From The Morgue

So said Tony Blair on Sunday, in probably the smartest move he has made in the two years since I started paying attention to him.
He has set up the debate over Britain’s position on the EU Constitution extremely cleverly. The critics and Eurosceptics are on the back foot, and if Blair keeps hammering this soundbite home, they’ll stay that way.
It is an incredibly clever phrasing. Of course, it helps that the facts are on his side this time. It also doesn’t hurt that the opposition – the ‘mythmakers’ – include in their number many at the racist end of the nationalism spectrum.
The debate is really about whether or not England should go it alone or should join the EU fully. For what it is worth, I think England would take a hit by joining the EU fully at the moment – the currency is incredibly strong right now, and that alone is a good reason to stay out. In the long term, though, it will be better if they do sign up. Certainly, as an internationalist, I think it will be better for the world if they do join, not least to weaken that awful Anglo-American alliance that is sustaining a lot of horrible situations in the world and undermining the UN. But from the perspective of a Brit, it is clear there are valuable arguments on both sides.
Its a tricky sell to the public, but Blair is going for it in exactly the right way. With this angle he’s got a shot. Wow. He almost earns some respect from me for it.
===
Reality vs myth is at the core of so much political debate, especially with the very sophisticated manipulation of the media around the world. In America, of course, this is particularly clear.
(Although the culture wars that are dividing America are probably best understood as myth vs myth – a society split in two, divided between the contrary narratives served up by the massive PR operations of the two opposing forces.)
The Right-wing media machine is making great hay at the moment of Chris Hitchens, a left-wing commentator, tearing strips off Michael Moore’s new film Fahrenheit 9/11.
This fits into a decade-long effort to label Michael Moore as an extreme and unreliable propagandist – the left’s equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. A lot of people on the left have fallen for this; indeed, among a certain chunk of left-wing thinkers it is necessary to denounce Michael Moore before going on to attack the right with one’s credentials as a clear thinker established.
Be clear about this: Moore is not a left-wing Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh, along with the rest of the extreme right, tries to characterise their political opponents as dangerous and deluded people who can barely conceal their hate for right-thinking, ordinary Americans. Their political project is primarily about finding “proof” of America-hatred, and discounting any counter-evidence.
Any approach that fosters hate is itself hateful.
Michael Moore does not foster hate.
Nothing could be further from the truth. His political project is to expose as false the narrative presented by those in power.
The powerful, the Bush administration in this case, always present a narrative to the world that explains and justifies their actions. This narrative often bears little relationship to the real evaluations and value judgements going on behind the scenes.
This is why all the nitpicking sites that ‘debunk’ Bowling for Columbine miss the point. They turn elisions and normal documentary practice as misrepresentations, and shout that this invalidates the whole. It doesn’t.
This is why Chris Hitchens misses the point.
As I put it in a post on RPGnet, “Hitchens has valuable points to make. He buries them in irrelevant personal insults, straw man attacks, massive oversimplifications, false dichotomies, and an apparent inability to comprehend Moore’s intentions, let alone consider the validity of those intentions or his success or otherwise in achieving them. Ultimately it is shoddy evidence that doesn’t lead to the conclusion we’re asked to swallow.”
I guess I should put a conclusion here, but I’ve run out of thinking. Maybe someone else can do one for me. If anyone’s read this far.

This link actually comes from an article on Salon: Illegal Art.
Within are the overdub remix of the first Harry Potter film, Todd Haynes’ legendary Karen-Carpenter-biopic-performed-with-Barbie-dolls ‘Superstar’, and the Grey Album.
This is good stuff. It will be busy for the next couple days from the Salon link, but is worth bookmarking. Get yer guerilla culture right here goddamit.
Now if only I could find a copy of The Phantom Edit…

As in, ‘what is Ron the Body actually about’.
20 pages of notes later, I’ve got it sorted. Sweet. I am excited. More writing to be done.
Today, ran around at lunchtime playing basketball with bunch of women who are still learning the game. Silly but fun. More on Thursday. Breaking a sweat of any kind is good.
Hayfever sucks. Stupid Northern Hemisphere pollen. Not used to it.
Odd transition thing: as noted, have come to an end of a period of busy stuff, major features of which were some (North) American friends who are now leaving Scotland. Recently emailed friend Jasmine in NZ about how I felt like I was in a tunnel and that soon I’d be out of it and I hoped I’d be able to make contact with some of the cool folk I’d lost touch with over the busy period.
Well, today I went to a farewell party for Nancy. Beforehand I was scribbling Ron stuff at Elephant House, where I crossed paths with George and Tom, two of the people I’d been missing. One door closes, another door opens, that sort of thing…
Looking forward to sleepover at Haunted Derby Gaol. Wooooo.

