LOVE, DESTINY

All kinds of nonsense have been written about love; all manner of romantic foolishness. Terms like “destiny” and “soul-mate” abound – the idea that there’s one perfect person out there for all of us, if only we can find them.

            The truth is you can be content with just about anyone. As long as two people are relatively sane, and share some common goals, you can make it work. It just takes a little effort.

            So, you stumbled into this thing because it was better than your previous situation – or better than being alone – that doesn’t matter. Time, familiarity and shared experience breed a deep affection. You may even come to believe you love this person who’s suffocating you.

            And anyway, before too long you’re depending on each other: you’ve rented an expensive flat; you’ve got furniture and appliances; you’re living beyond your means and the bills keep rolling in; your books and CDs are all mixed-up; things become your “our”; friends and family no longer view you as a person – only as part of a couple. With all that going on, it’s easy to think your lives are inextricably bound.

            Who cares that your own life is getting further and further away from how you’d pictured it? No-one but you will notice. So what if every faltering step you take in the direction of those quickly fading ideals is sabotaged by something your partner does? It’s not really that important that this person doesn’t nurture the better nature you know lives inside you.

            And hey, if they keep making stupid decisions that affect your life without consulting you, well, that’s just the way it goes. Compromise; you can make it work. You can be content.

            But then you see that other; the one who strikes you like a thunderbolt on first sight. Suddenly content is harder. Should you ever actually spend some time together, then content is out of the question.

            Sure, you can try lying to yourself. Go on, try. Just makes things worse, doesn’t it? You can stand on principle – and on the expectations of others – that won’t do any long term damage; won’t sink your relationship with your partner like a torpedoed tanker.

            Now you’re worse-off than ever. Reality puts on a mask and makes night-raids on your unconscious. And daytime’s even more confusing. If only you hadn’t met that other person.

            After your relationship has imploded, you take a while to put yourself together. You might even go on a few dates. It doesn’t work. None of them are that one. Knowing that person exists, you can’t bring yourself to make the effort with anybody else.

            So you live with it. Maybe one day it’ll happen, but you’re not waiting for it. You’d rather be alone than “content”. If only you hadn’t met that other one; then you’d never have realised.

            All kinds of nonsense have been written about love; all manner of romantic foolishness – and it’s all true.

CATS AND DOGS

You are, so they say, a cat person or a dog person. One or the other. Never the twain shall meet. And in a world where we are judged, increasingly, by how we answer bland questions in social media profiles, which one you are supposedly says a lot about you.

            Everyone seems to like dog people; and it’s not affected by how many dogs are involved. In fact, the more dogs you have, the more kind-hearted and likable you’re perceived to be (There are, of course, exceptions. Most people are suspicious of someone with a Pit-Bull terrier – especially if they’re tattooed, and shaven and hairy in all the wrong places; and heaven forbid you should have a Rottweiler and a rat’s-tail).

            But, own a cat? You’re lonely, and a little pathetic. Two cats? You’re suspect. More than two? You’re clearly insane, and you’ll die alone – at which point your cats will eat you.

            Me, I don’t have a preference. I like both (Bi-petual? Reject all labels! Rage against the machine!). And yes, funnily enough, that probably does say something about me.

            Dogs represent my better side – what I’d like to be, or what I’d like to be more often: unquestioningly loyal; instinctively able to find their place in the pack and be content with it; teachable; fierce in defence of home and family; affectionate; easily amused; a comfort to those who love them.

            Cats, on the other hand, are more like what I really am: solitary; prickly; aloof to a point easily mistaken for arrogance; indolent; vicious when rubbed the wrong way; capable of extreme affection, but usually when I need it – not always when my companion does; built for exceptional self-reliance, but inclined to let others look after me if they’ll do it.

We can’t change our personalities and, as the formula goes, “Personality plus environment equals behaviour” ... and there’s the key.

While unable to change them, we can understand our personalities; we can examine our thoughts, our environment, and how we react to them. If we make this a habit – and are, above all, honest with ourselves – then ninety-nine times out of a hundred we can act according to our values rather than our impulses; our behaviour is still based on the same personality, thoughts, and external stimuli, but the result is different.

            There’s a school of thought which says that if you’re able to imagine and wish for something, then it’s part of you and you’re capable of achieving it. Not sure I completely believe that, but I’d like to think I won’t remain a sad old bachelor getting crankier and more set in my ways with every passing year.

            At the moment life is about standing on my own two feet, dealing with my own shit, and trying to be more like the person I want to be and to share. It’s a job best done alone.

            One day though, given the opportunity, I’d still like to show the right Lady my inner German shepherd.

