Pains, and otherwise, in the ass

So one of the things, MANY things, I like about running outside is being able to have al fresco pee breaks. I had one in the Don Valley a few days ago and in a moment of lighthearted madness decided to pull down my running skirt to take care of business, instead of simply pull the crotch to one side (an action which in itself is one of the principal benefits of running skirts - they're a sort of portable private loo). The upshot was an arseful of poison ivy. Well, one arse cheek, anyways. You know what? It hurt.

Hurting slightly less is that my trip to New York this weekend is off due to flooding upstate cutting off the Amtrak trains. I'm fine with it. I was having to run around too much and beginning to count off people here I want to see that I was not going to be able to see. Also I've already told La New Yorkaise I think her new husband (I was gonna be down for the wedding) is a right sack of shit, so it would be one of those weddings. It sucks I won't get to see her this year, but the odds are good when I see her next year it will be sans that cockchump, since she is the sort who tends to see the light eventually.

Also, she picked a shitty week for the party, it being the 10th anniversary of the thing that happened there 10 years ago. The city is going to be fucking crawling with presidents and former presidents and private security and police and roadblocks and basically too many edgy fuckers with guns. The odds are against another Menezes episode, but probably less against them than against the repeat explosive performance the city seems to be arming up for, and I'm too swarthy to be comfortable with those sorts of odds.

Also, I don't want to hear people there talk about it. I don't want to hear them saying how that day changed everything, I don't want to hear any soul-searching, I don't want to know, basically. Not with all those thousands of dead people being used as an excuse to extend the war on the developing world that most Americans hadn't realized they were waging, and still don't, and hundreds of thousands more dying as a consequence. Ugh. No please. Parlez vers la main. That's unfair, of course, especially since the people in New York I'd be hearing talk about it are the people who actually need to be talking about it, since it happened to them and people they were neighbours with and all. Nonetheless, I just don't want to fucking hear it. So it's just as well I'm not going.

USA Wins 1-1

After I spend a lot of time hanging out with Americans while in Europe, as this weekend, I feel simultaneously refreshed and slightly nauseous, like I've eaten too much watermelon. It just never ceases to amaze me how they can cut to the heart of some things and have a breadth of vision that baffle the locals here - mostly on the personal level - and are so infantile when it comes to other things, like the way anywhere else in the world works. I especially love to get them going about China. Not saying I understand China or anything but all of their imaginings based on sheer bloody panic over the possibility of getting replaced is really hilarious, and oddly cinematic, as if it hasn't even entered their head that the billion plus population there is made up of real people with aspirations to not get malnutrition and not the soulless Yellow Hordes.

Anyways, all that to say that contrary to so many non-Dutch Europeans (the Dutch seem to love Americans, who owe them a hell of a cultural debt), I really do enjoy their company and I don't find them annoying in the least. And part of that is because I really enjoy the way they make fun of other people. It's the really great thing about arrogance, you know, it's funny, a lot of the time on purpose.

This, for example:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
America's Strained Relationship With England
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

Victor Jara has had his second funeral.



Impossible to juxtapose that death and that voice. Not without getting into Jesus talk. People are such stupid brutes; he'd just been a rather lovely folk singer before. Now juxtaposed forever with some ugly foul-mouthed troglodytes in Washington who thought the world was dominoes.

What a life.

In which I fail to count my blessings

People, I'm fucked up. I know I'm fucked up because I was wandering around Istanbul bored off my tits yesterday afternoon, wishing - actually actively desiring - that all the people around me were trees instead.

I don't know whether or not I can really recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination, I don't have enough information after five days. The 'social programme' of the conference would have made me come in my panties five years ago; dinner in a giant Byzantine water cistern, a cruise down the Bosphorus, black tie gala in an early 20th century vizier's yali. But I spent it ovulating, wishing that I was being ploughed by the single attractive man at that fucking sausage-fest of a conference, studiously avoiding him in defense of my monogamism, and thinking about how all the breathtakingly beautiful things I was looking at were representative of a long and super-successful massive oppression of man by his fellow man. I'm fucking laugh-a-minute, people. Laugh-a-fucking-minute.

It was a relief to hit Saturday morning and run away to my much cheaper hotel and to all the sights I wanted to see. The Hagia Sophia, or as a particularly retarded American woman who was accompanying her husband to the conference called it with a rather shocking familiarity, "Sophia"* , was very beautiful and it satisfied the part of me who had had to study it a kajillion times in sundry art and architecture classes to explore it. But not being in a particularly arty frame of mind I was much more impressed by the Blue Mosque next door, which frankly was tidier, and still functioning as a religious institution. I was handed a pamphlet on the joys of Islam on my way in and was so impressed and so moved by the interior that I nearly read it.

And there were lots of other wondrous things about the city, but I only had two days to look at them, which means I didn't even scrape the surface - what I did was the equivalent of going to Paris, walking from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre to Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, with a quick trip up to the Marché aux Puces (Grand Bazaar, which was nice, I found a bunch of super-cheap fabric). That's why I can't say whether or not I recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination - I still don't know shit about it - not much more than I knew before.

Also, as I mentioned, people, I'm fucked up. It didn't feel exotic to me, it didn't feel exciting; it felt like every other big Mediterranean city I've been to, with touts yelling about how awesome the shit they were selling was, and too many men trying to chat me up in the quest for some fast tail or a North American residency visa, and too many people wandering around, and too many tourists speaking stupidities in snatches of languages I understood, and too much dirt on the ground and shit in the air, and too many drivers acting like brainless cunts.

And I know this sort of misplaced indifference, this 'it's all the fucking same anyways', is a symptom of depression, but I've been depressed, and this isn't depression. This is misanthropy, running away with me. I don't get homesick in the normal sense of the word - I miss my family desperately sometimes, but I don't particularly want to be back in Canada - but sometime in the middle of the Istanbul trip, when I realized that my brain was approaching the experience as simply another stay in a place with too many damn people in it, I thought of so much yearning of kayaking down the La Vase with no people in sight, or right in Lake Nipissing far away from everything, or hiking through the woods with my family, that the tears started to my eyes.

I may as well face it. I was raised in the middle of nowhere, isolated, and while I spent a lot of the time I was being raised wishing that I was somewhere with more people, trees and fresh air were my constant companions and trees and fresh air are probably where I need to go. Particularly on my vacations, since the wait until I can take myself there more permanently seems interminable. Taking a break from one dirty overcrowded city full of annoying people to go to another has turned out to not be such a hot experience.

