I have confidence in free

Wow, the Open Veins of Latin America is so grim. Or rather what it describes is. I don't know if it was the translator or Galeano or what, but the way the bestiality of the colonial exploitation of Latin America is described is actually almost jokey. Sarcastically and angry, obviously, but it makes the grim reading somehow bearable nonetheless. Or maybe I'm just getting less squeamish about grim reading as I age and as my job forcibly informs me that life is grim so might as well read grim too. I don't know.

One thing I've enjoyed about the first third is his historical economic perspective - not just in the sense of how dreadful the sugar or coffee etc. monocultures, single-minded resource mining, were in the colonies themselves, but also why Spain and Portugal have always been such economic shitholes relative to other major European nations despite such riches being exploited in their overseas property. How they failed to encourage any sort of industrial means of production on their own territory, and how all that money therefore ended up in the pockets of industrially producing countries like the Netherlands and England. In the case of Portugal especially, the country failed to have any protectionism in their policies vis a vis England during the gold rush in Brazil - that lovely old free trade - which meant all the gold went to England, all the produce went to Portugal and Brazil. Which leaves Portugal, eventually, with no gold and lots of worn-out stuff, and England with gold and a working class whose consumer demands can sustain some sort of functioning economy.

It's been a question I've been asking myself for a long time - why are we so fond of free trade? Especially now, as it's costing us jobs as the units of production move to cheap labour countries; and in the beginning, as the lovely Ha-Joon Chang pointed out, the economically powerful countries protected their home industries furiously. And as silly as it sounds, until the last week or so it had never properly sunk in for me that we're so fond of it because we're English, or as North Americans we're culturally English (face it). And it has quite an auspicious history in our culture, that free trade. If you imagine the self-evidently wrong things people have a real spiritual faith in - like, that a man this criminally irresponsible and sociopathic has some authority that the Good Lord Herself gave him - then it makes absolute and perfect sense that the idea of free trade (accessing raw materials and selling finished goods our population had processed), which did make us much richer than most of our trade partners over centuries, would inspire an even more devout and widespread faith.

This is the thing, you know - at work and on the news I'm faced constantly with things that are obviously destructive, environmentally or socially - I'm faced with these incredible iniquities, and this incredibly badly functioning economic system. And I don't think it's because the people involved wish to do evil, or wish to act badly; I don't think they want to harm their fellow man, or harm their planet. I don't even think the prime motivation is to be much richer or much better than their fellow men, although that's there, and it's huge, the animal motivation to be more secure than anybody else . . . I think we're looking at faith in action, at the conviction that there's no other way. That not only that this way of organizing ourselves economically is the best, or the least worst, but that any other way of organizing ourselves economically would lead to a complete fucking disaster.

I think it's a very religious sentiment, or religious faith; that all the horrible things done to Latin American nationalist movements during the 'Cold War', for example, were okay for US policy makers and for US people (because it's not like all those dreadful things were secret) because they had a conviction, a faith that the alternative to an admittedly obviously higly exploitative economic model would have been so much worse. It's something that's been so difficult to argue with, and so many people in the US who did argue with it were condemned with a really religious fervour. There are so many rational arguments against the economic model, but framing the arguments rationally doesn't really match the spirit, I think, in which the economic model is supported. So what to do about that? Maybe it's already changing. I don't know. Latin America is going all lefty now and while there's a lot of bad noise in the media it doesn't sound like they're funding any more Contras.

Wishing, for once, TMZ had been right

I'm sad Natasha Richardson is dead. She was hot in a blonde way, she was a nice sort of actress, and she was the only good thing about that execrable film of The Handmaid's Tale back in the day. I wonder how Margaret Atwood felt about that film. I was crazy about the book, certainly relative to every other Margaret Atwood novel I read besides, which were all disappointing - besides Cat's Eye, which I also quite liked, but which is nowhere close to my desert island reading list. It must be annoying to have such a good book turned into such a lame film.

But I guess it wasn't that lame, because Natasha Richardson was really good as the lead. Poor lady. I liked her in Widow's Peak, too. That movie irritates the hell out of me because I know there was quite a nice twist at the end and I'm fucked if I can remember it, and the internet won't tell me the spoiler, and I didn't like it enough to watch it again. It reminds me of back in the days of VHS when I forced myself to sit through Breaking the Waves at a friend's house, because Emily Watson was so good. And the tape cut out about ten minutes before the end. Obviously there was no way I was ever going to watch it again, because it was a piece of shit, and no way I was going to pay money to rent it again and skip to the end, because I don't like encouraging that sort of thing. And all the other assholes who'd seen it at the time wouldn't tell me how it ended because they 'didn't want to spoil it' for me.

Well, it was already fucking spoiled for me by virtue of it being a bit of voyeuristic sado-wank fantasy from the intensely boring visual libido of Scandinavia's stuttering answer to a question about love nobody asked. Anyways, I'll try asking the internet how it ends now. Oh, she kills herself, her husband recovers, and she goes to heaven. Wow. That sucks. Let the trite shittiness of that movie be a warning to any parents who attempt to raise their children as atheist nudists.

Speaking of voyeuristic wank fantasies, we watched The Proposition, I think the weekend before last. It was worth watching and stacked the odds a little more in Australia's favour as an eventual destination for us; in view of my present job and what it's making me think about trees, I'm finding the idea of living in a continent whose native trees look like people irresistible. Not that you have to travel to Australia to see the eucalyptuses now. They're a very aggressive, fast-growing hardy tree that take over all they touch; Sicily, for example, was full of eucalyptuses, crowding out the native vegetation. Large forestry companies are pulling out all the stops to have them infest South America and, increasingly, the south of Africa too, because they mature so much faster than other hardwood trees. It's an environmental disaster in progress, one of those nasty environmental disasters that large companies can get 'environmentalist' credit for, because they plant all these trees under the rubric of reforestation.

