Michael Garrison,
from the back cover of In the Regions of Sunreturn, 1979

I first heard Michael Garrison’s music in January of 1984. And the very first piece of his music I heard was “Daydreams” from Point of Impact. It has always been my favourite.

I had recently arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, after a few years of itinerant wandering in Europe and the Middle East. I was dead broke, but managed to score welfare. I rented a furnished room in a dilapidated boarding house on Richmond Street, with the intention of beginning a book. Welfare supplied enough money to pay the rent, eat sparingly and to drink a half bottle of cheap red wine every night while I banged away on the AZERTY keyboard portable typewriter I’d bought for a song in France. I supplemented my food income by shoplifting rump steaks and butter and the like. I borrowed a bicycle from a friend and drove twice a week to McGavin’s bakery, where I loaded up on day old bread. It was a frugal existence, and one of the happiest of my life.

Missing was some way of listening to music. I inveigled a friend into loaning me the money to buy a Sharp Double Cassette recorder with FM, AM and a couple of Short Wave bands. Paying her back from various gardening jobs I’d taken on to keep fit and supplement welfare would take more than a year. Almost immediately I came across CFUV FM, the station run out of the University of Victoria. One of the programs was called Ear Meals, hosted by Brian Lunger. This knowledgeable young dude played electronic and experimental music and sounds, the kind of music I’d come to love while living in Europe. But until now the only artists I’d heard were Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. He extended my listening range exponentially, and I owe most of my musical experience in these genres to him.

After listening to his weekly program for the first time, I extended my shoplifting items to include quality blank cassettes. The following week I was ready with a pristine BASF ninety-minute tape. I hit record and on came Garrison’s “Daydreams.” I still have this cassette. Indeed, over the next few years I recorded over one hundred tapes of what I came to call Bananas Music (early Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley) — in that their repetitive minimalism tended to drive unsuspecting partygoers bananas, and what French friends referred to as Musique Planante, or “mind-blowing music” (Garrison, Schulze, et al). Lunger’s Ear Meals introduced me to the work of Ian Boddy, Ron Slabe, Steve Roach, Manuel Göttsching, Don Robertson, Ron Berry, Rainer Bloss, Danna & Clement, Ebondazzar, Michael Stearns and Robert Schroeder, to name a few. And then there were the alternative groups such as Algebra Suicide, The Legendary Pink Dots, Ptose, Merzbow, Xray Pop, and Courage of Lassie, again to name a very few. There were hundreds.

In Europe the signature music for me was Schulze’s “Floating” (from the album Moondawn), a masterpiece of Sturm und Drang, and Reich’s tabula rasa music, such as “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Six Pianos.” But after first hearing Michael Garrison, it was his music, with its uncomplicated life affirming, often child-like joys and mysteries, that became the music I turned to whenever I needed to boot myself out of misery.

I managed to find three of his albums while in Victoria: In the Regions of Sunreturn, Prisms, and Eclipse. But Point of Impact was nowhere to be found.

And then I moved to Australia in 1989 with my new wife, an Aussie. I wrote Mike, putting in an order for a cassette of An Earth-Star Trilogy, and asked if he had any copies of Point of Impact, as it was unavailable in Australia as well. To my astonishment he too was sold out. What he did was to send me, free of charge, a cassette of three songs, which he called The Basement Tape. It included “Daydreams,” but the next piece was not from Point of Impact. It was only recently that I found that it was “Daydreams” and subsequent songs from the CD reissue of Eclipse.

Later, we corresponded again, when I ordered The Rhythm of Life on CD.

Then, with a new daughter to look after, and life being what it is: a series of nows that often do not connect, Michael Garrison and the great synth masterpieces of the Germans slipped out of my musical consciousness.

Many years elapsed before I wrote again, to find out how things were going and what new releases he’d come up with. But I never heard from him. I thought, maybe he’s hit the big time, or moved. So I let it go.

Just last week, while I was looking through a 1976 journal I’d written while in the south of France, I came across the mention of the “recent” Tangerine Dream recording of “Ricochet.” I went to look for the CD in my collection and found, several slots above it, Garrison’s Rhythm of Life. I’d forgotten I had it!

