Hiding In Plain Sight

*

The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm. He came along the street of Green Town, Illinois, in the late cloudy October day, sneaking glances over his shoulder. Somewhere not so far back, vast lightnings stomped the earth. Somewhere, a storm like a great beast with terrible teeth could not be denied.

So the salesman jangled and clanged his huge leather kit in which oversized puzzles of ironmongery lay unseen but which his tongue conjured from door to door until he came at last to a lawn which was cut all wrong.

No, not the grass. The salesman lifted his gaze. But two boys, far up the gentle slope, lying on the grass. Of a like size and general shape, the boys sat carving twig whistles, talking of olden or future times, content with having left their fingerprints on every movable object in Green Town during summer past and their footprints on every open path between here and the lake and there and the river since school began.

"Howdy, boys!" called the man all dressed in stormcolored clothes. "Folks home?"

The boys shook their heads.

"Got any money, yourselves?"

The boys shook their heads.

"Well --" The salesman walked about three feet, stopped and hunched his shoulders. Suddenly he seemed aware of house windows or the cold sky staring at his neck. He turned slowly, sniffing the air. Wind rattled the empty trees. Sunlight, breaking through a small rift in the clouds, minted a last few oak leaves all gold. But the sun vanished, the coins were spent, the air blew gray; the salesman shook himself from the spell.

The salesman edged slowly up the lawn.

"Boy," he said. "What's your name?"

And the first boy, with hair as blond-white as milk thistle, shut up one eye, tilted his head, and looked at the salesman with a single eye as open, bright and clear as a drop of summer rain.

"Will," he said. "William Halloway."

'Me storm gentleman turned. "And you?"

The second boy did not move, but lay stomach down on the autumn grass, debating as if he might make up a name. His hair was wild, thick, and the glossy color of waxed chestnuts. His eyes, fixed to some distant point within himself, were mint rock-crystal green. At last he put a blade of dry grass in his casual mouth.

"Jim Nightshade," he said.

The storm salesman nodded as if he had known it all along.

"Nightshade. That's quite a name."

"And only fitting," said Will Halloway. I was born one minute before midnight, October thirtieth. Jim was born one minute after midnight, which makes it October thirty-first."

"Halloween," said Jim.

By their voices, the boys had told the tale all their lives, proud of their mothers, living house next to house, running for the hospital together, bringing sons into the world seconds apart; one light, one dark . There was a history of mu mutual celebration behind them. Each year Will lit the candles on a single cake at one minute to midnight. Jim, at one minute after, with the last day of the month begun, blew them out.

So much Will said, excitedly. So much Jim agreed to, silently. So much the salesman, running before the storm, but poised here uncertainly, heard looking from face to face.

"Halloway. Nightshade. No money, you say?"

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

Once they came out of the woodwork, once he knocked on the door which opened on to clouds, the vast sky, and he took a single step out on to the precipice, to find no floor beneath him. We were shadowed by the astonishing popularity of the Prime Minister. Kevin Rudd now has a 74% approval rating, almost equal to Bob Hawke's peak of 75%, an Australian record. So much did we bequeath. So much did we shelter. The passions of the time are so different to the passions that ruled us. Now everyone wants to find their own village, their own group of friends, to protect themselves against the storm of anonymity and the final glaze of horror that was ours. He wasn't certain. He didn't even know why he had been placed here. He was going out in a big way, God bless you all.

This thought disorder, so different to the past, was much more frothy, cheerful, self-deprecating. It was never his intention to be born again. He had clung as long as possible to the beliefs of the past. But the external had become the internal, the marginal the mainstream, the boundary riders the core of government policy. Getting up and going to work was for fools, when the government kept dishing out vast amounts of largesse to the welfare class. It made no sense. It disappeared in a flash, in cheap Chinese goods and wrapping paper on the floor of housing commission units. It disappeared into dealers pockets and bottle shops, into pubs and debts, and created no jobs. But what would he know. He didn't look good in a suit. He wasn't part of the ruling class.

These abject attitudes, these inconsiderate bastards who kept pecking at him, pecking at him, as if there was anything to be gained from persecuting the already disadvantaged. Screw loose, they said. Not the brightest brick in the wall. And the spirit of the suburbs; it was close. It was warm. He was certain to be made clear and whole. He was certain to find a purpose, in the beauty of the mundane. That's what he thought. He would make poetry out of the plain, the ordinary, the humble days, the unambitious loves. He remembered vividly how terribly disappointed he was when he discovered Ray Bradbury voted conservative, as if it was entirely astonishing that someone with such an imagination could be right wing. How as that possible? Surely it invalidated everything he had written.

