Always A Reason

The Dynamics Of Inaction

A song can take a long time in gestation. You can sit on a verse for months, and have nowhere for it to go. In theory it has anywhere and everywhere it can go, but there is something about the chords or phrase or sentiment or whatever bit of lyric in it that demands it goes somewhere important as opposed to just anywhere. So somewhere between the arbitrariness of decision-making and the imagined importance of making the right one lies the sea of paralysing option anxiety.

Then you might glom on to a chorus that might work with it, but then you can't find words for it. Or maybe you're looking for a bridge that changes the mood sufficiently or appropriately, and then you might be thinking about how the breakdown might go. This is all part of the mechanical bit of songwriting. It's not like painting or sculpting or making a film or designing posters, simply because music demands a certain level of intrinsic coherent structure.  It sure ain't like blogging here, I tell you. 

Let's say you have a C chord and you go to A minor, you're treading where just about every songwriter and composer has been down. Coming up with something new that fits across that is going to be very difficult. The history of music is filled with C followed by A minor. If you want to be original, the first thing you might want to do is avoid doing the same thing as a gajillion other songwriters; And even that might just be one single thing out of hundreds of these kind of things. It's no wonder rap came around and did away with melody and to some extent harmony. 

Ironically, the best thing to have happened to songwriting is Digital Audio Workstations. DAWs allow you to just park your ideas and forget about them. When you punch in information to a DAW and then forget about the original genesis or inspiration of that idea, it gives you the liberty to come at it from other angles at a later date. You need to derail yourself from the thing that locks you into the same old ideas. 

Yet most days it can be like anything else where you're staring at a blank canvas or page wondering what the hell you're going to go with the project at hand. I had a guy who taught me lots of things when I was a kid and he used to say there was little difference between the thoughtful pause and just resting. Whatever it is, the dynamic of waiting for things to fall into place is the very dynamic of inaction. 

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Portrait Of A Cyberpunk As An Old Fart

 "It Used To Be Cool, Now It's Just Junk Fiction, Dude"

Live long enough, you get outmoded. It doesn't actually take all that long - more like "long enough". The music, the styles, the movies, the what's-so-cool of anything becomes obsolete so quickly. When I was a teenager working in the local music shop, there was this guy Neville who did repairs. He was a lovely old fella, but alas, you just couldn't talk to him about how cool Eddie Van Halen was. Neville, an old jazzer had played in some great stage bands in the 1940s and 1950s, looked at popular music in 1981 like it was musical junk. This aesthetic obsolescence on his part was just something that happened to him some time in the 1960s. One minute he was a really switched on sax player and then the whole musical world had changed on him. The radical aesthetic shift had dealt him out of the musical mainstream he once inhabited. 

And it's not just music where this kind of thing happens. There are whole tracts of popular culture that are here-today-gone-tomorrow. Even in the internet age you have things like MySpace which was all the rage once-upon-a-time and now it's a punch line about how we were in the mid-2000s. There are kids today, - totally into Tik-Tok - who will look upon this moment in history as that moment when they had the cultural cool or mojo or whatever going for them. Arguably, this stuff happens even faster than it used to.  

For instance, Cyberpunk was not a sub-genre as such way back when. It was more like an aesthetic about technological civilisation and urbanity. After William Gibson won some awards with Neuromancer it became recognised as a sub-genre of science fiction and other people jumped to the fore with ever edgier bits of fiction about how urban spaces would devolve into the future. The beautiful capitalist/consumerist dystopia of the near future was suddenly the darling. Then came the Matrix movie and other bits of appropriation by other science fiction branches and franchises until the aesthetic itself became so old hat a young kid told me "that stuff's so lame!" 

Heh, kids, right?  

And that was well over 13 years ago. Today that same kid has grown up and he still tells me that the worst fad in science fiction was the whole cyberpunk thing. I keep telling him he just had to be there; but were we ever really there? Today, - after 2019 when the original Blade Runner was set - we're living in an alternate reality to all that. That stuff is all in a parallel universe of imagination, tucked away into a bubble of memories and nostalgia and fascination with pretty lights. As for the things the kid likes, it all looks like junk to me. It's frustrating to be so old your entire aesthetic outlook and framework has been consigned to the dustbin of history. You become obsolete, like an older model human.  

