Issue #95 January 20th - February 3rd 2005

The Annual Friends Of The Heroes Festive Poetry Competition
Finally, the moment you've all been waiting for... The results are in!

Phoenix
We sat in the park, watching the hills burn above the town, the red glow swallowing the sunset. It found a faint and disconcerting echo in the blanket spread below us on the dry and dying grass.
By Johan Hugo

Never Judge a Book By It's Cover
Edward works at a small firm of accountants in the City. Monday to Friday, 9am to 5.30pm he sits bolt upright at his desk which is bare of clutter and focuses his eyes on his work. He rarely listens to the office gossip let alone shares any.
By Rachel Queen

Beautiful Lies - Bush's Inaugural Speech
President Bush’s speech on his inauguration for a second term was certainly full of uplifting and positive rhetoric about freedom. Unfortunately his policies continue to do little to extend freedom – and much to take it from people worldwide.
By Duncan McFarlane

The Amazing Friends of the Heroes Poetry Competition

I know the waiting must have been hard, but finally the votes have been counted and The Friends Of The Heroes are pleased to announce the results of the much debated festive poetry competition. So without further ado the results are:

In Joint Third Place...

Coal
All year long I had been a naughty boy,
I ignored my mother's warnings,
Yet still I wanted toys.
When I awoke on Christmas Morning
all I got was a potato.

Mother is this worse than coal?
"Yes" said she, "you have ignored my warnings"
Yet still I wanted toys.
When I awoke the next morning
all I had was a potato.

"Mother, I am very cold" said I.
"Coal would keep me warm
I promise to be good from now on".

By James Weaver

(We thought that it was our duty to share this poem. We can only hope this cruel fate never befalls anyone else)

&

Nine-Inch Poem
'write me a love poem, please... c’mon, write me a love poem,' she asks me.
You want a love poem? You want ME to write YOU a love poem? Okay...check it.
First of all, before I do anything, I have to start off with some poetic foreplay. You can bat your eyes or rub your thighs against mine so that way my poem can begin to take shape by getting a feel for you. This is where we whisper sweet nothings into each other’s ear. BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH! After the sweet whisperings of sweet nothings that supposedly mean something which get me into a poetic mood, I’ll expose myself and show you nine-inches of pure poetry. Well, so maybe I’m exaggerating (you know, stretching the truth), but in all honesty this is poetry, so I can use as much hyperbole as I want. Okay, so now my love poem is hanging out on a limb for you to see. This is where I cover it in cliché, saying stuff like 'My love is like a flower,' and ' You complete me,' stealing lines from such and such movies, poems, songs and pop-up books. After my poem is all wrapped in cliché, I’ve got to deliver it before it loses steam or you examine it too closely and find faults. Let me just interject here: I know there might be some stiff competition out there by other fellow poets showing you their love poems, but I’ll warn you right now that they just want sex! You want a love poem? Well, when my love poem deeply penetrates you, you are going to be screaming for more and more and that’s when I suddenly pull out. Things will get really quiet so that I can create a sense that my poem is bigger that what it really is, and this is where I deliver the climax and come to the conclusion that I am a-dick-ted to you because you are cunt-agious.
You want a love poem?
I’ll show you one...

By Christopher Perez

(Not one mention of Christmas but we couldn't remember what the rules for the competition were anyway)

In Second Place

And the Winner is..

Bling Bling Merrily On High:

Those northern heroes came down to the smoke
For a few days of boozing and the odd puff of toke
Flat caps and whippets, ey' up lass 'yer ready?
Crusin' and smoozin' with strange gentlemen, steady!

A night on the town
Their pants stained dark brown
Slammed in a cell for being so yokel
A tip for poor Santa, say '' 'innit " like a local

(It was about us! We liked that)

We would like to whole-heartedly thank all those that were kind enough to donate prizes for this competition, especially: The Wedding Present (especially Jessica at Scopitones), Gavin, Ted and Ali from Clayhill (including Lewis, Nigel and Chris), and Ian Cheek, without whom all of this would not have been possible, so thank you all very very much indeed.

Phoenix

We sat in the park, watching the hills burn above the town, the red glow swallowing the sunset. It found a faint and disconcerting echo in the blanket spread below us on the dry and dying grass. An army helicopter clattered overhead, trailing an ineffectual-looking bucket, somehow full of precious water from the sludgy bottom of a failing dam. The hairdryer wind carried the sweet smell of the burning pines to our faces, mixed in with the sour smell of ash and other gases.