I went to a Doctor Who convention yesterday. ‘Global Conspiracy’ was a one-day affair themed around a story called ‘The Green Death’, just released on DVD. This story lives on in the vague memories of a generation as ‘the one with the giant maggots’.
The guests were writers/producers Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts, guest actor Stewart Bevan, and Nicholas Courtney who played the iconic recurring character the Brigadier. They were all very charismatic raconteurs, thoughtful and driven and absolutely lovely to listen to.
Most compelling was Barry Letts, who was in acting in the 40s and 50s, then moved to directing, then on to production and writing. He knows the business of TV thoroughly, and expressed himself with care and commitment. He was mesmerising. The others were also great fun; the massively enthusiastic Terrance Dicks, the booming luvvie Nick Courtney, and Stewart Bevan, bemused to find himself answering questions about a minor role from thirty years ago.
The discussion ranged much further than Doctor Who, though. A major theme was concern over the current state of British TV and film. There was a charming moment when Barry Letts talked about the great tide of reality TV, and as if on cue the other three panellists shook their heads gravely at the awfulness of it all.
I like Doctor Who. I like what it stands for. I remember mulling over the character and the TV show when I was newly arrived in Britain, flying a kite on Blackheath as it happens, and it all made sense in a way it never quite had from the other side of the world. Scribbled some lines in my notebook that evening, which I’ve dug out for this blog entry:
“The power of the idea – a man who solves problems through good humour and common sense and lateral thinking, who opposes the crushing logic of Voltaire’s bastards… there is a need for this kind of man, now more than ever. This man makes particular sense among the isolating traditions of England. Ultimately, [the heath] is where his stories return to – the common space in an increasingly uncommon world.”

Irony dept: finally start working on novel about governing power of body in life. Immediately get just sick enough to not be able to work on it. Stupid body.
Nostalgia dept: Sai Baba doco on BBC2 right now. Todman St regulars may remember the Religion Of Love flyer we had on our wall for so long.
World Wide Morgue dept: i have a livejournal – mr_orgue. Just to comment on other LJs, really. Friend me if you have one, I’ve done a few people so far. I also have a gmail, and I have scored the ‘morgue’ id. Rockin’.
Today dept: sat around reading. George Monbiot’s ‘The Age of Consent’, Don DeLillo’s ‘Underworld’.
Sibling dept: oldmost sister Miriam leaving NZ for the UK in a week. Davie diaspora continues.
Comic dept: Grant Morrison’s ‘Seaguy’ is ‘Astro City’ crossed with ‘Flex Mentallo’. Or something. Joss Whedon’s ‘Astonishing XMen’ is serviceable.

“What does it mean to be human?”
So I sat in a cafe and I brought out my notebooks and writing books for Ron the Body, last touched almost a year ago. And I was surprised by how much there is – 40,000 or 50,000 words, whole subplots and sections I’d forgotten, and a lot of it seemed good.
What I had to do was what I needed to do a year ago, what I realised I had to sort out before carrying on – I had to figure out exactly what Ron the Body is about. And check that it is about what I think it’s about.
So I wrote five pages on it, impressions and core ideas, key principles. Key questions. Including the one at the top of this entry. Blimey. So, not avoiding the big questions, then, I guess 🙂
It’s cool. My brain has been Ron-buzzing since.
—
Over on Rafah Kid, Mark has posted a great entry about how the sides talk to each other over Israel and Palestine, including an excellent section about Rachel Corrie and how she has become a rhetorical battleground.
Read it. It is really something special.

Up here.
Only one day still to come.

PREVIOUSLY: PALESTINE TRIP 6

Wednesday April 14 , 2004

Breakfast with Manar and Johnny and little Nicole

BEIT SAHOUR
It was just like driving around a town anywhere in New Zealand, except for the bullet marks, the burned out buildings, the missile holes, and the streets blocked off by rubble to control Palestinian movement.

I can’t emphasise it enough. Its easy to think of places where these sorts of things as happening as special environments, different, where the horrible things that happen are somehow context-appropriate. They aren’t. Imagine how it would feel if there was a wall built across a major street near your home. Imagine a bulldozer pushing rubble into the road outside your house so you need to go the long route to get where you’re going. Imagine the motel nearby all smashed up and burned out. It wouldn’t make sense. Neither does it make sense here.

There’s nothing special about Beit Sahour. There’s nothing special about Palestine. There’s nothing special about the Palestinians. They are just people and chaos is half in the door and its pushing hard.

After breakfast with Johnny and Mannar we meet back at ATG and Samer takes us for another drive. We see more of the signs of chaos. A bypass road being built, at massive expense, flanked by layers of security fences, dividing one village, more in its path. Facts on the ground.

HERODIUM
We drive out to Herodium. This is a hill, the highest for miles. It was made by human hands. Herod built it as a fortress and palace, and the ruins on the top and at its base remain, as do a network of tunnels through its interior. We head out to it, see sheep grazing in the excavated swimming pool at the foot of the hill. The road up goes right past an IDF military base. There are a couple of soldiers in the carpark at the top of the hill, but otherwise this major tourist destination is empty. The soldiers watch us indifferently.