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Say Goodbye To Revolutions

Conversations With My Barber

Some days you realise you take your freedoms for granted. These days those reminders come from places like communist China or Putinist Russia during election time, or North Korea all the time, but occasionally you're reminded that there are some countries that continue to be very uncomfortable for personal liberty without reaching a lot fo headlines like Iran.

My local barber says he is Persian. I asked him about how it is that he identifies himself in that manner. 

"Aren't you Iranian, in modern parlance?" I asked. 

"But I feel like I'm Persian. Being Persian makes more sense to me than what is going on there today in the country that cals itself Iran."

I tried to dig deeper into the sentiment, trying to catch the drift of his defiance. There wasn't much to it - he basically disagreed with the theocracy that has been in place since the Revolution. Otherwise, he likes customising Japanese cars and driving really fast. He likes middle eastern cuisine and thinks Shakira is still hot. Things the Revolutionary Council in Tehran would not like. 

I remember the damn Revolution taking place on TV no less (unlike the song about revolutions not taking place on TV) but my barber is way too young for that experience. To him, the Revolution is somewhere in the deep mists of history where dinosaurs lurk with Don Bradman. 

I asked him if he remembered anything about the time a young woman by the name Neda Agha-Soltan was shot in the chest by the paramilitary during protests. He did not recall the incident, but he said he hated all of that civil unrest and going-on in Iran. Being Persian allowed him to disown all of it. I guess that's defiance enough to be called cultural. 

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Where Things Turned South For Hong Kong

How Hong Kong Protesters Screwed The Pooch 

The following is a comment from R.S. who wanted to tell me a few things about the subsequent developments since the handover. I will put it here without editorialising it. It's well worth the read because it comes from the heartland of HK politics, if HK could said to have a heartland in its polity.  

There are links at the bottom which are well worth a check.

---->

Gday mate. I tried to post a comment in your blog but it only allows me 4000 characters! Where to start?

Interesting post but like all things in life, things are usually a bit more complicated than what you normally see and there are many shades of grey in between.

I guess since the ‘97 Handover, Hong Kongers, particularly its youth, have had a hard time accepting that they were in fact now under the guise of the Chinese motherland. It’s still pretty weird to me now, more than 20 years later, that they play the Chinese national anthem every night after the News on TV and on the radio. I cannot imagine what it is like for a child born after 1997 to hear this Communist patriotic anthem and try and relate this to life in HK. In the last few years at sporting events in HK, where the HK national team were competing against another team, they would play the Chinese national anthem and spectators would stand up and turn their backs to the sporting arena and hold up their middle finger! What patriots! Go team! 

What really pushed HK to where we are now, were the “pro-Democracy” demonstrations of 2019 where the city descended into sheer utter madness for months on end as hordes of black clad boys and girls in hard hats, goggles and umbrellas, would wander particular areas of HK and cause unbelievable chaos under the banner of “democracy”. This was totally different to the Occupy Central Student protests in 2014 which was mainly non-violent and had a totally different vibe. The 2019 protests had no “leaders” and caused utter destruction to public property, trash businesses that they “believed” were pro-government, mainland banking offices and any business that had the slightest leaning towards being Pro-Government. They would stop traffic and blockade public roads. Anyone that dared to confront them were quickly backed up by other angry hordes of protesters. When the police finally arrived after 30mins, they’d all disappear within minutes. And since they were all wearing black, you weren’t able to tell who were the troublemakers and who were there just standing by.

There were 3 things that really pissed off a lot of people that were initially sympathetic to the Democratic cause.

1. The storming and defacing of the Hong Kong Legislative building - This would be the equivalent to storming of Parliament House in Canberra or the Capitol Building in Washington. The HK Riot police eventually gave up trying to defend the building from the inside as it was inevitable from the number of protesters outside that they would eventually break through. The police eventually fully retreated, hoping that the angry mob would just leave after they broke in. It eventually turnout out to be a PR disaster for the pro democracy movement as nothing was achieved except for the filming and documentation of those that did the violent storming (who were later arrested or who were afraid of being arrested, eventually fled HK). Government offices and equipment were mindlessly trashed and the legislative chamber was occupied and defaced and graffitied. Even that didn’t happen in The Capitol Building! Millions of taxpayers dollars were spent afterwards on the damaged property. The Proud Boys would have been….well “Proud”.  

