Above The Traffic

*

Everything turned to dust, or more precise than that hoary old cliche, everything he had ever believed in turned out to be false. That was the way of it. Bukowski, Ballard, Burroughs, they were all wrong. We were born to strew flowers down dead avenues. Really? Well, perhaps. He was surrounded by diseased consciousness and crumbling overpasses, crowded train carriages, empty lots and soaring apartment blocks. Everywhere wealth and poverty, extremes, jostled against each other. In a city of 14 million people that never stopped.

He thought, ever so briefly, of revisiting the Miami Hotel where they used to stay forty years ago. A young man, a different man. Bangkok was astonishing; and the people he met, petty English crims, gangsters, harsh times, loud mouthed Americans. He had the picture clearly: if he heard one more loud mouthed American he would turn into a whirling dervish and slice their heads off; and the meeting would be full of bouncing balloon heads shouting: get yourself a sponsor, step 11, surrender or die.

Ian has finally gone back to Oz after spending up big on a Thai girl he particularly loved. She showed him a very good time. He showered her with gifts and money. We took him to the airport yesterday; driven in a private car from Pattaya. The driver gave me a big hug after I tipped him 250 baht - ten dollars - and the muggy heat closed in around him as he entered the lair of yet another gangster. Why was it so? Wasn't there a straight man left on the planet?

All too soon the wild ones were there, the mawing giants in the head. He was crystallised and confused, confirmed and bereft. He knelt down to prey and rose up to condemn. He saw the shadows flickering everywhere and knew there would be no end. He hoped and hoped that sanity would prevail. All the future held was dread. He had heard enough, made enough friends. He saw the darkness take his best friends and could barely look up, could barely process the grief. They had been everything to him. Even in the bars, even late at night in perilous circumstance, they had been his tribe, his bedrock, his firm belief.

And it all fell apart. Funny the stuff that went cycling and cycling through his brain. They were the bait, allowed into the Rex Hotel under age to attract the queens; live bait. Later, in therapy, the rare ones he met or heard from the same time and circumstance spoke of a most astonishingly abusive situation, of being terribly scarred by all that had gone down, the creeping hands, the drinks, the money. Those snakey men. They spokes of having never felt worse and of having barely survived. They spoke of the streets and they spoke of that bar; and it was the cruelest circumstance.

He had survived; in a manner of speaking. And he was here. Soon to be gone. The days followed. He reached out in sadness and relief; and was surrounded by strangers.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7036973.ece

Relatives of 27 people killed when Nato aircraft bombed a civilian convoy in southern Afghanistan have demanded that foreign forces leave the country.

Afghan officials said that at least four women and a child were among the dead. Twelve other civilians were wounded when three minibuses were attacked on Sunday in a remote part of Uruzgan province.

“They came here to bring security but they kill our children, they kill our brothers and they kill our people,” said Haji Ghullam Rasoul, whose cousins died in the attack. “We’ve had enough.”

The local governor and the Interior Minister said that all of the victims were civilians. Nato commanders said that their new strategy was focused on protecting the population — but the airstrike capped a week in which more than 60 civilians were killed by Nato weapons. The Afghan Cabinet called the attack “unjustifiable”.

The convoy was travelling from Day Kundi to Kandahar when Nato and Afghan forces targeted it. Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said that troops on the ground thought the civilians were militants “en route to attack a joint Afghan-Isaf unit”, but later confirmed that there were women and children at the scene. Isaf refused to say how the airstrike was authorised, “to avoid prejudicing the investigation”.

Dutch and Australian troops are based in Uruzgan alongside US Special Forces. The Netherlands is expected to withdraw its forces by the end of this year after the collapse of the Dutch Government.

http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/story/2010/02/23/the-time-has-come-to-go-mr-garrett/

WHAT’S happened to the Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil fame?

You know, the bloke who lamented about the big corporations, the destruction of our environment and our treatment of indigenous Australians.

Now he’s part of it – the political machine which seems more intent on survival than truly saying sorry.

As one radio jock crudely joked, he should be singing the Batts are Burning over his government’s bungled home insulation scheme.

Yesterday, as pressure mounted on the federal environment minister to resign, he was trying to suggest it would be wrong of the opposition to claim to know the cause of the home insulation deaths before State

Government safety authorities and coronial inquests had delivered their findings.

“I certainly do acknowledge where there has been a tragic loss of life, in relation to the potential linkages between this program and a fatality, that that is a matter of great concern,” he told parliament.

“I make the point to the leader of the opposition that I have made no judgement on what the cause of those fatalities was.

“And neither should I in my position as minister and frankly, neither should he as opposition leader.”

Mr Garrett claimed it was an abuse for MPs to infer what had or had not caused the deaths.

“It is the case there have been, regrettably, these fatalities and their association with this program have been identified and I very, very much regret that.”

Not as much as the people who have lost loved ones because the scheme was rolled out without proper safety systems – or checks on shonky operators – in place.

In Rudd’s rush to save the economy and deliver stimulus cash, there was no thought for the huge number of fly-by-night operators who could emerge – grabbing the money and ripping off pensioners with unsafe insulations in the process.

Mr Garrett argued he was responsible for delivering a program that had helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions, stimulate the economy during the global financial crisis and created extra employment.

“I take responsibility ... for ensuring that it was delivered in a way that was safe,“ he said.

Of course, he’s talking exactly like the corporate giants he blasted in his Midnight Oil days.

Computer sample pics. Laptop stolen. Travelling. In Bangkok, Thailand.