MAYBE MY HOROSCOPE'S RIGHT ...

Fortune rains down upon me like the sweet urine of angels.

According to this week’s horoscope, I’ve become “a magnet for love and money”. How did they know? In the last twelve months, simply by virtue of owning a mobile phone, I’ve won more than four million dollars in lotteries and competitions I hadn’t even entered.

First, it was the “two-hundred-and-fifty thousand pounds” from “Nokia customer promo”.

Next, it was “THE SUM OF $2,000,000 USD ON BlackBerry PROMO”.

All I had to do to claim either of these prizes was e-mail my bank details to addresses in Thailand or the former Soviet Union. Easy.

And then, just a fortnight ago, I was informed that my “mobile number has won 720,000.00 pounds in the ongoing freelotto bonanza”. This one even had a transaction number and a claims department; there had to be a claims department, because that’s where you send the “transaction fee”.

Apparently the ongoing freelotto bonanza really is ongoing, because I won it again on Sunday morning. This time it was “£1,000,000.00”, and they even told me what my draw numbers were. Lovely, kind, generous folk. I won’t hear a word against them.

I’ll buy that chateau in the Loire Valley yet.

As to being a magnet for love: my five-year-old niece still thinks I’m the greatest man walking the Earth. I should be able to sustain that delusion for a few years yet.

And of course, there’s always Mum.

TRICK OR ... HUH?

Pumpkins; everywhere, goddamn pumpkins. Pumpkins with gap-toothed grins. Why? Halloween, of course – you know, that traditional Australian holiday?

            Last year it was a novelty. The year before, an experiment. This year, it seems, we’re all just expected to go along with it like good little morons; to shell out a small fortune on sweets, decorations and costumes, just in case an army of hyperactive brats alights on our doorsteps to extort sugar in one of the world’s oldest protection scams.

            When I talk about this, I’m treated like the Grinch who stole Christmas. “But the kids love it,” I’m told, “It’s fun for them”. Big deal; there are no end of ways kids can have fun, without the rest of us being dragged into the latest marketing wank. And anyway, who ever said that a kid’s life has to be an uninterrupted stream of enjoyable sensory-stimulation, preferably featuring microprocessors and carbohydrates?

            I can understand all this going on in America. There it’s part of their history – it means something. Here, it’s just a way to wring more dollars out of us between Easter and Christmas (which you’ll know, if you play the same little game I do, appeared in shops this year in June).

            Stand up, people, keep your money in your pockets; take your kids to the park instead. Send these cynical money-grubbing bastards back where they came from.

            Next, we take out the fat, jolly guy ...

REAL MEN - Beer, Football, Cars

Amid all the recent talk of misogyny a truth has been left unspoken: while he holds some antiquated ideas about women; although he is confused and threatened by females in authority; the Australian Male’s true contempt is roused only by a rival male wandering onto his patch who doesn’t fit his idea of what constitutes a bloke.

            A trip out of town for a family event allowed me to study this atavistic glitch first hand.

I could happily have lived the rest of my days without ever again setting foot in the land of my youth. Even in Bondi, Kings Cross or Canterbury people often look at me as though I’ve just flown in from Jupiter; you can imagine the reception I get in Moree – a place where even Westies are viewed as stuck-up city folk to be treated with suspicion.

My first mistake it seems, upon arriving at said family event, was being what Jerry Seinfeld called “mid-thirties, thin and neat”. My fault, I know.

And of course, if you will insist on not having twenty or thirty kilos of gut spilling over your jeans; on looking as though you may have given a thought to your hair since the turn of the century; or on not dressing as though you threw a clothes hamper into the air and wore whatever landed on you; then for god’s sake, on no account be sufficiently attractive or intriguing that any girlfriend in the room feels compelled to look at you more than twice.

Do not be seen with a book – unless it was written by a cricketer, a footballer, or a racehorse.

While having a drink with one of the few cousins who’d engage you in conversation if standing next to you – much less walk across the room to say hello – I was treated to an interesting revelation. He described me – in a friendly, matter of fact way – as slightly effeminate.

