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Issue #108. July 22nd - August 4th, 2005 Hudson
Tiny Airborne Enemies
The Pool
Not justified – but caused
Record review #1: Viva Voce (The Heat can Melt Your Brain - Album)
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Hudson I was desperate for a vacation, a mini-jaunt to some local out of both cell phone and laptop range. Job pressures were killing me, so a back to nature escape was in order and although I'd never been on one before the whispering pines and the salty sea were supposed to be good for one's harmony and balance. I didn't want to go alone. I couldn't anyway because I was incapable of driving, so I bribed, begged and bought a friend who was a man of the woods (I think the free beer finally secured the persuasion.) I wanted to go to the west coast of Vancouver Island where, I heard, the pounding Pacific Ocean mercilessly attacked the rugged coastline and the noise was so loud you couldn't hear yourself think. Perfect, the last thing I wanted to do was ponder my useless, anxiety-ridden life in the city. I must say, however, that the idea of unheard screams and me with a broken leg at the bottom of some cliff did occasionally send shutters of panic through my twitching body. Oh well, my friend of some years was there to save me. I'd been so stressed out lately that I had developed a disgusting skin rash on my scalp and coupled with intense weight loss it made me appear quite atrocious. I looked like a decaying pussy willow ready for the slightest wind to send me into oblivion. On the incessantly winding and curvy drive, I couldn't help scratching, flaking, squirming and slightly whimpering with every painful twist the brand new SUV I had rented took, but I never complained out loud even though my friend had rolled his eyes so many times I wondered how he could possibly keep his eyes on the road. We stopped to get lunch at some remote roadside cafe in the middle of who knows where. As I left the truck, a trail of dead skin followed me as if I was some fearful child lost in the woods. Near the end of my itchy road trip, we came to a fork in the road. About thirty clicks to the right was one town and to the left was our town only ten clicks away. The left was promising if not for political reasons, I thought. Stuck between the two villages was a mediating patch of national park. We were much too early to go to the cabin. The owner was very adamant about the time we should appear, so we decided to head into town for a drink to calm my nerves after the eight-hour twisted drive. We parked the oversized, gas-guzzling beast near a bunch of rusted out pickup trucks. This should have been my first clue. I tightened my sandals and dropped my heavy camera around my neck, nearly breaking my pussy willow twig neck. My friend was psychotically anxious to get his babysitting reward, so I was dragged to the first bar that was in our line of sight. We walked inside but I had to wait until my eyes adjusted to the dark and smoky surroundings. I sucked the musty, poisonous air inside my precarious lungs, which caused me to thunderously cough out loud. When I recovered and opened my eyes all I could see were the red and tired eyes of twenty out of work fishermen and loggers, I presumed, staring at me. As I entered the dungeon, the entire place went as silent as a union hall waiting for commercial fishing or logging licences. It was too late to back out because my friend was already half way to the bar, so I moved surreptitiously to a soaking, cigarette burnt cloth covered table. I couldn't even recognize the original colour of the covering and if you had squeezed the disgusting piece of cloth, you would have received a pint of beer. My friend came back and as he put two bottles of domestic beer on the table, they landed with a splash. I reminded him that I only drank Bordeaux, but he told me to shut up and drink the beer. This was no place for wine, unless it was out of a box or in a paper bag. Soon the dank little hellhole filled with voices, most of them laughing. I'd never drunk a beer so fast in my entire life. I prodded my friend to make an early exit, which we carefully did, while I kept my cowardly eyes glued to the scurvied patrons in case a flying bottle came our way. I had to watch out for my friend after all. We jumped into the vehicle, as a snowfall of dead skin swarmed me, and made our way to the cabin even though we were technically still too early. I should have made a reservation to the right of the sign, I thought as I silently belched, which might have saved me from guzzling a repulsive beer in two seconds. I had booked the vacation retreat having never seen it, but the pictures showed a comfortable, cozy and reclusive spot, but, come to think of it, I got the brochure from a lumber store. Panic ensued. However, it really didn't matter at the time because of my desperate need to escape. The place could have been a shack held together with tape and string. As the last flakes of panic dropped, we drove into the parking lot and pleasantly the cabin was gorgeous and huge. I noticed a huge patio that ran the length and width of the shiny tanned log cabin, which looked like a National Geographic show home. The owner who greeted us at the truck was a weather beaten young man, a jack-of-all-trades with a tool belt permanently attached to his hip. All he needed was a pack of cigarettes rolled under his sleeve to complete that macho tool man look. The first thing my friend asked for were directions to the ocean. The owner didn't speak, but pointed to some distant road across