Whine . . . complete.

*As in, "the mosaics in Sophia weren't that great. Now look at my photos of them." That wasn't what I was basing my evaluation of her retardation on, BTW - more on her opinion of what a shame it was all the black people who didn't know what they were doing turned out to vote Democrat last year instead of staying home like they usually do. Sure lady, like white Americans have a fucking clue what they're doing if they're trying out any task more complicated than stuffing their fucking cracker face with Twinkies or changing the channel from Fox to Fox News. Of course, there are always exceptions, like anyone reading this blog. Smile.

Maybe the songbirds needed universal healthcare

Canada was a little funny. Missing it in a fierce and generalized sense at the moment because everybody was just a little polite to each other - a sort of generalized, unconscious consent to not be absolute bastards to everyone around you in the unvocalized understanding that it would help stop everyone, including you, from losing their shit. Not an understanding that's penetrated too far into the Belgian unconsciousness, I'll fucking tell you that. Also it was cleaner, the air even in Toronto was roughly 50 times more breathable than here, and there were lots of birds and crickets, again even in Toronto. I was a little unnerved this morning when I listened to how quiet it was - just the screeching invasive parrots and the magpies - though I did miss the magpies. Just birds left here, essentially, who have good enough reasoning skills to change their eating habits to be eating our shit instead of all the native insects and vegetation millenia of too many fucking Europeans has killed off.

Anyways, that was a bit tangential, when what I wanted to write was that Canada is a little weird because nobody there called it 'swine flu' anymore, they all called it H1N1, and there were hand sanitizers fuckin' everywhere. I guess a bunch of people there died of SARS so the caution is a little excessive; either that or we've been living next to those paranoiacs in the States for too long.

Speaking of paranoiacs in the States, and health, my boss sent me this clip:



I've been doing my level best to just ignore what's happening in the States now because it just drives me batshit. I can have a higher level of discourse with my used menstrual pads and as far as anyone has been able to figure out my only diagnosable mental disorder is SAD. It did feel nice to see some old Jewish guy (he is Jewish, right? I have this game I like playing here in Europe called "gay or French", and when it comes to Americans I'm thinking of starting one called "eloquent or Jewish") respond to the healthcare/Nazi thing as it deserved to be responded to - which is, not.

But the very fact that question gets asked in a public forum - how ass-clenchingly embarassing. I'm starting to feel guilty that the US is going high comedy as it turns in on itself - that like Italy, it's just turning into a place you can laugh at until you cry. But I guess the big difference is in the States the electorate handed out such a clear whine for change and if they don't get it they won't deserve not getting it. I don't know, man. It's like watching a car crash that can either end in absolute fucking carnage (likely) or a perfect triple-axle spin and triumphant landing on the opposite lane, speeding off in the other direction (less likely, judging from the historical record).

The ex and the new are relative

Mmmm . . . my expectations are being bucked at the moment. That's nice. I do hope it's for real. What's been disturbing me about the Honduras coverage is the way the BBC jumped right into the coup - yesterday morning, they were calling Zelaya 'the former president' and Michiletti 'the new president'. Given what happened in Venezuala you'd think they'd be a little more careful to hedge their bets in cases like these - but this is the Internet age and all you have to do is change the text after Barack Obama bucks expectations and talks about terrible precedents. Which they have done.

The BBC has such great coverage in terms of having news gatherers everywhere, but it is highly politicised. Inevitable, I guess. Most state-owned media are, in a more or less but generally less way than private media, because taxpayers are so happy to cry foul. The interesting thing here is that it looks like a sort of inertia, rather than a particular agenda, just sort of drifted the BBC into saying the coup was an accomplished fact . . . and then they could just rewrite their language when they realize that no, the hegemons weren't supporting it this time. Inertia. Such a powerful social force.

A word about elections, sour grapes, and conclusion-jumping

Robert Fisk knows rather more about Iran than I do, he's actually there and reporting at the moment, and has written about it extensively over the last few days, so instead of going on about it more than I'm already going to I'll link him and use a quote he quotes in one of his articles:

"The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad. You know why so many poorer women voted for Ahmadinejad? There are three million of them who make carpets in their homes. They had no insurance. When Ahmadinejad realised this, he immediately brought in a law to give them full insurance. Ahmadinejad's supporters were very shrewd. They got the people out in huge numbers to vote – and then presented this into their vote for Ahmadinejad."

Arlopop wrote a point-by-point description of why we should question the Iranian results, and while I think he can find most of his answers in the Fisk or the Cockburn in the same paper, I'd like to go over them briefly here. Let's start with majority-Kurd provinces. How could they have swung so Ahmadinejady? Maybe because the comparison of the Kurdish areas to San Francisco-going-McCain is almost offensive. I've never been to either but I'm sure the Kurdish areas of Iran aren't San Fran-fucking-cisco, they're places where people are still operating at the subsistence level and a bad winter kills you, and one of the regions where billions of dollars of massively inflated oil revenues were, according to any proper economist, thrown around like some particularly irresponsible candy since the 2005 elections.

And 'curious election results on the day'? A bit of Voter's-News-Service-2000? I'm aware saying the same thing happened in the States in 2000 isn't likely to persuade 49 to 51% of Americans that the latest Iranian one wasn't a steal; I am saying that this isn't a particularly uncommon thing to have happen. In a similar vein, Arlopop listed other objections that aren't strictly anecdotal or likely to be the actions of a large, impassioned minority of people deeply unhappy about the way the wind was blowing. The thing is, "apart from the fact that the Ahmadi was declared the winner before the votes were counted. apart from the fact that by law Khameni is not to receive the certification from the election commission until the third day following the election and only then can he approve and announce the winner, yet he did so within 24 hrs, apart from the remarkable election result graph that shows a preposterously straight line rise in the votes counted for Ahmadi" - these aren't really bizarre things to have happen if the man was actually leading by around 30%.

If I seemed to 'concede' in a recent post that that Ahmadinejad was less popular in urban areas than rural ones, I didn't mean to. My understanding is that he's unpopular with middle-class urbanites, and Tehran isn't peopled exclusively with middle-class urbanites. Once more, we're not talking about San Fran-fucking-cisco. Ahmadinejad got his big start being the mayor of Tehran, and he's spent the last five years subsidizing people who were being priced out of the Tehranese real estate market (in part because of his own economic policies, but there you are, if most Iranians aren't capable of appreciating economic cause and effect, they can join a club that includes everybody else in the fucking world).