I reached for her hand, and held it. We weren’t saying anything about it, but both of us were grateful that we weren’t up there, trying to fight the flames racing fast and ravenously before the gale-force wind; both of us were – somewhat guiltily – grateful that someone, and we wished them well with whole our breathless hearts.

It had been devilishly hot for days before and when the wind came up this morning, we both and everyone was sighing already with the fatalistic inevitability that the drought-stricken land around us would be going up in flames, somehow.

By mid-morning the palls of thick white smoke were billowing all around the town, mocking the clouds that everyone had almost given up on hoping for and that, even now, refused our need.

I turned to her and said: “In ancient times there would have been a remedy, you know. We could have settled on some god and figured out what it was that we had done to piss him – or her – off. Then we could have slaughtered some cows or something – and saved them from dying slowly in the fields anyway.”

She looked back at me funnily and not amused – and I hadn’t tried to be amusing - and said: “And you think that would have helped any, even back then?” It was clear that she, at any rate, didn’t think it would have.

“No – not really. But at least it would have felt as if we were doing something, as if someone was responsible. Perhaps it would have brought us all a little closer together, somehow.”

We’d both spoken a little too angrily, too quietly, bitterly… and then we were silent, and yes, we were a little angry, but not with each other. It was just that it really felt as if the world was ending all around us, and we’d only just found one another. It was a silly feeling, perhaps, and self-indulgent – definitely – and of course we knew that it wasn’t really, but that’s the way we felt, and it made us angry. We’d both watched many news-reports before, of course, solitary and single: news-reports chronicling disasters both natural and man-made, but not even those that were calibrated to suffering in the thousands had ever felt this close to us, this personal.

Neither of us said anything more then, scared of what the hopelessness would squeeze into our voices, until she moved and said, simply and softly: “Just hold me. Please.”
And for the first time in a sweat-soaked week the heat did not penetrate to me at all as I put my arms around her and her tightly to me.
An ambulance was going by… or was it another fire-truck? A keening siren heading for the hills in the falling red-lit night.
I leant across and kissed her, for the first time.
And though it really did feel as if the world was coming to an end that night, something deep below the surface stirred: the first, faint kick of a new beginning, too.

Johan Hugo

(More by this author)

Never Judge a Book by It's cover

They say that every person has a story to tell and that you should never judge a book by it's cover. Well I'm not sure about every person but I happen to know that for at least one person this is indeed very true.

The person in question is named Edward Walker; a grey looking man aged approximately 45 years old. Edward works at a small firm of accountants in the City. Monday to Friday, 9am to 5.30pm he sits bolt upright at his desk which is bare of clutter and focuses his eyes on his work. He rarely listens to the office gossip let alone shares any. His colleagues have very little insight into his life.

Those that do allow him a little time in their thoughts paint a bland existence for him. They imagine him living in a small house that he shares with his wife drinking milky tea and watching Coronation Street. Maybe on the weekend they will go to look around furniture stores or more often than not they might stay in and work in the garden.

They are wrong. Edward does not live with his wife; he hates milky tea, and does not even have a television. Furthermore, since he is on the run from the law his life is anything but bland. Now before you jump to the wrong conclusions I must tell you he is not a criminal. Well maybe he is but not in the strictest connotation of the word.

Edward is a writer. He lives and breathes and survives by writing about anything and everything. Ironically the very thing that kept him alive almost destroyed him.

25th June 1988, had been a very normal day for Edward. He returned home from work with a familiar feeling excitement in his stomach. Soon he would see her. They had got married young and he had felt lucky ever since. She was like an extra part of him; the sensible part, the funny part, the part that made his life make sense. Even after 10 years of marriage he would find herself watching her out of the corner of his eye and feel his heart leap into his mouth as she smiled.

His heart hit the floor as he approached their house. The front door was wide open and belongings where strewn across the floor. He ran to his desk and his worst fears were confirmed. He knew he shouldn't have written it, he knew he should have hidden it, he knew it was too late for regrets.

There was nothing remarkable what he had written. Just a simple book detailing their day to day lives. He hadn't ever considered trying to get it published. It was just something he had to write. For the children, for the grandchildren, who was he kidding for himself. He was a writer that was what he did.

Edward knew he had to leave. He'd found her note. Thank God they'd got out too. Of course they couldn't leave an address for him to follow. He doubted if they'd even known where they were going when they had fled their home.