I can honestly say it was the first time I’d heard that. If pressed, I’d have said that I’m comfortable enough with my sexuality that I don’t get nervous about what might happen if there’s a gay person nearby; that I’m in touch with my feminine side, an integrated personality; that I’m happy to express heterosexual masculinity without resorting to chest-thumping, testosterone-driven stupidity.

In short, evolved.

I have two or three friends (seems a lot, I know). The males, while very different individually, would seem to an outside observer to be all of a type. That same observer – having decided the type was artsy-fartsy latte-sipping inner-city fags – would be surprised on listening-in to learn at least half our conversation consists of moaning about the women in our lives. Not inner-city fags, but sad old heterosexuals.

Some of us even like football.

It’s the fault of progress, really. The Australian Male, a simple creature at the best of times, finds himself daily in situations beyond his comprehension. It’s confusing. Bad enough that his boss is now a woman, without having to deal with me or my friends. In the good old days, he could just fall on us with some companions, tear us limb from limb, and then get back to fighting each other over rape-rights. Progress has really screwed him.

Maybe I’m wrong; maybe the fear change and destroy the different approach is the natural way of things. Maybe some of you ladies can clear it up for me ...

RUDE WORDS

I was chastised the other day for using – ahem – the ‘c-word’ in a blog post. As the chastisement was done privately, the chastiser will remain anonymous. I won’t name you, Mum.

            It got me thinking, though, about words we consider dirty or unacceptable, and how they got that way.

            Take the aforementioned ‘c-word’ for instance. It derives from a Latin word meaning simply ’wedge’, or ‘triangle’. Fairly self explanatory; and taken at its face, much less offensive than some other terms for that particular organ.

            Our sex-organs especially nearly always leave us groping for a euphemism. What few people realise is that even the supposedly ‘correct’ terms began as Latin slang: penis was colloquial for ‘tail’; vagina for ‘sheath’ – yes, the place you put your sword.

            We’re driven to even more absurd flights of coyness over what to call the small room where we relieve ourselves. There is not actually a word for it in English that didn’t begin as a euphemism.

            Once, on asking for directions to ‘the bathroom’, I was reprimanded by an elderly friend who curtly informed me: ‘It’s the lavatory’. Evidently she didn’t know that lavatory comes to us from Latin via French: lavatorium, lavatoire, lavatory; it means ‘washing place’, or if you prefer, ‘bathroom’.

Even the word toilet originally described a lady’s make-up table (Fr: toilette, from toile – the embroidered cloth which covered it). Powder-room, privy, water-closet, WC and so on, all euphemisms. As soon as it becomes too clear what we’re actually talking about, we get embarrassed and change it again; linguists call it ‘the euphemism treadmill’. The most straightforward approach would be the honest, Anglo-Saxon derived: shitter.

In life – and in writing above all – it’s probably best to just say what we mean. However, words come to mean what the reader or listener thinks they mean; and there’s never a need for egregious bad language.

Used sparingly, curse-words make their own point. I used ‘the c-word’ in a passage describing the internal dialogue of depression. I could have used any number of words, but none had the same power, or communicated as effectively what I wanted to say. Bastard didn’t do it; neither did mongrel, prick, son-of-a-bitch or any other. In the end, ‘Everything reminds you you’re a cunt’ was the right sentence for the purpose. If it’s confronting on the page, imagine hearing it in your head, in your own voice, several dozen times a day. Point made?

I use a couple of general rules for rude words and writing:

First, they’re not punctuation. Overused, they lose their punch and precision.

Second, and most important, if you’re going to swear, then swear; fuck or cunt, not f_ck or c_nt. Don’t mess around with blank spaces in the middle of words.

That’s for p_ssies.

CENSORSHIP, IDEALISM, CHERNYSHEVSKY

Leery as we are about the suppression of ideas, arguably a worse form of censorship is seeing your work raised to prominence, only to propagate a travesty of your vision. Think Nietzsche in the hands of the Nazis; Christ and Saint Paul in those of roman emperors, popes and puritans (okay, I know Christ wasn’t a writer, but you get my point); Voltaire and Rousseau twisted by Robespierre and pals.

            Tsarist Russia’s Guantanamo Bay, the Alekseyevsky Wing of the Peter and Paul Fortress, St Petersburg, 1863; radical journalist and social-critic Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky ponders the present, and dreams of the future. Between interrogations and a nine day hunger strike, he manages to write a novel and smuggle the manuscript to the office of his journal, Contemporary (Sovremennik).

