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Daily Blah for... Saturday, September 28, 2002
A Major Revelation
Today's top news from Britain -- former Conservative cabinet minister Edwina Currie reveals she had a four-year adulterous affair with former Prime Minister John Major -- has left me feeling highly amused and somewhat vindicated. I'll tell you why in a second. First, a primer for those unfamiliar with British politics. Currie was health minister under Mrs. Thatcher, and made herself notorious for decrying the eating habits of inhabitants of the North of England (where I grew up). She was finally forced to resign over the strange and unsubstantiated claim that eating British eggs put you at greater risk for salmonella. Major was Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997. The day he was tapped to replace Thatcher and the day he won a surprise election victory were two of the darkest in my political upbringing (all I could write in my diary in response to the former was "I feel sick"; after the latter, I couldn't write anything at all). The day he was defeated by a landslide was easily the sweetest.
Flash back to 1993, when I was at Oxford and writing an anonymous political satire column for the student newspaper. At the time, Major was suing two left-wing magazines (the New Statesman and a small publication called Scallywag) for daring to mention the rumor that he'd had an affair with his Downing Street caterer, a woman called Clare Latimer -- even though both articles also refuted the allegation. He could get away with this because of the perverse nature of Britain's libel law, which puts the burden of proof on the defendant. Simply because they mentioned it, these small and relatively poor magazines would have to prove the affair had happened.
So one night, on deadline and out of ideas for my column, I sank four or five pints of cider in the college bar and sat down with the newspapers. It struck me that no one was questioning whether it was morally right for Major to be conducting this half-a-million-pound lawsuit against two publications that, by the way, happened to disagree with him politically. Instead, the press -- most of which had Conservative sympathies at the time -- was printing damage-control articles that could have come from Conservative Central Office. The one headline that stuck in my craw, about the PM's wife, read: 'Wonderful Norma is Love of my Life: Major." I was furious, I was cider-soaked and I was on deadline. If there are three more conducive factors to writing provocative political commentary, I have not yet discovered them. "The libel law is a funny beast, isn't it?" I opined. "Simply by writing 'JOHN MAJOR HAD AN AFFAIR WITH CLARE LATIMER' in big letters, I could now be issued with a bloody big Downing Street writ."
Which is very nearly what happened. About a week or so later, word leaked out that the Prime Minister's law firm (the amusingly-titled Biddle & Co.) were weighing whether to take the Oxford Student -- our tiny, free, sophomoric newspaper! -- to libel court over my column. For roughly 24 hours, the news was a national sensation. My editors called Biddle and Co. and to their shame, and my lasting outrage, agreed to print a front-page apology in the next issue. Then the proctors, Oxford University's internal police, called and asked my editors to reveal the name of the offending author. To their credit, and my lasting relief, they never did. My friends and family knew, though. I remember my mother calling (she denies all knowledge of this) and asking whether it would be a good idea to consider an alternative career, like accountancy.
Now Clare Latimer is back in the news. Having learned about Currie's affair, Latimer accuses Major of using the rumor about her a decoy for any journalists probing too deeply into the Prime Minister's past. "I was used to take the heat off John Major and send the media down a false trail," she told the Telegraph. "when I went to him in despair about what was happening he simply told me to 'earn as much money as possible' from the story. I thought that was a strange thing to say when my whole life was in ruins." Strange indeed. Latimer, New Statesman, Scallywag, and (for one day) me and my tiny student newspaper -- we were all pawns in Major's bid to prevent the country from finding out about his affair with Currie.
He couldn't just admit it, as the then Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown had done when evidence emerged of his extra-marital affair. No, Major went off in the absolute opposite direction, crafting an infamous Conservative policy called "back to basics" that emphasized "traditional family values" and Victorian sexual morality. This led to the high-profile resignations of a series of cabinet minsters who'd had affairs and was, as it turned out, the height of hypocrisy. No wonder Major made me sick. No wonder Scallywag is considering reopening the libel case to get its payout back. Ah, but at a distance of nearly a decade, I can't complain too much. After all, it was the notoriety of that cider-fueled column that cemented my interest in journalism and led me to where I am today. Had it not been for Major's affairs, I might have ended up an accountant. Or worse still, a politician.
Daily Blah for... Friday, September 27, 2002
Do Not Attempt This At Home
What happens when you create a society full of highly-specialized individuals with too much time (and tape) on their hands? You get guys who duct-tape people to walls. As a friend of mine said recently: when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, September 26, 2002
Curtains Up on 'Drama'
Everyone run straight to Amazon and check out Drama in the Desert, a book and DVD about Burning Man that some good friends of mine have been working on for more than a year. It's filled with poetry and essays, all pegged to photos taken over the last few Burning Mans (Burning Men?) by the immensely talented Holly Kreuter. There's a foreword by Dave Eggers, and an introduction by Burning Man founder Larry Harvey. Full disclosure: I helped edit the prose selections, and one of the essays is mine (here is page one, and here's page two). Not that my participation should in any way influence your decision to purchase this fine tome. Now go buy it!
