two haiku: night and morning

a silver jet flies

across the moon at rush-hour --

february night.

***************

the whole way, transfixed

by his misshapen ear --

morning bus to work.

The Dalai Lama Crowd

Did anyone else notice George Bush's reference to "the Dalai Lama crowd" as one group who might want to politicise the Beijing Olympics? Such a delicate, diplomatic, sophisticated tongue he has! God or Allah forbid that such sticky considerations as government-sanctioned murder and brutality, not to mention the wholesale suppression of free speech, should get in the way of a business opportunity, eh George? eh, Gordon?

THE GUARDIANS OF DEMOCRACY

I seem to have beaten my writer's block. I've squeezed out a couple of poems over the last few days, albeit neither of them is quite good enough for public exposure. When they're ready, I'll let you know. Try not to bait your breath too emphatically.

In the meantime, politics.

We live in paranoid times (or do we?) Since those planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and George Bush used it--to quote or paraphrase (depending on how well I've remembered it) William Burroughs--as a pretext for "establishing an international extreme Right Police Authority", everybody with a free bone in his body has been looking over his shoulder.

Myself, I just hate anything that is opposed to free speech. Anything that sets its crossed arms against an individual person's right to make his or her mind up without coercion. Ergo, I loathe Al Qaeda. Ergo, I am fundamentally opposed to Bush and all his accolytes. But if the advice I'm getting from various sources is correct, the fact that I have made public pronouncements against the US and British action in Iraq, and against the spectacular abuse of democratic process that is Guantanamo Bay, means I am very likely under surveillance by some clandestine agency which imagines (bizarrely), that it is working in the service of democracy and I'm not.

Sites with a political content that opposes the present American administration have been shut down without explanation on MySpace. Frank Serpico's site has been interfered with on Blogger. Word is these agencies, whoever they are, monitor blogs for key words and then pressure the site hosts to shut down the ones that don't meet with their approval (though who elected them guardians of democracy I'd like to know). I have no proof that this censorship is happening, but that's the word. The only thing that gives the word an appearance of paranoia is that I haven't been shut down yet. But maybe they just haven't caught up with me.

Yesterday I was even advised, by somebody much more reasonable than I am, and less inclined to paranoia, that I should think twice before attending the pro-Tibetan rally outside the Guildhall in Northampton on March 4th. "I'm always careful of things like that," he said. "Your name will go down on a list, Hodder."

These are frightening times when even the moderates don't trust their leaders anymore.

CRIMINAL CLASS

I received in the mail today Wild Bill Blackolive's latest bit of mad genius scribbling "Criminal Class", which recounts the problems he had after being arrested for drunk driving a year or two ago. I'm not sure where you can get it right now, or even if, but if you can't find it anywhere else, write to Bill. You can find HIM under the friends list at my MySpace page.

A Dream For You

Sometimes it seems I deflect readers from personal issues at this blog by talking politics. Well, maybe I do. It takes immense courage to bare yourself publically the way my friend Holly does at her page Bus Stop (http://busstopholly.blogspot.com) and I just don't have balls that size. Plus I've been doing a lot of meditation lately, after my early December meltdown, trying to get to the root of my periodic derailings; and if my readers are anything like me, which I suspect they are, they probably experience something akin to an involuntary epileptic absence whenever somebody starts talking about religion. Most of you know I have Buddhist pretensions. It doesn't have to go too much further than that!

But should anybody out there be requiring something sort of personal from me today, how's this? It's a dream I had last night, recorded in my journal the moment I woke up (well, after I'd had a wee). If there are any psychiatrists out there, please analyse this for me:

I was with a group of people and we had got hold of the last jumpsuit Elvis Presley wore on stage before he died. I decided to show off by trying the suit on. Went away to change, then came back with the suit underneath my green winter coat. I was about to let everybody see it when the door came open and Frank Sinatra rolled in driving a golf cart. Suddenly embarrassed, thinking, "My God, Sinatra can't see me like this!" I crept furtively out of the door and went to put my own clothes back on.

Anita Thompson Blogging On

This caught my eye when I was playing around on Facebook the other day. It's the blog of Anita Thompson, she of Hunter S. Thompson fame, and she's carrying on the work of the world's second best journalist (my dad is the best of course), in a manner that all Hunter S. fans will probably want to catch up with. Doesn't entertain quite like he did, naturally. But who the hell could?

http://www.owlfarmblog.com

Oops She Did It Again

Ah, poor Britney. You have to feel for her. Going publically haywire, being sectioned, and then having control of her affairs delivered into the hands of a father she supposedly can't stand. According to the radio, she expressed the wish that somebody else take care of business while she was dribbling and screaming in the booby hatch but the court ignored her because, presumably, she wasn't deemed fit to make a sound decision.