STUPID SEX

“I just don’t see any reason to be a feminist,” the young woman walking behind me declares to her male companion. “Not in today’s world”.

            She obviously hasn’t heard that the average salary gap between male and female graduates doing similar jobs increased to fifty per cent last year. She’s also obviously never clicked on one of those pop-up porn ads on the internet.

            The nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries were defined by the inability of our moral and ethical maturity to keep pace with our intellectual curiosity and technological innovation. In the nineteenth, machines and engineering were going to make everybody’s lives better; we promptly began sending children to work in factories and down coal mines, while we got a head-start on polluting our environment.

            Then came the twentieth. No sooner had Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, et al revealed the beauty of sub-atomic science, than we used their discoveries to create the most terrible weapons ever devised.

            Now we’re able to link the world’s computers – and therefore their users – in a grand, universal mind. Like all minds, beneath the surface of this one races a strong current of sex. Not, in itself, a bad thing – except that our universal mind appears to be a drooling, sexually retarded sociopath.

            Click on one of those ads – or, like the academic authors of The Porn Report, just Google “free porn” – and you’re immediately confronted by sites with names like “Eighteen and Abused”, and “College Girls Exploited”. Although we’re assured the girls are all over eighteen, most look considerably younger.

            Once upon a time, in order to see a young woman kneeling naked on a bathroom floor while a muscle-bound goon relaxes his grip on her throat just long enough to make her drink a dog-bowl full of her own urine, you had to actually be looking for it.

            It’s naive, I know, to expect much porn to depict real, loving, joyful sex. Fair enough but, far from love, most of this stuff seems to express hatred – worse, contempt – of women.

            Follow the links long enough, and you can end up somewhere called “ZooTube”. You might think this is a site devoted to amusing footage of our furry friends; you’d be wrong. It caters to men for whom the gagging, strangulation, hair-pulling, face-slapping, spitting and name-calling of “regular” porn is no longer degradation enough; men so jaded they can only be turned on by seeing women fucked by dogs, horses, and anything in between.

            I’m not strictly anti-porn. Done properly, it can be a source of fun for couples and release for singles. But a lot of porn used to have an edge of naïveté that’s been lost as it’s become more extreme; it’s crossed the line from sexy to ugly. Me, I love women – and it’s in no way a turn-on to see them treated so brutally.

            Internet porn is as much a sign of our moral retardation as the nuclear arms race was last century. It’s little wonder we can’t have a grown-up discussion about issues like gay marriage; it’s got less to do with religious belief than the fact that, when it comes to sex, at least half our species are morons.

RUSSELL BRAND'S DRUG CRUSADE

It finally happened. Tonight, for the first time, Russell Brand really made me laugh. Was it one of his eloquent, witty descriptions of his scrotum? His always hilarious hair? No, sadly it was his earnest documentary about drug and alcohol treatment.

            Russell, you see, is a convert. Having realised the admirable accomplishment of getting, and for a decade staying, clean, he now thinks that the way he did it – residential, abstinence-based rehab – is the only way; and (ironically for a guy not averse to taking the piss out of religious faith) he spruiks it with positively evangelical zeal.

            What could have been an informative and powerful documentary was marred by Brand’s puritanical insistence that only one road leads to sobriety. We were treated to the spectacle of his visit to a busy methadone clinic, where he talked over a softly-spoken addiction specialist. If you’ve ever heard a Christian debate a gay Buddhist you’ll know the tone of the discussion – “You’re a nice person, and I love you, despite the fact that everything you do and think is not only wrong but evil”; that sort of thing.

            The real irony is that his own documentary highlights the flaw in his thesis. We begin with his immediate motivation for making the program – the death of his friend, Amy Winehouse – and end on the story of a middle-aged addict who Russell tries to help into rehab (we learn over the end-credits that she checked herself out after only three weeks. Oh, well, it’s her, not the program).

            While lamenting that he wishes he’d been able to do more for her, Russell somehow misses a glaring fact: at the time of her final relapse, Winehouse had been clean for more than five weeks after completing a residential rehab program.

            And that’s the problem with abstinence-based treatment for heroin addiction – as opposed to alcoholism: it renders relapse more dangerous. While the methadone Brand demonises has its faults (that’s another discussion), it does have one prodigious benefit. If you’re on a maintenance dose, your first slip off the wagon is much less likely to kill you.