            The novel passes the censors. The first chapters, appearing to be no more than a pot-boiler romance with a mystery twist, raise no alarm. By the time the later chapters, with their radical vision of sex-equality and socialist nirvana, are serialised the genie is out. The authorities close down Sovremennik, but the novel has spread throughout reformist Europe.

            Just how much, and when, Chernyshevsky himself knows of all this is open to question: after months of interrogation he is exiled to Siberia. He remains there twenty years, returning home a few years before his death. His maltreatment isn’t over.

            Less than three decades after his passing, the social order Chernyshevsky despised implodes. The Tsar is deposed, and for a brief moment a democratic Russia struggles toward life. It’s a stillbirth. The Bolsheviks storm the new parliament and, in the “Glorious October Revolution”, usher in their own brand of tyranny. The rule of monsters like Lenin and Stalin gives way over time to that of their grey progeny in the Politburo.

            Among their sacred canon, next to Marx and Engels, sits Chernyshevsky.

            His dangerous little book was Shto Delat’?, published in english as A Vital Question, or What Is To Be Done? (I’m reliably informed this is better rendered What To Do?  A cursory acquaintance with the book will cause you to question that punctuation mark as well. Picky readers take note: these are accepted english translations, not my own).

In it, he sets forth his practical – if somewhat utopian – ideas for social transformation. He decries the ignorance of the mass of the people, but acknowledges that it’s not their fault – they’re only surviving the best way they can. His scorn is for the elites, those who should know better, and could change things, if their immediate interest wasn’t served by preserving the status quo.

            Chernyshevsky never loses his faith in the basic goodness of evolving human nature. By changing those few minds ready to listen to reason, the word will slowly spread – words and example, not bullets and gulags. At its most seductive, his vision combines the best of socialism and capitalism in a way that makes you think of pragmatists like the factory owner, Ricardo Semler, in Brazil. But he knows it will take time – a long time.

            His emphasis is always on individual freedom; free individuals with a social conscience working toward a better and more free world.

            Compare this with the Bolshevik ideology, which states that because the common man is slow to catch on, he must be dragged to the light by those who know better. And if he still won’t play along, well, that’s what Siberia’s for (sound familiar?). The Bolsheviks want it to happen yesterday.

            My copy of Shto Delat’?  was printed in the Soviet Union in the early eighties. Realising their economy would inevitably collapse under the weight of competing with the US Military Budget and trying to spread socialism with tanks, thinkers in Moscow returned to an old standard: putting the soft-sell on western intellectuals.

            Toward the end of the book – the business end, that is – a strange thing happens. In a long sequence Vera, the heroine, is shown Chernyshevsky’s ideal future in a dream. It all goes along quite well; passages numbered 1, 2, 3, and so on until 6, then this:

7

.....................................................................................................................

.....................................................................................................................

At which point we continue to section 8.

            Now, given the genesis of the book – written in prison with an eye to fooling the censors, heavily symbolic and circumscribed; circulated for years in Russia, where it was banned, in hand-copied editions; edited and re-edited – it’s feasible that something just got lost along the way.

            However, you can’t escape the feeling that here, in the middle of one of the most powerful passages in the book, something just didn’t sit right with the bureaucrat assigned to publish it. For all the faulty syntax and malapropisms of a work produced quickly under pressure, this is the only glaring, complete, and unexplained gap.

            (Don’t think for a minute that I’m picking on Russia and ignoring the west. In the US, Hollywood producers collected Academy Awards and millions of dollars off the backs of men like Dalton Trumbo and Howard Fast, while the authors themselves languished, blacklisted and penurious.

            Here in Australia, we lionise men like Henry Lawson – ignoring the fact he was not only a Republican and out and out socialist but, at the turn of the twentieth century, already decrying our largely urban population’s identification with an outback ideal whose reality he knew to be lonely, pitiless and miserable.

            The difference – small but not insignificant – is that you won't find a copy of Spartacus, Johnny Got His Gun or The Collected Works of Henry Lawson with politically embarrassing passages unaccountably expunged.)