the quiet highway that ran in front of the cabin. We quickly put away our gear, me in the provided chest of drawers; my friend just dropped his bag on the polished floor. Then I put on my brand new bright yellow raincoat and new hiking boots, good until minus three hundred. We crossed the highway and headed down the road so loquaciously exposed by our cabin keeper. Once you moved about ten meters down the road, there was a huge government sign with very small print, that no human could ever possibly read, declaring the road open to all. Ah, I thought, a government road, it must still be under construction. Good thing we were walking. As we started walking down the road, I noticed a huge black and tan dog nearly two meters high and weighing in at one hundred kilos. He was guarding the public road and we were trespassing on the hound from hell's territory, as his black soulless eyes told us. He flew at us with saliva flying in the wind. My "flight or fight" response didn't take long to kick in and quicker than you can say big ugly mean dog, I was flying across the highway and back to the cabin. I was a yellow streak darting through the air like super banana to get the gleaming new SUV and save my friend. It hadn't even dawned on me in my panic that I couldn't drive. As the brutal beast saw the yellow flash running away, he knew he was right on the mark. "One down and one to go" went through that callous pea sized brain. Just to let us know who was the most macho animal on the planet, he took a chunk out of my friend's hip. Cujo's master heard the commotion and came running to my friend's rescue, but none was needed because through calm dictation my friend had befriended the beast. In fact, they were on a first name basis by the time I arrived after cowering in a ditch and according to the look my friend gave me, I think he preferred Hudson's vicious company to the yellow streak. The owner was gushing with apology while Hudson was content with the large human femur he was chewing on as we continued our journey down the road. When we finally got to the beach, I noticed how all the trees along the coastline were permanently bent from the onslaught of the Pacific Ocean winds and they were right, I couldn't hear myself think, but good thing because it was hard not to think about the grapefruit size bruise on my friend's hip, which I guess was better than worrying about my jittery life, but it was a good thing I didn't fall off a cliff because my friend had deserted me on the rugged coast. He also made me wear the yellow raincoat for the whole trip. I didn't have the balls to argue.
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Tiny Airborne Enemies I awoke 20 minutes before my alarm clock was due to go off with a sneeze, and instantly wished that I hadn't; woken up, that is. The sneeze was a sort of ok as sneezes go. I lay still trying to remain calm, trying to slip back into the deep warm sleep which would protect me from the memory that was soon to hit me. I stretched out my legs feeling the duvet surround me soaked in warmth and sleep. I felt myself drift away; escaping a world I was not yet ready to embrace. I almost did it. I almost escaped but my eyes scratched and burned and itched, and my nose felt heavy. Pollen battered away at every available pore, burrowing, tickling and generally making a nuisance of itself. Everything about my head was wrong at that moment, so when the memory finally hit me I think I was half expecting it. It was over. It was over. I groaned inwardly and felt a faint wave of sickness rise in my stomach. "Not today. Please not today" I begged silently but I knew that no amount of hoping and wishing and dreaming was going to change the fact. I remember when it had started. We had been so excited and so full of hope. We were going to do anything and everything. Nothing seemed out of our reach, nothing seemed impossible. Maybe that is how everyone feels. And now we won't get that chance. I turned onto my side, scrunching up my eyes, secretly hoping that I had forgotten to set my alarm so that I could put off the inevitable for another day. "Just one more day, that's all I need, just one more day." But then I was cursed by another sneeze and a sudden need to blow my nose. I was going to have to get up. I turned over and looked at my clock. Ok, 15 minutes. I could get up and blow my nose in less than one and still have 14 minutes to get back to sleep. 14 more minutes to forget. But it doesn't work like that. Once you get up everything becomes real, whether you are ready for it to or not. That is how I found myself walking my dog 10 minutes earlier than I needed to. I watched her jealously as she ran through the long grass kicking up pollen as she went. Excited by cigarette packets and bits of chewing gum stuck to the pavement and things too disgusting to mention at that time in the morning. She was oblivious to the fact that things had changed. She was oblivious my tiny airborne enemies who floated through the air in their millions. She was oblivious to all of the things we had done, and all of the things we hadn't done. Oblivious to the fact it was now too late to do any of them. It was over. The holiday which had stretched out endlessly for two weeks was over. It had evaporated into nothing, and today I had to return to work and to a life of doing the things I did not want to do. And as the reality crept upon me, and as I put on my dull dark work clothes, and as I sneezed for the 57th time that morning a little thought snuck into my brain. "One day it won't be like this. One day I really am going to escape."