As for generational shifts, he's also spent the last five years subsidizing the young. Why would we assume - especially now, during an international economic crisis that most of the world believes was caused by excessive economic liberalism - why would we assume the generational shift would be away from his managed-economy, high-subsidy side of the spectrum? Especially while there's a 40% unemployment rate?

And if their pre-occupation was peace, why assume Ahmadinejad would be a repellent candidate? Sigh. I'm already trying to avoid offending my own feminist sensibilities by appearing to defend Ahmadinejad, who I think is a cunt; I don't want to start appearing to defend nuclear weapons in the same day. Nonetheless, here're eight little words the young Iranians I went to school with in Paris five or six years ago quoted at me when I asked why the idea of getting nuclear weapons was so popular with them: Iraq, North Korea, 2003, invasion and lack thereof. And then two more: Israeli arsenal. I don't know, but I expect the road to peace looks different when you're a defensive country that actually has a reason to be defensive.

And anybody who would imagine that Iranians would be feeling any less defensive now than they were in 2005, now that someone who made Sharon look like Bambi has his finger on the button, needs to look at a fucking map (not to mention to stop thinking about Obama as a bouquet of roses they can hand the world to apologize for decades of fuck-ups, and to start thinking about him as their own president - but more on that below.) The US is important, sure. It's not where the Iranians I knew were expecting the planes to come from and it's not a geographically small and militarily enormous enemy Iranian strategists would hope to be able to neutralize with the threat of four or five well-shot missiles. Not my cup of strategic tea, but again - if Iranian strategists aren't capable of appreciating the conflict between nuclear armaments and an honest desire for peace, they can join a club that includes just about all the other strategists in the fucking world.

Now, I don't think we're looking at anything in Iran in the protests that could be called sour grapes or sore losing. I think people who want Ahmadinejad gone have the right ideology. I don't like him. I like their right to protest. But look at these two pictures:

Half a million people turn out to protest America's involvement in Indochina, 1971. Then, in 1972, incumbent Nixon beats pacifist McGovern by an embarassing margin, even with the start of the Watergate scandal.

May and June 1968 - a huge chunk of France goes apeshit left, making American peacenik demonstrators look like the spineless bourgeois potheads they turned out to be. Later in June, in the French legislatives President De Gaulle calls to calm everybody down, the rightwing parties clean up nearly 58% of the vote.

Hundreds of thousands of people hitting the streets is evidence something is wrong. But mass demonstrations are not in themselves a sign that the majority isn't being represented.

But look - it's always questionable, right? Arlopop could just as easily ask, why shouldn't we question the Iranian results? They are questionable, even beyond questions of fixing after the fact. The tactics leading up to the election persuading people which way to vote were lousy, Ahmadinejad is a populist to an irresponsible degree, and it's a shame he won - legitimately or not - because if he hadn't won it would have been much simpler to deal with for the rest of the world. Questionable, on all sorts of levels. No less questionable for the questions being common to most democratic systems. And most questionable of all because it's impossible for us to know. We're not Iranian, we weren't there, we didn't count the votes, we didn't see what happened in the counting stations, we didn't have observers there.

Questioning is fine. But there's a difference between questioning and a wholesale leap to the conclusion that the demonstrators represent the Iranian majority and that Ahmadinejad's election was a steal. And let's not leap the other way - for the moment, let's forget similar massive demonstrations in 1953 and the CIA and Iranian government paranoia about how this is the first internet age Yankee-sponsored right-wing coup. Let's think about what we do know - ourselves, us Anglos, now.

Let's look at the fact that international Anglo opinion-leading media outlets like the Economist are already making absolutely unprovable, unqualified statements like "most Iranians believe electoral fraud has occurred on a massive scale", that Republicans are frothing at the mouth for some sort of intervention in favour of Moussavi, that in mainstream American media Moussavi supporters are demonstrating for a wholesale structural change from the Ayatollahs on down - and ask ourselves how this Anglo certainty, this transformation of we don't know into almost definitely, is going to do to the tightrope being trod in the region as Obama seeks to transform the US's fucking lamentable role there. The Financial Times actually has a rather smashing article about it.

Questioning is fine. Questioning is always fine. Anglos and westerners conclusion-jumping en masse in a way that is so illegitimizing is not. Unfortunately it's already been done, and done before we know shit about shit except that a few hundred thousand Iranians are monumentally pissed off and that they're being governed by the sort of murderous thugs governing most of the human population of the world, functioning democracies or not. And now Barack Obama is going to have an exponentially harder time engaging diplomatically with an Iranian regime who millions of his own electorate are being convinced is illegitimate. That's just fucking dandy, and I really have to ask: who is going to be happy about that?

Given the history of US and Iranian relations . . .

So considering what's happened with Iran, the US, and regime change over the last 40 years, I was rather relieved to read this this morning. It's really fantastic that people are demonstrating there for what they believe in, in the face of a repressive security apparatus. It's really awful that the repressive security apparatus is being repressive. And if there were irregularities or corruptions in the voting patterns, I really hope they're exposed and dealt with. But take a deep fucking breath.

The percentage Ahmadinejad's supposed to have got this time - low 60%'s - is about the same as he was supposed to have got in 2005 without raising eyebrows. That was in the second round, true - but his opponent in the second round wasn't a 'reformist', he was another conservative. A reformist candidate came third in 2005, just topping out 17% of the vote. 'Reformers' performed worse in the last election, without everybody screaming foul.

We've known for a long time that educated urbanites in Iran thought Ahmadinejad's a dangerous hick and that everybody else there rather liked him. And now he's spent the last five years offering politically popular subsidies to the bulk of the population against any rational economic advice. When they've caused piss-off, his domestic policies have mainly pissed off middle-class urbanites - not really the bulk of the electorate. And his posturing on Iran's nuclear programme hasn't resulted in the disasters people warn about yet, and indeed surely Iranians have remarked that without Ahmadinejad tempering his speech, the US has nonetheless voted for the man who didn't sing 'bomb bomb Iran', and whose administration has spent the last few months indicating it's interested in a better relationship.

Based on what we know - why would we assume that now, in 2009, it's impossible for Ahmadinejad to get the votes he got in 2005? Why would we assume there has been a 30% + shift in voting patterns that has been fraudulently covered up, just because the educated urbanites who are sick of the dangerous hick - and yeah, he's a dangerous hick - are bravely and efficiently hitting the streets? Why are we assuming so readily that democracy has failed, instead of asking if the demonstrators are just extremely disappointed about the way democracy has gone? Why are so many Americans assuming that just because they managed to vote for the least embarassing candidate for once last year, every other country is going to start doing the same?