2. The shutdown of the Hong Kong International Airport for 2days by anti-government protesters - This was sad sad day for the symbol of the free wheeling economy of HK. Named the busiest Airport in the world since 1996, it handled around 70million passengers in 2019. For it to be completely shut down for two days in the name of “democracy” was just outrageous. Protesters blocked departing non HK passengers that were leaving to go home or to other destinations and argued that it was to draw attention to their cause. ie cause as much chaos to Hong Kong and to the image of Hong Kong so that the government will back down and accede to their demands. Yeah right. What they did do was cause economic pain and inconvenience to everyone including international travellers. You could tell in the days before the standoff that things were going to descend into something ugly, when they occupied the Arrivals Hall for several days and handed out fliers and took to beating up anyone (mainly mainlanders coming back to HK) that disagreed with their demands to the Government.

3. The siege and standoff of PolyTechnic University  - This is the equivalent to UTS in Sydney, where students and high schoolers literally took to the grounds surrounding the university campus and occupied it for a week while battling riot police. Not only did they trash the University completely, but they trashed the surrounding areas to the university by digging up bricks and laying them around the outside so that the Riot police would not be able to approach them in armoured vehicles. They lobbed Molotov cocktails off the roof of the campus and used giant catapaults to attack the police on the ground. Sporting equipment from the university were used as weapons and real bow and arrows were fired into the the police. It was completely insane and scenes were like something out of Beirut. The police eventually starved the students out as they had no food or water, as one by one they walked out of the only entrance that was not blocked. Some protesters tried to escape by going into the underground sewerage system. (Not a good idea in HK!) When the police eventually moved in, they found thousands of unused Molotov cocktails that were piled up in the student courtyard and the Chemistry Department has been completely raided of its most toxic chemicals. After the siege, the university was boarded up and sealed off for 6months as they cleaned up the defaced halls and damaged rooms. Again all paid for by the taxpayer. 

So after much social upheaval and constant rioting that became increasing violent (on both sides), the CCP introduced the National Security Law to quell and prevent crimes of secession, subversion, sedition and collusion with foreign forces, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. After this law was passed, all political demonstrations and any rioting immediately stopped. It was like switching on a light.

So yeah, here we are now. Yes they are putting people in jail now using the National Security Law and yes you can’t say shit about the Government now. But at least its back to business (or work from home) and there are no nightly reports of Molotov cocktails being tossed into the MTR stations and MTR station entrances being lit on fire. No mass acts of violence or major disruptions. Trying to impose a democratic system on HK now is further away than ever. Those students really did stuff things up for themselves. And hence that’s why most of them will leave eventually.

Some clips from those times:

https://youtu.be/QtsR5JpF5aU

https://youtu.be/m_0-x_2l3XE

https://youtu.be/YHCArqqE9rE

Cheers mate. Keep up with the posts!

Anybody But You

Write What You Know

There's that old adage about what one should write about bring what one knows, and what one knows well is mostly their own dumb opinions. Your preoccupations tend to come to the fore a lot even when you're not conscious of letting them out the door. The Beatles for instance wrote a lot about love, presumably because they had a lot of interest and insight into love. In my case I tend to write about relationships that fail and the terrible breakups the ensue. 

This might be because I have a lot more knowledge in this area. I'm not saying I had a lot more misfortune in this area than other people, but ... I did get to see a lot of people behaving very badly on their way out of relationships, so much so that I find that I'm not exactly short on fodder here. There are a lot of shitty people walking the face of this earth and they don't even know just how shitty they are - but when they do their shitty thing, they have no shame or remorse, they justify it so well to themselves, they carry on as if there's nary a problem. Really appalling human beings doing some terrible things. I used to wonder how they lived with themselves but truth be known, they're mostly okay with the carnage they leave behind. 

All of us writing songs are in the wake and slipstream of the Beatles, and so we do have to bend our minds a little bit towards love. One thing I will say about love is that it is hard to fake it. It's really hard to fake liking something you do not. When it comes to another human being? Even more so. 