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The Pool Today is a beautiful day - perfect blue skies and bright sunshine - and I am looking at it all from my office desk. The sunlight hitting the old bricks outside my window and is actually quite pretty, but I would still like to be out enjoying the sunshine. I would prefer to be walking through the park with an ice-cream or on the beach with the sand beneath my toes and the sea-breeze whipping around my legs. However, my ideal place to be would be beside the pool in Eagle Lodge, reading a good book and throwing my self into the icy water at regular intervals. I’d spend the entire day there, with a picnic lunch and an ice-box of cold fruit and melting ice-lollies, like we did when I was small. The way I remember it the summer stretched on and on, we spent the almost everyday at the pool. Eagle Lodge was my grandparents house and they dug the pool when my dad and his brother were both winning medals for their school swimming team. It had to be big enough for swimming laps and deep enough for diving. I don't remember my grandparents living in that house, but my uncle bought the house from them and kept the pool up and running. But since it was outside, in Ireland, it was only useable for maybe 4 months in the year. The rest of the year it would get gradually greener and was left to the assorted pond-life that made their home there – water-skaters, newts, sometimes the odd frog or two. It would take a lot of work clean it up again and yet we did it every year. All the water would have to be pumped out and when the water level got too low for the pump, buckets of green water would be lifted out and thrown over the hedge, while the sludge at the bottom had to be scooped up with dust-pads. Cleaning the pool meant getting in with brillo pads, pot scrubs, etc and scrubbing the walls and floor of the pool. Brillo pads could only be used on the walls, because the pink foam made the floor dangerously slippy It was an event that we looked forward to, at least the children did, the adults who did most of the work probably weren’t as enthusiastic. We looked forward to it. We would arrive early and be eager for the water levels to go down enough that we could get into the pools and start cleaning the walls. It was disgusting – I can still remember the feeling of sludge between my toes – like thick, gloopy mud, but green and full of bugs. We would spend the entire day filthy dirty, in swimming togs and shorts and we loved it! It was a party, we used to invite friends to help clean the pool, and even more surprisingly they came! It meant summer was coming. The satisfaction came when the last person got out of the pool, using a cloth to wipe away their dirty footprints as they walked up to the shallow end. Then it was empty and clean – blue walls and white floor. Even though the pool was clean, we could enjoy it yet. First we had to fill it back up again. This took weeks as the water came from an outdoor tap, through from a single, skinny hose pipe. Watching the water dribbling into the empty pool, it was hard to imagine how it would ever get there. Eventually it did, and the first swim of the summer was a big deal, though we couldn’t wait until it was full – if the water reached our waists, that was good enough! After that, we’d go swimming whenever the weather was good enough. It didn't have to be sunny, just had to be warm. The water was icy cold, so you wouldn’t stay in too long, and when you did get out you would be covered in goose bumps. It used to be bliss coming home from school in the first few weeks of September, getting out of your uniform and going straight down to the pool. But of course, the summer would eventually come to an end and when it was obvious that we weren't going to get anymore nice days, the steps were taken out and we would abandon the pool to the water beetles and other pond life for another year. We abandoned the pool for good about 8 years ago because it had sprung a leak, exacerbated by the spring at the bottom of the pool, underneath the lining. We couldn’t afford to replace the lining and the pool sat, green and idle for a couple of summers. Then my aunt and uncle did up their house and garden and the pool was filled in and lost forever, along with the hedges that sheltered it and the old, old apple trees that we used to sit in, in our towels. The whole thing was flattened and it’s hard to imagine the pool ever being there at all.