This led me to look through the old vinyls stored away in the closet. I pulled out the three albums mentioned above and decided to digitize them. While doing this I Googled “Michael Garrison” to find out what he’d been up to. I was absolutely stunned, physically paralysed for a moment, to find that he had died in 2004 … six years ago! How could this be? The website Perfect Sound Forever: Michael Garrison is in part an interview by Mark S. Tucker with Mike shortly before he died, and a eulogy. It turns out that he suffered depression from childhood and became an alcoholic. He died of massive liver failure. The very last thing I would have expected. Drugs, perhaps, but alcohol? He just didn’t seem the type. But then, who really is? As Tucker so eloquently says, “If any sum-up might be drawn, perhaps it would be that he was living proof that, even amidst the most unbearable of circumstances, spirit always prevails. As with so many creative minds, Mike found profound solace and intellectual engagement in beauty and wonder, documenting his visions for the rest of us. That is the essence of all art.”

It was as if I had just learned that a dear old friend, not seen for years, had died and I had been too busy with my life to notice. I can tell you that a day or so later, I shed tears listening to this gentle soul’s music.

Another web site, Music Blog of Saltyka and his friends, provides a Garrison discography with comment and downloadable links. It seems most of Mike’s work is out of print. Through this site, I was finally able to get a recording of Point of Impact. It has taken me 26 years!

By now I’ve downloaded all of Mike’s work, except Aurora Dawn, the link being broken. For the past two weeks I’ve been playing Michael Garrison in my car, often driving out of my way to keep listening. I’ve found many new favourites, but “Daydreams” remains number one. Tucker describes it as “an almost tabernacularly moody number, a gem in the Garrison repertoire and unusually pensive.” And I agree with him when he says it’s much too short.

I was a heavy dope smoker in my younger years. Growing older, my lungs started rebelling, and so these days I only occasionally have a few tokes. I do so to rouse myself out of whatever mental status quo I’ve sunk into. These occasional tokes are like spiritual medicine. And so is Michael Garrison’s music.

Michael Garrison, from the cover of Images, 1986

Addendum: Tucker says, “Mike had none of the pretensions too often normal to many artists. He was unhurried and natural. Even in his e-mail’s, there was always an unselfconscious smile.” How true. He was, in a word, a nice guy. I’ve included the following scans of his letters to me simply to verify this. And also, to quote Tucker once more: “… for the selling [of] a half million units from a 13-title catalogue, his was, and still is, not a well-known name.” These letters will add a little to the dearth of what is known about Michael Garrison.

See also the web sites of: Craig Padilla; Klaus Schulze; Steve Roach; Ian Boddy; Don Robertson

Technorati Tags: alternative music, ambient techno, electronic music, michael garrison, Music, synth, synthesizer

Inherent Vice has been described as “Pynchon Lite” and a “beach read” and it’s true that of all his tomes, this is the easiest to digest without recourse to a complete encyclopedia and a ten kilo dictionary.

But on page 347, Pynchon nails perhaps the main reason why the world we’re living in is too broke to fix. Doc, in conversation with Crocker Fenway, a man who speaks for Those Who Have Always Ruled, is told:

“We’re in place. We’ve been in place forever. Look around. Real estate, water rights, oil, cheap labor — all of that’s ours, it’s always been ours. And you, at the end of the day what are you? one more unit in this swarm of transients who come and go without pause…eager to be bought off with a car of a certain make, model, and year, a blonde in a bikini, thirty seconds on some excuse for a wave--a chili dog, for Christ’s sake. We will never run out of you people. The supply is inexhaustible.”

Technorati Tags: Books, thomas pynchon

They cannot abide being in opposition. How could they? This is the Born to Rule Party. Tory Toffs and lower caste right wing larvals long ago put aside their innate revulsion for one another to become a grab bag Coalition to further the interests of the big end of town. To ensure this wealth creation of the few it was a logical step to eliminate as far as possible any interfering human rights. This later became a sport with asylum seekers.

It must have been hard for the likes of Alexander Downer to rub shoulders with a Wilson Tuckey or a Bill Heffernan.