But for a tree to survive and thrive in a desert continent like Australia, they'll take over the world elsewhere where things are friendlier if they're allowed. Mark my words, one day we'll think of eucalyptuses as Australia's answer to the syphilis conquistadors brought from South America via their rape of the indigenes: you dip the stick (or rather force it violently in), you pay for the oil . . . anyways. I'll go on more about that later.

So we watched The Proposition last weekend, and it was very beautiful to look at. I'm an absolute pig for Nick Cave, who wrote the script and co-wrote the soundtrack with another Bad Seed. The soundtrack was as good as I'd been expecting. The script . . . well, it was reassuringly unexceptional. If it had been very good I would be scared of Nick Cave's goodness. There were some nice moments of dialogue, particularly with the outlaws, but the way he wrote it for the police chief and his wife made suspending disbelief difficult - made it all a little too kabuki. The biggest revelation of the movie was that it made Guy Pearce attractive. For me - besides in Memento, in which I enjoyed his performance very much but which somehow didn't count because of the amnesia making him all appropriately vacuous - the man was unshakably Felicia from Priscilla. Even though I loved L.A. Confidential at the time, for example, his appearances as Ed always shook me out of my audienceship as I expected him to start singing "I Don't Care if the Sun Don't Shine." But The Proposition managed to get me wondering, during conferences and staff meetings, what he'd be like carnally, which I'd never wondered about Felicia.

Knees and toes

Does it ever strike you that our conscious selves are wrapped up in the task of preparing us, even hurrying us along to our deaths, and that it's our dark, greedy animal shadows or ids or whatever you like that are keeping us stubbornly alive? Maybe that's just my conscious self. Maybe I'm just exagerrating to myself, how unhealthy I think my professional life is. Because I'll tell you one thing: it sure as fuck isn't my shadow keeping me there. Sorry for all the whining, but if I have to be annoyed by my job my blog will have to be too.

Went driving again last night. I still suck but I'm getting to participate in the flow of traffic - luckily most of Belgium sucks, too. My guide only had to yell at me once. Poor guy. It's getting funner and funner. Still, once I've pocketed the license, that's it, pretty much. No driving until I move to a better country. Seems silly, and expensive, but I'm laying steep odds we will be moving to Australia - it's early days yet, but the indicators are pointing in that direction - and I won't wait the two years to get a license there.

Last night I had a dream Richard E. Grant did a commercial for Head & Shoulders. I couldn't work out whether or not it was a joke even at the time. His hair is alright, I guess, but it doesn't start at the typical place one sees in hair commercials. He had short, poofy bangs, too. It was a all a little, for lack of a better word, gay.

The Will to Glower

My parents bought me a pressure cooker and it's pretty sweet. Now I have a new Mac and a new pressure cooker, and I'm really not sure which one is sweeter. The Mac is pretty fucking sweet, and there's the added charm that I didn't let them pay for it; it's the shiny aluminum fruit of my labour. But the pressure cooker has the charm of being a gift, and I can cook ceci soup in it, which I did, last night, for my darling and my parents. I can't do that with the Mac. Anyways, the mother and father have gone off to Italy now; I'm sad, don't want to talk to anybody about anything - least of all business - and my will to work is at an all time low.

I realized a couple of weeks ago that I have enough money now to move on and do something else with my life. It's not enough in the sense of it being anywhere close to my savings goals or letting me have a child without lying there like a beached whale wondering how I'm going to pay for it, but it's enough in the sense that it would let me move on and do something else with my life. That, combined with feeling sad and grumpy my parents have left, and feeling surprised and pleased that they seem to understand that I will have to slow down and hippy out pretty soon - and they're not worried about it, unless they're far better actors than I've given them credit for - all that combines and leaves me with no will to work. Back down to worrying about my manager's bonuses again. Ah, I'll pull my thumb out, they deserve it.

Your grey-haired daughter loves you and knows how not to eat peanuts

My parents are here, oh them of the auspicous genes, having a nap at the mo while I don't, I repeat, don't go to the office, which is pretty great and makes up for any little niggling annoyance at being asked for the umpteenth time if I'm managing my food allergies properly or some such - God, no wonder I was such an asmathic little drip as a teenager. But in a larger sense I'm learning how to manage such little niggling annoyances - feel them and enjoy them. They're luxurious annoyances that not everybody benefits from and that I, assuming I manage a normal lifespan, will not always benefit from - not just because of mortality in his ugliest guise - but because of the aging process gradually reversing our dynamic of futile, unwelcome concern. So may as well benefit from the annoyances now. It all comes from love.

We've been having a nice time and eating superbly and now they understand why I hate my job, so will hopefully only worry the inevitable amount when I get fired/quit and hippy out. Drinking far more than I usually do; I think half the reason I became such a pothead is not liking drink as much as most of my family does. But it's fun. We went to my neighborhood's wine-tasting festival, which in a European context means something besides hipsters with nothing else to do that night sauntering around a congress centre being ignorant and putting on an act of slightly less ignorance. It means a big marquee full of overweight Belgians getting fucking sloshed on fine wine, peeing in the corners and then getting led out in handcuffs after paying a 10 euro cover. Frankly, it made me appreciate hipsters. I never thought I'd say that, but you try sampling wines in a tent full of moronic elephants sweating stale tobacco-scented grappa, and you'd appreciate hipsters too. It was fun, though, and then we went to my favourite tajine place. Generally we've been having a nice time. They're leaving in the morning. It seems dreadfully short, it's bizarre how these visits always seem so short when you're in the home stretch. Oh well.