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Not justified – but caused Two weeks ago bombers killed over 50 innocent people in London. Among the people they killed were Muslim civilians – including an Afghan – some of the very people they claimed to be taking ‘vengeance’ for the deaths of. Today someone attempted to repeat this attack – and thankfully they failed. Witnesses will hopefully now be able to identify the bombers and the police may be able to find out from them who else was involved. The government argue that terrorism motivated by extreme interpretations of Islam existed before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – pointing especially to September 11th - so there can be no link between these and the London bombings. This argument is based on the hope that we will suffer collective amnesia, or, perhaps, believe that history began on the 11th of September 2001. There is no justification for killing innocent people but the idea that there was no reason for it – that the bombers simply ‘hate our way of life’ is stretching the truth to breaking point. The terrorists on September 11th, in Madrid and in London made it very clear what their motives were. After September 11th Bin Laden said “If avenging the killing of our people is terrorism then…we are terrorists.” .The Madrid bombers asked “Is it ok for you to kill our children, women, old people and youth in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Kashmir? And is it forbidden to us to kill yours?” . The London bombers claimed they were taking ‘vengeance’ for the ‘massacres in Afghanistan and Iraq’. They were all completely wrong. The murder of innocent people can never be justified by the killing of other innocent people – but revenge for the killing of Muslim civilians is still clearly their motive. There was no occupation of Afghanistan or Iraq before September 11th – but the US government was (and still is) propping up the corrupt torturing dictators of the Saudi Royal Family , the torturing authoritarian regime in Egypt, and arming and funding the Israeli military occupation which kills and tortures Palestinian civilians. Our governments and their defenders will protest that there is no global conspiracy to target Muslims – and they’re right there isn’t one. They will go on to claim that our forces are protecting Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq from the Taliban, Al Qa’ida and Ba’athists as well as replacing torturing dictators with elected governments which respect human rights. If this was true then it would certainly be right to argue that our troops should stay in these countries whether or not this caused us to become targets for terrorist attacks. This, unfortunately, is far from the truth. In Iraq corpses bearing torture marks are still found in mass graves. Now though they are mostly Sunnis arrested by Iraqi government forces. On the 5th of May fifteen were arrested. Ten days later their mutilated corpses were discovered in a shallow grave. Another mass grave was discovered on July 10th – this time of 10 Sunni men arrested 2 days before. Dumping the bodies in rivers is an alternative favoured by some government forces. Sometimes the corpses make it to hospitals – like those of 9 men who Amnesty International report were allegedly bricklayers arrested by government forces on suspicion of aiding insurgents. Hospital staff in Baghdad say their corpses, found in a shallow grave a few days later, bore marks of torture including electricity burns. The Iraqi government claim to be trying to stop torture and murder by their forces – but this claim seems to be empty. As the new Iraqi government General Adnan Thabet (who also served under Saddam) told the Times newspaper “This is a dirty war and we’re the only ones with the guts to fight it”. Coalition governments turn a blind eye to the fact that the ‘new democratic’ Iraq and Afghanistan involve torture, murder and mass graves just as they did under Saddam and the Taliban. Many of those doing the torturing and the killing are the same people who worked for Saddam. The only difference today is that more of the bodies are Sunni and less of them Shia or Kurds. Certainly thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by terrorist bombings and continue to be. They are also killed at American checkpoints, not to mention being killed by the hundred in each coalition assault on the mostly Sunni cities of central Iraq – starting with 600 civilians including over 300 women and children killed in the April 2004 assault on Falluja - as well as facing torture by some coalition troops. The same process is taking place in Afghanistan where the US bombing campaign which began after September 11th has never entirely ended. Joint British and American offensives and air strikes kill civilians as surely as the Taliban – most recently when 17 Afghan villagers including women and children were killed by a US air strike in Kunar province on the 1st of July. The new ‘democratic’ government includes warlords every bit as brutal as the Taliban – among them General Dostum and Gul Agha – the governor of Kandahar. They and US forces have continued to torture and kill Afghan civilians according to Human Rights Watch. The inevitable result is that as well as killing at least as many civilians, in as horrific ways as the Taliban or the insurgents, our occupations are strengthening terrorist networks both in these countries and in our own by giving them more instances of brutal occupations of Muslim countries and killings of Muslim civilians to ‘avenge’ as they see it. Those who died on September 11th were mostly innocent of the killing or torture of Palestinians in the occupied territories, propping up the torturing dictatorship of the Saudi monarchy or bombing Iraqi civilians in the first Gulf War just as the thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed in the subsequent wars were not responsible for September 11th and the victims of the London and Madrid bombings were not responsible for the killing of civilians in Iraq. To pretend that there is no connection though – that we can keep on propping up torturers and dictators and killing civilians in Muslim countries and then claim we are spreading democracy and that terrorist murders of our civilians are motivated purely by insanity or hatred for our way of life – is to stick our heads in the sand and deny the bitter truth that they are killing our civilians because our troops are still fighting wars of occupation in which they inevitably kill theirs. The London bombers – some teenagers, others highly educated men with families and good jobs- were not motivated by hatred of our way of life but by a twisted interpretation of their religion’s injunction to act to protect other Muslims. They saw Muslim civilians being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and as they saw it took vengeance for it. There is no doubt that they were wrong – that revenge – especially taking revenge on innocent people for the actions of others – can never be justified. It may be that we can never end terrorism entirely – that there will always be a few people who see killing the softest targets as the easiest way to get publicity for a cause. What is certain is that continuing wars of occupation which not only kill more innocent people but also lead to more recruits for terrorist networks and more terrorist attacks on our civilians without changing the use of torture and massacre by the governments we are installing is a failed and morally bankrupt policy.
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