Therefore even in the worst relationships and their breakups, it's not like love doesn't figure into it somehow. Even if the other person is a psychopath manipulating you to their ends they probably still like you on some level if they're bothering with the charade of love. That said, it is possible for people to kid themselves into thinking they like somebody more than they really do. It's a hard facade to keep going. People eventually tire of it and break down. It's really in those instances that one wonders if love is real at all. 

Some of these things are unknowable and you can only unpack them years later. When you do, you might find that it was more projection than love. 

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HK '96

The People You Meet On The Road

All the political stuff going on in Hong Kong to do with democracy and human rights was foreseeable. I was there in 1996, about 18 months prior to the handover. The Communist take over was slowly underway and they sent in their uniformed state police who stood on street corners demanding IDs from people. I spent a bit of my free time talking to locals about it all and told them that they won't be able to keep all of their lifestyle once the Communists took charge. 

Just about everybody I met insisted that it was going to be business as usual. As long as people were making money, there would be no reason to change things. They resented the mere suggestion that Hong Kong might be about anything but money. Money, yo, money talks and bullshit walks! If the mainlanders could just get first hand experience of capitalism, then they would not want to go all authoritarian on them. I tried to explain to them that's not how authoritarians and totalitarians think. They first thing to be kicked aside would be democratic freedoms and rights, and when those are gone, it would be a lot less pleasant for everybody concerned. They then told me I was paranoid and nuts. The thing is, it's not that paranoid to think an authoritarian organ like the Communist Party of China hates your freedoms. 

Still, given the prosperity gap and the lifestyle gap between Hong Kong and the mainland at the time, it may have been inconceivable that the mainlanders would come to call the shots in such a way as to curtail Hong Kong's very sense of itself. Hong Kong after all was like a wild flower of modern capitalism that blossomed off the coast of the mainland, while the mainland seemed to have more in common with the medieval world than modernity.  

Somehow during that time in Hong Kong, I met an American woman who explained to me the frightening things she had witnessed and told me she was bugging out to Singapore before the takeover. She could see the writing writ very large and in Hi-Viz colours on that metaphorical wall. She even had stats at the ready as to how the mainland would inevitably grow and how when time came, it would would seek to undermine the independent-thinking of Hong Kong. All, that in spite of their promise of one state, two systems. I remember walking around Lan Kwai Fong talking about all this with her. She loved Hong Kong, but she couldn't see how it could stay the same after the Handover. It might look the same but at some point it would breakdown. The pretence would get old and erode away. 

It made a lot more sense than anything else I was hearing on the ground. Years later, here we are. The communists have taken away freedom of speech and have dismantled the institutions of democracy. Democracy as it turned out, was a lot more fragile in Hong Kong, just like she had predicted. 

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No Future For Us

Dystopic Blonde

The media and political landscape seems to have a plethora of a certain kind of women: The Power Blonde. They have lots of agency combined with a truck load of motivation, which they then use to support authoritarianism. Like the blonde talking heads on Fox News. Or Julie Bishop or Michaela Cash. There's something sociopathic and authoritarian about the Power Blondes on the political right. Recently some of them have taken to complaining that their side of politics is gender deaf but of course, if you join the party for gender deafness. It must be hard to do feminism when you don't believe in feminism but you want the fruits of feminism.  

They're not just on the right, the left has them too. It's like when you see Cate Blanchett heading up a group of actresses demanding diversity. I look at that and wonder how it is that the Power Blonde gets to head up that posse and not, say, Sonequa Martin-Green. As a man of not-whiteness, I kind of wonder a little about that sort of soft-shoe-shuffle whereby the Power Blonde is on the inside of the diversity debate and I'm on the outside looking in. Or you know, Tanya Plibersek telling us about diversity in Australian Tertiary Education or something... it kind of makes me squint a bit. I feel like I'm copping friendly fire. What can I do but pick up my guitar and play, and get on my knees and pray, I won't get fooled again.   

Back in the early seasons of 'Mad Men', there's an episode where Betty Draper gets the shits with her neighbour scolding her kids so she gets her gun out and starts shooting the neighbour's pigeons. It stuck with me because as an image, it was an empowered woman choosing to do whatever the hell she liked. At the same time it was completely sociopathic. It's one of those scenes that are so shocking the episode ends without repercussions. We never see the neighbour again in the series. Presumably he moved away. 