Months later Edward wound up in England. He worked hard, found someone to forge papers, changed his name and learnt the art of blending in.

Now he sits and waits. He waits for the day he can return, or even for the day he will be able to talk to his three children and his wife. He imagines their lives without him and hopes they are safe and well.

He waits Monday to Friday, 9am to 5.30pm sitting bolt upright at his desk which is bare of clutter and focuses his eyes on his work. It is unlikely that his colleagues will ever have any insight into his life.

He waits, a grey looking man, slowly fading away...but never losing hope.

Rachel Queen

(More by this author)

Beautiful Lies - Bush’s Inaugural Speech

“For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom…………….

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world”

President George W Bush – Inaugural address – 20th January 2005

“The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic,realistic, justice each have several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another...Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way… the person who uses them has his own private definition but allows the speaker to believe he means something quite different’

George Orwell , ‘Politics and the English Language’ , Horizon , 1946

So Bush has been inaugurated as President for a second term. Despite many electoral irregularities in the 2004 Presidential election , some of which are still being investigated by the US Government Accountability Office. Although senior Democrats including Hillary Clinton ,Edward Kennedy and Barrack Obama made speeches condemning electoral irregularities in the final state by state ratification vote of the joint session of both houses of congress only one Senator – Barbara Boxer (Democrat , California) – and 33 members of congress voted against ratifying the vote in Ohio as free and fair

President Bush’s speech on his inauguration for a second term was certainly full of uplifting and positive rhetoric about freedom and liberty. Unfortunately his policies continue to do little to extend freedom – and much to take it from people worldwide. This isn’t surprising when you consider the membership of the Bush administration – which includes many of the same people who helped crush democracy in Latin America in the 1980s. It’d be nice to think they’d changed since then – but they haven’t.

Back in the 1980s Vice President Cheney was a congressman backing aid to the death squads of the contras in Nicaragua. Donald Rumsfeld was negotiating the sale of anthrax and chemical weapons to Saddam as Reagan’s Middle Eastern envoy. Like many in the Reagan administration Paul Bremer was organising torture and death squads in Latin America, as was the Bush administration’s Ambassador to Baghdad (and formerly envoy to the UN) John Negroponte.

True some faces have changed in the new administration – but their beliefs and policies are still the same as those of the old hands from the Reagan administration. Alberto Gonzales , Bush’s new Attorney General , was a White House lawyer in 2002 who drafted memos arguing that the President could declare prisoners in Afghanistan legally outside the Geneva Conventions – which he described as ‘quaint’ and ‘outdated’ – and that torture isn’t torture unless it results in pain ‘equivalent to that’ which would cause death or permanent organ damage.

The Geneva Conventions were based on the experience of war crimes committed in the 19th and 20th centuries. The idea that no war crimes could take place in the modern world is ludicrous. By re-interpreting the conventions to suit themselves the Bush administration and the Blair government made war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan by their militaries virtually inevitable.

It’s no good arguing that we’re now fighting a new enemy – global terrorism from Al Qa’ida – that just results in everyone – civilian , combatant or terrorist and man ,woman or child – being defined as a potential terrorist suspect. This is exactly what has happened at Guantanamo Bay , at Abu Ghraib , at Bagram air base in Afghanistan , at Belmarsh prison in the UK. At Abu Ghraib all Iraqis brought to the prison were made to wear plastic bracelets with the word ‘terrorist’ written on it. Not one of them had been tried. The majority were either guilty of no crime or petty criminals.

This relaxed attitude to torture led to not only torture at Abu Ghraib – known to have resulted in several deaths – but torture and killings by occupying American and coalition troops across Iraq and Afghanistan. This unfortunately wasn’t a new policy – just the extension of the existing policy of torture used by British and American troops occupying other countries since World War Two.

Promoting democracy and human rights abroad would probably lead to reduced support for Islamic fundamentalist groups like Al Qa’ida and increased safety for Americans and Britons – if it was a policy of either government. Unfortunately Afghans and Iraqis aren’t safer or freer today than they were under Saddam – nor are the citizens of allied governments propped up by US military aid , arms sales and alliances in Saudi Arabia (a monarchy employing torture of Saudis and foreigners – including British and US citizens , with no elections) , Uzbekistan (dictatorship , torture , no free elections) and Colombia among many others.

Many of the abuses the Geneva Conventions were meant to outlaw are being carried out by the occupying forces. Forced labour, jailing without trial, torture, execution without trial, denial of the right to form trade unions independent of government, denial of the freedoms of speech and assembly , collective punishment by destroying houses and farms and cutting off electricity and water supplies – or by attacking entire towns and cities and in the process killing hundreds of civilians in each attack as in Falluja and Samarra.

