General Hot Topics

[Wyndham]

How do they know that the tidal wave wasn't just something that happened, and that God's will is actually the relief effort?

I have to agree with the Jews on this one: how can you know the mind of God?

[RobertGraves]

The Anglicans in Sydney have the most frighteningly fundamental leaders at the moment. This is a far cry from th eposition of the current Archbishop of Canterbury I'm sure.

[Wyndham]

Indeed Robert. I can hardly imagine a position further from one apt to be adopted by Archbishop Williams!

This is from his Christmas message:

" This tragedy has had a devastating impact in Asia; it is also felt here in Britain and across the world. Every life lost is a personal tragedy for each family and our hearts go out to the bereaved and injured. The hardship caused by this devastation will be a challenge to many and will require the help and support of the world community. You are all very much in my thoughts and prayers at this time."

www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/releases/041228.html

Cripes. I'd hate to be terminally ill in Australia! Wouldn't be expecting alot of sympathy from clergy. Brother, think on it: what terrible thing have you done that God hates you so much?

[RobertGraves]

The Archbishop has enlightened positions that make Sydney Anglicans seem positively backward. It is terribly embarrassing but sums up the social conservativism currently finding popularity in many avenues of life here.

[Wyndham]

This is a really interesting. Its about Walmart business practice. Part of it attempts to quantify the cost of the thing. For example, it appears the US subsidizes Walmart several billions of dollars a year, to the extent that it shorts its workers relative to competition and therefore makes them eligible for public charity.

I must say, that one of the things that's astounded me most about the past decade is the speed with which big business has been working to prove Marx right -- the Cold War safely over, of course.

www.nybooks.com/articles/17647

[Tenarke]

Your article contra Wal-Mart is one of many I have been seeing lately. Apart from their Scroogelike labor practices they have had a very negative impact on whatever charm American small town life retains. As your article points out their marketing will target a small community opening up an “everything” store putting local “mom and pop” small businesses out of business. This done they close these smaller outlets forcing shoppers to travel to one large regional hub.

As for proving Marx right, the next bit of major mischief planned by our current administration is the destruction of the US Social Security system; done, naturally, in the name of saving it.

This editorial does a good job of explaining things:

www.nytimes.com/2005/01/03/opinion/03mon1.html?oref=login

Fortunately this does not directly impact the rest of the world but if successful it would do much to send us back to the good old days of the 19th century.

Given this time line, I will be long gone before my SS retirement bites it, but you younger folks better be keeping on good terms with your kids because they may be looking after you in your senior years, unless you are willing and able to work ‘til you drop.

Yep; old Ebenezer would be proud.

[Aravis]

MSNBC/Newsweek World News has a story out about how different faiths are looking at this disaster: Countless Souls Cry Out To God.

[Wyndham]

Don't know that I agree with all of this, but its worth a read.

www.observer.com/pages/frontpage3.asp

[Tenarke]

For some reason the article brings to mind Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”. If you recall in this story, the White Knight who invented things. Among these inventions he had invented a way to dye his whiskers green and had then invented a very large hat so that they never could be seen.

If the creator is indeed responsible for the laws of thermodynamics which make necessary the convection currents which cause the continental drift and the “ring of fire” which joins parts of Indo-China with Tokyo and the San Francisco Bay area where I used to live, then I guess the buck stops with him, or her, or it.

Of course, if these things worry you; you could always move.

Meanwhile Maureen Dowd has written a dilly of an editorial:

www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/opinion/06dowd.html?th

It’s going to be an “interesting” four years.

[Wyndham]

That is quite the blistering editorial Tenarke, and spot on, though it might have gone further still.

The thing that really makes me wonder about the 'obsolete and quaint' dismissal of the Geneva convention is that nobody really signed the thing out of humanitarian consideration for enemy soldiers. They did it to prevent any future enemy from mistreating our boys in captivity, and to provide grounds for trial if they did.

Suppose, for example, that you were an American soldier captured by Afghan or Iraqi Jihadists. I'm thinking you'd wish to God that nobody had ever heard of Abu Gharib or Guantanamo. I'm thinking that your parents would prefer that America's reputation was, not for torturing captured insurgents, but for treating them with every consideration as proper PWs in accordance with every quaint, obsolete article of the Geneva Convetion. I'm wondering what code the same Jihadists would be tried under, if captured, after ensuring that your exit from the world was accompanied by considerable pain and suffering . . .

Looking beyond this set of conflicts as well. Nobody, I don't think, ever figured that Taliban irregulars would play by the Geneva Convention) --

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!
(last verse, Kipling's, "The Young British Soldier")

-- you'd think that lawyers would be more attentive to precedent. Law isn't a question of convenience, right? What happens when the next enemy concludes from current events that beastliness to our guys is actually aviable option?