A lot can be said about Don Draper's sexism and his escapist infidelities that brings about the end to his marriage to Betty, but we are also privy to the hard-lean to the right that Betty takes as she gains more agency through the series. The irony being the liberties Don seeks are personal, so even in the most conservative, patriarchy-drenched moments, Don's personal ethos is small 'l' liberal. Betty on the other hand is progressive to the degree she thinks something should be done about improving society. She is compassionate and believes in structure. Yet her personal ethos is libertarian and fascist. She is nakedly a gun-toting maniac in that scene, and what we learn from that moment is that Betty's desire for control can only lead to a dystopian authoritarianism. 

All that aside, I've recently been thinking about my own interactions with the Power Blondes in my life and a lot of them are like candidates to be made into 'Karen' memes. Combative, assertive, sometimes casually racist or classist or both racist-and-classist, wowsers, and ready to throw authoritarian barbs at any passing person. Some of them, I even dated, although I can't for the life of me figure out why they tried me from their end of things. It's not like there was ever going to be any future.  

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Drunk In Paradise

Sydney, Back When It Was Waiting For Its Close Up Mr DeMille

The 1990s were fun. I knew it at the time and I knew it was going to end somehow. If you want to cut to the ending, I guess the fun of the '90s spilled over until the day 9/11 happened and that was that. 

Still, when I think back, I kicked off the decade starting at film school and that was a gas; and while there was that horrible recession-we-had-to-have going on in the middle of the decade, I tumbled through the decade having a lot of fun working in the film business and doing interesting stuff. I also worked with a Japanese advertising giant a lot and that led to nights out with the client going from restaurant to drinking holes to saunas to brothels. My own motto as it were was "How Much Fun Can One Boy Have?" - which, I still keep for my facebook page. 

It was the decade where a night-club aesthetic bilged out of Darlinghurst and lots of people were drinking heavily, popping eckies and fucking at sex parties. The first half had no internet and the second half barely had any internet worth talking about., so there was a lot more of a raw interaction with other humans in those days. Somewhere in there it was decided Sydney was going to host the 2000 Olympic Games and the city went a little nuts in the anticipation of its moment in the global spotlight. My own recollection of all this was that we were out wandering from place to place quite a bit, wondering what wonderful thing might be around the corner next. 

Sometimes we would end up at the Judgment Bar in Taylor Square. The sun would rise rather perfunctorily as we staggered out and looked eastward down Oxford Street towards Bondi direction. And it would be in those moments I'd wonder if there was anywhere more like paradise than Sydney. Sydney -if it were a person - was brainless, yet attractive; It liked thinking it was sophisticated all the while being anti-intellectual and decidedly into bad taste. Sydney was a party animal with an endless reservoir for snark and even then you couldn't exactly hate it because it has its charms. Even today if I were to characterise Sydney, it would be as a city that likes to guffaw at its own jokes while strung out on substances. 

If there was a problem for me in all of this was that I nursed a heartache, a mortal wound I sustained in the 1980s - a decade I detest for the misguided nostalgia it garners  - and I was haunted by it. It's hard to get over personal betrayals. Revenge movies play big with the audience precisely because betrayals never leave you. And so there was this dichotomy of the fun, the superficial joy, the effervescent bullshit of a happy-go-lucky town and this weird animus I carted around from party to party, scene to scene. I never really soured to Sydney. What I did sour on was its propensity to celebrate itself at every turn. I mean, yeah it's good, but is it that good?

All the same, the 1990s in Sydney were great. We were all there, kinda drunk, in Paradise. 

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The World Is Crazy Enough

You'd Better Believe It

It's well over 14 years ago now, but I had the earliest inkling of something being very wrong in the market place. It's not like I had shares or anything then. It was this simple phenomenon that took place during August 2007. I had been working for the little tyrant in the production company for about 5months when suddenly I started to field a lot of calls by our suppliers demanding payment. At the same time, none of our clients were paying up. Cashflow had dried up all over town, and people rich and poor alike were trapped in this very stodgy illiquidity. We down ourselves smack dab at the cutting edge of the oncoming Global Financial Crisis. We were the canary in the calming of industry, so to speak. 

