western Suburbs, where there’s at least as much storm water management wastefulness as not, but here there’s more room for single family dwellings and thus a greater possibility for recycling. Mostly I don’t like the idea because last summer was hot enough, and while I may have acclimated (negatively) to winter, I haven’t yet to summer. The idea of spending my summer commuting to Parramatta has no appeal, given the higher temperatures, and even if they’re only a degree or two or five. Those centigrade degrees can cover a lot more ground than Fahrenheit.

No Job
I mean, the one I was after, which didn’t pan out – four interviews and three hours of psychometric testing, and I didn’t get the job because I wasn’t “passionate” about consulting (whatever that’s supposed to mean). I’m left thinking it was a personality problem with the boss, whom I didn’t meet until the final interview, and that I ought to send them a bill for the time spent with them. Since I’d get $60 per hour in consulting fees, approximately, and I could charge travel, it’d be worth about $450. Since I spent preparation time, too, let’s just round that up to a mortgage payment and call it even. I mean, if Qantas can charge its applicants for testing fees, why can’t I charge prospective employers for the time they force me to spend with them to no purpose. Bah. Passion. I’ll show you passion: I’m passionate about getting paid.

Here Comes the Sun
Once upon a time the sun came up and it was morning and the sun went down and it was night. Then, supposedly to get more daylight working hours in a day for the farmers, we changed how time works, so that now, every Spring we move our clocks ahead an hour and every Fall we move them back. Except in Indiana, where they rely on more primitive reckonings of time, I guess, and in the Australian states, where one state’s Daylight Savings Time is another one’s not-just-yet. Unless Victoria Premier Steve Bracks can convince the rest of eastern Australia to adopt a uniform change-over. I’d prefer we just stick with one and let the earth rotate as it pleases without reference to whether or not farmers can manage to work out what time it is. It’s pretty easy, really: in summer the days are longer; in winter the nights are. Sun’s up, plants grow; go thou and do likewise. Or something. Look at England: they used to shut the pubs so the Germans wouldn’t have all those lights on to guide their bombers. Now everybody gets to stay out really late and don’t have to drink eight pints of lager as soon as the barman calls, “Time, gentlemen.” Although that does mean there’re lots of bombed people bombing around between the pubs and home in the dark.

It was Mom & Dad’s 50th, back in NC, and I had a nice bouquet lined up to arrive as a commemorative from M. and I in our absence, necessitated by 12,000 miles between us and them, when the first email arrived and announced a devastating death in the family, Dad’s cousin Eileen. I called as soon as the sun was aligned properly for all of us to be up, but missed them. Then I went in to check email, as I do each morning, only to discover that on the same day, Dad’s brother had also died.

Eileen was definitional to me of my father’s generation. Dad himself, you’d say, would be, but he’s too close to see with that kind of perspective. Eileen, on the other hand, was an imposing, iconic figure, even while she was also immensely fun: witty, urbane, dismissive and sharply deflating of pomposity, I developed an association with her of cocktails and elegance and style. Her presence was always an occasion and made any occasion an event. Younger Brother, T., credits the food she served at her holiday parties with an early interest in cooking and why he became a chef. The Counsellor was always close to Eileen’s daughter, R., and that would be in no small part due to the fact that her character was so deeply reflective of her mother’s. Most of all, I recognize that Dad’s lost a person who was for him a foil, much as he was for her, the two of them brightening the other whenever they were together.

Hardest of all for Dad, of course, is losing his little brother, Roy. I suppose my memories of Roy are always going to be colored by those early encounters. I’ve never forgotten how he’d play with us, engaging us on a level that most adults wouldn’t have been bothered stooping to, but always interested, always a figure of humor and kindness. He was an entertainer, someone to be relied upon for music, even if his greatest accomplishment in that regard was the ukulele. In later years we didn’t see as much of him or our cousins, even though they lived not very far, but separate families grow their own ways and often grow apart, regardless of proximity. It was a source of frustration for Dad and for us all that Roy so limited contact between them, but none of us ever doubted they loved each other.