I'm very, very sorry people are getting killed, and apparently getting disappeared into the bargain, and that it's a big fucking mess. Election or not, this government, like so many Iranian governments before it, bears the responsibility for murder. But look - this is a country where, 45 years ago, democracy was snuffed out - with a great deal of international help - under the guise of massive protests. This was followed by a quarter of a century of extremely repressive absolutist rule and massive international resource exploitation. The revolution that ended the situation in 1979 was attacked with both barrels by the international community, up to and including arming a thug like Saddam Hussein to the teeth to fight a brutal proxy war.

Morally revolting or not, it's not a surprise that the government is trigger-happy now. History and our common sense has to tell us there's a very real prospect that the election results were legitimate, and that it wouldn't take a paranoid schizophrenic government to imagine that the massive anti-government demonstrations represent yet another internationally-sponsored, anti-democratic coup attempt. Is murdering and disappearing the right way to deal with that? No. It's an awful way to deal with that. But - given the history of US and Iranian relations - I understand why it's being dealt with this way. Tragic. But there you are. You spend forty years fucking a country, and what have you got? A fucked country.

Obama knows what he's talking about, which I'm really not used to thinking about things American presidents say. I hope he means it.

In which I give vent to my subscription to the "Dumb Belgian" stereotype

1. So remember when I stumbled into a hipster apartment full of hipsters who reminded me of hipsters back home?

2. And remember how I feel quite strongly about the humanity of great apes?

Well,

1. In retrospect, it was not a nice thing to say about the hipsters back home, and

2. Living in Belgium is helping me address the opposite side of the coin: that if I say great apes are a kind of human, I am being inaccurate; instead I must say humans are a kind of great ape.

We'll still be pushing on with the organic food collective, because the F-word feels strongly about eating organic, and I feel strongly about food being more delicious when it's been grown close to the point of consumption. But after the last meeting, I've decided I'm going to have to take a zoological approach to the collective if I'm not going to lose my shit. I've never seen so much ham-fisted, half-witted idiocy cluttering a room as that collection of 25 Belgians talking at once, but I manage to see them as overdecorated chimpanzees it'll be funny instead of infuriating.

I've never attended a meeting involving so many repetitions of key points that had already been adequately and repetitively explained in detail (and remember my French is far from perfect) and never seen so many faces remaining vacant and slack-jawed in incomprehension for so long, or at least not since we studied Heidegger in undergrad at the end of fourth year when everybody's brain had already packed up and moved on to how they were going to pay off their student loans armed with nothing but a humanities degree and a drug habit.

It's hard to pick out a gem for you from the collection of sparkling intellectual turds mined during the meeting, but here's the one that still seems to be striking me the most. There are two kinds of organic buying collective operating in Belgium. One kind: you pay upfront at the beginning of the year and get a mystery box delivered to you every fortnight containing whatever's in season from your farmers, or whatever looked good at the organic wholesaler's that week. Let's call it a contract arrangement. The other kind: you get a list every fortnight of what's available, choose what you want, submit it, and pay for what you've chosen when you pick it up a few days later. A pay-as-you-go arrangement. Are you with me so far? Are you managing to follow the fucking complexities of two of the fucking simplest concepts in the motherfucking economic firmament?

The most recent meeting of our collective was the third. From the first, it's been clear that with the supplier we've chosen we'll be using the pay-as-you-go concept. Halfway through the meeting, when the chairwoman (re)explained the fortnightly rotating task of repacking bulk deliveries from the farmer into bins containing each family's order, it finally dawned on one of the attendees - who had attended the two previous meetings, which had included exhaustive descriptions of how the pay-as-you-go collective worked, including a two-hour presentation from one of the men who had set up the first such pay-as-you-go collective in the city - that we were going to use the pay-as-you-go method.

She wasn't happy about it. She had managed to spend, by my calculations, eight hours of discussions of the pay-as-you-go collective, including the 90 minutes immediately preceding her realization, convinced that she was participating in the birth of a contract collective. And once she realized her error, we had to hear about it. The entire meeting had to stop for a few minutes while this woman expounded on why she wanted to be in a contract collective, and not a pay-as-you-go collective, but oh well, she guessed the would participate in our pay-as-you-go collective anyways, having already committed the time. It was awesome.

The meeting was full of incidents like that, incidents of egregious stupidity that could only be ascribed to mental deficiencies or a very real effort by many of the participants to actively tune out what was being said and what had been said, in detail and at length, over many hours. It was really remarkable. After two hours they were still going strong but the F-word and I had to leave because he was getting pissed off - he works in a Belgian school, and he said it was the same shit-headedness he saw at his staff meetings every month - and I was going a little bit red in the face because it was so fucking hilarious. When we got out of the building and a safe distance down the street I let loose with a serious case of the giggles, that lasted 10, 15 minutes.

Anyways. You know how it's all funny and retarded when Americans get upset about anything that looks like socialism, and are all, like, "it's horrible, we're turning into Sweden," when it should be obvious to the meanest of intelligences that they should be so fucking lucky as to turn into Sweden, where the tax rate is quite reasonable by developed-world standards, the political system accountable, and the social services first-class? It is funny and retarded. I even suspect that once you add up federal and state and local and sales taxes, the Swedish taxation burden doesn't really massively outstrip the Yankee taxation burden, but still the Swedes manage to have a functioning and supportive state instead of an inefficient, free-for-all, insecure fandango that couldn't function without the presence of an unregulated labouring underclass.

But I think I understand why so many of them are able to retain such a funny and retarded belief now. I suspect that at some point in the post-WWII period, some poor Yankee assholes were forced to spend a big block of time in Belgium trying to have productive meetings with Belgians, and made a not-unreasonable connection between the utter intellectual helplessness and incompetence of their interlocutors and the Belgian welfare state. They went home and they spread the frightening word: the Belgian welfare state enables uninterruptedly baffled people to live uninstitutionalized lives. Which since then, through a game of right-wing media Chinese whispers, has turned into socialism is like zombies. Fair enough. Bigger misunderstandings have been innocent.