Now, with the final farewell performance of the Smirking Jerk, Peter Costello, the only representative of the Higher Born is Malcolm Turnbull. And look at what a dill he has become. Who knows what kind a leader he might have been had the Howard Virus not continued to quarantine the ethical standards of those still in Parliament.

If I’m not mistaken, Turnbull used to be a liberal. But the Liberal Party is Conservative; they just don’t have the courage to correct that glaring error. A political party that calls itself Liberal but is in fact ultra conservative is a good indication of its schizoid state.

At the beginning of his leadership, Turnbull found himself trying to convince a rabble of Howard loyalists that the party must change. Now, with the OzCar disaster, it is clear that his integrity has been gutted. A shadow of his former self, all we see and hear now is a stentorian bully, a patrician whose features are getting sleezier by the day. Soon his ravaged visage will be indistinguishable from Heffernan’s.

And any day now, Turnbull will become yet another failed leader swinging in the breeze. Who is left? Joe Hockey? Also damaged by OzCar. Tony Abbott? He should get out of politics. Andrew Robb? Another nasty, but perhaps their only hope.

As an opposition, the Coalition’s one and only goal is to bring down the government. It has no other purpose than to be obstructionist. Its opportunism is on display every day in every way.

Imagine how vastly improved the governance of Australia would be if a broader version of the Greens were the opposition. Instead we have this wheyfaced pantheon of ferals whose self-interest places the well being of Australia dead last in a miserable list of grubby priorities.

Australia desperately needs an effective opposition. The Coalition has forfeited that right.

Technorati Tags: australian politics, coalition, ethics, john howard, liberal party, malcolm turnbull

Memorial to Neda Soltan: Angel of Freedom

The current horror in Iran between a majority of people who want to be free in a secular society and the minority of insane fundamentalists who are happy to slaughter in the name of Allah is a clear example of a species that looks to have passed its use-by date. After centuries of moral crimes committed by each and every religion, it’s hard not to conclude that now, in the 21st century, the human race is too broke to fix.

The Iranian government, led by the devastatingly vicious ignorance of Ayatollah Khamenei, his stooge, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and their stooges, the Basiji, speaks for the persistence of evil in the human psyche. Perhaps not since Hitler and Stalin has a regime so blatantly embodied a hatred of their fellow man. Indeed, for them their fellow man is non-existent.

At the root of the insanity is a triumvirate of hopelessness: 1) The Y Chromosome. 99.99 per cent of all violence is caused by the malformed male gender. 2) Religion. The Gods are not crazy. The people who made them up are. Religion is the single greatest contributor to intolerance in history. 3) Money. If religion is not involved in the quest for power, money is. All three work together in most cases.

The Iranian killers are all men. The Iranian religious hierarchy is all men. Allah is a man. God is a man. Yahweh is a man. Men and religion are the toxic combination that will eventually destroy the human race.

History shows one thing very clearly: life is cheap. Iran’s protesters have two choices. For Neda Soltan and every human being who realizes that we are all brothers and sisters, they can use their numbers to overrun the Basiji, the police, the Revolutionary Guards, and finally the desiccated old men at the top, until what is left of them can take over the government. It’s time to stop offering their precious lives as nothing more than target practice for a mob of deluded maniacs.

Or they can go home and try to live out their lives as best they can.

Technorati Tags: fundamentalism, Iran, Iran election, Khamenei, Neda, religion

It was too early for the weekend rush so I had a chat with the woman on duty while the cook went about the task of sizzling and toasting. I’d bought The Age, which lay open on the counter. The woman noted President Obama’s photo on the front page — he’d just given the Cairo speech — and wondered how long he had to live. I seconded her worry, remarking that politicians who spoke of uniting different cultures and especially religions were usually targeted for death by Right Wing dividers.

To my surprise she started to talk about the situation in Israel. She knew all about hardliner Binyamin Netanyahu and moderate Tzipi Livni and their opposing views on a separate Palestinian state. I was blown away. Most people who work in a food court are barely able to grunt when local politics are raised, let alone foreign affairs.