Strange they should go on the same day, and hard to bear. It alters the family landscape more than I can express, although it’s changed so much in the last five years or so I’d hardly managed even to take in those alterations. When Mom’s brother, John, died, that was a blow, but one we’d been prepared for, as he’d kept us involved with his terminal illness throughout the course of treatment. When Roy’s middle daughter, Jane, died, we only learned of it afterwards, and to be honest I still haven’t fully learned to exclude her from my familial reckonings. I suppose it’ll be much the same now with Eileen and Roy, so much a part of so much of my life that I cannot do anything but to have them with me always.

Signs
Since moving to Australia, I’ve heard a lot about the wonderful economic results of the Howard years, mostly, of course, from the PM himself and his front-benchers. As is usually the case, this government inherited an economy that was on the upswing and benefited and was able to claim the results as its own. But the real estate market and various other indictors – bananas and fuel prices, if you were listening to Peter Costello and Mr. Howard these past few weeks – show we’re headed for a downturn. How bad it will ultimately be is impossible to know, and the Reserve Bank is doing what it can with inflation by raising interest rates. (All well and good for the economy, but for actual people, it’s a killer: mortgages jump, credit cards jump; only people who managed to have investments outside property are going to see anything out of this, oh, and the banks, of course.) But we still get the jobless rate and so forth trumpeted as signs of how well the Prime Minister and his Treasurer are managing the economy.

Like the President, there’s no real power inherent to the PM, or, for that matter in government overall to manage the economy. Governments manage the spending of tax money, and their spending can impart some measure of health into the economy, whether or not it’s at any given time more or less artificial, such as was the case in the wartime economy of the Vietnam era or now that we’re in the perpetual War on Terror years. Business, as a monolithic entity in and of itself, is irrational, reactive to perceived trends and world events as managed by government, but that’s because capitalism, as administered by individual businesses, is competitive, and everyone takes their advantage where they can and bunkers where and when they feel they must.

But if you believe the economy is doing so well, then why is it that both the companies I’ve worked for since my arrival have undertaken massive layoffs? That can’t just be chance. Sure, I’m glad I’m relatively safe this time: fixed-term appointment due to expire before the next school year begins, job search already underway and two good prospects in hand; that doesn’t mean I got lucky. No, the economy is tanking and companies that are heavily reliant on the spending power of ordinary people are immediately affected and will take immediate cost reductions in response. Ordinary people can’t afford private schools when they can barely afford their mortgages, let alone a tank of petrol, and they can’t afford pricey security systems. Bread-and-butter land is being hit in the pocketbook, and that’s bringing down profits elsewhere. It’s only just begun. We’ve been living in a false economy for some years now, and its hollow nature and the hollow claims of the Howard government are being tolled like a funeral bell.

Maxima Culpa
So, Gunter Grass was an SS Nazi. And this comes out just after I bought a remaindered copy of Crabwalk, his most recently celebrated novel, so I am faced with finally getting around to reading this celebrated, Nobel Prize-winning, anti-Nazi author’s work just when his reputation blows up. I suppose if I’d read The Tin Drum or something back when I first encountered it (or even had seen the movie), I’d have something to work with in coming to terms with what it all means, but instead have to contend with Mr. Grass’s past’s effect at the same time as I come to assess his work. Looking at his time in the service of the monsters of Europe, he doesn’t present a history entirely different from that of another former SS soldier, one more recently elevated to a position of even higher moral authority than a literature prize: Pope Benedict XVI. Well, except for the fact that Grass actually volunteered and believed in the war up until the Nuremburg trials showed him the reality. And both men kept their past pretty well covered up, though one by silence, the other by, well, not lies exactly, but not the full truth. Is Grass discredited then? Or can we say, in making this revelation, he finally has come to admit his sins and repent them even while he has long been attempting to atone for them?