The Red Dragon gets on her high, grassfed horse

Alright, marvellous, swine flu. That's just fucking fantastic. 10-to-1 odds I'm offering that the virus started in the southern US, in one of those massive, moronly inhumanely crowded and insalubrious feedlots/abattoirs where they illegally employ Mexicans in their thousands to make sure your typical North American Anglo asshole can have meat that's cheap enough to eat two or three times a day, fuelling their massive fucking waistlines and their health insurance companies' massive fucking profits.

You know, one of those situations where everybody is happy (except for the animals, and one assumes the disenfranchised and underpaid illegal workers, though frighteningly perhaps the alternative employments available are worse), especially those selfish assholes who pretend to be libertarian whenever there's any sort of governmental suggestion of interfering with their mammoth appetites - the sort of selfish asshole that, in my experience, Canada and the US produce record numbers of. The sort of gargantuan, stupid prick who trots out the line like 'next they'll be trying to ban red meat, WHERE WILL IT ALL END?' whenever there's a move towards banning smoking in public spaces or raising sin taxes or something of the sort.

Look, you stupid fucking cunts, where it should end is that I don't get a fucking pandemic so that you can eat cheap pig twice a day, every fucking day of your futile, parasitic lives that serve no immediately visible purpose aside from being a spend-happy consuming cog in a large, soulless capitalist machine that's already caused international damage you obviously haven't been educated to appreciate. Where it should end is that domestic animals don't have to live in shit-caked conditions that would fit without much alteration into the Inferno - in conditions that are both inhumane (if you have soul enough to care) and incredibly fucking unhealthy (which you would care about if you weren't a goddamn cretin, considering that sort of lack of hygiene and overcrowding are the perfect conditions for the genesis of virulent disease).

Fuck! It pisses me off. To rip off a line from Margaret Atwood, why does my veggie household have to pay with our 'freedom froms' (pandemics, in this case) for your 'freedom tos' (be a big fat cheap cholesterol-burdened fuckwit, in this case)? Okay, it was a dystopian novel. But capitalism itself is getting so dystopic that unless we find a voluntary way to balance our 'freedom froms' and our 'freedom tos' now, things are going to get so stupid and chaotic that a bunch of people who figure they know best will find a way to take all our freedoms away.

By the way, you goddamn 'libertarian' babies, it's only in the last two years I've lived in a place that didn't outright ban my appetite of choice, and somehow I managed to get by for a decade without particularly feeling my human rights were being trampled on because I had to act mildly furtive when I bought pot in the supermarket from the dealer who worked at the deli counter. Fucking grow some balls. There's an entire drug-addicted subculture around you who's gone on happily getting fucked up despite their governments outlawing the things they like best, and they're on drugs, for fuck's sake. You're straight and you're still scared of the big fat government? Oh, boo hoo for poor little you. Fucking whiny losers. Fuck.

No, seriously, now we're taking Berlin

We watched Battleship Potemkin last night. Just that sort of mood. Sometimes I can't emotionally commit to a film but just want to watch some sort of cultural document. But it turned out it was actually a film, even though it was silent and from 1925. The end made me cry. Goebbels loved it, apparently. He thought it could turn anyone Bolshevik who wasn't already strongly something else. Unsurprisingly it was banned in Nazi Germany; rather more surprisingly, it was also banned in the UK until 1954, at which point it was released with an X rating. A few chocolate-syrup blood scenes aside there's no gore, and there wasn't any move to ban other propaganda films like Triumph of the Will even at the height of the war, or, you know, that American one by Griffiths about how if you fully enfranchised black people they'd uncontrollably rape white women, the poor helpless dears, so I guess we know what that's about.

I wonder how much the working class still scares policy makers and property owners in the UK. Probably not much. The Labour party, who theoretically represented the working class, managed to sweep to a huge electoral victory after publicly castrating itself in the mid-nineties, and the public snobbery about the working class is amazing. But I guess that's the thing. The workers there don't have any impact on the means of production anymore because there are no means of production - they've all been exported, and the working class has turned into the service class. Just insecure retail or service jobs that don't mean a damn thing if you go on strike. It's pretty gross.

According to the Open Veins of Latin America, which I'm hoping to knock off on the plane tonight, because I just got The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson to read in tandem with A Social History of England by Trevelyan just to blow my mind (yes, I'm the world's biggest geek who doesn't understand math or computers) exporting industry wasn't always the British way; their constant push for free trade applied to primary resources for many years while the means of transformation stayed, aggressively, in England. Which was noticed by Ulysses Grant (sweet name) when his country opted to follow the same model for awhile:

For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes, and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.

But a point always comes where the workers just get too scary and where protection can no longer offer anything because you've managed to create a big enough consumer class, to the point that it's worth exporting production piecemeal to export-focused economies full of people who remember what it's like to be hungry. Leaving the UK a bit of a shell when it comes to production, and increasingly the US as well. People get so het up about European protectionism in the manufacturing industries, and there is a huge and easily mocked disconnect between what is legally committed to and what is actually done here in trade terms. But there's no doubt French people or people here get more say what their government and their employer do to their lives than do British people. Oh well. Time to get ready for Berlin.

Provided that he or she gives notice or pays compensation as prescribed by FUCKING CIVILISED law

Hungover after celebrating San Francisca’s dismissal with her briefly but efficiently on my way home last night. She’s ecstatic - she's been working here more than five years, which means she gets half a year's severance pay instead of the standard three months, and the timing couldn't have been better in terms of her family's move to Amsterdam. Not to mention she’s feeling as though she’s dodged a bullet, having turned down a transfer back to San Francisco a few months back, which would have seen her get handed a box and a fortnight’s pay, instead of half a year, minimum, upwards-ly negotiable . . . Unworthy as it is, I'm having to deal with jealousy issues where she's concerned, not to mention upset because I'm going to miss her so much, but I'm trying to just focus on being happy for her.

I feel a bit sad in an abstract sense* about all the Americans who got canned, though. Here's a box and two weeks pay, merry Christmas, fuck off now. I don't know how Americans, or Canadians for that matter, can bear it . . . those are some of the worst labour laws in the eurocentric world, in a couple of countries that pride themselves on being the best in the eurocentric world, with that sort of ‘we rock, you suck’ nationalism. And now here we are in this crumbling economic edifice we call the 2008 financial year, and thousands of North Americans are learning the hard way that their political and employment structures don't give a shit . . . they can watch middle class assholes who bought more house than they could afford get mortgage holidays so that whole neighbourhoods don’t run to seed and erode general property values, while the unemployed queue at overstretched soup kitchens. If this all gets as bad as I fear it will it’s going to be really dreadful, and the Marxist lizard part of my brain says ‘about fucking time’. I don't know how long I'll still be able to keep hearing that if this downturn touches my friends and family harder than it has, but something has to give, as they say, and people have to see how powerless they are to get their power back.