But that, of course, was before he lived through some of the terrible excesses of the left, before he had become a victim of its pack mentality, before a crusty old right winger had taken residence in his brain, right next to the drunken old queen and the left wing young idealist, sandwiched between entirely conflicting personality types. Tell me what must be done. Warn me of further cuts. Celebrate what had already been achieved. Select out the marked man. Prepare to die. Dress elegantly and hide in plain sight. He knew he would need a week to recover. All the random incidents that had been his journalistic life came flooding back. He couldn't have been more saddened by what was happening. Nothing was fair. Nothing made sense. Brutopia had come to the here and now.

We were tiny little vessels in the matrix of democracy; and not very effective ones. He could remember everything that had happened, the plane that had crashed in Botany Bay, the chaos at the scene. That was early on in his reporting career, and that meant nothing. He was worried. He hadn't acquired the superficial gloss and the easy command. In truth, he didn't have a clue what he was doing. It was one of his first big stories and he was well at sea. None of this had happened before, not for him. He remembered with some astonishment the sight of D.D. McNicoll. It was the first time he had eyed a McNicoll since he used to have to take the wire stories by hand into David McNicoll's office, D.D.'s father. They were both big walrus style men, almost identical in physical appearance, albeit it of different ages.

They plane perched up out of the water about 30 metres from the shore. Miraculously, if he remembered rightly, there had been no casualties. But the laden plane, bound for Norfolk Island, had flown its last. The opposition, in the form of D.D., had it all over us because they had been on board the plane. The pictures inside the plane, taken by Chris Pavlich, showed in perfect, graphic detail the chaos on board the plane seconds before it crashed. There was no way we could beat that. He was astonished at everything that had happened. He wanted to be wasted and completely on the board. He wanted to hide and he wanted to trumpet news of all this astonishing beauty from the highest vantage point. He wanted to time travel and live every moment to the full. And so it was that he picked up the paper, followed the story with some grim satisfaction, they hadn't made complete fools of themselves, and never knew that in the quiet alleys and behind whispering hands he owuld meet these people again, his life would be swallowed by daily dramas, he would dismiss the curiosity and even admiration of ordinary people, and he would join the slip stream, destined for disaster.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7974867.stm

US President Barack Obama has set off from Washington DC for Europe on his first major foreign trip since taking office in January.

Mr Obama's first stop is London where he is due to attend the G20 summit.

He will also join leaders at a Nato summit on the French-German border and visit the Czech Republic and Turkey.

Mr Obama's mission during his tour will be to restore the US's place at the head of the diplomatic table, says BBC North America editor Justin Webb.

He will do so by asserting that the US has changed - that America is willing to listen and engage, but he will also insist that America still has the capacity to pull the world in the right direction, our correspondent says.

A White House spokesman stressed the president would "listen in London as well as lead".

'Everyday values'

The host of the G20 meeting, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is keen for world leaders to reach agreement on a new set of rules for regulating global finance as well as measures to boost economic demand and support poorer countries.

According to UK officials, Mr Brown spoke to the president on the phone during his flight to "identify outstanding remaining issues" ahead of the gathering of world leaders.

The call was an "opportunity for both of them to take stock of where we were," a No 10 spokesman said.

Speaking earlier at a gathering of religious leaders at St Paul's Cathedral, Mr Brown called for the "values that we celebrate in everyday life" to be brought to the financial markets.

"I believe that unsupervised globalisation of our financial markets did not only cross national boundaries, it crossed moral boundaries too," Mr Brown said.


OBAMA'S EUROPEAN TRIP
Tuesday: Arrives in London
Wednesday: Mr and Mrs Obama breakfast with the Browns at 10 Downing Street; Mr Obama holds talks with Gordon Brown; meets Russian and Chinese presidents, David Cameron, and the Queen
Thursday: G20 summit; Mr Obama will also meet the Indian PM, the South Korean president and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia during the day
Friday: Departs for Strasbourg; meets French president; holds town-hall meeting; visits German Chancellor in Baden-Baden, returns to Strasbourg
Saturday: Attends Nato summit in Strasbourg; departs for Prague
Sunday: Attends EU-US summit, departs for Ankara
Monday: Departs Ankara for US

But with two days to go before the London summit, further splits are emerging on how to tackle the economic crisis.