Then she returned to Obama’s speech. She wasn’t so sure about his opening salutation of Salaam Aleikum. I was about to differ on its utter appropriateness when the brekkie was delivered. Putting the plate on a tray, she said: “Almost the very next thing Obama talked about was the Holocaust. You know, don’t you, that millions being killed is a lie. I doubt the toll was more than a hundred thousand.”

Now I was blown away again. I gibbered something before saying, “Well, I’m off to eat. See you later.” I found a table well away from the food court and sat there for a stunned minute or two before opening The Age to read the news of the day. But for the life of me, I was unable to concentrate. What in the hell had I just heard?

Here was a woman in her mid-fifties, seemingly intelligent and definitely articulate. A Holocaust denier. So how, in the face of irrefutable proof, could she maintain the belief that the Holocaust had killed so few? I guess I was lucky to get away before she could go on about “what really happened”.

Are the brains of Holocaust-deniers (and creationists too, for that matter) defective? What part of their cognitive faculties is switched off so that belief replaces reality? I have no problem with debating reality: what it really is and how many of them there are. Reality, in this case, is what we all agree on, but beliefs are the stillborn offspring of dogma, and, as Robert Anton Wilson said, “When dogma enters brain, all intellectual activity ceases.” The vital signs are there, but the brain is dead.

Belief is where you part company with complexity. Holocaust deniers believe that six million Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and the physically and mentally impaired did not perish at the hands of the Nazis, just as creationists believe that God created the earth in six days some four or five millennia ago. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in both cases.

If Holocaust denial weren’t bad enough, my face almost fell into the eggs when I read about what amounts to the other extreme end of this spectrum. That of Michael Ben-Ari, an MP for the right-wing Nation Union Party in Israel. He was recently arrested during rioting by settlers in the occupied West Bank. These settlers are as blind as their opposites in Holocaust denial. They regard the Palestinians the same way the Nazis regarded the Jews. Of Obama’s speech, Ben-Ari said: “Mr Obama’s hatred for the people of Israel led him to deliver a most dangerous speech that exposed his pro-Islamic trends.”

Is this man insane? How could he interpret Obama’s speech as full of hatred or pro anything except world peace … unless he is stark raving mad?

But this is the world we live in. Peopled by far too many subs ‘n’ duds who are clearly out of their minds.

But leave us not forget their leaders. That Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the Burmese Generals continue to rule with unrelenting cruelty while the Free World looks on is indicative of the moral failure that plagues all governments. Kim Jong-il of North Korea may be the worst of all. He has the mental capacity of a booze-addled eleven-year-old in charge of a military with nuclear capabilities. Recently we’ve heard that Kim is favouring his youngest son to replace him as Dear Leader. And why not the eldest son? Well, that nong fell out of favour with daddy when it was discovered that he snuck into Japan to go to Disneyland.

At least we hear on the odd occasion of Zimbabweans and Burmese challenging authority. But, aside from the international antics of disgraced number one son, the people of North Korea are phantoms.

Remember that lethal fool George W. Bush? Like the madmen above, he simply stole elections. A fundamentalist Christian, he is identical to his fundamentalist Muslim enemy, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Bush claimed over and over that God was instructing him in everything he did. Ahmadinejad claimed that he was surrounded by light when he addressed the UN General Assembly in 2005. But the “light” wasn’t coming from Dubya’s God, it was coming from his own personal deity.

The beat thuds on when we read that the world’s most wanted war criminal, Ratko Mladic, is living openly in Belgrade; or if not there, elsewhere. Serbian authorities are miffed that the unauthorized release of this information might jeopardise their entry into the EU. But they are mum about successive Serbian governments and the military keeping him safe all this time. The point being surely that his alleged part in the murder of 7000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica was no more than a soldier doing his duty. One thing is sure, the world’s overfunded spy agencies have been conspicuously impotent in his capture. Just as they allowed hundreds of Nazis to get away after WWII. In some cases they even helped the war criminals to migrate freely to other countries.

We also read of James von Brunn, an 88-year-old American Holocaust-denying fascist who walked into Washington’s Holocaust Center and shot dead a black security guard. He was wounded by two other security guards before he got the chance to murder others. A fellow white supremacist wrote on his blog: “He was trying to set Our Race free”. If only this representative of “Our Race” would look in the mirror he would see that the only members of the race he is trying to save amount to white trash.