*BTW, I say 'abstract sense' because out of the nine Americans who got canned, I only knew two personally, and one probably needed canning, and the other apparently did too, despite being a piece of ass. Ho hum.

I now pronounce you unsympathetic

The Dutch intimidate me. But, as I've mentioned before, in the sort of way that makes me wish they ran the world. That's on my mind this morning not only because those crazy beautiful fuckers are talking about building islands to make their country bigger, and not only because it looks as though a mate of mine here is moving to Amstelveen, which rocks because then we can crash with him in Amstelveen, and not only because we're going to Amsterdam in a couple of weeks to see the Fleidermaus and some marionettes for my 30th birthday, but also because a high proportion of my acquaintance from the Netherlands are gay men, and I've seldom heard people express themselves so clearly about their animosity with certain kinds of ethnic groups as they do, because those gay men sometimes feel in physical danger from these ethnic groups whilst walking down the street being obviously gay, and now this morning MSNBC is blaming blacks and Latinos for getting rid of same-sex marriage in California.

In terms of those statistics or polling numbers or whatever out of California, it's really interesting, the way it's partly instinctual to think any socially marginalized group is automatically going to feel sympathy for and supportive of other socially marginalized groups. But it's also a completely unreasonable thing to think, because let's face it: if marginalized groups all felt sympathy for each other, they wouldn't fucking be marginalized anymore, would they?

The whole process makes me impatient. I'm a big believer in direct democracy, but I can't help but feel that matters of legal and familial obligations like marriage or adoption should be left for courts and religious groups to decide - it beggars belief that something so civil should be decided by political processes. That's like asking for a referendum on McDonald's being liable if I burn my twat by spilling one of their coffees on her. Marriage is either a legal contract or a religious sacrament with a direct bearing on the contracted parties, and not on the wider community - that's all it fucking well is - it's not stockpiling machine guns, for fuck's sake - and that means either religious figures should decide within their own religious community or that judges should decide for the secular community. Especially in a place like the States, that's blessed with civil law. Maybe I'm full of shit and I'd be cheering on another victory for direct democracy if California had voted the way that I'd sort of wanted it to. I doubt it though. I'm actually not that keen on gay marriage. I think it would strengthen an institution that outlived its usefulness, but not its iniquities, when women were given legal status as humans. Anyways, in this case it really doesn't matter what I think. That's sort of my point.

In a torturous sort of way this all comes back to the Netherlands in my head, where gay marriage has been legal since 2001, and civil unions for some time before that, and adoption laws are more or less straightened out (all through the political process, necessary as they're still having a Napoleonic hangover - but whatever, it seems to work for them), and there are no political parties on either side of the spectrum even mentioning taking these rights away again, and you can have a character like Pim Fortuyn dominate the political landscape for awhile, and then get murdered, apparently partly because of the way he laid into Islam, and whose party can sort of win the election after he dies . . . Super-gay, and not marginalized. Not at all. The splits are different and there are no illusions about mutual support among minority groups.

What's my point? I don't have one. It's just so interesting how things get so different from one democracy to another, from one developed country to another. And now I have to go keep writing about the economic meltdown at work.

For all the American people who want change

So this morning when I checked the news after a lovely night's sleep made visionarily tumultuous by some excellent new grass, I couldn't believe how relieved I felt. As the news page loaded I prepared for the worst, and told myself to enjoy these last few moments of not having to think Americans actively wanted the End Times, and even started wondering if I could persuade the F-word on New Zealand instead of Australia for our future home, because it's that much more isolated from a world I'd want to avoid if Americans did actively want the End Times. And then seeing the 'Historic Victory' headline was like taking a shit. A lovely big shit on a Sunday morning.

But in the spirit of me shitting on things: hey, people who voted Democrat, you won! And you won big. Congratulations! The senate probably won't be filibuster proof but otherwise, by winning 52% of the popular vote, you've precluded the 47% of voters who voted Republican from having any control of your legislative process. After what happened in 2004 and 2000 - you know, when the Democrats lost after getting 48.3% and 48.4% respectively, even winning the popular vote in 2004 - it must feel really good. But you also know that's bullshit, right? You know first hand that that's bullshit. I don't know what would have persuaded someone to vote for the McCain/Palin ticket, but millions did, and democracy should be about popular representation, not the nearly complete disenfranchisement of a HUGE (though in this case apparently apocalyptic) minority.

I'm not going to praise the Canadian system, though it's much more representative; it would be hard to be any less representative, so there's no great virtue in that. Any first-past-the-post system is going to end up crap. And as happened a few weeks ago, the Green Party can get 7% of the Canadian vote and lack any seats in Parliament, whereas a regional party like the Bloc Quebecois can get around 10% of the Canadian vote and 49 out of 308 seats. And we still have a fucking Queen, like a bunch of medieval thistle munchers. So no, I'm not going to praise it. But I am going to praise parliamentary systems in general, as something American decision makers should be forced to think about by you, the American People Who Want Change, and mention one that is set up quite well - Australia's. Seriously. Read about it and think about it. Manage that sort of thing without letting the motherfucking Queen step in and slap you down when you're getting too pinkoist, and you would be a proper beacon of democracy throughout the world.

And if you're feeling really ambitious, check out Switzerland. You won't believe your fucking eyes. Nobody ever knows, and then nobody can ever believe that Switzerland does this shit. And nobody can ever believe it works, but it does. You know when you're watching war documentaries, and all the battle lines just sort of stop at the Swiss border while ploughing through other neutral countries? That's why. You know why Swiss people are all fucking rich - even the poor ones? That's why. You know why that country can function as a multi-lingual (4, officially) republican entity, and has done so over centuries despite being located in the thick of the highest, shittiest mountain ranges in Europe with no marketable natural resources besides skihills? That's why. A fundamentally representative political system. And no fucking Queen. Though I bet she keeps a lot of her money there.