From there, the market which had peaked in July that year started to melt down all the way down to March 2009 when it bottomed out. It was during March 2009 when despair seemed rampant and nothing seemed to be viable that I bought my first shares. Talk about being a contrarian; but then I had a reason to buy what I bought. I bought shares in the rival production company which had been listed and had a monopoly on hotel events around the globe. I did so mostly because I believe in the power of monopolies as well as the enticing price of 1.0 cent per share. A couple of months later it rose to 1.5 cents so I sold and made 50%. That was my first trade.

I think about that now and I just want to run and hide in embarrassment. First of all, even though I thought I had good knowledge of where I was putting my money, I was flying in the face of the market at full tilt. The rest of the market had deemed that company was carrying too much debt to do anything good, monopoly or not. And while 50% is nice, sticking money in penny stocks without knowing how that company intends to dig itself out of their hole is ... well, nuts. 

At the same time I did some digging around the internet and to my surprise, I found that there were lots of other people like me who had decided that the bottom of the epic market collapse was a perfectly fine place to start dabbling in the share markets because the only way it could go was up. Honestly, my insanity as it were, was shared by a lot more people than I had anticipated. And that's the funny thing. The insanity of the makes begets more insanity because it draws in more crazy people willing to take a punt. 

The world really is crazy enough, but people keep going into there markets equipped with nothing but their life savings and a hunch that it's a good time to buy. 

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Fully Vaccinated

Yay Science

FWIW I've had my second Astra-Zeneca shot. I was one of the first people in my age group to go and get the first shot - so swiftly in fact that I missed out on the amendments to the rule that allowed the Pfizer to my age group. I even pleaded with the doctor at the time to give me the Pfizer if he could spare it but no, I didn't fit into the category to be a Pfizer recipient. And so it was I got my first Astra-Zeneca shot and booked myself 13 weeks hence from that date. I didn't think much of it at the time, but things have a way of changing rather rapidly. 

So 12 weeks on, the NSW government has brought in full lockdowns for Greater Sydney and found my clinic to be more than 5 km away from my domicile, so it was bit of an issue to be contemplating travel to get my second shot. Luckily a pop up clinic appeared in my neighbourhood so I sort of walked in, explained my situation and talked the people into giving me that second shot. At the end of it, the nurse said "congratulations!"

Well, if the bloody pandemic ended, that would be worth celebrating. The fully vaccinated thing? Eesh. Really?

Although my experience in waiting while some of my dear friends managed to finagle Pfizers for themselves and be fully vaccinated in 3 weeks as opposed to 12-13weeks got me thinking that perhaps one of the reasons why Australia is taking so long to get full vaccinated is because 

    a) People are waiting for Pfizer and hoping to skip the Astra-Zeneca

    b) 12-13 weeks between shots for Astra-Zeneca is a lot longer than you think when you're sitting around in-between jabs. It's a whole 3 months, baby. 

It's so bloody long, they've changed the recommendations and advised people to get it in 6 weeks instead of 12-13 - and what exact difference does it or doesn't it make? Does anybody have some data on this?

Turns out, they do.

Yay Data 

Since my 2nd shot I've also been wondering just how inferior the Astra-Zeneca is to a pair of Pfizers and my friend shared the video below which is absolutely worth watching:

Turns out the Astra-Zeneca is not too bad.

Anyway, I hope you are all well out there and that you're been vaccinated. Don't hold out - it's not worth it. Even if you're fully vaccinated, you can still get the Delta variant. It's a bastard of a virus. The good news is, it likely won't send you to the hospital if you do as long as you're vaccinated - and that's a good enough reason to get the shots. 

What an annoyance, but it's the world we live in. If you want a semblance of the old normal to come back, everybody's got to get vaccinated. The only way to live with the virus is to have everybody vaccinated. That's just what the numbers say. 

Out of Afghanistan

End Of A Terrible Era 

Everything about the war in Afghanistan sucks. It went on for so long people kind of got inured to this phenomenon out there in the middle of Eurasia whereby USA and its allies stationed their troops, flew combat missions, trained a largely low-motivation Afghan military and for years seemed to feed the Hollywood fodder of a seemingly endless, pointless, witless Forever War. It got so bad it made a defective POTUS like Donald Trump look vaguely statesmanlike when he announced he was completely pulling out the American troops.Yes, the same president who thought sitting down with Kim Jong-Un was a good move. 