Racism and nationalism go hand on spotty cock. To paraphrase Yu Hua, referring to the post-Tiananmen Square generation of Chinese nationalists: They “have no sense of ambivalence, no idea of life’s ambiguities.” Indeed, they could easily devolve into today’s equivalent of the fanatically murderous Red Guards. The only thing separating the Chinese nationalists with the inbreds among their Western brethren is religion.

It’s like we’re still living in the Dark Ages; or worse, trying to return to them. During Europe’s nadir at least the Islamic world flourished. Now every last religion is in mortal danger of being overrun by its extremist elements. They may be a minority, but they are a minority with weapons and the fanatic’s lust to use them in the name of each religion’s blinkered self-righteousness.

Tariq Ali is correct in naming the present era a “clash of fundamentalisms”. Anti-evolutionary extremists are like robots run amuck. The Christian who believes a foetus has more rights than its mother; the Jewish settler who burns Palestinian crops because his God decreed the land to be sacred for Jews and Jews only; The Islamic terrorist who beats to death a young girl because she went to school. It is these people, those among us, who look just like us, who have declared war on humanity. But it’s not just a battle between tolerance and intolerance, your god or his god, it’s a battle between sanity and insanity.
—
Addendum: The man whose name could be transmogrified into Ahm-as-mad-as-a-Djinn was never in doubt to win the Iranian election. When a nation is ruled by clerics, you can be sure their chosen halfwit will be victorious. Just look at Franco of Spain. The Catholic Church backed him to the hilt, the other end of which he drove into the heart of his nation.

Technorati Tags: Christian fundamentalists, Holocaust, Holocaust denial, Jewish settlers, nationalism, Obama, religion, Taliban, terrorism

My wife and daughter arrived home a little later and the three of us sat on the back verandah, basking in the cool southeasterly breeze that had routed the northwesterly and its dry heat. I drank an ice cold Ukranian beer and loved every drop.

Knowing the hot day was approaching we had wisely booked into a local restaurant we knew had good air conditioning. We ate our dinner — Spaghetti Marinara, Calimari Fritti and Spaghetti Napolitana — in a full house, cool and relieved and deeply thankful that the cool change had saved us from baking all night in our stifling house.

We had no idea that while we were joking with the people at the next table about the gigantic serves of sumptuous desserts, the cool change we had all cheered was responsible for turning the gale force winds around so that hundreds of people in Kinglake, Flowerdale, Strathewen, Humevale, St Andrews, Steels Creek, Marysville, Churchill, Labertouche, Callignee, and many other hamlets who previously had felt safe, were at that moment being burnt alive, literally vaporized, in a fire storm that has been likened to the fire bombing of Dresden and the equivalent of 650 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

It wasn’t until the following day, when we heard the morning news and that evening sat stricken in front of the television watching reports of the carnage, that the true horror of the conflagration emerged. The days since have produced harrowing coverage with heartbreaking photos of entire families lost in the fire that roared through without warning. The conditions were unprecedented. No rain in January and very little before that. Four days of above 43° heat the week before. And after a few days of cooler weather, the predicted record-breaking heat on that Saturday, the 7th of February, which eventually produced the worst natural disaster in Australia’s history.

One of my wife’s colleagues lost her house, but managed to drive herself and her two children down the mountain to safety. It was to be over twenty-four hours before she learned that her husband, who had remained behind to fight the fire, was still alive. Two friends of another colleague were killed. The boyfriend of one of my daughter’s closest friends lost an aunt and uncle and their children. Here in Melbourne, the six degrees of separation have been reduced to two.

The stories of some of the survivors show just how quickly it all happened, without warning. A man in Marysville (where it is estimated that one hundred of the 519 residents perished) said he and his family were sitting down to dinner at 5:30 PM. The radio had reported the fires to be far enough away to remain alert but that evacuation plans were not yet necessary. By six PM, a mere half hour later, he and his wife and two children were running for their lives, without even enough time to grab wallets and purses.

