ELECTRONIC STORM
Clunes - North Coast, NSW
And so, here where the electronic dancers kept their secrets, where the haunting shadows settled into a warmer place, there came days of a kind of archival bliss; they talked about almost everything. He hadn't been amongst native English speakers for years; anything complex was simplified into almost mono-syllables. Sure, there was an educated class, but he had not sought them out; and remained fascinated by the bars he should have left long ago. There was a way forward, he just didn't know what it was. Frightened of the future, mortified by the past, he remained frozen in a kind of juvenile detention; half baked, half longing.
So instead they ordered another bottle.
There was going to be an end to it all, he just didn't know what it was.
He could spot the miscreants from a hundred paces if needs be; but they weren't going down that path. You could always find whatever golden stream you sought, if money was no object. Kept imprisoned, in a strange way they also kept him safe. So he just bided his time and waited; and soon they peeled their way off in boredom, and the shock of what had happened, it, too, peeled away into an alternative past, a healing present. Roads not taken. A ruthful shrug. "I know, I know."
And still they said: "I didn't know that about him."
As if they should have cared.
And so he embraced the new, if not with open arms, with an increasingly positive attitude. Less frightened of being alone. Less horrified by the dance he had embarked upon, or been led on. "The problem was nobody among the devils cared about you," Gerardo said.
And having embraced so many disparate groups down the decade, and normally been welcome, he had not realised he had been caught in a group of thieving, poisonous snakes; until it was too late.
"I will never see you again." The thought ran like a loop for days, and then disappeared.
THE BIGGER STORY:
NAIROBI — Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta declared Tuesday night that the four-day-long siege of an upscale mall in the capital by Islamist militants has ended with the deaths of five attackers and 11 in custody. He announced three days of mourning for the more than 60 people killed in the attack, a death toll that he said is expected to rise with the recovery of more bodies from the mall.
“As a nation, our head is bloodied but unbowed,” Kenyatta said in a televised address. “We have ashamed and defeated our attackers.”
The Liberal strategy to turn the focus to Rudd’s dysfunction was supported by a secret tactical tool.
The Financial Review reports that held deep within the top strategy group of the Liberal war room was a document which gave a name and a diagnosis to the personality of Kevin Rudd. It was a document provided to the Liberal’s strategy team on an informal basis by a psychiatrist friendly to the Liberals after Rudd had returned to the Labor leadership on June 26. In a nutshell, this document offered an arm’s-length diagnosis of Rudd as suffering a personality disorder known as “grandiose narcissism”.
The document was not shown to Abbott, but rather remained within the strategy group as an informal check-list, often as a tool for comparison after Rudd had already behaved in ways that the Liberal strategists believed could be leveraged to their advantage. The Liberal war room had reached its own conclusions about Rudd long ago, based on his public behaviour and the damning revelations of his colleagues.
Describing grandiose narcissism as less a psychiatric disease and more a destructive character defect, the document suggested Rudd was held together by one key strut: an absolute conviction of intellectual superiority over everyone else. “Kick out that strut and he will collapse".
Rudd, the document went on, was vulnerable to any challenge to his self-belief that he was more widely-read, smarter and more knowledgeable than anyone else “on the planet”. Such a condition of grandiose narcissism would make Rudd obsessively paranoid, excessively vindictive – “prepared to wait years to get revenge”.
Rudd would be threatened by a rival in any of his fields and would be obsessively paranoid and ready to retaliate to real or perceived threats; he would suffer from excessive suspicion. This could be tactically exploited, the document suggested, by promoting the idea that Rudd was merely a caretaker prime minister, to be terminated by colleagues once the election was won.
The document – simple in its construct and in many ways echoing a view clearly held inside Labor itself where many of Rudd’s colleagues had described him as dysfunctional – raised a riddle no one could answer; if the symptoms were all so obvious and the character flaws so marked, how was it that Labor had chosen Rudd not once, but twice to lead the country?