The cost of the war is staggering; the human carnage and damage is staggering; the very pointlessness of it is mind warping; and we have to wonder if any of it accomplished anything. We did learn a lot about the nature of war in the contemporary world. We can't go to war without legitimacy and this desire for legitimacy prohibits us from doing drastic terrible things. We can get all the air superiority win the world, but we cannot carpet bomb them all - we're not willing to do that any more. We say we want to win over hearts and minds, but the kinds of troopers we send over like the SAS seem to be high functioning psychopaths, out on a safari to shoot locals. There's no wining of any hearts and minds with all that. 

I've mentioned it elsewhere that the USA is not willing to pay for health and education in rebuilding Afghanistan because they don't even spend that money back home in places like Alabama and Louisiana. Why would they? So that shows to us that America probably shouldn't go marching into places it doesn't want to turning the 51st state of the USA.   

There's a weird irony that then day Kabul fell to the Taliban is also VJ day. Wars rarely end with any dignity or decorum. This one ends with the powers leaving behind a vacuum that will get filled by the flotsam and jetsam of world politics. The fearless prediction we can make is that the Taliban will rise to being a threat again. The Americans will go back again. There will be no plan next time either. 

How Do We Feel About This?

I started this blog way back when around the time they first sent troops to Afghanistan. Blogging was sort of new then, and it seemed like a fun thing to pass commentary upon. I was not a soldier, I was in do danger at all in this 'war on terror', so I had all the luxury in the world to snark away at the conduct of the conservative governments in USA and Australia as well as bitch about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's ethically challenged Labour Government in the UK. Did the war affect me? It did in strange ways. I won't go into them all but basically I watched liberal democracy dismantle itself in the face of the boogeyman it created for itself. The arts and humanities got defunded over that time, and everybody seemed to lose interest in culture-as-national-project. In turn we've allowed neo-nazis and extremely rightists to gain access to the mainstream, and everybody seems to have forgotten about Marx and Engels. 

I have to admit, the going got so stupid around the early part of the last decade that I gave up commenting on politics. There's a certain kind of idiocy with leaders who choose ideological positioning over proper policy considerations, and such idiocies are too demeaning to analyse. If it can be said that you cannot polish a turd but you can roll fit in glitter; well, there's only so much rolling around the turd can take without losing shape. That's kind of how much our politics and polity devolved in the course of the Afghan War - it turned into a formless bit of turd.

In a way I am glad the USA is out of Afghanistan. It's no place to be, and no place to be dropping money. It is a thankless task to keep the peace in a country surrounded by countries that want to destabilise it or turn it into a puppet or colony. And truth be told it's hard to say for certain the Afghanis really liked having Americans there to keep the peace. The very fact that the Afghan government collapsed like a house of cards as the Allies headed for the door suggests the Afghanis themselves were far less serious about the value of the Peace being kept by the American presence. Now is the awful time of reckoning, The Taliban will come back and run their medieval government. There will be refugees headed for Europe and America and Australia. There will be leaky boats once more. We've lined ourselves up for another bout of history repeating. 

So What Now?

America will probably do a bit of soul searching about the twin follies waged by the George W Bush Administration. They really should. The failure is very real, although somewhat vague. As with Iraq, it was easy enough to dislodge the shitty government. What was hard was to set up a viable government in its wake. Worse still, they left the military there for a long time in a bid to shore up whatever democratic civil government they could. The fact that they did for nearly 2 decades may not actually be a straight up failure.

The Chinese government had talks with the Taliban. Presumably they want to back the Taliban government in the hopes of seeing stability. They might find the Taliban are a lot worse than having the Americans on their backdoor. After all, you're talking about a government founded on the idea that if you're not Islam, you're little people. Godless-Communists-As-Your-Friends might be a bit of a hard sell with these people. Your enemy of your enemy might be your friend, but something tells me the enemies of enemies like these might just be just another enemy. 

If there's one thing I'm willing to prognosticate upon, I think the Taliban will be just as dreadful this time through as they were in 1996-2001. It was a long time ago and people have short memories but, the Taliban were simply terrible. There will be pain.  

Last Thought On This Matter

You know what's amazing? There are still prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that date back to the early days of this war.