            It’s hard not to think that Chernyshevsky – celebrated as a “forerunner of Lenin” – would, were he born a century later, have lived almost exactly the same life.

            There will always be tyrants or potential tyrants. Great artists – Chernyshevsky; Shakespeare under the Tudors and Stuarts – find a way to get their point across; often under the noses, even on the dime, of those they’re excoriating.

            And personally, I’d like to think Nikolai was right about our evolving nature.

OUT OF AFGHANISTAN?

The former commander of our forces in Afghanistan, Major Gen. (Ret) John Cantwell, has been doing the rounds of the serious news shows. His purpose? To tell anybody who’ll listen that it’s time our troops were out of that godforsaken crater.

            Should our boys be stuck in a Central-Asian desert, being shot and blown-up by people they think they’re helping? To answer that, it helps to re-examine why they were there in the first place. Let’s see if I can’t deliver a cogent argument here.

            A little under eleven years ago, US and allied forces had Osama bin Laden and his cronies penned in the mountains along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. With Pakistan’s then President, General Pervez Musharraf, eager to appear helpful, they could have either laid siege and starved them out, or chased the evil bastards right to Lahore, if need be.

            Instead, as we know, they promptly began diverting resources in readiness to open another front; the war that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the boys had been hankering after since before coming to office – Iraq, and Saddam.

            Now, I’ve always been inclined to defend George W Bush against those who blithely denigrate his intelligence: he may be a lot of unpleasant things, I’d say, but he’s certainly no idiot.

            That being said, however, you’d have to think that it takes a special kind of moron to break four of the most important rules of warfare in one fell swoop.

            The first rule? Know what you intend to accomplish. Every great commander, from Cæsar to Napoléon and beyond, insisted that all campaigns should begin with a clear objective. That objective is, usually, to destroy the enemy’s forces in the field.

            Second: exploit your successes and follow through. Ruthlessly pursue, capture and/or destroy the fleeing enemy. Do not allow him time and space to regroup.

            Third: Don’t divide your forces. And fourth: Never, ever, if it’s in any way up to you, fight a two-front war.

            There isn’t space here for a detailed analysis of the Bush Administration’s failings on these counts. Suffice it to say, they had no clear idea what they wanted to accomplish in Afghanistan. Capture or kill Osama? Certainly; topple the Taliban? Oh, sure, why not? Replace them, with what? A democracy? Okay, how?

            The truth is, almost from the start, Afghanistan was an after-thought. Several well placed accounts have Cheney and Rumsfeld, on September 12, 2001, already pushing for an invasion of Iraq. It was Colin Powell who appears to have said, “Hey, fellas, do you think we should start by attacking the guys who actually did this?”

            By invading Iraq and leaving Afghanistan to fester the US launched a war, not on two fronts, but, with no front line at all. And we came along for the ride.

            Iraq descended into civil war and a resurgent Taliban began fighting back in Afghanistan. Both countries witnessed brutal, determined insurgencies. The answer, we were told, was a “Surge”.

            Here, it’s worth mentioning another two useful military maxims: think twice before committing too heavily to someone else’s civil war; and, more important, it is impossible to defeat a popular insurgency by conventional military means.

            In the first instance, the US had little choice; they had caused the Iraqi Civil War.

            During the Nixon Administration a phrase began to be heard – behind closed doors – in connection with Vietnam: “a decent interval”. Having acknowledged there was no way they could win, the goal became to ensure “a decent interval”  between the withdrawal of American troops and the collapse of South Vietnam – “It wasn’t me; it started falling over before I came and finished falling over after I left”.

            An insurgency buys legitimacy simply by being in the field. You can’t defeat it – attempts to do so, by inflicting civilian casualties, simply strengthen it. All you can do is fight it to a position where you can deal on terms less unfavourable. This is the philosophy behind a Surge – it buys you that “decent interval” or, if you prefer, “victory with honour”.

            Should we have been in Afghanistan to begin with? It’s hard to say no. Should we have stayed after the misadventure in Iraq? That depends on whether you think we were keeping in good with the big guy who protects us from neighbourhood bullies or chaining ourselves to the deck of a sinking battleship.

Whatever the case, it’s hard to make the argument that we should still have young men fighting and dying (and killing) there now, more than a decade later, for the sake of “a decent interval”.