This, more even than the recent reduction in veterans benefits, suggests most forcibly to me the gross hypocrisy of the current US administration: all the patriotic talk about 'our brave boys' making freedom safe from terror, and the truth of it is that nobody in the government cares a rap. Our brave boys = disposable trailer trash, children of nobody we want to know. If anybody did care, they'd insist upon observation of Geneva, 'obsolete and quaint' as it may be, as the only protection our own soldiers have. Observing it might mean the inconvience of having to close down CIA interrogation centres and a little open air exercise time at Guantanamo. Might also mean, however, that some poor wounded sap didn't spend his last minutes wishing the enemy could shoot straighter, or that kevlar had never been invented. Wonder if Gonzales et. al. will sing the same song the innevitable next time that a US soldier finds himself in a tiger-cage, or in some 'Hanoi Hilton'?

[RobertGraves]

It must be noted that the two new State Department chiefs worked closely together at the National Security Council when the elder George Bush was president.

[Tenarke]

It’s your fault Wyndham. Your last post got me to ruminating on Kipling.

I was thinking about the, “do it on the cheap”, lack of support for our present combatants and the continuing lack of support they have to anticipate from VA medical facilities when they come home and find that chronic combat related injuries really don’t exist. No such thing really, as cancers related to “Agent Orange” or the Gulf War Syndrome” and no such thing as post traumatic syndrome.

That naturally got me thinking about Tommy Adkins:

“For it’s Tommy this, an Tommy that, an’<br> ‘Chuck ‘im out, the brute!’<br>But it’s ‘Savior of ‘is country’ when the guns
Begin to shoot.”<br>
Also pertinent from, The Naulahka:

“And the end of the fight is a tombstone white
with the name of the late deceased.
And the epitaph drear; ‘A fool lies here who
Tried to hustle the East’.”<br>

[pinkozcat]

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

[Wyndham]

I love Kipling too Robert. Too instructive some times.

Kipling on why the present war in Iraq and Afganistan cannot possibly end in Western victory:

Arithmetic on the Frontier

A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe --
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villanous saltpetre!"
And after -- ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station --
A canter down some dark defile --
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail --
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow
Strike hard who cares -- shoot straight who can --
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

[Wyndham]

Here's a good'un too. Robert Service, 'March of the Dead'.

The March of the Dead
The cruel war was over -- oh, the triumph was so sweet!
We watched the troops returning, through our tears;
There was triumph, triumph, triumph down the scarlet glittering street,
And you scarce could hear the music for the cheers.
And you scarce could see the house-tops for the flags that flew between;
The bells were pealing madly to the sky;
And everyone was shouting for the Soldiers of the Queen,
And the glory of an age was passing by.

And then there came a shadow, swift and sudden, dark and drear;
The bells were silent, not an echo stirred.
The flags were drooping sullenly, the men forgot to cheer;
We waited, and we never spoke a word.
The sky grew darker, darker, till from out the gloomy rack
There came a voice that checked the heart with dread:
"Tear down, tear down your bunting now, and hang up sable black;
They are coming -- it's the Army of the Dead."

They were coming, they were coming, gaunt and ghastly, sad and slow;
They were coming, all the crimson wrecks of pride;
With faces seared, and cheeks red smeared, and haunting eyes of woe,
And clotted holes the khaki couldn't hide.
Oh, the clammy brow of anguish! the livid, foam-flecked lips!
The reeling ranks of ruin swept along!
The limb that trailed, the hand that failed, the bloody finger tips!
And oh, the dreary rhythm of their song!

"They left us on the veldt-side, but we felt we couldn't stop
On this, our England's crowning festal day;
We're the men of Magersfontein, we're the men of Spion Kop,
Colenso -- we're the men who had to pay.
We're the men who paid the blood-price. Shall the grave be all our gain?
You owe us. Long and heavy is the score.
Then cheer us for our glory now, and cheer us for our pain,
And cheer us as ye never cheered before."

The folks were white and stricken, and each tongue seemed weighted with lead;
Each heart was clutched in hollow hand of ice;
And every eye was staring at the horror of the dead,
The pity of the men who paid the price.
They were come, were come to mock us, in the first flush of our peace;
Through writhing lips their teeth were all agleam;
They were coming in their thousands -- oh, would they never cease!
I closed my eyes, and then -- it was a dream.

There was triumph, triumph, triumph down the scarlet gleaming street;
The town was mad; a man was like a boy.
A thousand flags were flaming where the sky and city meet;
A thousand bells were thundering the joy.
There was music, mirth and sunshine; but some eyes shone with regret;
And while we stun with cheers our homing braves,
O God, in Thy great mercy, let us nevermore forget
The graves they left behind, the bitter graves.