Andrew Bolt

April 01, 2009 12:00am

IF China were no threat, our Defence Minister might not have been so secretive about the Chinese gifts he'd pocketed.

Nor would our Prime Minister be just as secretive about his own ties to this Communist autocracy.

In fact, it's precisely because China's rising influence here is a security threat that Joel Fitzgibbon should now resign and Kevin Rudd should stop hiding.

When dealing with such a regime, our politicians must come clean.

Yet Rudd is still playing absurd games, secretly meeting China's top security and propaganda chiefs in private, but asking the BBC this week not to film him sitting next to the Chinese ambassador in public.

Fitzgibbon's secrecy is the more culpable, of course, even if Rudd's may have the more serious consequences.

While in Opposition, Fitzgibbon was groomed by Helen Liu, a Chinese-born businesswoman with strong ties to China's military and foreign affairs establishment.

She gave him a $20,000 campaign donation, a suit (later returned), other unspecified gifts and two business-class trips to China when he was an Opposition frontbencher.

It's those two trips that Fitzgibbon failed to declare on the register of members' interests, as obliged by Parliament, and it's those trips that the now Defence Minister failed to own up to when confronted by a reporter last week, after his links to Liu hit the news.

Reporter: Have any of your trips to Beijing been paid by Ms Liu? Or any of her companies?

Fitzgibbon: I've said on a number of occasions I've had a close, personal relationship for the Lius and the family for 16 years now. And over that period of time there has been an exchange of a number of small gifts, for example on birthdays etc. No one has ever raised concern . . .

Reporter: Can you give an example of those gifts?

Fitzgibbon: No, very small gifts.

But luxury travel and five-star accommodation are not "very small gifts", and Fitzgibbon may have worked out reporters were asking questions to which they already knew the answers.

And so he quickly announced he'd made a "mistake". Or as Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard put it so generously: "I think it's just an innocent lapse which occurred."

Actually, it was two lapses - first, the failure to disclose to Parliament, and then the failure to disclose, perhaps out of sheer funk, when asked a direct question by a journalist.

(I was the journalist who asked the first question.)

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/03/lobbyists-thriv.html

Obama in Europe -- could she upstage her husband? »
Lobbyists thriving in Obama's Washington

Barack Obama said during the campaign that he wanted to change the culture in Washington, to close the revolving door on lobbyists seeking to influence his administration.

No doubt the president means to make good on his promises.

But ironically, in the months since Obama was sworn in as president, the number of lobbyists in Washington has grown. The reason: complex bills like the president's $787-billion stimulus package are like lobbyist catnip to Washington's K Street corridor of influence peddlers.

And with so much money on the line, the Washington Post found that more than 2,000 cities, companies and associations outside Washington have hired, you guessed it, lobbyists.

"We decided we needed eyes and ears in Washington," said Ed Tinker, city manager of Glenpool, Okla. So the town of 10,000 hired Capitol Hill Consulting Group, which employs former Rep. Rep. Bill Brewster (D-Okla.), for $10,000 a month to help it win grants for education and infrastructure improvements. "There are dollars up there that could come to our community that we weren't aware of," Tinker told the Post. "It's worked out real fine for us. Having that guy on the ground in Washington is going to keep us in the loop."

So the economy may be in the tank, Wall Street may be weeping dollars every day, but jobs are opening for lobbyists. And chief beneficiaries seem to be Democratic firms, like former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart's Glover Park Group, which posted a 27% increase in business last year. One big client: PhRMA, the pharmaceutical lobby, which expects a huge effort this year on the president's health care reform proposals. "We're busy as bees out here," said PhRMA CEO Billy Tauzin. "Making honey."

Democratic causes are also becoming a new growth industry in Washington. According to the Houston Chronicle, climate-change lobbying is enjoying a renaissance. With likelihood of a Democratic victory last fall, roughly 2,340 lobbyists dealing with climate issues -- from doubters to boosters -- were hired in 2008, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Senate lobbying disclosure forms.

As a result, said the Texas newspaper, climate lobbyists now outnumber members of Congress by more than 4 to 1.

-- Johanna Neuman