How not to end a war

Whilst going off to all and sundry here about how awesome Rotterdam is, how exciting the new architecture is, how beautifully arranged it all is, I have got reactions ranging from disbelief to curiousity to agreement to Miss C's - she couldn't find it, as a reconstruction, beautiful because of the suffering that had been involved in its flattening. Can't contradict that, of course, it's quite true. Rotterdam on the brain, combined with the fact that its flattening was used as a reason, to a certain extent, for the beginning of the RAF assault on German civilians, and Hilts' obsession, and certain inevitable thoughts at the moment about the suffering of the innocent, is making me sit around thinking about the second world war.

Back in my strategy concentration in Paris, we were taught that the role massive city bombing played in World War II was an emotive one, to a point. The Luftwaffe were doing too good a job knocking out British airfields in the first part of the war, so the RAF broke with accepted practice and started the massive bombing of German cities, beginning with Berlin. This produced the desired effect of nudging the Luftwaffe into retaliating with British city bombing, drawing their limited resources away from strategic bombing - sacrificing British proles pawns, so to speak, to keep the queeny-poo of ensuring air superiority. And after that the city bombing had its own twisted, retributive logic.

But did it hasten the end of the war? I don't think so. It's a sort of Law of Nature that gets drilled into you in strategy studies - Air Power Doesn't Win Wars. Maybe mutable or not, but one thing is sure in this case: Germany didn't surrender because German civilians were tired of getting bombed by the RAF, it surrendered because the Russians had arrived. And while the argument that Germany was easier to overrun because of all the important things that had been bombed is a persuasive one, I find it less persuasive than the argument that the German army and population went on fighting as long as they did because of their fury over how their cities had all been burnt down, or because of fear of what enemies who had shown so little mercy to civilians would do to them if they put down arms.

I honestly believe the Germans could have allowed fifty genocidal tyrants to come to power, and the English could have allowed their governors to go on murdering and enslaving darkies in the colonies for another 50 years, and neither group would have morally deserved to have their lives, happiness, and sanity abused by their leaders in such a disgusting and futile way. But who deserves anything anways.

Death, monkeys, and dancing bears

Thinking about the meaning of death in different cultures these days. My study of non-European cultures has been either so academic or so pop, so Bhagavad Gita or else Monkey!, that I have no practical idea what death means to people outside Europe. There's something rather brutal about the dominant thread we have in Europe and North America now. Centuries of training by our religion to see life as a linear progression to death and to the subsequent judgement of our selves, as we now understand our selves, by God, who we comprehend as another self. I think we still have that pattern, if you can call something so simple a pattern, in our minds. But now, for so many of us, especially in Europe, who have been repelled by the church, we've lost even the small complication of the assumption of judgement at the end - just the simple linear sentence of our selves, growing and aging and dying, and then a sudden full stop.

But in early Christian theology (well, not REALLY early - really early, it was a death and apocalypse cult) there was a conception of the afterlife that was less deeply personal. An idea that on death, we came to understand the will of God, and being in heaven was the same thing as being part of God's will. The release of one's own will, which leads inexorably to the idea of the release of the self - of our consciousnesses in any way that we can understand consciousness. Though from what I remember that's an idea that was resisted by the people who wrote about heaven, and when I listen to Christians going on about God's will they're able to contort their mind into believing that surrendering yourself to God doesn't mean not being your self anymore. Too pagan? Too frightening? I don't know. But the release of the self. Imagine that. You could spend years trying to imagine it. A lifetime. And once you did - once you could imagine that - surely you're no longer your self . . .

I think being alive is the process of being able to release your self. I think I'm very excited to be moving close to Asia and to start taking my holidays in countries and societies I don't know a fucking thing about in any practical sense. My head was full of it last weekend when we were in Brussels Far East museum - Congo-era colonial visioning of the east extraordinaire, to the tackiest effect possible, and I was standing there in the middle of all the Chineuropean fantasization, thinking - I don't know shit. I don't know shit. No cleverer than that fat corrupt shitful bastard Leopold II. I've never gone outside of my cultural comfort zone whilst travelling so I'm really not used to thinking like that. I don't know shit. A bit like death, really.