The fact that Al Qa’ida and other Islamic fundamentalist groups kill civilians too cannot justify this.

Far from realising the dangers of these policies and changing direction in its second term the Bush administration is preparing for a new war in Iran. According to Seymour Hersh – the journalist who first reported both the My Lai massacre in Vietnam (around the time Colin Powell was an officer deciding war strategy) and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in Iraq – there have been US special forces on the ground in Iran for over 6 months , identifying possible targets for air strikes.

As in Iraq these supposedly include ‘WMD sites’ – though as in Iraq the IAEA and UN inspectors report that Iran is not close to having an arsenal of long range nuclear missiles. As in Iraq there are no links with Al Qa’ida. As in Iraq there is no chance that Iran would use nuclear weapons if it did have them – because the large nuclear arsenals of Israel, the US and the UK would utterly destroy them if they did. That’s why Saddam never used chemical warheads on the missiles he fired into Israel in the first gulf war when he did possess them (Nye & Smith , 1992, 211-216).

Every country in the world will inevitably acquire nuclear weapons just as they acquired rifles and tanks in the past – but they won’t use them because to do so would be suicide. Dictators may want power – but megalomaniacs successful enough to get into power also have a well developed survival instinct. They will not throw away everything in a pointless and suicidal attack against more powerful opponents.

The reason that Iran is an Islamic state rather than a democracy today is also worth remembering. In 1953 the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, was overthrown in a military coup organised by the CIA and MI6 after he tried to nationalise Iran’s oil industry. In his place the Shah of Iran was installed as monarch and military dictator. The resulting repression backed by a foreign power led to an upsurge in Islamic fundamentalism and nationalism in Iran – leading to the 1979 Islamic revolution which replaced a military dictatorship with an Islamic fundamentalist and theocratic one.

If Iraqis and Afghans are ruled by new US puppet governments controlled not by their own people but by Washington then they haven’t gained freedom – merely returned to square one before their puppet dictators and warlords came into conflict with their patrons in Washington. The same will be true for Iran if it becomes the next target.

The idea that the US government will go round the world fighting wars to free people from dictatorship and spread democracy , and that this will lead the people of the world to gratitude towards the US government is a fairy tale. It sounds uplifting. It inspires those who want to believe that they and their country are inherently good. And it’s a lie. The Bush administration don’t spread freedom – they spread occupation and puppet governments, take away the freedom not to be jailed without trial from foreigners while planning to remove it from their own citizens in both the US and the UK, remove any incentive for other governments to abide by international treaties like the UN Charter and the Geneva Convention by openly acting in defiance of them , increase support for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists like Al Qa’ida by handing them propaganda victories by committing war crimes , and generally erode freedoms in the world by their example. They make Americans and Britons less safe from terrorism.

This is the reality behind the double-speak. Maybe Bush and Blair ‘genuinely believe’ what they say. Double-think is possible with sustained effort. So what? They’re wrong and in Blair’s case at least they’re in a clear minority on the issue.

Orwell wrote that words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ had no agreed definition – they have become merely words meaning ‘good’ as opposed to ‘tyranny’ which means ‘bad’. Bush’s speech said effectively nothing other than ‘I am inherently good, my opponents are inherently bad’. This is not a rational or a moral argument – just a statement of faith that is meant to justify anything and everything done by his side to anyone who opposes him or gets in the way of policies (like the privatisation of Iraq’s schools and hospitals) which his corporate backers want carried out.

It may be pleasant to believe that we are innately good people and members of innately good countries. In reality no-one is innately good or evil. Their actions can do harm or good and be necessary or un-necessary. A good intention, or stating one, does not guarantee that more harm than good will not be caused.

The truth may be unpleasant at times – and hard to know for certain - but it feels far better, to me at least , to say what appears to be the truth based on the sources available than to rally behind a beautiful lie that hides the un-necessary infliction of suffering and death on large numbers of people.

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) "Walden," the Conclusion

Offline Sources

Nye , Joseph S. & Smith , Robert K. (1992) , ‘After the Storm’, Madison Books , London , 1992 (Note - Iraq possessed 30 chemical warheads for Scud missiles and chemical artillery shells but used none of them in the Gulf War)

copyright©Duncan McFarlane 2004

Duncan McFarlane

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