Samer chats briefly to the man in the ticket booth and we go up to the top. Its an impressive ruin, a crater filled with old Roman construction. It is also hot, and we soon duck into the tunnels, out of the sun. We wander through, reading signs explaining the history of this place, particularly its key role in important rebellions in Jewish history.

As we leave, I refill my water bottle at a spout near the soldiers and one of them greets me. They are sitting on a bench with a set of high-powered binoculars mounted before them. “Do you want a look?” he says. I go over and peer through, see villages and settlements for miles in all their flattened detail. “We were in that village yesterday. They were throwing stones. We were shooting.” He says it without any particular emotion, as if it was just the weather. “Rough,” I say, listening with some surprise as the words come out of my mouth, “tough situation.”   He shrugs and doesn’t say more.

This view shows some Palestinian villages seen from the top of Herodion. At the centre of the top is a square of light – that’s a bridge. A bypass road will pass under the bridge – it has already been built up to the bridge. The photo shows the olive groves and village that are in the way of construction and will be annexed and demolished to make way for the road.

Cal stole this shot while a guard in a sniper tower (not visible – that’s a water tower in the photo) watched our van suspiciously. This is the road down from Herodion (the hill is out of shot on the left) and the sign says ‘Welcome to Herodion National Park’. The barricades, barbed wire and sniper tower are an odd accompaniment.

DHEISHEH REFUGEE CAMP
Dheisheh is a large refugee camp, also in Bethlehem, like Aida. We stop in for a look around at Jean-Guy and Sabine’s suggestion. Our host is a gregarious guy named Jihad (Samer: “You really should change your name.”) and we get the tour and history. We stop in at the camp nursery, full of swarming sugar-highed under-fives (it was someone’s birthday) and its impossible not to smile. When I lift one of them up to touch the ceiling he just about explodes with laughter. Cal ends up carrying three of them around at once. Its nice to stop in here.

The streets of Dheisheh are incredibly narrow, the memory of the enclosing wall still fresh. “There are no secrets here,” Jihad says. “Everyone hears everything. Every argument, every cry, every time you go to the toilet. Everything.”

Jihad tells us that Dheisheh was visited by the IDF the previous night. They blew up the sewage processing unit. No-one seems to know why.

Dheisheh refugee camp. Jihad, who told us the history of the place and showed us around, is in most of these photos.

Lunch. It was delicious.

NEXT: PALESTINE TRIP 8

it is being piped into my head right now.
It echoes in there.
Cool.
—
I feel like I’ve just come up for air. The last couple months have been hard work. Good work, but hard, and I was starting to feel I was drowning not waving. But now I pop into the open and fill up on O2 and its true that I’m better for it, stronger and more complete. There’s no such thing as time wasted for a writer, just a few less pages produced in the final tally.
Apart from making contact with a few welcome visitors from far afield, Justin Raffan and Avril Barker among them, I’ve been finishing up some roleplaying game commitments and generally discharging old promises. The end of the road was Friday night, taking part in ‘The Vault, a tournament one-off run by Nancy. The nicest thing for me, apart from getting to game with some people I haven’t had the chance to before (e.g.), was seeing it resonate with the tournament one-off I ran nine or so months ago.
This was Amnesia, by the redoubtable Matt Cowens. Amnesia and The Vault begin in basically identical circumstances. They are entirely different things, of course, but it was nice for me to see the start and the end of an intense period of fantastic gaming should complement each other so nicely.
There are many and obvious reasons why tournament games start with “you wake up and you remember nothing”. I think there’s life in that old saw yet.
This particular scenario was of a more experimental bent than most tourny games I’ve seen. I didn’t find an absolute success – it was laden with too many red herrings and not enough solid hooks for either plot development or character interaction – but it deserves recognition for being a good, challenging idea executed well. Anyway, in play most of these things didn’t matter – Nancy as GM and her Deadly Viper Squad of elite roleplaying talent were able to paper over any gaps in the scenario and make the damn thing hum.
It were cool.
—
Three new people came along to ORC this Saturday. Blimey. I have long ago lost track of our total numbers ever taking part, but I’d guess it in the forties, even fifties. About half of those have stick around long term. Which is just great.
The whole damn thing has been quite the success. Two weeks we have our anniversary. Hmm. I guess that means I still haven’t done everything I need to do: one anniversary to plan. And still gotta write up two final Palestine-trip instalments.
But then, lord have mercy, I will start writing Ron the Body.
—
Also: the Fringe Fest booklet is out. There goes August.

It’s Cal’s birthday.
Click on over and spam her comments with goodwill. Even if it’s the wrong day on the other side of the world. It still counts.
—-
And while I have your attention, click post something useful to the Challenging Definitions comments.
Peace, all of yous fullas.