Daily Blah for... Monday, September 23, 2002
Zen and Taxes
I ought to take week-long vacations from blog-writing more often. Write a long anti-American screed, exit stage left, and watch the fun begin. When I return, the comments are piled up to the ceiling. I've got people wanting to elect me President and I've got people wanting to ship me back to England ("the land of 56% income tax", apparently. Sorry to disappoint the anonymous Americanista who said that, but it's not nearly that high -- not even under a Labor government. To be honest, I've never had as much of my paycheck removed as when I've been working in the U.S., and I've certainly not had to suffer under the knowledge that half of my taxes were being funneled directly to the Pentagon.)
So what have I been up to? Well, I spent a long weekend in Tassajara, the first Buddhist monastery ever founded outside Asia, nestled in a beautiful canyon in the mountains south of Santa Cruz. It's also the home of the apparently world-famous Tassajara bread book. But I knew none of that when I showed up. I went because I can't say no to a little daily Zen in my daily blah. And because Petra, my girlfriend of two months, had been there four times before, and since I took her to Burning Man -- a place I'd been four times before -- it seemed only right and proper for us to do something similar where I was the newbie.
We were there in work season, the bit in between the summer (when it's a resort for paying guests) and winter (when it becomes a proper practicing monastery for monks, nuns and proteges only). Work season means you get free room and board -- surprisingly good vegetarian meals three times a day -- in exchange for six and a half hours of manual labor every day. This may not sound like a lot to you, but it's a hell of a lot to me. Let's get this straight -- I'm a writer. I don't do manual labor. I have not done manual labor for more than ten years now, and even then it was just a summer job. Look at my hands. I've never really worked a day in my life, have I? If I found myself in a Schindler's List situation -- and I do sometimes have nightmares to that effect -- I would be one of the first on the trains. The only part of manual labor I enjoy is moaning about it.
The work at Tassajara was different, however. Once I got the moaning out of my system, I was able to look around and see the way they treat work there -- as Zen practice. Chopping potatoes, cleaning bathrooms and cabins, sweeping twigs out of the garden, swinging a pick axe at a hill where they want to build a retaining wall; it's all meditation, just as much as squatting on a pile of cushions in the Zendo and staring at the blank Japanese-style walls (a practice we had the option to join in twice a day). You work because you are working; you garden because, in that moment, you are a gardener, and while you can make up all sorts of other reasons, none are really required. It's good to remind ourselves of that every now and then. Why do I do what I do? Because that's what I am. Why am I writing this? Because I'm a writer.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, September 12, 2002
Ugly Americanism Strikes Again
No matter how riled up I have ever become after reading the morning paper, I always respected its right to say what it had to say. I never crumpled up an entire section and tossed it across the room. Not until this morning, that is. The San Francisco Chronicle's Bay Area section was the recipient of a three-point drop into the wastepaper basket after I perused this smug little piece of isolationism from the underinformed and overfed Mark Simon. The headline should give you a taste. "America at its worst is still best," it reads. "Many who hate us would love to be us." And how did Simon reach this conclusion? Did he travel abroad for many months, conducting soul-searching conversations with people of all tribes, creeds and opinions? Er, no. He hung out at San Francisco Airport for a day and talked to a skycap, a security officer, a policeman and one guy who moved here from El Salvador 20 years ago.
Let me tell you something, Simon. And let me get one thing straight for any other Ugly Americanistas out there. The rest of the world does not want to be America. Why should it? You do not have a monopoly on freedom of speech or freedom of worship. There are half a dozen nations with better standards of living than the U.S. More than a dozen countries where the poor don't die for want of universal health care. Where free college education for everyone was a given tenet of basic civilization fifty years ago. And most importantly, where children have a less than one in five chance of being born into poverty. There are a lot of great things about being American, but there are also a lot of shameful things. So why do you persist in strutting around like the school quarterback at the prom? "I'm the best even when I'm at my worst. All you kids hate me because you want to be me." No. All the kids hate you precisely because you think they want to be you.
Do Norwegians, to pick one example, strut around and pat themselves on the back because they happen to have the world's highest standard of living (which they do)? No. Are they aware that they also have problems, like the western world's highest suicide rate? Yes. Does the rest of the world even begin to look like it hates and envies the wealth and freedom of Norway? No. Starting to see a connection? To puff yourself up like this, especially on such a sad anniversary, is the most unthinking, ostrich-like response possible. It is the flawed logic of solipsism that refutes the evidence of your eyes and robs you of that most vital of social skills: humility. And before you know it, the President is swaggering around in front of the U.N. -- in front of the nations of the world in congress -- presenting a unilateral diktat on what they should do about Iraq. Whatever happened to the ancient art of diplomacy? Discussion? Debate? Nah, putting together a coalition is too much trouble. Being a responsible player on the world stage is too much trouble. We'll just tell the world how to conduct its affairs, then go stick our heads in the sand and pretend we're the greatest, even when we're at our worst. Yeah, that's the way to behave after 9-11.
Robots and Robots and Robots, Oh My!