Don't get defensive, like this is some sort of commentary about Canada or Australia or Switzerland being better than the US. It's a commentary about their political systems being better than the US's. I've got no personal affinity for the Swiss - full disclosure - Bluebird was Swiss and you know how that went - and some of his more objectionable attitudes to the blacks and the gays were reflected by the other Swiss I met, leaving me with a bad impression overall. And Australians sometimes seem like a bunch of oiks who, like Canadians, still bizarrely tolerate the Queen (though the new leader of the opposition, silver spoon merchant Malcolm Turnbull, used to be the head of the Republican movement, and I believe the ruling Labor party still has republicanism listed as a basic platform, giving me a sliver of hope that by the time we move there that relic of an uglier time will be off the fucking money). And Canadians also shocked me last time I was home by the profligacies of their day-to-day lifestyle. I contemn pretty much everybody, in short. But everybody being contemptible in their own special way should not preclude an examination of that they do right politically, and then ripping off what they do right politically to use in your own country.

So. You want change you can believe in? How about change that's actually change?

Holy shit, am I ever sick of the American election

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Sometimes it's good to have an pseudonymous blog redux

As I happened to be at home during my homeland's snap election, and as my homeland is still dinging me for tax and as I don't believe in taxation without representation, and as my accountant may have fucked up the surrender of my residency in my homeland for tax purposes (so I might need increasing amounts of representation), I voted. And while my ballot is private, let's just say I exercised my rights and responsibilities as the citizen of a parliamentary democracy to vote for one of the weirdo parties who don't even have the possibility of winning built into their platform but whose views best represent my ideological convictions. Don't tell my parents. They're big movers and shakers in one of the non-loony parties.

Yankees, eat your hearts out. Or rather, do what you have to do to get rid of the Republicans, and then hit the streets and protest until you get a functioning parliamentary democracy, instead of the bullshit you have now that amounts to an expensive, well-spun form of fascism, which voting for a third-party candidate merely fucking bolsters.

Oh, and P.S., if I hear one more fucking American defend the nonsense that is their two party system by saying 'at least it's better than Italy', I'll fucking slap them. When it comes to politics, you know what else is better than Italy? The entire developed world. If that's the benchmark they're comparing yourself to, then I don't think they should be allowed to even hold pointy objects anymore, let alone atomic weaponry. One of my Yankee bosses was the latest one to poop out that little gem in front of me, and I think I nearly had an embolism, it was so hard to keep the scorn inside.

Not so lush

I'm still so sick. Went to the doctor's yesterday because I knew I wouldn't be making it to the office today, either, barring a miracle, and he told me that Brussels is a polluted hole that squanders billions of euros of its gross civic production by having roughly half the workforce ill like I am at any one time in the winter. I already knew it but it's good to hear it from a health professional and good to imagine that someday I'll live somewhere that won't fucking make me sick.

Didn't finish the Seymour Hersh book yesterday because I watched the entire first season of a twee little BBC comedy called Gavin and Stacey one of my bosses lent me. British television seems to have got so fucking cutesy and don't-worry, you'll-all-find-love, even-if-you-give-it-up-on-the-first-night-while-your-best-mates-fuck-in-the-hallway. At least there's a refreshing element of realism there. All my most emotionally satisfying and enduring romantic relationships began with a genital collision at the first opportunity, mostly because all of my romantic relationships began with a genital collision at the first opportunity. Why waste time, why deny yourself physical joy just for the benefit of cockteasing some poor sap into thinking you're less accessible than you feel? Sometimes I've wondered where my Britishness comes out, besides the passport and the inordinate fondness for money management, and I think I can safely say that my sexuality used to be far more British (why waste time?) than Italian (wherein the vagina is a wrench to be used sparingly to extract various benefits and concessions) or Canadian (Cosmo-style internal wrangling and calculation about when to first give it up, in a generally futile effort to emotionally compete with a Canadian man's PlayStation). But now I'm in a long-term relationship and those are little nationalities onto themselves, or all over themselves as the case may be.

Anyhoo, Gavin and Stacey was almost unrelentingly twee but I couldn't look away. And the Welsh accents were so cute. And now it's behind me. After that the couch was too comfy to move so I watched the rest of The Life of Mammals - the tree animals, the monkeys, and then, in the final episode, the Us - the great apes. I'm all for giving those other assholes full status as humans. Why not? They might be a pack of big homicidal jerks, especially the pan trogs, but then so are people. And seriously, how is an orang-utan any less human than a 17-th century drunk from a Hogarth engraving or the sort of moron who feels represented by this? Anyways, David Attenborough is class on a stick, man, that alone makes up for every bit of twee crap the BBC has invited me to laugh at.

My name is Mistress La Spliffe, freak of freaks: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Oh my god, I'm so sick and revolting. I bet my recovery time is going to be pretty fast though, because my fantastic corpus has already kicked into the goopy lymph phase of auto-immune protection. The human body is endlessly fascinating and its disorders even more so. Speaking of which, check this out. I love the way one of the researchers says it's more a matter of historical interest than anything else - not a matter of historical blame, of course - never mind that there are billions of people around who can still remember damaging overt, political, imperial European colonial machinations in Africa from the 1960's, and no matter that such machinations continue, both overtly and not, and no matter that AIDS, you know, continues to be a bit of a problem.

Jared Diamond wrote about the human damage of constructing European cities in Africa in Guns, Germs, and Steel, I recall. I believe his line of thought was that when the mountainous bushy region that's the Congos etc. now was a functioning African empire/state/however it worked, people lived in smaller groups at higher, dryer altitudes, and then Europeans constructed cities in Africa in the lowlands, close to navigable waterways for trade, and forced large groups of Africans down for labour, and everybody caught malaria. Brilliant. But malaria couldn't spread internationally, and HIV could, and now Europeans can't fuck without condoms. Hah! I'd say there was some sort of poetic justice in that, but considering eye-for-an-eye type justice in the case would be the ruination, decimation and enslavement of the European population by a kleptocratic African ruling class, I won't.

It's like a replay of syphilis spreading east from all the South and Central American populations the Spanish and such treated worse than animals, back when being Spanish still meant something besides having the most annoying voices in Europe. Syphilis is a really interesting disease. There's still some debate about whether it did spread out to Europe via Central American yaws, but I'm really convinced by the timing - first outbreak 1494? Come on, what's that two years after? - and by its virulence and the complete lack of resistance to it in the European population, but not the native American population, especially considering the native American population got fucking clobbered by basically every other filthy contagion Europeans carried.