I don't know what's going on with her, obviously. I don't know her. I don't even know the name of her latest album. But I wonder how crazy she actually is right now, and how much the state's assessment of her mental condition has been directed by stories in the press, and bigoted mainstream judgement of how eccentric behaviour might impact on the raising of a child.

It all started, didn't it, with the scandal of Britney driving her car with one of her kids on her lap in the front seat. How very dare she, as a friend of mine would say. The sheer depravity of it! Leave aside the fact that the profiteering scum who follow her everywhere taking photographs of everything she does are probably (if I know anything about the Gentlemen of the Press) drunks or cokeheads who would sell their own mother for a Grazia cover. When I was a kid, in less uptight times, parents used to let their children run around naked in public parks.

Where I Stand

Readers of this page must think sometimes that I am very anti-Labour. I do seem to be knocking them all the time, after all.

Well, I actually live in fear of the inevitable Conservative Party victory at the next election. The only people who don't must either have a vested interest in seeing them elected, or be too young to remember what a horrible, mean-spirited, soulless, oppressive, immoral society they created the last time they were in power.

The Eighties, to steal a comment Sam Shepard made about the Fifties, "sucked dogs". Even its supposed high point--Live Aid--was really a nastily onanistic spectacle, despite the good it did. In the Eighties workers' rights were stripped away, unions were devastated, gays were persecuted, rainbow travellers were assaulted with impunity by the police, and money became the guiding principle of every endeavour. We are, actually, still living in the shadow of Thatcher's erosion of all the civilised values painstakingly built in the decades before she was elected and after Queen Victoria shuffled off the mortal coil. How else would a brand of beds for pre-teen girls called Lolita make it into the Woolworth's online catalogue with nobody at the company realising the name was synonymous with sexual precocity because of a novel by Nabokov? Nobody, it seems, at one of the biggest companies in the country had even heard of the book.

I want to see our society rebuilt, with the inner man being as much of a consideration as the suit he's wearing and the bulge of the money in his pocket. And the Conservative Party aren't the party to do that.

Are Labour? Well, at least in their traditions they might be, however hard Mr. Blair and his pale shadow Mr. Brown might have tried to distance themselves from those traditions; and however appalling the government's misadventures in Iraq and their immoral association with China might be. But I feel sometimes that those of us trying to steer Labour away from its still-obsessive desire to become a more fair-minded version of the Conservative Party might be shouting into a wind so heavy it carries our voices out to sea.

Tibetan Rally On March 4th

On March 4th outside the Guildhall in Northampton, we'll be meeting with sympathetic people to remind the world, peacefully, of the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the human rights abuses the Tibetan people continue to suffer at the hands of their occupiers. We'll be raising the Tibetan flag and--according to one conversation I've had--two Tibetan Buddhist nuns will be in attendance. A timely event with Gordon Brown dragging Richard Branson to Beijing to take tea with the Chinese premier, not to mention the Olympics China is hosting later this year.

Business is good. We all want to see our nation prosper. But should it prosper materially at the cost of its morality? The Labour Government made all the right noises when the awkward subject of human rights was raised on Brown's Chinese tour. But I wonder if they mentioned the torture and murder of Tibetan citizens being carried out as a matter of provable fact by the Chinese occupiers? I wonder if they mentioned 11-year-old Karma (aptly named) shot at by Chinese border guards last October while escaping over the mountains to India. Brown may have Chinese names at the bottom of fat new business contracts, but Karma goes to sleep every night not knowing whether his family, whom he lost in the perilous crossing under Chinese gunfire, are alive or dead.

The days of Labour's "ethical foreign policy" seem a very, very long way off. Not that the Conservatives will be any better.

It Tastes Right

I woke up this morning to the news of the death of Heath Ledger, the intense, charismatic Australian actor. He was found dead in New York, apparently after an accidental drug overdose, though that hasn't yet been confirmed by an autopsy.I'd just seen Ledger in the outstanding movie "Ned Kelly". He made his name, however, in "Brokeback Mountain", a film that became infamous a couple of years ago for its depiction of homosexuality among American cowboys. A Christian friend of mine liked Ledger but vowed publically not to watch the film because of its sinful subject matter. I didn't see it either; but for me that was only because I don't like love stories, whoever they involve. There's something tragic about sitting alone in your flat watching one-dimensional people find happiness in a glowing box in the corner.

Somebody I know in real life died recently too. And it made me think: I have reached the point where I no longer have any doubt that the Buddhists and the Hindus are right about reincarnation. I used to like the idea intellectually, but struggle with it on an instinctive level. When you're dead, you're dead, right? Well, no.