Sorry if this post is coming off as morbid or (retch) "emo". I'm actually in top form. Rather in the grip of pity for Michael Jackson, though. I don't know about iconography but I think historians will look back on him as a sort of textbook figure about what obsessive fame in our era can do to a delicate person. I was going to post a video of a "Love You Save" performance from the late 70's - that song's in the running for my 'Best Song Ever' trophy - but having just looked at it again I couldn't help but feel, as I was watching him grin and dance around superbly, that I was geeking on a dancing bear with a ring through its nose and no more memory of the wild, no conception of the bad it might do, nothing except not fucking up, not fucking up and getting burned by its trainer . . . Couldn't do it. Poor dead dancing bear. Poor thing.

In testament to pity, here's the only joke about his death I've heard so far that had nothing to do with little boys (and I've heard at least a dozen already):

A post-mortem will be held to determine which was the cause of death:

A) Sunshine
B) Moonlight
C) Good Times
D) Boogie

There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon

Alright, fucking seriously: all this crap about companies getting government aid and then, gasp choke, funding parties or bonuses is getting fucking ridiculous. Let me make something clear that I've learnt through painful and tedious experience over the last three years: a lot of the people involved in a certain level of corporatism have social lives almost completely wrapped up in business events. Unless you count interactions with prostitutes and strippers, which is by no means a completely separate issue. Don't like it? Me neither! But you know what, a single little complete economic meltdown is not going to change that, no matter how angry it makes normal everyday assholes with functioning emotional lives feel. Do you think those fuckin' events are fun? Do you think it's emotionally satisfying for those fat fucks to drink inappropriately and then try to grope the nearest member of the under-represented female sex? But it's the best they've got. Don't take it away from them.

As for the bonuses . . . look, the numbers are opaque, but I have a feeling my company lost money in 2008. Nonetheless if I hadn't got my bonus after working me fingers to the bone all year, I would have screamed to high heaven. Okay, we're not talking seven digits after I oversee the greatest losses in my company's history. But bonuses are part of why people take jobs, and there's no fuckin' reason in the world why some middle-management asshole who busts her ass all year long to make whatever she's in charge of work properly shouldn't get the bonus she's been banking on just because some upper-echelon cunts have decided to equivocate or outright lie about the security of some fund package.

What I'm saying is the money for the parties and conferences and bonuses are drops in the fucking ocean, and what's more, legitimate drops, as far as the ocean is legitimate. There's a reason those drops are dripped. Advertising or marketing drops. HR drops. But they don't make sense to you? They make you angry? Well then, buddy, they're also Chinese water torture drops distracting you from the main fuckin' gushing cataract of an issue: the ideas of growth on which these companies and investment groups are based are completely fucking untenable for the likes of you and me.

We're squealing like dumbfuck little pigs now that things have gone bad, and taxpayer money is bailing out these quagmires, and company people are still giving themselves bonuses. But where were the squeals in the 'good times' when property investment groups were making money with their speculations - when professional couples had to take out 50-year mortgages at extortionate rates if they wanted to live in a decent house in a metropolitan region? Where were the squeals as people with average-to-'good' incomes were pushed out of our capital cities by galloping property prices, while thousands of speculative units stayed empty? Where were the squeals as university tuition shot up, forcing students to take out private loans, again at rates extortionate relative to their income, and then take the first dumbfuck job they could find after graduating so they could start servicing those loans, benefiting fucking no one except the bank's shareholders? Where were the squeals when Western governments stripped down public and private pension schemes, telling us to try our luck in the stock market with private retirement savings instead, thereby massively fuelling the overheated engine of our financial 'organization'?

Were we actually stupid enough to believe that the stock market was just going to get better forever so it was okay to give up the retirement benefits that the labouring classes had fought like devils for over more than a century, or were we just watching too much television to bother protesting? And when the stock market was turning in 12% returns for those of us who bet on the Asians, did we ever sit in our fucking Priuses planning our early retirement and reflecting on what that sort of investment in a series of overheated, under-regulated economies was doing to them socially and ecologically?

And where are the squealers now, when things are bad, and every government initiative to make things 'good' again focuses on rebuilding this shitty, shitty system? I'll tell you where the squealers are, whining themselves hoarse on the idea that everything sucks now because people who work at these companies and banks are greedy, and that the present meltdown has any fucking thing to do with conferences, parties, and bonuses - and not on the absolutely wrong-headed ideas of growth that come from publicly floated companies and from people's retirement savings being forced onto something as fucking bestially stupid, unstable and immoral as the stock market. I tell you it gets my fucking goat. Oh sorry, that's not my goat, it's John Kerry. My fucking mistake.