            None of this stops him sashaying into Parliament and preaching his gospel of abstinence before a committee on the drug problem – his testimony strewn with the phrase “We believe” (While we’re on it, I know Russell can afford a suit. I’ve even seen him wear one – if there’s a red carpet or a talk-show host nearby. Yet, when addressing his nation’s parliament on one of the few things he takes seriously, he appears in distressed jeans, singlet and Stetson, dripping with cheap jewellery. Go figure).

            He’s right about one thing, though. Once the beast’s on your back, it’s never really off again. When he showed a video of himself, back in the day, bent over a strip of foil smoking heroin, all I could think was: “Good god, what a waste of perfectly good smack; has he never heard of syringe-outfits?”

            Now, I don’t mean to imply that Brand’s preferred treatment never works. Some people are capable of facing and wrangling the demons that led them to addiction, over twelve weeks, whilst in the depths of withdrawal-psychosis. Others need the time afforded by methadone. In both cases, the majority of people who begin the program will fail and relapse.

And there’s the point. The aim of treatment is to keep the minority capable of reforming alive long enough to do it; and to minimise the harm done by the rest to society and themselves. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Abstinence is always the goal of drug rehabilitation, but to achieve it you have to survive. You do what works – anything.

Related Posts: http://tyrannyofglib.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/perhaps-shell-die.html

                          http://tyrannyofglib.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/cap-says-lion-tamer-on-it.html

REAL MEN II - Treat 'Em Mean

“Man, she’s like a princess or something,” are the first words to emerge, with the two men, from muttering shadows beyond my neighbour’s fence-line. “Guys would treat her like a treasure” (You hear all kinds of poetry sitting on your balcony at three in the morning).

            “Nah, mate, I treat her like shit, bro”. You’ve seen this guy before: body almost square; that awkward steroidal gait, arms stuck out forty-five degrees – the closest his biceps will let them get to his sides; no-neck bucket-head shaved high and tight, fudged up bristle on top; all chin and forehead. “She’s dying inside – she tells me all the time”.

            It’s not a drunken confession. This type of guy doesn’t drink much – too many carbs. No, the behemoth is bragging. He’s proud of himself.

            Why (Not, why is he proud of himself. You can answer that just by looking at him)? The question that screams at many a man and most women is: why would any woman subject herself to that? What’s the attraction?

            My friend, Parkstreet, has touched on this (Go to www.kentparkstreetblog.com and type “The Lovable Rogue” into the search field; highly recommended). Despite his many faults, however, the lovable rogue of my friend’s blog is at least entertaining. I know: my mother married two of them. But what hold does this brute exercise over a woman – let alone one with the choices our culture offers to beauty?

            It’s not a rhetorical question; I really want to know. Parkstreet and I aren’t the only two guys to have racked our brains trying to figure it out. And evidently loverboy’s companion is struggling with the answer too.

            It can’t be that he’s spectacular in bed. Women in a position to know tell me juicing gym junkies soon lose the ability, even if they retain the interest.

            Some would say money, but it’s not that either: he’s on foot. Although Hulk isn’t drunk, his mate obviously is. The only drinking holes within walking distance have been shut for hours, yet they haven’t taken a cab or driven home – whatever money he has left-over after gym fees went on the brand-name shirt stretched across his beefy back.

            So, I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind betting who does, though. It’s the guy whose shoulder the woman probably cries on when He-Man’s not around; maybe the one who, at present, is trying to talk him into behaving like a human being.

            Maybe she’ll run away with him. Wouldn’t that be lovely? Nice Guy gets his treasure; the woman gets someone who’ll treat her like a princess; and knucklehead gets to be with the one he truly loves – his reflection in the gym wall mirror. And they all live happily ever after ...

            ... Nah.

            Laurel and Hardy fade beyond the farther fence-line, voices mingling again with the darkness. I drain my coffee mug and step back into my own shadows. Maybe if I stare at the ceiling and groan long enough I’ll eventually get some sleep.

VILLAGE OF THE SPAMMED

I lost a reader today. No, not that way; he simply decided that social networking is no longer worth the risk to his privacy. You can understand his concern. If this was any other country – the USA or Britain, Russia or China, with an enormous, well-funded state security apparatus – you might share it.

            It wasn’t meant to be this way, was it? We were going to live in a global village. The free exchange of information, we were told, would pave the road to the New Jerusalem.

Right now a monomaniacal antipodean misfit seeks South American asylum, spouting all the while his messianic belief: that absolute freedom of information will absolutely free us all. His acolytes include human-rights lawyers, celebrities, and all manner of academics and idealists. The similarity of his rhetoric to that of John Calvin seems to have escaped them.