Somebody once asked Gary Snyder how he knew when a poem was finished. He said, "It tastes done." Reincarnation tastes right to me. Not that it's much of a comfort, given that it means you'll only have to come back and kick the bucket all over again.

TV? Me? No Way, Jose

I am having a paper war with the TV Licensing chaps. You know, those people who go around collecting £135 per household on behalf of the government so that we can have the privilege of watching the sainted BBC, supposed upholder of all the stout traditional values that once made this country ruler of the waves.

You see, I have a television, but I only use it for watching dvds. I can't actually get a tv signal in the Lookout. I was rather perturbed by this when I moved in last March,and made a nuisance of myself complaining about it to the Estate Agent who act on behalf of my landlady. But after a while, when nothing was done to remedy the situation, I thought, "Do I really care anyway? Am I missing that much?"

Only live football (and you can get that down the pub). Most good television, in my humble you-know-what, disappeared from British tv screens a long time ago. So I decided, though with the inaction of my Estate Agent I probably didn't have much choice, that I wasn't going to bother with television anymore and save myself the £135 for things that would enrich my life much more. Like books, and music, and the occasional bottle of wine.

But try telling that to TV Licensing. I've tried. Twice. And after both letters of explanation from me they've sent a further unpleasant and threatening missive telling me, in effect, that if I don't get a license immediately, they'll send the boys round.

Fine, I told them in my latest letter. Come round. I'll make you a cup of tea. I'll even go out and buy sugar for it (I don't take sugar personally). You could be in the Lookout for an hour and you'd still find no evidence that I watch television. But please stop ignoring the letters of explanation you have asked me to write. It's costing me a fortune (well, a few coins) in stamps and paper, and the bullying tone of your communications really aggravates me.

Is it so inconceivable, in the modern age, that somebody should choose not to spend half of their free time in front of a glowing box in the corner of their living room watching crap while the better part of their lives go by? Perhaps it is, given what a conformist society we live in. But I am somebody who has made that choice. As psychologically damaging as it seems to be for the people at TV Licensing to "take that on board", as the saying goes, I wish they'd deal with it and leave me alone.

One Man's Meat Is Another Man's Murder

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (now there's a political heavyweight) says she intends to "work closer" with--ie bully--internet providers to ban extremist websites, which are shouldering a lot of the blame for people being recruited to terrorist causes.

Uh-oh.

Now, before the spirit of Senator McCarthy rises indignantly in you, let me state (though it sickens me that I should have to), that I loathe Islamism (as opposed to Islam), with a passion. I hate any philosophy that's anti-intellectual, anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-alcohol, sexually puritanical and prone to enforce its agenda with violence. That's why I have a problem with the contemporary version of Christianity as well, though other than at the State level Christianity tends not to be violent.

Put barriers onto websites so that those under sixteen can't see them, by all means. But after sixteen isn't a person presumed to be an adult, and capable of making his or her own decisions? These Islamists will find ways of circulating their pernicious material anyway. Why do we want to help their cause by making political martyrs of their leaders and organisers?

And once legislation of the sort Smith is proposing (I presume they're going to legislate and not just act freely, this--let us remember--unelected government of ours), where are they going to stop? How, after all, do you define extremism?

Edward Abbey's fine novel "The Monkey-Wrench Gang" is, I understand, regarded in some quarters in the United States as advocating terrorism. It's about a disorganised band of environmentalists destroying machinery and blowing up bridges that are spoiling the beauty of the free spaces of the American West. Naughty, I'll grant you, and highly expensive for whoever has to foot the bill. But terrorism? What would you call businessmen working hand in hand with corrupt politicians to wreck the natural habitat of thousands of wild creatures, and steal from our beleaguered spirits the last few places a human being can go to escape the concrete and steel that are strangling him?

The society we live in is supposed to be a free one, with the exchange of opinion and the resulting vigorous debate between opposing views the engine that powers it.

If you start hacking away at that principle, Ms Smith, the whole social tree will fall down.

New Life

A pregnant friend of mine found out today that she is having a girl.

It's funny. Doesn't matter how cynical you get about life and other people; the arrival of a new baby always seems to give you an inexplicable feeling of optimism and general well-being. Well, it does me, anyway. The one time it looked as if the ex I have written about here from time to time might be pregnant, I was thrilled. She, unfortunately, was not (and she wasn't pregnant anyway).

Now we know what gender the baby is my friend has asked me to do some of my fabulous and world reknowned (should that have a "k"?)cartoons on the nursery wall. Maybe this time I'll restrain myself from my trademark depiction of Sombrero Sam, hippie cowboy, with long hair hanging out from under a large Mexican hat and a marijuana cigarette burning phallically on his lips.

Or maybe not.