Lots of Robots is a delightful piece of animation. I recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the style of A Bug's Life or, well, just likes robots. Amazingly, it was created by just one guy: Andy Murdock, who also made the excellent Rocket Pants and is still relatively unknown. Something tells me we're looking at the Nick Park of the 2000's.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, September 11, 2002
Fly Me to the Moon
Huzzah! Mankind's first commercial flight to the lunar surface, by a company called TransOrbital, has been given the green light by the government and will launch in the next nine to twelve months. You can send a bit of yourself along in a time capsule that will crash-land on the surface: $17-$60 for pages of text, $2,500 if you want to splash out and send a business card, and $2,500 per gram for mementos: place your order here. Before you scoff, imagine the bragging rights. "Here's my card. Yeah, it went to the moon. No, not just in any old lunar time capsule. Remember that first ever commercial flight to the moon in '03?"
For it will no doubt be the first of many. And it will, once we figure out ways to make the Moon pay (lunar-orbit satellites are a good way to start) usher in a whole new era of commercial space exploration. This to me has always made more sense than leaving space in the hands of lumbering old government-funded dinosaurs like NASA. Not only will they be beholden to government (read: military) interests in space, they'll always be way too slow in getting there. Remember, most all early trips to the New World -- the ones that established all-important trade routes -- were conducted by private entrepreneurs. Sure, Columbus got government funding, but look how long that took him. See, all you have to do is tell the entrepreneur class that there's enough wealth in the metal content of a single asteroid to make one man richer than all other men in the history of the world put together, and just watch them go -- setting up companies like Transorbital, conducting rocket tests, chasing the money. If you want to see something done within your lifetime, like a Mars landing, make it a capitalistic endeavor.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, September 10, 2002
9-11 Vultures
That does it. I was trying to stay silent on this orgiastic frenzy of September 11 remembrance. It's not hard for me as a member of the media to criticize media overkill, but it is hard to make the criticism stick in a public forum. So I was just going to silently roll my eyes at all the flag-waving, platitude-repeating crap -- the kind of stuff that the 3,000 honored dead, all of whom were from unusually clever segments of the population, would have recognized as a lot of mindless bleating. I was going to let the anniversary run its course and hope we all got back to our senses -- and our sense of proportion -- soon after.
But what I cannot stand are the vultures who take advantage of wall-to-wall media coverage to push their product. My current issue of the New Yorker, one of the few publications you can expect to have a sense of proportion, carries at least a dozen ads for fetishistic nonsense like a World Trade Center halo pin. That's right, the towers cloaked in a golden halo. What's that supposed to say? That you believe the World Trade Center should be canonized? That you're founding a new religion based on concrete and steel? Can anyone say golden idol? And at the bottom of the ad, the final insult: "A portion of the proceeds will go to September 11-related charities," a phrase so vague as to be meaningless. A portion, like 1% is a portion. Related charities like -- well, like just about every charity on Earth. And this, alas, is the ultimate mindless platitude, so often repeated that we are numb to its inanity.
What sent me over the edge this morning was an e-mail from a PR professional who shall remain nameless. "Technology takes on terror," it was titled. "Chris, here are two items to tie in with 9/11 coverage." The guy was pimping for a company, which I also don't want to dignify with a name, that "is providing military and government agencies with technology to successfully defend the US and stamp out terror." And what did this technology turn out to be? New X-ray screening equipment? A missile shield? A machine that makes terrorists forget where they hid the boxcutters? Nope. Instant Messaging software. Like AOL Instant Messaging, only more secure. That's what is going to successfully defend the US and stamp out terror. You'll sleep easier tonight, right? I know I will.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, September 05, 2002
W is for Wordsmith
I doubt many of you have missed this latest meme to go buzzing round our global network of fun and irreverence. It's a poem made of actual quotes from our illustrious President, compiled by Washington Post writer Richard Thompson to mark National Poetry Month. You've got to admit, malapropism in poetry is a strikingly original proposition; much more lively than the turgid surrealism coming out of the genre today. Perhaps W. (what a great name for a postmodern poet!) should put down the pretzel and pick up the quill?
MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
by George W. Bush
I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where
our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!
The Lazarus Act, Part 94
Call off the dogs. Spike the eulogies. Daily Blah is back from the dead (again). I know I had this grand plan of keeping you up to date from Burning Man, but once there I ran into three problems:
1) The 802.11b wireless network did exist. However, it was not entirely accessible across the playa. The only time my laptop was able to sniff it out was when I was in Center Camp, sipping iced chai and listening to poetry readings of questionable quality.
2) It turned out I hadn't paid the rent on this web address, Dailyblah.com. Network Solutions pulled the plug on me right as I was heading out there. And of course, as Black Rock City runs on a gift economy, I wasn't exactly carrying my credit card around everywhere. Sure, I guess I could have pulled things together, grabbed my wallet and Powerbook both and hiked over to Center Camp in the blazing heat, but ...
3) Dude. It's Burning Man. C'mon.
Anyway, I'm back now, mostly de-playafied and with lots of exciting Black Rock adventures to share. Watch this space. Really.
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