Kinglake survivors reported the same instantaneous attack by walls of flame that moments before were nonexistent. In both towns, there was only one road in and out. Both roads were later littered with burnt out cars, many with charred bodies still inside.

As of this writing, 181 are confirmed dead, with the figure likely to reach 300.

It is impossible to comprehend the horror of the people who died, people who one minute were alive and preparing for a Saturday night of fun or relaxation, and the next minute were huddled together or alone, calling or texting goodbyes to friends and families elsewhere, as the heat sucked the oxygen from their lungs and the fire turned them into ashes, some burnt so badly that they will never be properly identified.

It is even more difficult to comprehend the horror of the survivors, people who have lost members of their family, their close friends, and their homes. People who while escaping, heard the screams of the trapped, the bellowing of burning animals. People who experienced such fear that post traumatic stress will define their lives for years to come, if not forever.

This catastrophe is perhaps the worst kind: the event that comes without warning. It emphasizes the fragility, the impermanence of life. We never know what the next minute has in store for us. If we could all remain aware of this, our selfishness and greed and hate would largely disappear. Because that is exactly what has happened in the aftermath. The generosity of Australians coming to the aid of the victims is almost Biblical. Where politics tends to divide us, tragedy unites us.

For many of the survivors and the rest of us, there is a feeling of guilt — well known among Holocaust survivors — at having been spared. I myself have become almost ill watching with despair the daily reports in the media. But I have also felt unable to turn away, as if doing so would reduce my solidarity with the victims. In the lottery of life, I could have easily been one of them, just as they could easily be safe in their own home, like me.

The future of the planet depends on every one of us comprehending life’s impermanence. We are truly all in this together.

Technorati Tags: Australia, fire, Melbourne, Victoria

Obama is “that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.” — Mark Morford, Is Obama an enlightened being?

It appears that a sort of balancing agent occasionally steps in to tweak the evolution of the human species. Some people call that balancing agent God, some call it Gaia, the living breathing planet we all inhabit. Whatever you call it, as the planet and its occupants hurtle toward 21 December 2012, said by the Mayans to represent the end of history, we may be faced with a choice between light and darkness. That is, the transformation into a more evolved species or an atavistic return to primordial savagery.

The destruction route fits well with the blinkered worldview of the conservative mindset. Historically, conservatives have been humanity’s greatest impedance to evolution. They frighten easily because their accumulated assets and possessions — ultimately all that matters to them — are threatened whenever any change — always perceived as a threat — is at hand. They relish the status quo to the point of starting wars to preserve it.

It was not so much the Jews who killed Christ, as the Conservative Jews. Jesus Christ represented a threat to their status quo. Extrapolate this to every event and evolutionary moment in history. Who persecuted Galileo? Who shot Yitzhak Rabin? Who shot Martin Luther King? Conservatives who could not bear their transformative messages.

The overwhelming feeling of hope around the world at Obama’s presidency is neither naïve nor foolish nor stupid. It derives from the nascent desire of every human being to be free of petty small-mindedness, to open their hearts to others, to stop hating.

Contrast this hope with the feelings of anger and despair at the divisive and selfish solutions of frightened conservative governments of the past. Solutions which decree that “me and mine (family, nation) are all that matters, and to hell with everyone else.”

But in reality, we’re all in this together. And deep down we know this.

Obama is no messiah; that is a fanciful notion of the religious. Throughout history the religious have persecuted the spiritual, turning those natural yearnings for grace and compassion into “my God vs your God.”

But Obama may well be enlightened, or on the path to enlightenment, even if he doesn’t know it or even care about such a lofty ideal. He appears to be an American version of the Dalai Lama, without the arcane trappings. He emanates light; so vastly different to the darkness spread by George W. Bush, and all those like him.

If the Conservatives don’t murder him — always their final solution — then Barack Obama might be the global leader who begins to sow the seeds of humanity’s emergence from the darkness of the old history into the light of a new history — a kind of second coming, after all — where fear as the prime motivator is replaced by love. Or, to be less goopy, by always remembering to put ourselves in the shoes of others.

Unless, of course, we are all spiritual criminals sentenced to life without parole on this prison planet for crimes committed on a higher plane.