Anyways, I get to stay at home today while my immune system goops everything up, and I can ponder the origins of my favourite venereal diseases to my heart's content, but probably what I'll actually do is read the rest of the lovely Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command and ponder the nature of investigative journalism. It's an awfully good book. Not really bringing any revelations home to me but it's making me think of what investigative journalism is - what being a muckraker is - and it's journalism as a primary source, journalism responsible and direct enough to be something that future academics will be able to look at with the same seriousness as a government memorandum or a law - a forum for a primary truth that would probably not have any other public forum, and risks being lost to history forever.

Someday, not too far into the future, Chain of Command and those Bob Woodward books and things like that will probably be required reading for people studying the 2001-2009 period of American history - and you can bet your asses the asses will be studied off of this period, since it marks the end of an empire and of a certain philosophy of power. There's something in my academic's brain that that really appeals to, and something that explains to me why I'm so drawn to investigative journalism over the academic world that beckoned vigorously to me all through my undergrad and my masters via all those parental profs and incredibly good marks . . . I'm simply too conceited, too full of myself, and too concerned with my place in history to study primary sources when I have the possibility to write them myself.

On that level, the narrow, industry-specific investigative work I'm doing now is more satisfactory to me than the funnest, most interesting papers I wrote about poetry or drug politics in university, because it makes me feel like a participant in rather than an observer of history. And as of yesterday I have a byline. So somewhere, some obscure toiling academic may know Mistress La Spliffe existed, even years and years after her phenomenal (if presently mucus-y) body has crumpled, aged, died and dried to dust. And if I achieve my ambitions, not only will I be providing a valuable public service to my compatriots, but maybe someday long after I've left this mortal plane someone will love me like I love Herodotus.

Fuck, that's weird. The only thing more interesting than the human body is the human brain.

Chasing the Red Dragon

Headed home early yesterday because of the uterus becoming the owwwwwterus. Probably exacerbated by some psychological things mixed in there as a friend here is having a real medical uterus scare, and by the fact I'm stressed over the prospect that I'm stressed, if you know what I mean. I mean, if I'm stressed, and I think I am, what do I do about it at this point? A fat fucking load of nothing, that's what. Keep being stressed, is all, for another good long time; they just promoted me, for heaven's sake. And just keep having the escapist fantasies about things I won't be able to do for another good long time. Yesterday I found out what the minimum wage in Australia is, and okay, it's less than half what I get post-tax each month, but still enough for me to have a house and a family. Insane, though in a good way of course. North of $2000 a month. Imagine! A country where Labour-with-a-capital-L is still important enough to get a minimum wage it can actually live on!

And they're finally introducing mandatory paid maternity leave - next year probably - and the plan they're looking at is rather more generous than the existing mandatory plan in Belgium, so I'll never need to regret refusing to breed in this paedophile's playground. Still a shit plan in Australia, of course. Women who breed should get a year paid at least, and so should their partners. The Bulgarians really surprised me on this one! Just like with the way they wouldn't participate properly in the Holocaust. Nobody ever talks about Bulgaria as anything except a place where they're assholes to gypsies and aren't Hungarian, and here they are with this fantastic parental leave programme and WWII history that's slightly less shameful than the rest of Europe's.

That's all I have to write this morning - too stressed, too owwwterus-y - enjoy the financial meltdown, everybody! Americans, don't worry, you're insured up to $100,000 in bank accounts - if all else fails you can cash out and move to one of the countries your administration has spent the last century bankrupting, $100,000 still goes a long way there. It's all good! And if, in fact, you don't have $100,000 - if, perhaps, you have $100,000 in debt - just relax and watch that debt devalue as your currency crashes. Laugh at all the silly people who struggled to keep their heads above water and pay down their credit when the dollar was strong. All you have to do is fuck off to Asia for a year and teach English and/or sell your used underwear, and then you'll be singin'.

His name is Barack Obama, for fuck's sake

Madame Pariyorker weekend, and I am walking into Monday as exhausted as I was Friday night. Oh well. Madame Pariyorker inevitably has spent some time being my token American friend, because part of the reason we hit it off so well in Paris all those years ago, despite having very different brains, is that it was 2002 when we met. And all the French people around me were giving full fucking rein to how much they detested and despised Americans for their dreadful imperial foriegn policy and their consumptive lifestyle, supposing I'd be interested, I suppose, because they had mistaken me for an American and were rushing to assure me that despite their incapacity to tell the difference they could assure me 100, 1000, infinity%, by using highly objectionable language, that not only did they understand that I was not American, but that I was as 1000% better than Americans as they themselves were.

This was also the time I was choosing my academic path in international relations, however, and when it was coming home to me how corrupt, murderous, anti-democratic and repellent French foreign policy was and continues to be, and the only reason it's not talked about there as currently as American murderousness is is because they're a nation of cultural chauvinists with a media as supine in its own way as that of America. Ask your typical French person about Africa or Oceania and you'll wait through days of ejaculations about the charms of the beaches of Senegal and Tahiti before you even get a fucking word in edgewise to ask about 'defense agreements' - the nice term for arms sales to kleptocratic maniacs intent on murdering their own people in old African colonies or the nuclear bombing of Polynesian atolls. Ugh. Make me fucking vomit. I mean, the fuckers still have colonies, and they think they have anything to say about anything?

Anyways. I met Madame Pariyorker in 2002 when French people were informing me about what a big asshole I wasn't by explaining how they knew I wasn't American, and Madame Pariyorker was constantly receiving instruction about what a big asshole she was . . . and now it's 2008, and maybe she's not quite such a big asshole because possibly her nation will vote for un Noir, and mark my fucking words, by the time they let a black man run for president in France - well, look, it's just not going to happen. Even so, they're having no problem going up to her and saying, with the sort of supreme Gallic shitbrained confidence that let the Germans kick their asses irreperably twice in a row using the same technique within 25 years and the supreme Gallic chauvinistic inability to attach a human name to a brownish face that made the wars of liberation in their colonies some of the most brutal of the post WWII period, 'le Noir ne peut pas gagner. Pas dans une telle societé'.

Ugh. If I was American I'd vote for Barack Obama just to piss in France's eye. Well, there are a lot of other reasons I'd vote for Barack Obama, ranging from his reasonable positions on the issues to the fact that that's the sort of peice of ass I'd rather see on newspaper covers than a septagenarian warmonger. But that would be one of them, and anyways, I reckon the reason he'll win is that the economy has gone to shit and I can't imagine the most raving lunatic racist in the most atmospheric movie about the south of the States that I've ever seen voting Republican when the economy is this shitty. But then I have no imagination about some things. And this post was going to have some sort of point, but now it's time for work.