Not too long ago social media was going to free the Middle East. Facebook would roar, Twitter would tweet, and tyrannies would topple from Tehran to Tripoli. It's a nice story. Did wonders for share prices and advertising campaigns in New York and Silicon Valley. The reality was different.

Social media didn’t stop Egypt’s President Morsi appointing himself effective Dictator last week. Nor has it prevented his enactment of a new constitution – one heavy with Shari’ah Law. Whether Egypt’s new constitution passes or fails at a referendum, social media will have little hope of averting the likely consequences: either a brutal government crack-down, or a vicious civil war.

We won’t mention Syria. No amount of tweeting can help where China and Russia have money and the US has no interest (or any combination of the above).

 No, Facebook will not free the world any time soon; but what about privacy? At the moment our profiles are used to fashion ads for ourselves and our friends. Social media is a store, and we are the products. In Australia you’re more likely to be spammed than spied on ... for now.

Governments – authoritarian and “democratic” – have been quicker than activists to learn the real lessons of the internet. A century ago, Irish Nationalists feared infiltration of their groups by government agents. Nowadays it’s easier to train a few bloggers. These can then go online, monitor opposition activity, and disseminate propaganda.

 I don’t buy, sell or bank online, so I’m reasonably safe in that sense; but what about personal information? I make no secret of my past: drunk, junkie, and wastrel. In fact, I rather trade upon it – a kind of demented Dylan Moran of the blogosphere. I’m no longer doing anything illegal. My life, as my art, is an open book.

However, my network contains a fair cross section of political activists, artists and drug users. The right kind of government – or corporation – could use my profile to find them, and either arrest them, or follow them to bigger fish.

Conversely, imagine a government using the same techniques as Google and Facebook to create a flexible, intelligent, insidious and effective censorship system.

Freedom of information is a double-edged sword. As anyone knows who watches reality TV, some of the highest-security prisons have cells with transparent walls.

CHARACTER IS DENSITY

Julia Gillard here at home, David Petraeus in the US; the political circus is putting on the Character Show again. Are we being a little precious? Have popular perceptions of integrity always been synonymous with leadership and ability?

            I know people who claim to have bribed one of our modern luminaries when he was still a union leader. No suggestion that the future Prime Minister actually pocketed the dough. He was just the point man in charge of greasing the skids; it’s the way things were done – the price of a smooth ride in business.

            Without suggesting this is right, or should continue, it’s worth remembering: if this man had been exposed and precluded from office, this country might still be trapped in a 1950s mindset and a 1930s economy.

            John F Kennedy was not only a serial adulterer, but rode into office on his father’s electoral corruption. Ditto Lyndon Johnson (although, he did his own bribery). In fact, it was partly by virtue of his dubious associations that Johnson was able to ram through the most far-reaching civil rights legislation since the Emancipation Proclamation (on a related note, Martin Luther King Jr also had trouble keeping his trousers on).

            This brings us to Kennedy and Johnson’s tragic successor: Nixon. He should have been one of the truly great. As Vice-President he effectively ran the US for much of the prosperous 1950s while Eisenhower was occupied having heart attacks. Domestically, he was a “compassionate conservative” before it was a buzzword; on the world stage, a true statesman.

            Sadly, in Nixon’s case, character was destiny. He inherited a war and, in war as in politics, knew only one way to fight – totally. Escalate; deal from strength; carpet-bomb anything that looks like an enemy and sort out the collateral damage later. “Tricky Dick’s” major flaw wasn’t dishonesty or corruption – it was paranoia.

            And so on throughout modern history; from Franklin Delano Roosevelt – adulterous product of the Tammany Hall Democratic Machine – who steered the US out of the Great Depression, propped up Britain during the first years of World War II, and provided the USSR with the money and materiel to defeat Nazi Germany; to Thomas Jefferson, the spendthrift who fathered umpteen children on his slave, Sally Hemmings; and, of course, his namesake, William Jefferson Clinton.

            We could mention one historical exception, a man whose private life was blameless to the point of boredom; who neither drank nor smoked; and who set out a political ideology early in his career and delivered on every word of it – after becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1933.

            Our Federal Opposition should be careful. The Character Show is a Pandora’s Box. Any points are scored at the expense of the public’s respect for politics in general.

            Still, the Prime Minister is in a spot: the scoundrels I’ve named had real accomplishments to offset their faults. In trying to govern by sound bite, she has largely avoided that encumbrance.

            Her real problem is that recent allegations fit squarely with a narrative she herself created – that of a Machiavellian schemer who knifed her predecessor, lied to the nation, and made a deal to retain government then welched on it. She did this to herself.

            Now she’s doing it to the rest of us.