Note: This post was half written when I went to lunch and came across the following letter in The Age, published today, 23 January. I don’t know if the writer meant to alert folks to Mark Morford’s great article, written last June, but thanks anyway. I love the cluelessly arrogant hubris of the final line, which is another way of saying, “this is all I can see, so this is all there is”:

Psst: He’s not the Messiah

Many people, especially many Americans, appear to have expectations regarding President Obama that have no connection with rationality. One US commentator gushed that Mr Obama was “that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health-care plans … but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve.”

Obama won’t be able to match the fantasies he appears to have inspired in many. — Henk Verhoeven, NSW

Technorati Tags: conservatism, conservatives, gaia, Obama, religion, spiritual liberation

Technorati Tags: fascism

The circle jerk of war criminals didn’t stop there. In addition to Medal winners Tony Blair and Columbia’s handy Prez, Alvaro Uribe, Iraqi slaughter architects Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and their chief talkback spruiker of all things immoral and indecent, Rush Limbaugh, joined the festivities.

In his last days in office, King Dubya will probably pardon all the contributors to torture and infamy. Though they may want to eschew traveling abroad for fear of being snatched like Pinochet.

What a naive thing to say! The world is run by these kinds of people, who make sure everyone gets the shaft but themselves. And the ones still doing the shafting — Ehud Olmert, Robert Mugabe, for example — will get away with their atrocities too.

Back in the old days, megalomaniacs like Napoléon had to suffer island arrest, but in modern times war criminals live grandly, the bill for their elderly excesses footed by the descendants of those they happily killed.

Technorati Tags: blair, Bush, iraq, john howard, mugabe, olmert, uribe, war crimes

The Pro-Israel lobby worldwide is amazingly powerful. Grown men and women in democratic parliaments are afraid to speak out at the atrocities of the current Gaza invasion. Why? Because they would be attacked relentlessly.

Any Jew who criticizes Israel’s policies regarding Palestinians is immediately labeled a self-hating Jew.

Any non-Jew who criticizes Israel’s policies regarding Palestinians is immediately labeled an anti-Semite.

The result is that sane debate is no longer possible.

George W. Bush squandered the sympathies of the world after 9/11 by illegally invading Iraq with disdain for international law. Worse, goaded by rabid right wingers, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, he did it with the greatest of hubris.

The present Israeli government is squandering any and all remaining sympathy remaining from the holocaust they suffered under the Nazis.

People are calling the Gazan invasion a holocaust, comparing it to the Nazis’ treatment of the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Jews are being forced to swallow their pride and honour by condoning the slaughter of women and children in the name of defending their country against a people they have persecuted for decades.

Perhaps Israel’s problem is that it has been led by right wing hardliners since one of their own assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. With Yasser Arafat, Rabin had signed the Oslo agreement the previous year, heralding unprecedented peace along the border. Following Rabin’s assassination, Shimon Peres led the govenment for a mere six months before the election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli Government has never looked back. Netanyahu was replaced by Ehud Barack, the current Defense Minister and architect of the Gazan invasion, then Ariel Sharon, often referred to as the “Butcher of Beirut”, and finally Ehud Olmert, often referred to as the “Butcher of Lebanon”.

In a sane world, Olmert, Sharon and Barack, along with George W. Bush, would be classified as war criminals. Their combined efforts have caused the needless deaths of thousands upon thousands.

It is now sixty years since Israel was founded. It still exists and thrives. Yet successive governments have continued to frighten otherwise reasonable and compassionate Jews with the imminent destruction of their nation. It is true that Israel was founded by a people paranoid in the extreme, and justifiably so. But somewhere in these six decades was there not the opportunity to treat the indigenous population, the Palestinians, with enough generosity and compassion so that extremist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas could never have gained strength?

In short, was Yitzhak Rabin Israel’s last chance for peace?

If the Palestinians, under Hamas, have called for the destruction of Israel, it is now apparent that Israel has harboured the same intentions for the Palestinians. As the representative of Goliath, Israel appears to be determined to wipe out the Davids across the border.

Yet another example of the state of our world: this situation is too broke to fix.

Links:
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe

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